How the Soviets turned the Volga River into a machine |MIT Technology Review in Spanish

La pequeña ciudad rusa Dubná, a tres horas en tren desde Moscú (Rusia), se puede encontrar tanto en un mapa como en la tabla periódica: dubnio, el elemento químico número 105, fue descubierto en un centro de investigación allí y recibió el nombre de la ciudad. Es un sitio tranquilo con muchos bosques circundantes y bastante agua: está a orillas del embalse Ivankovskoe (o de Ivánkovo), la primera parte de un enorme proyecto hidroeléctrico denominado Gran Volga cuya construcción tardó décadas durante la era soviética. El complejo, que consta de 11 presas en el Volga y en su afluente más grande, el Kama, es responsable de aproximadamente el 5 % de la producción total de electricidad en Rusia. El embalse de Ivánkovo es la parte más antigua del complejo y la más lejana, río arriba, situada casi en el nacimiento del Volga.

The Volga River, about 2.300 miles (3.700 kilometers) long, sometimes called Volga-Mathushka or Mother Volga, it is the longest river in Europe and the largest due to the flow of water, and forms an arc from northwest of Moscow to the Caspian Sea.About 60 million people, about 40 % of the population of Russia, live in their basin, which covers almost a tenth of the vast territory of the country.Moscow, with its 12 million inhabitants, obtains most of Volga's drinking water through the Moscow Canal.Approximately 1.500 miles (2.414 kilometers) downstream, the strategic port city of Volgograd.As an artery of commerce, source of energy and drinking water, and part of history, the Volga affects almost all aspects of life in Russia.It's like the Mississippi for the United States or RIN for Germany.

When the Dubná station was designed, in the early 1930s, the young Soviet state had just decided to catch up with the capitalist countries of the West rapidly accelerating its industrial development, but to achieve this it had to generate energy on a mass scale.When the last station was built, in the 1980s, the Soviet Union, which had just organized the Olympic Games for the first time, was about to launch Perestroika, the program of large -scale democratic reforms aimed at ending an end to an end to an end to an end to anIt was of stagnation and revitalize the agitated state.The history of the Great Volga project is, in a way, the history of Soviet industrialization.It is also an example of rivalry with the United States, which for decades competed with the Soviets to build larger and more impressive dams.

That project was one of the greatest programs for the transformation of the nature of history: as a whole, artificial reservoirs in Volga are as great as Lake Erie.The river wanted to take advantage of the Russian people necessary: energy, transport and water.But trying to do too much.

The river has been contaminated, sedimented and overloaded with invasive species.The water flows at a tenth of the speed before the dams were built, according to the estimates of the researchers of the Institute of Ecology of the Volga River Basin, of the Port City of Togliatti, in the center of Russia.Generalized flowerations of toxic algae are currently common.

As global temperatures rise, the Volga basin receives less and less rains in spring and summer, and more snow in the winter.The head scientist of the Obukhov Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Academy of Sciences of Russia, Igor Mokhov, points out that the intensity of spring and summer rainfall is expected to increase, which will make the subsequent planning of the water level difficult for the level of water. Un equipo de hidrólogos rusos escribieron en agosto de 2021 un artículo publicado en Ecohydrology & Hydrobiology.In it they argued that, due to climate change, "there will be more water in the [Russia] regions where there is enough, and less where it is most needed".The Volga Basin is one of the regions with the greatest risk, they wrote.

It is not exaggerated to say that Russia's mother river is wrong.

I arrived in Dubná on a November morning in which I was very winding.Many people ran with colorful clothes ahead of other people who walked to their dogs through a careless catwalk of the reservoir.I found myself in a gray scale with whitish clouds and water from a color similar to mercury, with few spots of evergreen and autumn -brown tree.The other side of the reservoir was an impenetrable wall of coniferous trees, wrapped in a slight fog.

I tried to orient myself, but in vain, to discover how exactly one of the best known stories about this reservoir had to be developed.It turns out that at the end of November 1941, German forces approached Moscow with the idea of crossing that frozen water.According to the reports, the workers of the hydroelectric plant decided to drain the reservoir, reducing the level of the water abruptly by two meters and thus breaking the ice in order to gain some time for the defense of the city and to stop the invaders inYour advance.Eighty years later, although it was the same era of year, you couldn't see any ice.

