by Simon Ings
The Urals produce a heavy impression by the terrible plundering of its riches … forests, mines of precious stones, roads, forms of life – all reflect the disorder of this antediluvian government structure and the anarchy which reigns everywhere! You cannot imagine what barbarism is found in the famous Murzinka region and its vicinity! Yet, the wealth here is enormous. In two hundred years there is not yet one respectable road! The forests burn and are wasted. In order to obtain precious stones, almost half are destroyed and future work is made almost impossible.20
In 1920, responding to Vernadsky’s campaign to save the area, Lenin signed into being the first nature preserve in Soviet Russia, and for a while it seemed that the revolutionary government would embrace the nascent science of ecology and protect the Russian environment for its people.
These good intentions did not survive the desperate struggle to industrialise the nation. The engineer Peter Palchinsky pitilessly recorded the government’s practical and moral failures. Its signature ‘hero project’, the Dneprostroi dam, was an environmental as well as a human disaster. No one had thought to prepare proper maps, so no one knew just how large an area the 35-metre-high dam would flood. No one had included the loss of farmland in the estimates of costs. Palchinsky’s criticisms of the Magnitostroi steel plant were just as trenchant. There were no towns nearby, so an entire city would have to be built for the construction workers. The plant was named after the nearby ‘Magnetic Mountain’ – but no one had bothered to get a good estimate of how much ore was really sitting in that fabled peak. Worst of all, there was no coal nearby: it would have to be brought, over a phenomenal distance, by train.
The government ignored Palchinsky (for all his trouble he was executed in 1929) and brought in American engineers from Gary, Indiana, to help plan the mills. Their pretty enclave, nicknamed Amerikanka, boasted tennis courts, while the 200,000 who were brought in to build the works lived in tents and mud huts surrounded by open sewers and directly in the path of fumes from the blast furnaces.
Vladimir Vernadsky, ever the visionary, understood what lay behind these myopic government actions. On 7 April 1926, addressing the All-Union Congress of KEPS, he pointed out that no matter how advanced a social system got, it could not hope to change the laws of nature:
As [natural productive] forces are … not exhaustible, we know that they have limits and that these limits are real; they are not imaginary and they are not theoretical. They may be ascertained by the scientific study of nature and represent for us an insuperable natural limit to your productive capacity.21
The Stalin Plan for the Great Transformation of Nature was but the most grandiloquent monument to the Soviet state’s refusal to admit physical limits to its future. Natural resources were not included in its price system. They could not be owned privately, but at the same time they had no value: they were ‘free goods’. Is it any wonder, then, that resources, energy and materials were used without regard for waste or loss?
Projects were praised more for their daring and scale than for their utility. The economically worthless White Sea Canal, built in record time, but not lined and not deep enough, and which cost the lives of thousands of labour camp prisoners, became in the media and art a unique success of Soviet industrialisation. Slave labour without the appropriate tools was sold to the nation as creative work by a politically conscious proletariat.
Nikita Khrushchev, inheriting the Plan from Stalin and with it an unimaginably vast area of dead and dying forests, took one look at the looming repair costs and issued a decree eliminating the Main Shelterbelt Administration. All programmes related to the health of forests fell into steep decline. Some idea of the scale of the problem can be acquired when one remembers that Russian forests counted for more than a fifth of the world’s total. In the 1960s a fifth of all Russian timber ended up as wood chips, scraps and sawdust. Up to 40 per cent of the harvest was used as firewood, was thrown away, or simply decayed. Millions of cubic metres of wood rotted away in warehouses on the lower reaches of rivers.22
Khrushchev and his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, did not so much scale back the 1948 plan as overlay it with their own wildly ambitious projects. By the mid-1950s, under Khrushchev, virtually all Russia’s European rivers had been tamed to power the Soviet economic machine. They had also become dead zones of pollution. The Plan’s expanded irrigation system has been left unlined and loses half the water it carries. The lost water has turned an area bigger than France into unplanned swamps.23
The Aral Sea, its feedwaters diverted to feed a disastrous cotton-growing project, lost more than half its size from 1960 to 1991 – three-quarters of its volume. Inevitably, the climate around the lake has changed. Around 43 million tonnes of dust and salt are blown by storms annually. The salts are toxic to plants and make people sick.
