Up Sea, Back Rivers

The planning Russians, who have already drawn big blueprints for everything from history to human lives, now plan to raise the water level of an ancient sea and make a few northbound rivers flow south. The staggeringly complex plan is called the Greater Volga Project. G.V.P., a technically audacious scheme, was laid aside in 1939 and is now being dusted off and revised by a special commission of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Through a series of dams, canals and reservoirs, G.V.P. would provide an all-water route from Archangel to Batum. Involving cities, towns and villages where 50 million Russians live, it would install 14 new hydroelectric power stations. It would add enough water to the Volga to maintain--or lift--the level of the Caspian Sea.

To its only outlet--the sky--the Caspian annually gives in evaporation about 410 billion cubic meters of water. From the sky it receives back some 70 billion in rainfall. The difference must be made up by the Volga, Ural and other smaller rivers. In recent years, the Volga's contribution has fallen short. Without G.V.P., prospects look dim for such ports as Batum--and for the caviar industry.

G.V.P. proposes to correct the situation by raising the level of the upper reaches of the north-flowing Pechora and Vychegda Rivers (see map). Here in the flatlands, an imperceptible earth curve is all that determines whether rivers flow south to the grainfields or north to the Arctic. G.V.P. wants them to flow south. The Kuibyshev dam has already been started. All the rest of G.V.P. is still just a bright gleam in the Soviet eye.

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