In the Name of the Great Work: Stalin's Plan for the Transformation of Nature and its Impact in Eastern Europe

IN THE NAME OF THE GREAT WORK

The Environment in History: International Perspectives

Series Editors: Dolly Jørgensen, University of Stavanger; Christof Mauch, LMU Munich; Kieko Matteson, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa; Helmuth Trischler, Deutsches Museum, Munich

VOLUME 1

Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective

Edited by Bernhard Gissibl, Sabine Höhler and Patrick Kupper

VOLUME 2

Powerless Science?: Science and Politics in a Toxic World

Edited by Soraya Boudia and Natalie Jas

VOLUME 3

Managing the Unknown: Essays on Environmental Ignorance

Edited by Frank Uekötter and Uwe Lübken

VOLUME 4

Creating Wilderness: A Transnational History of the Swiss National Park

Patrick Kupper

Translated by Giselle Weiss

VOLUME 5

Rivers, Memory, and Nation-Building: A History of the Volga and Mississippi Rivers

Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted

VOLUME 6

Fault Lines: Earthquakes and Urbanism in Modern Italy

Giacomo Parrinello

VOLUME 7

Cycling and Recycling: Histories of Sustainable Practices

Edited by Ruth Oldenziel and Helmuth Trischler

VOLUME 8

Disrupted Landscapes: State, Peasants and the Politics of Land in Postsocialist Romania

Stefan Dorondel

VOLUME 9

The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa

Bernhard Gissibl

VOLUME 10

In the Name of the Great Work: Stalin’s Plan for the Transformation of Nature and its Impact in Eastern Europe

Doubravka Olšáková

In the Name of the Great Work

Stalin’s Plan for the Transformation of Nature and its Impact in Eastern Europe

Edited by

Doubravka Olšáková

First published in 2016 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2016, 2019 Doubravka Olšáková

First paperback edition published in 2019

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Olsakova, Doubravka, editor of compilation.

Title: In the name of the great work : Stalin’s Plan for the Transformation of Nature and its impact in Eastern Europe / edited by Doubravka >Olsakova.

Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2016. | Series: The environment in history : international perspectives ; volume 10 | Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016024960| ISBN 9781785332524 (hardback : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781785332531 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Environmental policy--Europe, Eastern--History--20th century. | Environmental policy--Soviet Union--History. | Stalin, Joseph, 1878-1953--Political and social views. | Socialism—Environmental aspects--Europe, Eastern--History--20th century. | Nature--Effect of human beings on--Europe, Eastern--History--20th century. | Environmental impact analysis--Europe, Eastern--History--20th century. | Environmental degradation--Europe, Eastern--History--20th century. | Social change--Europe, Eastern--History--20th century. | Europe, Eastern--Environmental conditions--History--20th century. | Europe, Eastern--Social conditions--20th century.

Classification: LCC GE190.E852 I5 2016 | DDC 333.70947/09041--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016024960

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78533-252-4 hardback

ISBN 978-1-78920-502-2 paperback

ISBN 978-1-78533-253-1 ebook

Table of Contents

List of Tables

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction: The Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature, and the East European Experience

Paul Josephson

1.   Paradigms: The Stalinist Plan for the Transformation of Nature in Czechoslovakia

Doubravka Olšáková and Arnošt Štanzel

2.   Seedlings: Hungary and Stalin’s Plan for the Transformation of Nature

Zsuzsanna Borvendég and Mária Palasik

3.   Conspiracy of Silence: The Stalinist Plan for the Transformation of Nature in Poland

Beata Wysokińska

Conclusion: Environmental History, East European Societies, and Totalitarian Regimes

Doubravka Olšáková

Index

List of Tables

Table 1.1   Growth in collective farms in Czechoslovakia

Table 1.2   The prognosis of cultivating rice in Czechoslovakia

Table 1.3   An overview of the largest water management projects in Czechoslovakia

Acknowledgements

The research was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (Research Grant reg. no. 15-04902S), the National Cultural Fund of Hungary (3802/04556), the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security, the Institute for Contemporary History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, the Institute for the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the Visegrad Fund. Our sincere thanks to all of these.