And once the European USSR had been tamed, Khrushchev turned his attention to Siberia. The large-scale construction trusts that had been established in the Stalin era grew ever larger. Some ended up with around 80,000 employees, none of whom could be laid off, because the law did not allow it. The moment the planners finished one project, they had to announce another to keep their workers employed. The trusts rampaged across the landscape in search of the next geo-engineering project. If you look on a map of the USSR you can follow them up the rivers, as they built dams and locks, year by year and decade by decade.
Another major consequence of all this construction was pollution. Between 1948 and 1951, 76 million cubic metres of high-level and intermediate-level radioactive waste were discharged from Chelyabinsk-40 into the local river system. The Techa River and its floodlands were put beyond use, and in 1951 10,000 people were evacuated while prison labourers built dams and reservoirs to isolate the river.
In 1957 another nuclear accident – a massive explosion at the nuclear waste dump in Kyshtym, close to Sungul – contaminated the area with radioactive waste. The plume rose about a kilometre into the air, exposed about 100,000 people to measurably harmful levels of radiation, and created a dead zone of several hundred square kilometres. The ‘East Ural Radioactive Trace’ became a unique testing area for radio-ecological studies but cleaning up the mess was a real headache, especially when, during the hot, dry summer of 1967, Lake Karachai evaporated, and winds blew radioactive dust more than fifty kilometres from its source, affecting 41,000 people.
In 1968, the Soviet government finally hit upon a sure-fire way of preventing people wandering into this contaminated zone. They turned it into a nature reserve.
*
If you are pure and selfless and focused – this was the Bolshevik promise – then the physical world will shape itself to your will. Believe in your dreams. Invest yourself in them, wholeheartedly. Concentrate completely on your work. Do not allow yourself to be distracted by obstacles. Above all, do not accommodate reality: it will only scatter your effort.
Focus on doing what must be done. Fulfil your crazy dream. Do not despair.
Well, since Stalin’s day the world has done its work and fulfilled, in patchwork fashion, its crazy dream of clean water, sewage disposal, hospitals, roads, schools and civic institutions. And we are just now beginning to reap the unforeseen consequences of this uneven, gargantuan effort at global development. As I write this, human consumption is exceeding long-term supply by about a quarter. In other words, it takes the earth a year and three months to regrow what people consume in a year.
Natural resources accumulate over time. Oil is the example everyone reaches for first, but forests, soils and aquifers of fresh water also accumulate, and once these resources are gone, they’re gone. Simple waiting won’t bring them back, because the very processes that generated them in the first place have been disrupted.
By the time this book is published we’ll be needing one and a half earths to meet our demands. Ten years after that, we’re going to need two and a half earths. (Bogdanov was there before us: the highlight of his science-fiction novel Red Star is a debate between two Martia
ns over whether they should exterminate us all to get access to more natural resources.)
No wonder we live in millennial times. Some believe there will be an ending, a collapse, a rapture. The rest of us think we have generated so much knowledge and technology that we’ll soon be able to ignore and forget the last 10,000 years of human experience of living on a planet. We are all little Stalinists now, convinced of the efficacy of science to bail us out of any and every crisis, regardless of what science can actually do, impatient of anything scientists might actually say.
There was, I believe, something piteously unavoidable, something admirably human, about the way the Soviet Union faced a world of scarcity and poverty, and tried to light up its land with the fitful glow of science. For all the terrors, follies and crimes of that time, I believe this has also been a story of courage, imagination and even genius.
I fear we will not acquit ourselves nearly so well.
London, 2016
Notes
1. N. F. Fedorov, What Was Man Created for? The Philosophy of the Common Task: Selected Works.
2. Quoted in Krementsov, ‘From “Beastly Philosophy” to Medical Genetics’, p. 90.
3. Quoted in Gloveli, ‘”Socialism of Science” versus “Socialism of Feelings”’, pp. 43, 49.
4. Arran Gare, ‘Aleksandr Bogdanov and Systems Theory’, Democracy and Nature 6, no. 3 (2000), p. 355.
5. According to Leon Trotsky, ‘For Lunacharsky each and every new philosophical and political toy had its attraction and he could not resist playing with them.’ Gloveli, ‘“Socialism of Science” versus “Socialism of Feelings”’, p. 33.
6. John Biggart, Alexander Bogdanov, left-Bolshevism and the Proletkult 1904–1932.
7. James D. White, ‘Alexander Bogdanov’s Conception of Proletarian Culture’, Revolutionary Russia 26, no. 1 (2013), pp. 52–70.
