The Soviets turned the Volga River right into a machine. Then the machine broke.

You will discover Dubna, a small city three hours away from Moscow by practice, each on a map and within the periodic desk: dubnium, aspect quantity 105, was found at a analysis heart there, and named after the city. A hasteless city, Dubna is outlined as a lot by the encompassing forests as by the water: it sits on the banks of the Ivankovskoe Reservoir, the primary a part of an enormous hydropower undertaking referred to as “Large Volga” whose building spanned many years throughout the Soviet period. The complicated, consisting of 11 dams on the Volga and its largest tributary, the Kama, is accountable for about 5% of the entire electrical energy manufacturing in Russia. The Ivankovskoe Reservoir is each the oldest a part of the complicated and the farthest upstream, located virtually on the Volga’s headwaters. 

About 2,300 miles lengthy, the Volga—typically known as “Volga-matushka,” or “Mom Volga”—is the longest river in Europe and the largest by water stream, arcing from northwest of Moscow round and right down to the Caspian Sea. Some 60 million individuals—about 40% of Russia’s inhabitants—reside in its basin, which spans virtually a tenth of the nation’s huge territory. Moscow, with its 12 million individuals, will get most of its consuming water from the Volga through the Moscow Canal. About 1,500 miles downstream, the strategic port metropolis of Volgograd, previously often called Stalingrad, was the positioning of World Conflict II’s most decisive, and arguably bloodiest, battle. As an artery of commerce, a supply of vitality and consuming water, and a conveyor of historical past, the Volga touches practically each side of life in Russia. It’s what the Mississippi is to america or the Rhein to Germany.

When the station in Dubna was designed, within the early 1930s, the younger Soviet state had simply determined to meet up with the capitalist states of the West by quickly accelerating its industrial growth—however so as to take action, it wanted to generate vitality on an enormous scale. By the point the final station was constructed, within the 1980s, the Soviet Union, having simply hosted the Olympics for the primary time, was about to launch perestroika, a program of large-scale democratic reforms meant to finish an period of stagnation and revitalize the flailing state. The historical past of the Large Volga undertaking is, in a way, the historical past of Soviet industrialization. Additionally it is a historical past of rivalry with the US, which for many years raced the Soviets to construct greater, extra spectacular dams.

The undertaking was one of many largest nature-transforming schemes in historical past: put collectively, the bogus reservoirs on the Volga are about as large as Lake Erie. It tried to harness the river to offer the Russian individuals with crucial issues: vitality, transportation, and water. But it surely tried to do an excessive amount of.

The river has grow to be polluted, silted up, and overwhelmed by invasive species. Water flows at a tenth of the velocity it did earlier than the dams have been constructed, in response to estimates by researchers on the Institute of Ecology of the Volga River Basin, within the central Russian port metropolis of Togliatti. Widespread poisonous algal blooms at the moment are frequent. 

As international temperatures rise, the Volga basin is getting much less and fewer rainfall within the spring and summer season, and extra snow within the winter. Igor Mokhov, chief scientist on the Obukhov Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, factors out that the depth of spring and summer season precipitation is predicted to extend, making post-high-water planning tougher. A workforce of Russian hydrologists, writing in an August 2021 paper in Ecohydrology & Hydrobiology, argued that due to local weather change, “there will likely be extra water in these areas [of Russia] the place it’s ample, and fewer the place it’s most wanted.” The Volga basin is among the areas most in danger, they wrote.

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that Russia’s mom river is damaged.

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I visited Dubna on a windy November morning. Runners in colourful clothes zipped by individuals strolling their canine alongside an unkempt reservoir entrance. I discovered myself in a grayscale picture of milky clouds and water like quicksilver, interrupted by the odd patch of evergreen and autumn brown. The other aspect of the reservoir was an impenetrable wall of coniferous bushes, shrouded in a light-weight mist.

I used to be making an attempt, in useless, to orient myself to determine how precisely one of many better-known tales about this reservoir should have unfolded. The story goes that in late November 1941, German forces have been closing in on Moscow and had deliberate to cross the frozen physique of water. The hydropower station employees reportedly determined to empty the reservoir, dropping water ranges abruptly by two meters, crushing the ice and shopping for the town a while by stopping the invaders of their tracks. Eighty years later, although it was the identical time of 12 months, there was no ice in sight.

The hydropower station itself is a restricted web site, encircled with an abundance of barbed wire, warning indicators, and towering cranes so monumental there are small buildings on high of them. The noise of the water was pierced by seagulls and the occasional automotive as I walked alongside the dam. It was Unity Day, a contemporary Russian vacation devised to supersede a Communist vacation celebrating the 1917 revolution. A few of these individuals have been driving to the Vladimir Lenin statue, a spot beloved by locals.