Abbreviations

Introduction

The Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature, and the East European Experience

Paul Josephson

In October 1948 the Communist Party of the USSR unanimously passed the Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature. According to the propaganda of the time, nature itself would be subject to the party’s dictates.¹ No longer would droughts, hot, dry winds (sukhovei), energy shortfalls, or agricultural failures prevent Stalin from achieving superhuman targets in industry and agriculture. The same propaganda claimed that major rivers would be turned into machines, with stepped reservoirs and hydroelectric power stations. Rather than flowing uselessly downstream, the water would serve year-round purposes of power generation, irrigation, municipal supply, and industrial processes; they might build a total of 45,000 reservoirs and ponds. Foresters audaciously approved the task of planting 70,000 kilometers of forest shelterbelts—30 to 100 meters deep—to protect farmland from winds and to keep moisture.

Although a massive undertaking for any society, the Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature was in fact one program dedicated to improving agricultural performance in the European part of the country, and in particular in the steppe region of the south. It then became connected with a series of related plans to transform and remodel nature in the USSR, some of which, including the 1948 Plan, became known as hero projects (velikie stroiki) of communism.

In this way the Stalin Plan was more than the 1948 decision with its focus on the European USSR. It was folded into a larger program of economic, scientific, and cultural construction. It was a product of the era of high Stalinism, of bold determination to finish rebuilding the economy from the devastation of World War II and to advance its military to compete with the United States in the nascent Cold War. Scientists and engineers throughout the nation took advantage of the 1948 proclamation and implicit state support to join their research and development programs to the plan. They gained support to create new institutes. They expanded their foci and intentions to hydroelectricity and land reclamation. Engineers designed locks and canals to improve inland river transport with the goal of linking major seas. In the designs of planners and visionaries the Stalin Plan of 1948 was soon extended to Central Asia and to the expansion and creation of a series of research and construction institutes dedicated to irrigation and canals. The irrigation water would turn vast regions of Central Asian desert, rich in soil nutrients but low in rainfall, into productive farmland and cotton and citrus plantations. There are maps of the period that show the Aral Sea, fed by Stalin-era canals, to serve rice culture. Later Nikita Khrushchev saw the 1948 Plan as part of his Virgin Lands campaign in the mid-1950s.

The Stalin Plan quickly became the focus of myriad articles in magazines, journals, and newspapers, and of public pronouncements about hero construction projects of Communism that extended into Siberia. Literary magazines paid homage to the plan as a vehicle of state and cultural construction. I therefore refer to the Stalin Plan for its various scientific, economic, social, and cultural meanings, not only its initial European focus, and for its inspirational and motivational messages among the workers, peasants, Communist Youth League, and Communist Party members who rushed to embrace it. To varying degrees and intensities, with different emphases and possibilities, East European socialist nations, especially in their Stalinist periods of roughly 1948 to 1953, also engaged the Stalin Plan and referred to it as such.

Here I also use the Stalin Plan as shorthand for a series of government resolutions for dam, reservoir, canal, forestry, roadway and other construction projects, some of which dated to the 1930s; some required significant investments and institutional expansion even to begin in the years following the promulgation of the plan. The Council of Ministers and the Central Committee of the Communist Party passed the Stalin Plan itself, On the Plan for Forest Defense Belts, Grass–Arable Crop Rotations, and the Construction of Ponds and Reservoirs for the Guarantee of Highly Stable Harvests in Steppe Regions and Forest-Steppe Regions of the European Part of the USSR, on 20 October 1948. The dams, canals, irrigation and other projects, many with pre-war roots, were then embedded in this effort.

For example, the government and party passed resolution No. 1339 on 10 August 1937 to build the Kuibyshev hydroelectric complex; the war ended any nascent construction at the site, and the government did not publish a new resolution to build the Kuibyshev power station until 21 August 1950. The Stalin Plan itself was a belated response to droughts in 1946 in Ukraine, Northern Caucasus, Black Earth, Volga, West Siberia, and Kazakh regions that, along with Stalin’s murderous investment policies favoring industry over agriculture, led to famine in 1946 (peaking in August 1947) and caused at least one million deaths. To follow through on the forest defense belts thousands of kilometers in length, the authorities created a design institute, Agrolesproekt, in 1949, that exists in a modern incarnation, to design and carry out forestry projects along the Dniepr, Don, Volga, Ural, and other rivers. Construction on the Volga–Don Canal actually predated the Stalin Plan by six months, and itself dated in designs to 1944 and in the popular press to an article in Tekhnika-Molodezhi in 1938. All of these projects were gulag slave labor projects, and many of the lead engineers and design institutes were gulag organizations.² While scaled back and eventually abandoned after the death of Stalin in 1953 owing to significant costs, a more accurate understanding of the technical limitations of Soviet geoengineering organizations, and likely the absence of the will of Stalin, the plan indicated the great potential for reworking nature in the Soviet Union given the tremendous momentum that ministries and construction firms had acquired and the absence of any public opposition to the environmentally disruptive and fantastical plans.

