Who Murdered Lake Baikal?

By Andrei Sakharov

The planet's oldest, deepest and largest lake, Baikal is about the size of Belgium and accounts for a fifth of the world's freshwater reserves. The threat to this unique ecosystem, home to more than 1,000 species of plants and animals unknown anywhere else, stimulated a vociferous Soviet environmental movement. Baikal, says Siberian activist Valentin Rasputin, contains "such pulchritude as to be unimaginable this side of paradise."

It is a precious resource, an area of surpassing natural beauty, a source of national pride and, to some extent, the very symbol of our nation. For several years, newspapers had been publishing alarming reports on threats to Baikal from industrial construction along its shores, the felling and rafting of timber and pulp mills' discharge of chemical wastes.

Early in 1967 a student at the Moscow Institute of Energy invited me to attend meetings of the Komsomol ((Communist Party youth wing)) Committee to Save Baikal. I learned that in the late 1950s, Orlov, the minister in charge of the paper industry, had ordered construction of a large cellulose complex on the lake's shores to produce a particularly durable viscose rayon cord for airplane tires. It was assumed that the pure Baikal water would facilitate polymerization ((a chemical process in which many small molecules combine to build much larger molecules called polymers)) and the resulting fibers would be stronger.

The plant's output showed that this hypothesis was unfounded. More important, the aviation industry switched from rayon cord to metallic cord. Whatever rationale the Baikal complex may once have had -- and it never offset the potential harm to the lake -- vanished. Construction nevertheless went ahead, with whole armies of officials defending their decision and saving face by insisting on the complex's importance for the defense of the country, the usual clinching argument.

The story goes that Orlov had chosen the site by simply pointing to a place on the shoreline while cruising in a motorboat with cronies. Building was already under way when someone discovered that this was the precise spot where the famous Verninsky earthquake had caused the lake to swallow up 35 acres of shoreline in the 19th century; it was a seismically active region. But instead of canceling the project, the authorities transferred responsibility to the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. One scientist taunted me: "Do you know who's in charge of the murder of Baikal? Your own Slavsky!" New plans were drawn up for earthquake-resistant aluminum-and-glass buildings supported by steel piles. But the buildings are still vulnerable to the major earthquakes that have occurred there once or twice a century.

The big problem now was treatment of toxic waste. The pollution caused by floating logs down the rivers that empty into the lake kills the spawn of most fish, including the Baikal omul, which a century ago rivaled beef as a source of food for all Russia. The accidental discharge of effluents, deforestation and fire also threatened the fragile ecological balance of the region. We proposed that the lakeshores be closed to new industry and existing enterprises be moved.

At a meeting of the Council of Ministers, Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin, who was handling the Baikal project, asked Mstislav Keldysh, president of the Academy of Sciences, "What does the academy recommend? If the safeguards aren't reliable, we'll stop construction." Keldysh quoted a report that the water-purification system and other safeguards were completely reliable. He may have been acting in good faith. Still, my feeling is that his stand was greatly influenced by the academy's dependence on the bureaucratic machine, and that he was predisposed to respect the wishes of this machine and to ignore the warnings of whistle blowers.

Only a couple of years after these events, a Komsomol expedition brought back photographs showing the massive destruction of Baikal's fish and plankton caused by toxic wastes. No accidental discharges had been logged. As always, everything was fine on paper.