Concerning the paintings:
A former velodrome racer for the Russian Nationwide Biking Federation, Stoyan Vassev stop his sports activities profession and commenced making images professionally in 2009.

The photographs accompanying this story are from his ongoing collection No Fish, wherein he paperwork
the consequences of environmental exploitation on life in Kirovsky, a small fishing village within the Volga Delta.

I may see Lenin’s again on the finish of the highway. The statue was surrounded by ceremonial blue-green fir bushes, and regarded throughout the water at nothing particularly. The corresponding monument to Joseph Stalin had been demolished in 1962, after the Soviet authorities determined to “de-Stalinize” itself. The 2 monuments, every virtually 40 meters tall, as soon as guarded the entry level to the Moscow Canal, a Soviet engineering marvel connecting the Volga and Moskva rivers.

Beside the complicated, there’s a memorial hardly taller than I’m. It appears like a random granite constructing block, tilted to the aspect, seemingly thrown out by the mighty waters to the foot of the Lenin monument and behind its again. The stone was positioned there in 2013 to commemorate the greater than 22,000 prisoners who died constructing the canal. Flowers and wreaths on the backside have been nonetheless recent from the annual ceremony, held on October 30, when Russians keep in mind these persecuted and murdered by the state, often by studying their names aloud in entrance of numerous related memorials throughout the nation.

A younger boy in a yellow jacket requested his mom, who was placing their issues into the automotive parked close to the memorial, “Mother, what’s written on the stone?” 

To the builders of the canal, she responded with out trying.

This solely made him ask her one other query: “Why builders? Isn’t the Volga an actual river?”


In a means it isn’t actually a river anymore—it not flows naturally. It’s now so mediated by human intervention that it’s higher considered a machine.

Simply two months after the primary gulag prisoners had arrived on the future dam web site in Dubna, in November 1933, analysis bigwigs on the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union gathered in Moscow to debate the state of the Volga and the Caspian Sea. Evgeny Burdin, a historian within the Volga city of Ulyanovsk, some 900 miles downstream from Dubna, learn to me from one of many studies offered on the assembly. The report predicted that reservoirs would trigger “swamp formation on account of flooding, poor circumstances for soil self-restoration, flooding of cellars in houses, altering microclimate, algae blooms and off water, air pollution, slowing down of water stream, and native dangers of malaria.”

The river has grow to be polluted, silted up, and overwhelmed by invasive species. Widespread poisonous algal blooms at the moment are frequent.

“Even when there wasn’t deep public consciousness and dialogue, absolutely most of the hydrologists and engineers knew that there could be important and unavoidable impacts … Many individuals have been conscious of it, however it was very troublesome, I’m certain, to say something,” Paul R. Josephson, a professor of Russian and Soviet historical past at Colby School, advised me.

It was, certainly, fairly troublesome: one may very well be sentenced to laborious labor for daring to criticize the federal government. In reality, one may even be very a lot in keeping with the federal government and nonetheless find yourself purged. That was what occurred to Konstantin Bogoyavlensky, a turn-of-the-century engineer who designed the primary recognized hydropower station undertaking on the Volga, within the Samara area, just a little downstream from Ulyanovsk, in 1910. The native authorities and clergy protested Bogoyavlensky’s thought, which required flooding loads of land, and it was shelved till after the 1917 revolution. Described as a fanatic, the engineer spent years lobbying the nationwide authorities to construct his station—and succeeded, solely to be declared a spy and an enemy of the revolution shortly afterward and despatched to a gulag camp in Siberia, the place he ultimately died.


“The vital issues to get from the Volga have been vitality for trade and good circumstances for transport to and from Moscow,” Burdin advised me. The technocratic, goal-oriented considering of the time had no persistence for well mannered objections from scientists or something that might intrude with industrial growth.

In April 1941, about two months earlier than the us was attacked by Germany, bringing it totally into World Conflict II, engineers began to fill the Rybinskoe Reservoir, the third one within the cascade, round 50 miles northeast of Dubna. (The second reservoir was additionally being stuffed on the time, however it was a couple of 20th the dimensions.)

The Rybinskoe Reservoir would grow to be the most important synthetic physique of water on the planet on the time. Greater than 130,000 individuals needed to relocate to make room for it, together with some 6,000 residents of Mologa, a settlement first talked about in historic chronicles within the 12th century. Mologa’s church buildings, the tallest buildings on the town, needed to be blown up. The dam and reservoir have been additionally constructed by gulag prisoners, who labored by the struggle to verify the unfinished station may nonetheless energy Moscow. 