The hydroelectric power plant itself is a restricted access site, surrounded by a large amount of spike wire, warning signs and very high cranes, so huge that surrounding buildings seem small.The noise of the water was mixed with the sound of the seagulls and the occasional car while I was walking through the dam.It was the day of unity, one of the new Russian festivities, designed to replace another communist party that celebrated the 1917 revolution.Some of the people passing by car were heading towards the statue of Lenin, a place very visited by the locals.

About the photos: the exciclist on track of the National Federation of Cycling of Russia, Stoyan Vassev, left his sports career and began to devote himself professionally to photography in 2009.The images that accompany this report belong to their latest work No Fish, in which it documents the effects of environmental exploitation in life in Kirovsky (Russia), a small fishing village in the Delta del Volga.

I could see Lenin's back at the end of the road.The statue was surrounded by bluish green firs and looked on the other side of the water towards nothing in particular.The monument corresponding to Stalin was demolished in 1962, after the Soviet government decided to 'de -stress'.The two monuments, each of almost 40 meters high, before protected the entrance point to the Moscow channel, that wonder of Soviet engineering that connects the Volga and Moskva rivers.

Next to the complex, there is a monument just higher than me.It looks like a granite construction block, inclined to the side, apparently thrown by the powerful waters at the foot of the Lenin monument and behind its back.The plate was placed there in 2013 to commemorate the more than 22.000 prisoners who died building the channel.The flowers and chief.

A boy with a yellow jacket asked his mother, that he put his things in the car parked near the monument: "Mom, what is written on the plate?".

- "To the canal builders" - the mother replied without looking.

His answer only made the child ask him another question: "Why 'constructors'? Isn't the Volga a River of truth?".

In a way, it is no longer a river, because it no longer flows naturally.It is currently so mediated by human intervention that it is better to consider it as if it were a machine.

Only two months after the first prisoners of the Gulag arrived at the site of the future dam in Dubná, in November 1933, the most important researchers of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union met in Moscow to discuss the state of the Volga andThe Caspian Sea.The historian Evgeny Burdin, from the city of Ulyanovsk (or Uliánovsk, Russia), in the Volga, about 900 miles (1.448 kilometers) Dubná's below, has read one of the reports presented at that meeting, which predicted that the reservoirs were going to cause "swamp formation due to floodhouses, changing microclimate, algae flowering and stagnant water, pollution, decrease in the flow of water and local risks of malaria ".

"Although there was no deep public awareness or debate, surely many of the hydrologists and engineers knew that there would be significant and inevitable impacts [...].Many people knew it, but it was sure it was very difficult to say something, "explained the Russian and Soviet History professor at Colby College (EE.UU.) Paul r.Josephson.

It was actually quite difficult: a person could be condemned to forced labor for having dared to criticize the government.In fact, even being very in line with the government, one could end.That was what happened to the engineer Konstantin Bogoyavlensky, which designed the first known project of a hydroelectric power plant in El Volga, in the Samara region, a little Ulyanovsk below river, in 1910.The local authorities and the clergy protested against the idea of Bogoyavlensky, which required to flood a large amount of land, and was filed until after the 1917 revolution.Considered fanatic, the engineer spent years by pressing the National Government to build its center, and achieved it, and then be declared a spy and enemy of the revolution shortly after and sent to a gulag in Siberia (Russia), where he died.

"The most important thing that could be obtained from the Volga was the energy for the industry and good conditions for transport from and to Moscow," Burdin explained to me.The technocratic and objective thinking of the time of the time did not show much patience for the attentive objections of scientists or at all that could interfere with industrial development.

In April 1941, approximately two months before Germany attacked the USSR and took it fully to World War II, engineers began to fill the Rybinskoe (or Ribinsk) reservoir, the third in the waterfall, about 50miles (80 kilometers) northeast of Dubná (a second reservoir was also being filled at that time, but it was approximately 20 times smaller) size).

The Rybinsk reservoir became the largest artificial water body in the world at that time.More than 130.000 people had to move there to accommodate, including about 6.000 residents of the Molga town, mentioned for the first time in the historical chronicles of the 12th century.The Mologa churches, the highest buildings in the city, had to collapse.The dam and reservoir were also built by the prisoners of the Gulag, who worked during the war to ensure that the unfinished central could continue to supply Moscow energy.

