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large-scale working of the Donets coal basin and theKrivoi Rog iron-ore region (see map i) caused the influxof Ukrainian and Great Russian peasants into new miningvillages and new industrial centres, the up rush of thegreat South Russian coal and heavy industry which hasbeen so immensely extended during the last twenty years.Similarly elsewhere during the last seventy years workersof coal, iron, copper, lead, oil, and under the Sovietregime of much else, have repeated under new formsmining frontier conditions and have transformed thecolonization map. The unrelenting pace of Sovietindustrialization, above all in the Far North, the Urals,Kazakhstan and the Kuznetsk basin of central Siberia,has revolutionized the miners' frontier, which togetherwith its dependent industrial giants has become the greatmelting-pot of the Soviet peoples. 12. Forest and SteppeMuch the greater part of Russian history has beenplayed out in five great zones (see maps 3 and 4), stretchingfrom the south-west to the north-east, similar intheir prevailing low elevation and, in certain respects,in climate, but differing widely in humidity, soil, andgeological structure. Usually the zones overlap andshade into each other without clearly marked limits.Except for the first, they are not European and Asiaticzones, but both together; hence the recent term Eurasiaas a geographical expression for the unity of the bulkof the Russian empire or the Soviet Union, a conceptionharnessed and adapted by some contemporaryhistorians.(i) The zone of mixed forests, deciduous and conifer,spruce and Scots fir, larch, birch and aspen, oak andlime, ash and elm, but (in Russia proper) no beech oryew or holly; for the most part composed of the so-1Admirable illustrations of the Soviet mining frontier are providedby J. D. Littlepage and D Bess, In Search of Soviet Gold (1939), theunvarnished account of the ten years' experience of an American miningengineer in Soviet Asia; and of the Soviet industnal frontier by JohnScott, Behind the Urals (1943), an excellent first-hand account of theearly years of Magnitogorsk.19