In East Central Europe after World War II, the newly socialist states followed major aspects of the Stalinist program: secret police and trials; centralization of cultural and educational institutions and their control by party officials; a planned economy; the construction of such hero cities as Sztálinváros, Hungary, Nowa Huta, Poland, and Dmitrovgrad, Bulgaria, in line with the single-profile cities arising throughout the USSR; rapid industrialization; and the collectivization of agriculture. Also included in the effort to remold society to one degree or another in socialist Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia was the transformation of nature. But because of firmly established scientific traditions in those countries, their relatively small geographical size compared with the USSR, and the death of Stalin in 1953 before nature transformation programs could be fully established, the impact of nature transformation was smaller and shorter-lived than in the USSR.

On the one hand, wherever it was pursued, the Stalinist plan to transform nature was not very different from many other large-scale nature transformation projects of the twentieth century—the construction of large dams and canals in India and Brazil (for example, the Sardar Sarovar and Tucurui, respectively); the taming of the American West by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation; the harvesting of the rain forests of Brazil and Indonesia; the Panama and Suez canals (the former at a cost of 22,000 lives); geoengineering along the major rivers of China including the Three Gorges Dam (with 1.5 million people ousted from their traditional homes in the flood plain); and many other such expensive, extensive, and environmentally questionable projects that moved ahead with significant social displacement and loss of human life.

Yet Stalinist transformation was geoengineering and agricultural engineering run amok. Leading party officials and scientists set forth aggressive programs to subjugate rivers, streams, steppe, forest, and croplands to party dictates. Planners in central cities, many of them without agricultural knowledge, dictated the establishment of citrus or cotton cultures in regions that could not, for climate, soil and other reasons, support them. Granted, many scientists opposed the hubristic plans, or at least one or another aspect of them, if not for their scientific futility, then for their waste of resources.³ But they opposed the plans in a hostile environment that might lead to official censure or loss of a job or worse, because Stalin and the party had spoken. Many other forestry, hydrology, and other specialists embraced a transformationist ideology steeped in Lamarckian faith in the ability and desirability of scientists to adopt and adapt crops and lands to each other, and for plants and animals to pass along their acquired characteristics to the next generation; in the socialist experience this was called Lysenkoism after the Russian peasant farmer Trofim Lysenko whose Lamarckian policies were officially endorsed by Communist leaders. These specialists benefited in the support to their institutes and research programs. They had no doubt that damming, dredging and straightening waterways was always worth the cost, and that the benefits outweighed potential ecosystem damage, including the flooding of millions of hectares of land.⁴

Whether in the USSR or Eastern Europe, they carried out extensive propaganda campaigns to convince the masses of the utility and glory of their plans, co-opt their assent, and preclude their opposition. They stressed the indisputable fact that such projects were possible only under socialism—and only under the wise gaze of Stalin. It helped that many East European Communist officials had been trained in Moscow through the Communist International, beginning in the interwar years, and had been fully converted to the belief the state must control nature no less than industry and man. And Stalin’s Red Army ensured that each nation would embrace Soviet socialism to one degree or another.

Nature transformation in socialist Eastern Europe was large scale, costly, and environmentally unsound—and abandoned quickly after the death of Stalin. It diverted needed investment funds from other programs, was based on unsound scientific calculations, and would have been inappropriate in East Central Europe in any event given the relatively small size of the nations compared to the USSR, not to mention different scientific traditions and social structures. The programs in each country differed according to their level of economic development, social structure, educational system and its goals, extent of natural resources, degree of urbanization, and so on. The countries had long shared borders, and had only recently abandoned private property. This too served as an obstacle to revolutionary change. Furthermore, they all faced significant pressures and costs to rebuild from World War II—and nature transformation was quite expensive.