This reservoir destroyed thousands of square kilometers of arable land to obtain a relatively small amount of electricity;After the improvements, the hydroelectric plant current.In the 1980s, it began to be quite questionable even for the USSR.Gosplan, the State Planning Agency, explored the possibility of draining it.The experts concluded that "any consequence of draining the Ríbinsk reservoir would be more drastic than those of filling it first," says the Head of Research of the WWAR Problems Institute (WPI or Water Problem Institute) of the Academy of Sciences of Russia, Victor Danilov-Danilyan.At least several hundred years would be needed for the area, covered with sediments that had accumulated industrial and domestic pollution, recovered on its own, adds the expert, while cleaning it would basically mean "relocating this terrible disaster in another place" to acost that Russia could not afford.And so the reservoir has stayed.

Decades later, the last inhabitants of Mologa and its descendants still go to the nearby city of Rybinsk for an annual meeting in mid -August.Some of them visit the ruins that sometimes emerge again when the year is especially dry.That happened again in 2021, when the summer left low water levels in the reservoir, which caused alarm on a possible shortage of water downstream.In aerial photographs, the streets and foundations of Mologa formed a mysterious geometry that emerged from the subsoil.

The Dam waterfall has turned the Volga into a chain of reservoirs.The amount of water flowing from top to bottom depends on a complex technical process that implies fighting both uncertainty and worrying global trends.The hydrologist and geographer of the Lomonosov State University of Moscow Natalia Folova explains how the change in precipitation in 2021 was developed: the level of the volga water in spring was more or less normal and as planned, and the reservoirs were full, butThe driest conditions (which brought to light the ruins of Mologa last summer) caused the water levels in all the reservoirs to fall below the usual.

For Volga -dependent cities, it is not just the amount of water, but also quality.The Volga is constantly among the three most polluted rivers in the country, and represents almost 40 % of all contaminated wastewater in Russia.The Rivers Researcher of the Water Problem Institute of the Academy of Sciences of Russia Alexander Demin points out that only about 10 % of all wastewater from specific sources such as sewerage pipes are treated as required by Russian regulation.There are also many scattered pollution sources that are not effectively regulated: agricultural runoff, rainwater, thaw water, wastewater of ships and even contaminated soils and other debris that end in the river as sediments.

Since almost all cities and towns of Volga, together with Moscow, through the channel, end up using the river for supply, this pollution is a great expense for water treatment."The worse the water in the Volga, the more expensive it is to make it drinkable," says Demin.As the river basin has 60 million people, approximately half of the Russia industry and a similar part of its agriculture, the costs are accumulating.

A recent analysis carried out by the media dedicated to climate change Carbon Brief, based in the United Kingdom, places the USSR and Russia thirdly in the world in terms of historical emissions of greenhouse gases.A 2014 National Evaluation Report of Russian weather scientists showed that the average annual temperatures in the country had increased twice faster than the world average for climate change caused by man.The report also indicated that the trend was expected to continue.The impacts of climate change, driven in part by Soviet industrial development, are already visible in Russia, from the defrosting of permafrost to desertification in the southern sections of the country where there is a lot of agriculture.The same large -scale industrial development that generated great Volga and was driven by the waters of the river also contributed to the global problem of climate change, which has brought the threat of water shortage to millions of people living in cities next to the side of theVolga.

When I went to the final cascade node, the Cheboksarskoe (or Chebokary) reservoirs, about 370 miles (595 kilometers) east of Moscow, I saw algae flowers that made the water look like a brew of witches.

The nearby city of Cheboking, the capital of Chuvasia, one of the ethnic republics of Russia, was leafy, quiet and cozy when I arrived as part of a press visit organized by Rushydro, the owner of the waterfall, who had been pressing the governmentTo increase the water level in the reservoir.After several years, it is still five meters below where Rushydro wants it to be, because the Cheboksarskoe reservoir is where the Gran Volga project, after four glorious decades, finally stopped.

In the mid -1980s, with Glástnost, Mikhail Gorbachev decided that the Soviet Union could be a little more freedom of press and transparency, and allowed citizens to discuss and even criticize the decisions of their government.And thus, the irreversible environmental damage to Volga also became partly part of a broad public debate.A book about the river published in 1989 criticized the people responsible for the construction of the reservoirs that caused that "the vivifying water of the Volga became dead water, with nothing we can do about it"."Presuming worldwide that the Volga-Mathkka [Mother River] has been domesticated several times, those who domesticated her, still calling her children, also condemned her to a long, horrible and painful disease," he put in the book.

