A grandiose Soviet water scheme raises widespread fears
Each spring when the snows melt in the Urals and the icy waters come cascading down the mountains that divide the U.S.S.R. into its European and Asian halves, the Kremlin's planners are painfully reminded of their country's great geographical "mistake." By a quirk of nature, several of the Soviet Union's great rivers flow north, spilling into the Arctic Ocean, while to the south the steppes of Central Asia remain parched and sun-bleached, thirsting for fresh water.
As long ago as 1830, a czarist surveyor named Alexander Shrenk suggested a way of easing this imbalance by diverting the northerly-flowing Pechora River into the Volga, the great river that sustains much of southern Russia. But even in the 1930s, the Stalinist heyday of dam building and hydroelectric construction, the scheme was considered no more than a mammoth pipedream.
Now the old fantasy has taken on a staggering new reality. Under pressure from its water-needy Central Asian republics, and shaken by repeated agricultural failures, the Soviet leadership seems on the verge of sanctioning a water-diversion scheme that would be the grandest engineering project of all time. At least a dozen northerly-bound rivers would be reversed. By channeling 37.8 billion extra cubic kilometers of water a year to the south in European Russia and 60 billion cubic kilometers in Siberia, the project would greatly increase farm output in such arid regions as Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where the high birth rate of the largely Muslim population could overtake food production.
The diversion, which would take 50 years to complete, would exact an enormous toll. In an area larger than Western Europe, tens of thousands of people would be displaced from their homes. Millions of acres of northern land would be flooded, including great tracts of game forest. Towns and villages would disappear, some of them with onion-domed churches dating back to the Middle Ages. No less disturbing, the diversion could drastically alter climate not only in the Soviet Union but throughout the Northern Hemisphere, even as far off as the U.S. and Canada.
So high and unpredictable are the social and ecological costs that an environmental debate has broken out in the Soviet Union. Ignoring the strictures against public dissent, an increasingly vocal group of Soviet climatologists, historians and distinguished citizens have joined local protesters—to say nothing of worried scientists abroad—in strong criticism of the scheme. The argument has even reached the staid columns of the influential weekly Literary Gazette, where one economist, uncharacteristically outspoken for a Soviet official, argued that it would be economically disastrous to tamper with nature on such a grandiose scale.