the process of procuring timber, including the main and auxiliary operations of felling trees, hauling them from the felling sites, and partly processing them at lower woodyards. Felling requires approximately 25–30 percent of the total amount of labor involved in logging, transport (hauling the trees to woodyards) 5–10 percent, storage 15–20 percent, and other operations 40–45 percent.
The Russian word for logging, lesozagotovka, means literally timber (leso) procurement (zagotovka). The word is derived from the practice in prerevolutionary Russia of manually procuring lumber, in the form of logs (graded timber), at felling sites, mainly in winter. The logs were piled up along riverbanks and floated in spring and summer. In the USSR all the production processes in logging and timber procurement establishments are mechanized.
The USSR leads the world in the amount of logs hauled (1972). The logging and timber procurement establishments are steadily increasing the delivery to the economy of commercial timber and lumber in ever more finished form.
Commercial timber constituted 42 percent of all logging in 1923–24 and 73 per cent in 1951, and it was expected to constitute 87 percent in 1975.
D. K. VOEVODA and V. I. ALIAB’EV