8. John Biggart, ‘Bukharin and the Origins of the “Proletarian Culture” Debate’, Soviet Studies, 39 (1987), pp. 229–46.
9. Bogdanov’s own account of this work has been translated into English by Douglas W. Huestis as The Struggle for Viability: Collectivism through Blood Exchange.
10. A. Gastev, Ustanovka rabochei sily, 1929, no. 1–2, p. 11. Irina Lunacharskaia, ‘Why Did Commissar of Enlightenment A. V. Lunacharskii Resign?’, trans. Kurt S. Schultz, Russian Review 51, no. 3 (1992), p. 326.
11. Johansson and Gastev, Aleksej Gastev, p. 129, n. 30.
12. A. Bogdanov, ‘O tendentsiyakh proletarskoi kul’tury (ovtet A. Gastevu)’ [‘Regarding Trends in Proletarian Culture (the Role of A. Gastev)’], Proletarskaya kul’tura, nos. 9–10. 1919, pp. 46–52. Cited in Sochor, ‘Soviet Taylorism Revisited’, p. 249.
13. Alexander M. Etkind, ‘Psychological Culture: Ambivalence and Resistance to Social Change’, First Nevada Conference on Russian Culture, p. 15.
14. Another Fedorovian nugget: not content with his assertion that death is neither necessary nor inevitable, cosmism’s founder insisted that it was our moral duty to ensure that the living live forever, He even expected us bring our dead ancestors back to life.
15. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, p. 367.
16. Korolenko and Kensin, ‘Reflections on the Past and Present State of Russian Psychiatry’.
17. There is a striking and none-too-flattering portrait of Snezhevsky to be had in ‘The World of Soviet Psychiatry’, Walter Reich’s anecdotal article in the New York Times (30 January 1983).
18. Sakharov, Memoirs, pp. 309–12.
19. Sidney Bloch, ‘Psychiatry as Ideology in the USSR’, Journal of Medical Ethics 4, no. 3 (1978), p. 128.
20. Quoted in Bailes, Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Revolutions, p. 125.
21. Weiner, Models of Nature, p. 44.
22. Paul R. Josephson, Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World.
23. B. S. Richter, ‘Nature Mastered by Man: Ideology and Water in the Soviet Union’, Environment and History 3, no. 1 (1997) pp. 69–96.
Acknowledgements
The reader is in luck: not being an academic, I am under no pressing obligation to thank every scholar, department and library whose hand-towels I darkened with my sweat. If they’re in the bibliography and they’re alive, you can be sure I begged favours off them. They know who they are, and they know how much I owe them. (The people at the Wellcome Library in London are powerful minor gods.)
Better that I mention the people who suffered through my monomania, who indulged it and, in some cases, even encouraged and facilitated it. Obviously any errors in the text are mine; however, the project as a whole is entirely their fault.
Will Hammond at Penguin Books sowed the first seed, with a notion that a biography of the pioneering neuropsychologist Alexander Luria might lead me down interesting rabbit-holes. Anna Davis probably had the worst of it, as she commented on my countless false starts, ‘one-pagers’ and important statements of intent. My agent, Peter Tallack (‘The Science Factory’ to his friends), drove me to write a book-length proposal document and then won me extension after extension as this project accreted and flaked away, accreted and flaked away, like a particularly tortured figurine by Alberto Giacometti.
I burned through one editor completely (Neil Belton – you were brilliant, and kind, and you deserved better from me) and ended up in the tender care of Julian Loose at Faber, who, to my amazement, proved even more of a Soviet nut than Neil.
Some books are so complicated, they have to be performed before they can be written. A chain of happy chance led me from Stephen Dalziel, via some splendid parties, to Julian Gallant and the intellectual oasis that is Pushkin House, and the opportunity, in lectures, to off-piste through Russian science long before I had earned my licence. Rhidian Davis of the British Film Institute, Doug Millard of London’s Science Museum and Louis Savy of Sci-Fi-London all afforded me vital opportunities to straighten out my story in public.
Conversations with friends, had I only had the wit to transcribe them, would have made a book better (though no shorter) than this one. Stephen Jelley, Simon Spanton, Megnah Jayanth, Matthew Cobb and Oliver Morton: thank you. (And Daniel Brown, obviously: my éminence grise.) At my day job, Sumit Paul-Choudhury and Liz Else have kept a quiet, coolly amused eye on this project, and without their encouragement and patience I never would have finished.
Finally Lydia Nicholas, who thinks, speaks, feels and acts faster than anyone else living. Never mind her practical assistance (which was essential): if, as I hope, this book carries the spark of life, then it’s hers.
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