The East European socialist nations were not a monolithic communist bloc,⁵ and pursued nature transformation to different ends and with more or less enthusiasm. Yet certain common features of East European socialism had an impact on environmental thinking and environmental change in East Central Europe after World War II—especially the Stalinist economic plans for the region. To a greater or lesser degree, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary embraced one-party systems that were organized through plebiscites, subterfuge, and coercion in which Stalinist Communist parties dominated public and private life. The parties organized show trials of intellectuals and other innocent people with suspect political views, and even of their own party members, with the foregone outcome of guilty verdicts, prison terms, and executions like those in the USSR; the goal was the creation of a class of worker-peasant intellectuals loyal to socialism. The state claimed to organize the economy for the worker through central planning and three-, five-, and seven-year plans. Governments pursued rapid industrialization with a focus on heavy industry, and ignored, at least initially, housing, food, and other sectors that would have benefited the worker more immediately. The peasant was forced into collectivized agriculture, although many peasants were permitted to own private plots that contributed a small, but important share of agricultural production.

Leaders and many scientists and engineers came to see the environment, like the people in it, as a malleable object, a source of energy, ore, and water to be tamed by the glorious plan in the name of the proletariat. The nations even pursued their own versions of the Stalinist plan to transform nature. Considering the human costs of World War II and the destruction of housing stock, the decision to focus on heavy industry and geoengineering rather than human recovery reveals one of the most disturbing features of the Stalinist model—the emphasis on industrial production rather than human capital. The hubris and impact of the plans to transform nature itself quickly and without adequate study, even if never fully achieved, reveal the danger of environmental management in authoritarian regimes. All of these aspects of the Stalin Plan are clear in scientific, scientific popular, and literary works as it evolved from 1948.

The Nature of the Environment under Socialism

The Stalin Plan to Transform Nature had prerevolutionary roots in a series of interbasin water transfer, dams and canals, peasant settlement to the ends of the empire, and other projects. But crucial for its success was a government and Communist Party apparatus anxious to transform the economy, society, and nature itself into a socialist wonderland of plenty. The decision to pursue the plan grew out Stalin’s self-proclaimed great break (Velikii Perelom) with past institutions and approaches that arrested Soviet cultural and economic development at the beginning of the 1930s; the seeming victory of the Bolsheviks over the economy and agriculture during the five-year plans; a determination to rebuild the economy after World War II; and the enthusiasm of significant numbers of scientists and engineers to work with the Bolsheviks on heroic projects, with welcome government support for them and their research programs.

Russian dreamers, scientists, and poets had long imagined great projects. The nineteenth century poet Nikolai Nekrasov, who grew up on his father’s estate, Greshnevo, near the Volga, witnessed the hard life of Volga boatmen. But in this poetic excerpt from On the Volga, he saw the nation’s future connected with river commerce.

I foresee the beginning

Of the new times and different scenes

In the fortuitous life

Of my favorite river:

Liberated from shackles,

The tireless nation

Will mature and densely settle

The coastal deserts;

Science will deepen the waters;

Through their smooth plain

Giant ships will swim

Like an uncountable crowd,

And the exhilarating work will be eternal

Above the endless river . . .

From their first days in power, the Bolsheviks set out to create socialist industry, establish workers’ control of major enterprises, give land to the peasants, and nationalize all forests, waters, and subsoil minerals with the goal of rational use.⁶ Many of Lenin’s early proclamations concerned forestry, agriculture, and irrigation. Early Bolshevik leaders believed that under socialism they could indeed transform desert into productive farmland, end poor forestry practices, and even eliminate forest fires.⁷ However, the Russian Revolution and resulting civil war and anarchy put nature at great risk. This risk abated during the New Economic Policy of the mid-1920s. Several engineering projects commenced at this time in the Caucasus and Steppe regions near Saratov, Samara, and Astrakhan. Stalin himself wrote about several of them and stressed the importance of using irrigation to increase grain production in the Trans-Volga region.⁸

