Happy Nice Mall

STOYAN VASEV

This pollution comes with a heavy bill for water purification, as nearly all Volga cities and towns – and Moscow by canal – use the river for their water supply. “The worse the water on the Volga, the more expensive it is to make it drinkable,” Demin says. Considering that the Volga basin is home to 60 million people, about half of Russia’s industry and a comparable segment of its agriculture, the costs are rising.

A recent analysis compiled by Carbon Brief, a UK-based climate media outlet, found that the USSR and Russia third the world in historical greenhouse gas emissions of all time. In a national assessment report compiled by Russian climate scientists in 2014, it was stated that in a time of human-induced climate change, the average annual temperatures in the country increased twice as fast as the global average. The report also stated that the trend is expected to continue. The effects of climate change, fueled in part by Soviet industrial development, are already evident throughout Russia, from permafrost degradation to desertification in the country’s agriculturally southern regions. The same large-scale industrial development that gave birth to the Great Volga and powered by the river’s waters has also contributed to the global problem of climate change – it now threatens water shortages to millions of people living in towns along the Volga.

When I visited the last node of the waterfall in the Cheboksarskoe Reservoir, about 370 miles east of Moscow, in 2010, I saw bursts of algae that made the water look like a witch’s brew.

The nearby city of Cheboksary, the capital of Chuvashia, one of the few ethnic republics in Russia, was leafy, quiet, and welcoming when I visited. I was part of a press tour organized by the waterfall owner RusHydro, who lobbied the government to increase the water level in the reservoir. Years later, it’s still five meters below where RusHydro wanted it to be, because the Cheboksarskoe Reservoir is where the Great Volga project finally stumbled after forty glorious decades.

By the mid-1980s, glasnostMikhail Gorbachev decided that the Soviet Union could do with a little more freedom of the press and transparency, allowing citizens to discuss and even criticize their governments’ decisions. And so the irreversible environmental damage done to the Volga gradually became part of a broad public debate. A 1989 book about the river urged the people behind the construction of the reservoirs that led to “the life-giving water of the Volga turning into dead water and we have nothing to do about it.” “The world-praised Volga-matushka [mother-river] tamed several times, they still call themselves sons, and those who tamed him condemned him to a long, terrible, and painful illness,” the book says.

“Whose land is being destroyed and whose water is polluted so that someone else can make money?”