Davydov Plan
The Davydov Plan was a project within the framework of the "Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature" in the Soviet Union from 1948, which covered the entire steppe belt from Europe to Central Asia. The Siberian rivers Ob and Yenisei should be diverted in order to make the distant arid areas around the Aral Sea and the Caspian Sea usable for agriculture through irrigation . The plan is named after the Soviet hydraulic engineer Mitrofan Michailowitsch Dawydow.
The project was announced by the Council of Ministers of the USSR in 1950 and abandoned in 1986 under Mikhail Gorbachev , the new General Secretary of the Communist Party. Neither the costs nor the possible consequences could be assessed. The planning of the entire project was well advanced by then. In August 1985 the first blasting work for the first construction section of the Sibaral Canal is said to have been carried out over a stretch of 500 meters, and in December work began on dams on the Lacha and Wosche lakes.
Exact plan
The two Siberian rivers Ob and Jenissei were to be dammed up to form a reservoir that would have been about the size of West Germany before reunification . They were then to be connected by a canal and water to be transferred to the Irtysh . The lowest point, the lowland on the Ubagan and Turgai rivers in the Kazakh threshold , was to be overcome by a 70 m deep cut. From this valley, the water would have flowed through a canal to the Aral Sea, from which several secondary canals led away, and thus into the Aralo-Caspian valley .
Zibaral Canal
In October 1984, Prime Minister Nikolai Tikhonov announced that the end of the project planning was imminent and that the decision to implement the plan had been made. Accordingly, the last details should have been worked out in the next two years and the first ship could possibly have sailed on the Sibaral Canal by the end of the century. It was planned to be ten meters deep and, at 200 meters wide and 2,550 kilometers long, would have been the largest navigable waterway in the world. Der Spiegel reported that the first work had already started in a secret location. The cost of the channel alone was given as 50 billion rubles, and the New York Times had named three times as much.
Possible effects
Due to the huge size of the planned reservoir, much urgently needed water would have evaporated, which would have been lost. In addition, the vegetation would have been destroyed, both forests, which were very important for the timber industry, and other vegetation. This lake and the resulting rise in groundwater would have resulted in land swamping, which in turn would have destroyed a lot of vegetation. Western Siberia is affected by swamp even without the implementation of the project. Another problem would have been the reduced supply of fresh water to the Arctic Ocean . This would have increased the salt water content, which means that ice would have formed more slowly. The smaller amount of ice mass might have led to global warming, and climate belts could have shifted up to 400 km to the north. The abundance of fish could have decreased, which was also an important factor in the Soviet economy. In addition, the risk of flooding would have increased.
On the other hand, the Aral Sea, which had become much smaller due to the withdrawal of water from its tributaries, and the Caspian Sea could have been saved. It is controversial whether the Aral Sea was actually intended to be saved or whether it would only have been sacrificed for the benefit of further irrigation projects in agriculture. Agadschan Babajew ( Russian Агаджан Гельдиевич Бабаев ), President of the Academy of Turkmenistan and former director of the Desert Institute, was quoted by Spiegel in 1984, before the Davydov Plan was abandoned, with the words: "The future of the Aral Sea has been determined" - and Der Spiegel added: A human-made ecological disaster. The Caspian Sea, on the other hand, has not been threatened by falling dry since the late 1970s, and the lake level has risen again. The latter is said to have played a decisive role in the task of the project under the influence of Adel G. Aganbegjan, then director of the Institute for Economy and Organization of Industrial Production and advisor to Gorbachev.
trouble
Defective canals would have caused immense costs, but the most serious problem would have been that the rivers on the upper reaches were frozen for up to six months a year.
literature
- Demtschenko: About the irrigation of the Aralo-Caspian lowlands to improve the climate of the neighboring countries. Kiev 1871. (Russian)
- Jürgen Salay: The Soviet Union River Diversion Project: from plan to cancellation 1976–1986. Uppsala Universitet, 1988, OCLC 77880921 .
- Marianna Butenschön: Dangerous and too expensive - Moscow has decided not to divert entire rivers. Die Zeit, March 21, 1986
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Marianna Butenschön: Dangerous and too expensive - Moscow has decided not to divert entire rivers . In: The time . No. March 13 , 1986 ( zeit.de [accessed June 19, 2018]).
- ↑ PROJECT DAWIDOW: Get killed . In: Der Spiegel . No. 19 , May 11, 1950, pp. 18–19 ( spiegel.de [accessed June 19, 2018]).
- ↑ a b c When Siberia's rivers flow backwards . In: Der Spiegel . No. 47 , November 19, 1984, pp. 194–200 ( spiegel.de [accessed June 19, 2018]).