The Rybinskoe Reservoir destroyed hundreds of sq. miles of arable land for a comparatively small quantity of electrical energy—after upgrades, the hydropower station now produces 376 megawatts, lower than a fifth of what America’s Hoover Dam places out. By the 1980s, it started to seem like a questionable cut price even for the us. Gosplan, the state planning company, explored draining it. Specialists concluded that “any penalties of draining the Rybinskoe Reservoir could be extra drastic than these of filling it within the first place,” says Victor Danilov-Danilyan, head of analysis on the Water Issues Institute (WPI) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It will take a minimum of a number of hundred years for the realm, coated in sediment that had amassed industrial and family air pollution, to get well by itself, he provides, whereas cleansing it up would primarily imply “relocating this terrible mess elsewhere” at a price that Russia couldn’t afford. And so the reservoir stays.

Many years later, the final surviving Mologa townspeople and their descendants nonetheless come to the close by city of Rybinsk for an annual get-together in mid-August. A few of them go to the ruins that sometimes resurface when the 12 months is especially dry. That occurred once more in 2021, when summer season left water ranges within the reservoir low, inflicting alarm about potential water shortages downstream. In aerial images, the streets and foundations of Mologa shaped an eerie geometry rising from the lakebed.


The dam cascade has successfully turned the Volga into a series of reservoirs. How a lot water will get by from the higher components to the decrease components now hinges on a fancy technical course of that entails wrestling each innate uncertainty and worrying international traits. Natalia Frolova, a hydrologist and geographer on the Lomonosov Moscow State College, explains how the pattern of shifting precipitation performed out in 2021: the spring excessive water on the Volga was roughly regular and properly predicted, and the reservoirs have been full, however the drier circumstances that introduced out the Mologa ruins this previous summer season brought on water ranges in all of the reservoirs to fall beneath regular ranges

For the Volga cities, it’s not simply in regards to the amount of water but additionally the standard. The Volga is persistently among the many three most polluted rivers within the nation, accounting for practically 40% of all polluted wastewater in Russia. Alexander Demin, a river researcher on the Water Issues Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, says solely about 10% of all wastewater from level sources like sewer pipes is handled to ranges required by Russian regulation. There are additionally many diffuse sources of air pollution that aren’t successfully regulated: agricultural runoff, rainwater, meltwater, wastewater from ships, and even polluted soils and different detritus that wash into the river as sediment. 

man in his boat on the Volga

STOYAN VASSEV

Since practically all Volga cities and cities—and Moscow, through the canal—find yourself utilizing the river for his or her water provide, this air pollution comes with a hefty invoice for water therapy. “The more serious the water within the Volga, the dearer it’s to make it potable,” Demin notes. On condition that the Volga basin is dwelling to 60 million individuals, about half of Russia’s trade, and a comparable portion of its agriculture, the prices add up.

A current evaluation compiled by Carbon Temporary, a UK-based local weather media outlet, places the us and Russia third on the planet in all-time historic greenhouse-gas emissions. A nationwide evaluation report compiled by Russian local weather scientists in 2014 stated that at a time of human-caused local weather change, common annual temperatures within the nation have been rising twice as quick as the worldwide common. The report additionally acknowledged that the pattern is predicted to proceed. Impacts of local weather change fueled partly by Soviet industrial growth are already seen round Russia, from permafrost degradation to desertification within the agriculture-heavy southern reaches of the nation. The identical large-scale industrial growth that spawned Large Volga and was powered by the river’s waters additionally contributed to the worldwide drawback of local weather change—which has now introduced the specter of water shortage to hundreds of thousands of individuals residing in cities alongside the Volga.


Once I visited the ultimate node within the cascade, the Cheboksarskoe Reservoir, about 370 miles east of Moscow, in 2010, I noticed algal blooms that made the water seem like a witch’s brew.

The close by metropolis of Cheboksary, the capital of Chuvashia, one in all a number of ethnic republics in Russia, was leafy, quiet, and welcoming after I visited. I used to be a part of a press tour organized by RusHydro, the proprietor of the cascade, which had been lobbying the federal government to extend the water degree within the reservoir. Years later it’s nonetheless 5 meters beneath the place RusHydro desires it to be, as a result of the Cheboksarskoe Reservoir is the place, after 4 wonderful many years, the Large Volga undertaking lastly stumbled.

By the mid-1980s, with glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev determined the Soviet Union may do with a bit extra freedom of the press and transparency, letting residents talk about and even criticize the choices of their authorities. And so the irreversible environmental injury to the Volga steadily turned a part of a large public dialog too. A 1989 e book in regards to the river referred to as out the individuals behind the development of reservoirs that led to “the life-giving water of the Volga turning into lifeless water, with nothing for us to do about it.” “Boasting world wide that the Volga-matushka [mother-river] has been tamed a number of occasions, nonetheless calling themselves her sons, those that tamed her additionally condemned her to an extended, horrible, and painful sickness,” the e book reads.