At the same time nascent environmentalism grew among professionals to establish inviolable nature protection areas and encourage conservation of resources. Ecologists and other scientists, amateur naturists, and a variety of citizens participated in an extensive nature movement in the USSR. The movement had prerevolutionary roots. Some of its organizations became the largest voluntary societies in the USSR and included the Moscow Society for the Admirers of Nature and the All-Union Society for the Preservation of Nature. These organizations actively sought to temper breakneck economic development and successfully lobbied the government to establish a series of nature preserves (called zapovedniki). From the 1930s specialists, however, the organizations and individual scientists were co-opted and coerced to figure out ways to use nature for the economy, and they struggled to protect the zapovedniki and promote conservation measures against state efforts to encroach on the nature preserves and subjugate greater and greater tracts of forest and field to development programs.⁹ Given the imperatives of the Stalinist economic model and the lack of autonomy of specialists, they had limited influence on the scale or content of nature transformation plans. As we shall see, in Eastern Europe these early environmentalists managed to maintain greater autonomy and worked quietly to limit the impact of transformationist plans.

But during Stalin’s great break, party officials, economic planners, and engineers joined in the effort to master the empire’s extensive natural resources toward the end of economic self-sufficiency and military strength. At their order, armies of workers began the process of constructing giant dams and reservoirs on major European rivers—the Don, Dniepr, and Volga. They planned extensive irrigation systems across Central Asia. They built canals and waterworks. The workers erected massive chemical combines, metal smelters, and oil refineries in both European and Siberian parts of the country, paying little attention to the pollution they produced. They put up entire cities to house the laborers whom they exhorted to meet plans and targets, irrespective of the environmental costs and the risks to the workers’ own health and safety. Scientists, party officials, and writers produced self-conscious, self-serving literature praising these hero projects, without any sense of the ideological ironies, human sufferings, or environmental degradation that ultimately accompanied this heroism. Beginning with the White Sea–Baltic Canal, they employed gulag slave laborers in murderous large-scale projects. Indeed, many of the hero projects were in fact built by gulag organizations. The major Soviet hydro-engineering design and construction firm, Zhuk Gidroproekt, actually was born in the blood and lives of seventy thousand prisoners at the White Sea–Baltic Canal Construction. The Belbaltlag slave camp director, Sergei Zhuk, used prisoners as fodder and used them to set up other canal and dam construction organizations that moved down the Volga and built Stalin’s water works. (Gidroproekt exists in the twenty-first century under Vladimir Putin as RusGidro.)

Immediately after the White Sea–Baltic Canal, many Belbaltlag prisoners were sent to build the Moscow–Volga Canal. In 1931 Comrade Stalin proposed to build a canal and turn the Volga to the walls of the Kremlin. They built the canal in four years, with 240 major structures including locks, pumping stations, dams, and tunnels. They excavated 200 million cubic meters of rock and soil, cut the shipping distance from Moscow to Gorky by 110 kilometers, and provided water for Moscow industry and residents through the Moscow River.¹⁰ In July 1937 the first ships traversed the canal, cutting the distance between Leningrad and Moscow by 1,110 km and between Moscow and Gorky by 110 km. They built the Ivan’kovskii (1937), Uglichskii (1939), and Shcherbakovskii (1941) waterworks along the Volga River. They created the Moscow Sea at 327 square kilometers; the Rybinskoe Reservoir at 4,100 square kilometers; and other massive seas.¹¹ (As ships entered the canal from the Volga, they passed by statues of Lenin and Stalin on either side; Stalin’s was removed in 1961 but the pedestal remains, and Dubna city residents now use it to train for rock climbing.) The camps had their own environmental and of course human costs. In this way, the pattern for the Stalin Plan of 1948 was established: large-scale projects carried out by armies of laborers, many of them slave laborers.

Not only canals and dams, but bridges, forestry, smelters, mines and factories—and their construction organizations—spread inexorably from one finished project to another in response to the whims of Stalin’s planners, who drew lines across maps and circled various locales that indicated their suitability for rapid development. The planners did so in the confidence that the small landowners endemic to the capitalist system had been eliminated through class war and so could not interfere, while nature herself could no longer resist the planner’s pencil or the builder’s bulldozer under socialism. While in some cases the socialist regimes of Eastern Europe the authorities resorted to slave labor in their industrial, agricultural, and forestry projects, those projects were never on the scale of Soviet ones, nor, apparently, did they create entire forced labor camps dedicated to the geoengineering and nature transformation, although they used prisoners. Yet they embraced the notion that, under socialism, they could draw lines on maps with planners’ impunity.

The Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature combined prerevolutionary ideas with glorifications of the socialist economy in the 1930s. In Men and Mountains (1935), called by Maxim Gorky a prose poem, M. Ilin (pseudonym) described many projects that dated to any early era and the determination of the Soviets to remake nature—its forests, rivers, deserts—and turn nature into an instrument of the socialist economy. Planning and science would turn the steppe into farmland; new dams and canals would open cotton plantations; the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers would be diverted to Central Asia for fruit growing and would enable ships to sail from the Caspian Sea, while hydroelectric power stations would furnish light for cities and electric power for machines. Already in May 1932 Stalin and Molotov signed a decree against the elements for Ending Droughts in the Volga Territory with forest shelterbelts so that water would gush forth and flow over the fields.¹² Engineers would make the Volga deeper and faster to become the main traffic artery of the country and would link, also by railway, the center of the country to the Arctic through the Kama and Pechora rivers, and to the Baltic and White Sea.¹³ Rivers would be bridled, weather controlled, there would be no floods, Arctic ice would be melted for agriculture, and so on.

Since, in the 1930s, planners focused investments on rapid industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture, large-scale nature transformation would wait until after World War II. Yet Soviet authors celebrated a number of signal achievements that presaged the hero projects of the late 1940s. In agriculture, for example, collectivization destroyed what they believed were ingrained and unscientific peasant farming techniques and replaced them with a kind of socialist agribusiness. Modern machinery required collectivization, because new tractors, combines, and other equipment could run to the horizon and back during plowing, sowing, and harvesting. There is, in fact, some evidence that modern agribusiness inspired some American farmers who visited the USSR in the 1930s and saw what machinery could do on massive plots.¹⁴ In any event, in the USSR, the experience with big earth-moving and harvesting machines in agriculture encouraged thinking about how to alter nature itself, and led to the development of massive bulldozers, section dredges, and other equipment.

During the first five-year plans, several distant transformation projects from the Arctic to Central Asia, and from the plains of Europe to Siberia and the Far East, accompanied urbanization—so-called socialist reconstruction. Scores of new industrial towns and cities appeared, notably Magnitogorsk in the Ural region, Norilsk, Kirovsk, Molotovsk, and others. These would serve as models for the East European hero cities of metallurgy, concrete, and power production. Yet Stalin did not overlook nature itself. At the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 Stalin called for increases in irrigation systems in the Trans-Volga region and afforestation through the planting of forest shelterbelts to fight drought. He said:

As you know, this work is already taking place, although it cannot be said that it is being carried on with sufficient intensity. As regards the irrigation of the Trans-Volga area—the most important thing in combating drought—we must not allow this matter to be indefinitely postponed. It is true that this work has been held up somewhat by certain external circumstances which cause considerable forces and funds to be diverted to other purposes. But now there is no longer any reason why it should be further postponed. We cannot do without a large and absolutely stable grain base on the Volga, one that will be independent of the vagaries of the weather and will provide annually about 200,000,000 poods of marketable grain. This is absolutely necessary, in view of the growth of the towns on the Volga, on the one hand, and of the possibility of all sorts of complications in the sphere of international relations, on the other. The task is to set to work seriously to organize the irrigation of the Trans-Volga area.¹⁵

The pre-war years were a prelude to the transformation of nature. From 1927 to 1941 laborers planted more than 468,000 hectares of shelterbelts at collective farms – forty-three times more than was planted in the entire Russian Empire from 1817 to 1917. By the third five-year plan the amount of irrigated land had increased by 75 percent since the revolution.¹⁶ In all cases, it is difficult to verify Soviet data, which was frequently exaggerated for the consumption of domestic and foreign audiences. But there is no doubt that the Soviet planners truly increased the production of industrial goods, electricity, irrigation, and so on many fold.