Apparently, thousands of people could no longer be given a warning two months in advance to leave their ancestral land, as was the initial plan for Mologa (the relocation finally took four years).Two nearby regions in European Russia, on the border with Chuvasia, ended up more affected by floods: the nizhni nóvgorod (or nizhegorodskaya) community in the west and the republic of Mari el in the north were as defenseless areas to thegrowing Aguas, along with other historical places of great value such as the tombs and churches of the cities.The republics protested and caused delays, counting on the fact that the funds of the central government would be exhausted, and it is what happened in the end.In 1989, the Soviet government decided to maintain the water level in the Cheboksarskoe reservoir so that the hydroelectric power plant could produce only about 60 % of its designed electricity generation capacity.The reservoir ended approximately 380 miles (611 kilometers) square smaller than planned.

El río ya no fluye por ahí

Map: The Volga, with its largest tributary, the Kama, is a huge waterfall of 11 reservoirs with hydroelectric plants responsible for approximately 5 % of the total electricity production in Russia.

Due to the cheboksarskoe debacle, the Volga-Kama waterfall is, on paper, still unfinished.In a way, the Soviet Union lost one of the strangest races of the Cold War: in the 1930s, as part of the New Deal, the United States government began to build several hydroelectric plants in the Columbia River basin in theWashington State (EE.UU.).For a while, at the end of the 1950s, the gigantic central Kuibyshevskaya in the Volga was the largest in the world in terms of capacity, which had previously been the Grand Coulee dam in Washington. Ambos proyectos se promocionaban como los mejores de su tipo, y hay algunos paralelos, según PaulJosephson: "Realmente han convertido ambos ríos en máquinas".

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the new Russian government tried to fix the Soviet machine.The Federal Volga Revival program (Volga Recovery), a conservation and restoration effort launched in 1996, lasted only two years due to the deep economic crisis and government instability.The most recent iteration of these efforts, the Healthy Volga program (healthy Volga), began in 2018.The government plans to spend 205.000 million rubles (2.900 million dollars or 2.557 million euros) in six years to clean the gigantic wastewater flow.

But the Healthy Volga program is already being criticized for not making a dent in the problem: at the end of 2020, the Russian Chamber of Accounts, the State Audit Body, issued a report entitled Insalubre Volga Healthy, in which he criticized managersof the program for an excessive approach to the contamination of specific sources and by a very complicated management structure.Water quality in Volga, according to the report, has not improved substantially in the last three decades.

Josephson, the historian, believes that the first necessary step is to enforce the existing regulation and abandon the Soviet habit that it is cheaper to send the waste without treating the river and paying the resulting fines to clean the water.

Una conversación franca y abierta sobre los riesgos de los proyectos como Gran Volga es esencial más allá de la cuenca del Volga, argumentaJosephson.Many Soviet "zombies" projects have returned to life in modern Russia.Near Kamchatka, in the Far East of Russia, a proposed dizziness complex of 100 gigawatts that was previously considered too expensive, is being reevaluated as a possible hydrogen factory.Two large more hydroelectric plants are planned, also discussed in the Soviet era, for the Angara, the only river that flows from Lake Baikal in the east of Siberia.But with six stations in total, activists fear that Angara will become "a cascade of dead reservoirs".The Amur, the river on the border between Russia and China, recently overflowed, which caused floods and almost 7.500 million dollars (6.614 million euros) in damage to property and reactivating plans for prey and central plains that had been made in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 2017, when the Moscow channel turned 80, the CEO of the state company that manages it told the media: "It is difficult to imagine, but the Moskva River has approximately 80 % of the Volga right now,"And he explained that before the construction of the channel, in the early 1930s, the situation was so terrible that Moskva had been reduced to a stream;right next to the Kremlin, you could simply cross that river walking.While the cities of the Volga Río Down face growing water risks, the water authorities of the Russian capital report that, in the predictable future, Moscow is out of danger.

That means that Volga has been used to supply the Russian capital. PeroJosephson reflexiona así: "¿De quién es la tierra que se está destruyendo y el agua que se está contaminando para que alguien pueda ganar dinero? El Volga sirve al Kremlin.It is from Moscow.It no longer belongs to the people who live next to Volga ".