Window on Eurasia

River Diversion Debate Helped Change Course of Russia

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 25, 2006 – Debates within and among Soviet elites in the early 1980s about the possibility of diverting Siberian river water to
Central Asia in the end did not change the flow of these rivers but did change
the direction of the country, by opening the way for glasnost’, the more public discussion of issues under Mikhail Gorbachev.

In an article published in the latest issue of “Neprikosnovenniy
zapas,” Dmitriy Vorob’yev describes the ways in which individual
scholars, writers and officials and then sections of major institutions
entered into what he calls “the government’s debate with itself”
[http://www.nz-online.ru/print.phtml?aid=80011629].

According to Vorob’yev, the discussion passed through three stages.
In the first, those specialists and politicians who were inclined against
the project competed with each other to discuss how the existing plans
could be “improved” – a euphemism for delayed or even cancelled.

Then, those working in particular specialities or in particular places
took sides. In this stage, most of the USSR’s geologists were on one
side of the debate, while most of its hydrologists were on the other.
And many officials in Moscow were behind the plan, while those in areas
likely to be negatively affected sought to defend “their” locales.

And in the third, the debate broadened out, first to include individual
writers and then the Soviet Writers’ Union as a whole. That body, in
what was something between samizdat and an official proclamation
(published in “Russkaya mysl’” (Paris), July 15, 1982), denounced
the idea in the strongest possible terms.

The denunciation of the idea of Siberian river diversion became a
central theme in Vladimir Chivilikhin’s novel, “Pamyat’”
(“Memory”), which posited a basic conflict in the Soviet Union
between the predominantly “Slavonic taiga” and the largely Muslim
“Asiatic steppe.”

Chivilikhin’s title was then picked up by the Booklovers Society
organized at the Ministry of the Aviation Industry in 1980. While that
organization later became infamous for its anti-Semitic and
anti-Western ideas, it rose to public prominence in the first place by opposing the
diversion of Siberian river water to Central Asia.

Because ecological issues were among the few that the Soviets permitted
more or less open discussion of – in 1981, Moscow even created an
ecological commission to serve as a forum -- those concerned about
Siberian river diversion were in a position to speak out more
forcefully than might otherwise have been the case.

But the very success of this discussion, the ways in which the back and
forth revealed problems that the authors had not earlier identified,
helped to convince Gorbachev and those who rose to power with him that
such debates could prove useful in overcoming the stagnation into which
the USSR had fallen in Brezhnev’s time.

Soon, however, the debates perestroika ignited overwhelmed first the
Communist leadership and then the Soviet state, leading many in the
Kremlin both then and now to conclude that active public debate on key
issues was something that could threaten not only them but the system
over which they presided.

All too many Russian officials think that way now, Vorob’yev
concludes, noting that they appear to have forgotten that “the
history of debates about Siberian river diversion not only show the
productiveness of role conflicts for finding compromises but also
create the preconditions for the rise of social-political discussions and also
increase the role of the latter as a counterbalance to the adoption of
authoritarian decisions.”

Efforts by some in the leadership to promote loyalty above all,
Vorob’yev continues, “cannot be constructive elements in the life
of the state. The Soviet experience already showed the dangers involved in
taking important decisions in the absence of social and institutional
debates.”

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