Electricity would power this transformation; Soviet molecule counters had enumerated 108,000 rivers in the USSR with 15 percent of the world’s hydroelectric potential, many of them in Siberia. They referred to rivers as white oil. In terms of the USSR, 80 percent of the nation’s hydroelectric potential was on the Siberian Ob, Lena, Enisei, Amur and Angara rivers.¹⁷ Between 1928 and 1953, hydroelectricity capacity grew forty-seven fold. Soviet engineers moved forward unabashedly in a variety of climatic and geological conditions along rivers from the Arctic Circle to the steppe, to arid Central Asia, and to Siberia, along the Dniepr, Svir, Kura, Syr Darya, Dnestr, Narva, Rioni, Kovda, Kama, Don, Niva, and Razda rivers.¹⁸ No river would escape the search for ways to power and water nature transformation.

Planners focused on large-scale integrated geophysical technologies to achieve the goal of the transformation of nature. The so-called hero projects—dams, weirs, hydroelectric power stations, irrigation and transport canals, sluices, forest defense belts, and the like—were the epitome of modern technology; yet, paradoxically, they were built with poorly equipped armies of men who had fewer steam shovels and bulldozers, fewer trucks, fewer horses(!), and fewer wheelbarrows than they needed. Capital was expensive, while labor inputs were easier to requisition, even if it meant using gulag slave labor.

Stalin Begins to Rebuild in Earnest

In the midst of a difficult recovery from World War II, with millions of people still living amongst the rubble or in dug-out earthen huts called zemlianki, and with factories, power stations, and infrastructure in ruins, the tireless Stalin set the nation on a course to transform nature, with geoengineering projects from the White Sea to the Ural Mountains and to Central Asia, with hydroelectric power stations rising on the Volga and other major rivers, with Lysenkoist agriculture spreading into formerly barren or underperforming fields, and with harvests of grain, barley, rye, cotton, and fruits increasing up to fivefold. In six to seven years, irrigation would enable the production of sufficient grain, sugar beets, vegetables, fruits, and livestock to feed a hundred million people.¹⁹ Even more fantastic, the Soviets promised that within twenty-five to thirty years they would turn the sand of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan into forested lands capable of producing thousands of cubic meters of wood annually, and that the Central Asian republics, each now with its own Academy of Sciences staffed with eager engineers, would engage water transfer projects to create gardens of cotton and fruits. Rivers would be tamed and rapids removed so that barge and steam ship travel would grow significantly. The White, Baltic, Azov, Black and Caspian seas would be tied together into one transport nexus. The major focus was stepped reservoirs and power stations on the Volga, including the largest in the world, the Kuibyshevskaia, the Stalingrad, and others that would permit the irrigation of millions of hectares of the Sarpinskaia and Nogaiskaia Steppe.²⁰ A propagandist, Kasimovskii, wrote, In the country of Soviets this utopia became a reality.²¹

In order to reach the level of communist plenty, not only industry, but agriculture would have to be revolutionized in the postwar years, with ever more ambitious hero projects and with increased sowing and harvests, new crops, and better animal husbandry. To achieve these agricultural targets they needed forest defense belts, irrigation systems and hydroelectricity to transform the landscape. One-fifth of land in the European part of the country was steppe and forest steppe regions of the European USSR that suffered from droughts and dust storms. Soviet scholars were determined to overcome the constant droughts that revealed the ineptitude of the Tsarist regime in handling crises—for example, the famine of 1891. They and political leaders were also aware that civil war (1918–1920) and postwar crises (1945–46) had resulted in a total of five to six million deaths by starvation and disease.

Stalin’s plan primarily required vast stretches of land to be afforested in the south of the country in order to prevent the dry winds, coming from the steppe of Kazakhstan and Central Asian deserts, from penetrating the fields and causing damage.²² Planners also intended to plant up to 80,000 miles of forest defense belts, built from trees planted in up to three bands 30 to 50 meters in width; they succeeded at great cost in planting only 5,000 kilometers.²³ With Bolshevism, adherents of ambitious afforestation plans came to power. World War II had halted afforestation, but in 1947 the Ministry of Forestry Management advanced a program for 1.5 million hectares of forest, followed in 1948 with another 5.7 million hectares—in part in response to the famine and grain failure of 1946. As part of Stalin’s plan, the world’s largest waterworks along the Volga, Dniepr, Don, and Amu Darya, the canals and reservoirs would revolutionize travel and tie the entire country together, region to region, countryside to city.²⁴

Soviet authors saw the hero projects as crucial for an agricultural revolution including crops,