Making Rivers Run Backward

By Frederic Golden

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.

Grandiose may be an understatement. The enterprise involves two separate sets of river diversions. On the European side of the Urals, the volume of the Volga would be increased by funneling into it the flow of three major northern rivers, the Onega, the Northern Dvina and the Pechora. Officially sanctioned by President Leonid Brezhnev in his speech on agricultural goals two weeks ago, the European grand scheme is scheduled to be launched next year. The rerouting would require the building of 25 dams and numerous pumping stations. As the barriers go up, they would raise river levels a section at a time, until the water no longer reached the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean. The builders would also erect colossal dikes across the mouths of the rivers, creating great fresh-water bays. The first northern water should begin flowing southward into the Volga through a network of canals and reservoirs by the late 1980s.

The Asian portion is no less ambitious, involving the rechanneling of Siberia's mighty Ob River and its major tributary, the Irtysh. The original idea was to carry the water south by building a canal some 1,500 miles long, perhaps by nuclear blasting. But that proposal drew so many objections in the West that Soviet planners are now talking of rerouting the water along old riverbeds revealed by satellite photographs.

Backers of the river reversals are convinced that the great investment--at least $40 billion in the early stages alone--would pay off handsomely. They predict grain production would be boosted by as much as 30 million to 60 million metric tons a year--equivalent to 18% to 35% of the U.S.S.R.'s current crop. They also point out that the northern waters would revitalize two major inland seas, the Caspian and the Aral, whose levels have been dropping rapidly because of irrigation needs.

The enthusiasm of the planners has not allayed widespread fears. The project's opponents say it would wipe out great expanses of forest lands and close off such historic ports as Arkhangelsk. In addition, the diversions would flood northern agricultural lands, temporarily halt river traffic and, by denying salmon and other river-breeding species their fresh-water spawning grounds, wreck flourishing fisheries. Severe problems may also come from the thick ice expected to remain well past winter in the new reservoirs. By retarding the spring thaw, the freeze-up could cut the already brief northern growing season by two weeks. The prolonged winter weather might also increase spring winds and reduce vital rains.

More disturbing, some scientists have cautioned that if the Arctic Ocean is not replenished by fresh water, it will get salt ier, its freezing point will drop, and the icecap will begin to melt, possibly starting a global warming trend. Other scientists fear that just the opposite may occur: as the flow of warmer fresh water is reduced, the polar ice may expand. In any case, British Climatologist Michael Kelly of the University of East Anglia sees an ironic consequence: changes in polar winds and currents might reduce rainfall in the very regions to benefit from the river.

--By Frederic Golden.

Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof/Moscow

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof

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