“Whose land is being destroyed and whose water is being polluted in order that another person can make cash?”

It was additionally apparently not attainable to easily give hundreds of individuals two months’ discover to go away their ancestral land, as was the preliminary plan for Mologa (the relocation in the end took 4 years). Two close by areas in European Russia, bordering Chuvashia, could be most affected by projected flooding: the Nizhegorodskaya Oblast to the west and the republic of Mari El to the north stood to lose territory, together with treasured historic landmarks comparable to gravesites and metropolis church buildings, to rising waters. The republics protested and imposed delays, relying on central authorities funding to expire, which it did. In 1989, the Soviet authorities determined to maintain the water degree within the Cheboksarskoe Reservoir at a degree that meant the hydropower station there may produce solely about 60% of its designed electricity-­producing capability. The reservoir ended up about 380 sq. miles smaller than deliberate.

A river not runs by it

volga map
The Volga, with its largest tributary, the Kama, is an enormous cascade of 11 reservoirs with hydropower crops accountable for about 5% of the entire electrical energy manufacturing in Russia.


Due to the Cheboksarskoe debacle, the Volga-Kama cascade is, on paper, nonetheless unfinished. In a way, the Soviet Union misplaced one of many extra curious Chilly Conflict races: within the 1930s, as a part of the New Deal, the US authorities began constructing a cascade of hydropower stations within the Columbia River basin in Washington state. For some time within the late 1950s, the enormous Kuibyshevskaya station on the Volga was the most important on the planet by capability, a title it snatched from the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington. Each tasks have been being touted as the best of their variety, and there are just a few parallels, Paul Josephson says: “They’ve actually turned each rivers into machines.”

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the newly shaped Russian authorities was left making an attempt to repair the Soviet machine. The federal Volga Revival program, a conservation and restoration effort launched in 1996, met its demise simply two years later throughout a bout of deep financial disaster and authorities turmoil. The most recent iteration of those efforts, the Wholesome Volga program, began in 2018; the federal government plans to spend 205 billion rubles ($2.9 billion) over six years cleansing up the gargantuan wastewater stream to the Volga.

However Wholesome Volga is already being criticized for failing to make a dent in the issue: in late 2020, the Accounts Chamber of Russia, a state audit authority, issued a report titled Unhealthy “Wholesome Volga,” chastising this system managers for an extreme concentrate on level supply air pollution and a convoluted administration construction. Water high quality within the Volga, the report discovered, hasn’t improved considerably over the past three many years.


Josephson, the historian, says the primary crucial step is to implement current regulation and abandon the Soviet behavior of constructing it cheaper to ship untreated wastewater into the river and pay any ensuing fines than it’s to truly clear the water. 

A frank and open dialog in regards to the dangers of tasks comparable to Large Volga is important past the Volga basin, argues Josephson. Many “zombie” Soviet tasks have been coming again to life in trendy Russia. Close to Kamchatka, in Russia’s far east, a proposed 100-gigawatt tidal energy complicated that was as soon as thought too costly is now being reevaluated as a possible hydrogen manufacturing unit. Two extra massive hydro stations, additionally mentioned within the Soviet period, are deliberate for the Angara, the one river flowing out of Lake Baikal in japanese Siberia; with six stations in complete, activists concern, the Angara will flip into “a cascade of lifeless reservoirs.” The Amur, a river on the Russia-China border, not too long ago flooded, inflicting virtually $7.5 billion in property injury and reviving plans for lowland dams and stations that had been made within the 1970s and ’80s.

man peeks out of ship port

STOYAN VASSEV

In 2017, when the Moscow Canal turned 80, the CEO of the state-run firm that manages it advised the media, “It’s laborious to think about, however the Moskva River is about 80% Volga at this level.” He went on to say that earlier than the development of the canal, within the early 1930s, the state of affairs was so dire the Moskva had been lowered to a trickle; proper close to the Kremlin, one may merely stroll throughout it. Because the Volga cities downstream face rising water dangers, the capital water authorities report that for the foreseeable future, Moscow is out of any hazard.

It’s telling that the Volga has been put to make use of to offer for the Russian capital. As Josephson muses: “Whose land is being destroyed and whose water is being polluted in order that another person can make cash? The Volga serves the Kremlin. It’s Moscow’s. It not belongs to the individuals alongside the Volga.”

Olga Dobrovidova is a science journalist primarily based in Moscow.

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