Tag: Soviet Union

The Draining of the Aral Sea

The Aral Sea had once been the 4th largest lake in the world. It was a source of life for the succession of civilizations that existed in central Asia. People have been fishing its waters since the last ice age. Today it has almost completely vanished.

When the Middle Eastern economies closed to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, cotton became scarce throughout the Communist world. The USSR undertook several waves of ambitious irrigation projects in its southern Republics to make those areas amenable to large-scale cotton cultivation. Beginning in 1971, close to 20 cubic kilometers were diverted from the Oxus and the Jaxartes rivers annually. Little or no water reached the Aral Sea from these rivers which were its main tributaries. At first, the water level dropped only a few inches from year to year, but as the sea began to heat up and the salinity increased, evaporation in the Aral basin exploded. Water level dropped by three or four feet each year during the 1980s. In the last 30 years, the amount of water that has disappeared from the Aral Sea years is roughly equivalent to the entire contents Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. The once robust fishing industry has been decimated. Towns along the shore are almost all abandoned. What water that has been making it into the Aral is agricultural runoff filled with pesticides and fertilizer. Each year, the sea became smaller and more poisonous.


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The Aral’s gradual death was not a secret in the Soviet Union. Initiatives were introduced at the Kremlin to make the irrigation system more efficient and to divert other rivers in the region to replenish the Aral. But all proposals that ran counter to the status quo were met with hostility in Moscow. People living in the European republics were indifferent to the problem. Ultimately, it was more profitable to the USSR to protect its cotton production than it was for it to save the Aral Sea from complete destruction. The tens of thousands of fishermen who had made their living on the Aral were ignored and forgotten.

Entrance to Moynaq, once a port town with a thriving harbor.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, what remained of the Aral Sea was split between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The Uzbek government continued to maintain many of the same policies instituted by the Kremlin, especially in regard to agricultural and industrial organization. Today it is one of the top five leading producers of cotton despite its receiving only a fraction of the amount of rainfall needed to successfully grown cotton. Kazakhstan, on the other hand, pursued a very different path by privatizing most of its industries. Since there was money to be made in maintaining at least some of the Aral sea for industrial purposes, a competing demand arose which sought to protect the sea and sustain a regular shoreline. The Kazakhs built a massive dam containing the north stretches of the Aral and preventing it from flowing into the southern part of the basin, controlled by Uzbekistan. It is likely that the North Aral Sea will survive. Unless something is done to by the Uzbek people to introduce new water into the South Aral basin, what we call the South Aral Sea will probably dry completely before the end of the decade and become a vast salt flat desert.

The Jewish Autonomous Oblast

The other day I was looking at a list of provinces that made up Soviet Russia. I found one called Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Of course I had to investigate.

Consequently, it is crucial to bring deeprootsmag.org levitra samples at discount with an endorsement of a spelevitrat to guarantee that you are sufficiently solid to participate in sexual action. However, the patient may have to suffer mentally, financially, and physically throughout the treatment and afterward because of specific chemotherapy side generic levitra pills effects. Do not lowest price for levitra http://deeprootsmag.org/2013/10/01/perhaps-the-richest-body-of-stories-by-any-north-american-writer-of-his-generation/ consume dubious unnamed remedies with unproven efficiency. It is advised that only one tablet of Tadalafil be consumed in a period of 24 hours. buying tadalafil online (Tadalafil) produces very minimum to no side effects generally. This passage in Wikipedia offers a succinct introduction: “Soviet authorities established the autonomous oblast in 1934. It was the result of Joseph Stalin’s nationality policy, which allowed for the Jews of the Soviet Union to receive a territory in which to pursue Yiddish cultural heritage within a socialist framework.” The Soviet Union was made up of 15 separate republics. Each of these was supposed to represent a different nation (Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, ect.). Jewish people residing in the Soviet Union asserted that they too constituted a nation and should apportioned the same status and autonomy as the other Soviet nation-states. Since many of the Jewish leaders in the Party were secret Trotskyites, Stalin saw political opportunity in this demand for a “Soviet Zion.” He arranged for the formation of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast as a way to dislodge Jewish influence from the political landscape and rob prominent Jewish leaders of their constituency. The new Oblast was 5,000 miles from Moscow. It probably took something like two weeks to reach it on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The land itself was covered in morass and impenetrable forest. The only people who lived in the region were Manchurian Chinese who crossed the border routinely and treated the land as though it was theirs. Living in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast would have been hard, dangerous and utterly desolate. Despite propagandistic novels written in Yiddish describing the Oblast as an unspoiled paradise and numerous “back to the land” campaigns focused upon the largely urban Jewish populace, very few Jews ever went to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast.
At its highest, the Jewish population in JAO was 30,000; that was in 1948 and still only constituted just 30% of the total population. After the formation of Israel that number dropped to just 17,000. Of course, there were millions of Jews living in the Soviet Union. The proportion of them living in the JAO was negligible. So what we know as the Jewish Autonomous Oblast is Jewish in name alone. One of the Soviet Union’s many failed attempts at social engineering.

Hallucinatory Playground Installations
of the Soviet Union

For some reason, playgrounds in the Soviet Union often featured distorted, inscrutable statues of fairy tale creatures, some legitimate characters from folklore, others just wild fever dream hallucinations. It is difficult to say if the grotesquerie of the figures was an accidental or intended. I like to imagine disillusioned artists from the provinces with no other method of publicizing their work being commissioned to do these jobs. They are uncooperative from the very beginning. They quarrel with the bureaucrats dispatched to oversee the projects. I see local officials despising the works once their finished, but since immediately tearing them down after their completion would be proof of their mismanagement of the project and make them vulnerable to criticism within the party, they leave them up. The disabused artists accomplish their aim: to frighten and terrorize a society which they loathe profoundly, to use the people’s own small mindedness to disturb and cause unease.

Then again, since this was communist Russia, there was probably a single guy who worked for the Ministry of Recreation or some such department whose only job was to design playground equipment for the whole empire. Maybe this gentleman was attempting whimsy but was incapable of imaginative play and humor. Maybe he confused fanciful illusion with basic abnormality. And so we have these images that are actually kind of subversive emerging out of blind ineptitude. I still admire what they were trying to do. The modern playground is built to be nothing more than a mechanism for expending effort through vigorous physicality. They are really just workout facilities for children. The people who designed soviet parks were trying to make these spaces more interesting for kids. The statues are supposed to imbue the playground with enchantment and inspire children to respond involuntarily with wonder. They do succeed in conjuring up a special magic; unfortunately it’s the accursed kind.

All of these images come from the excellent englishrussia.com http://englishrussia.com/2007/08/15/the-most-weird-russian-kids-playgrounds/, a website devoted to Soviet-era kitsch and oddity.

 

 

 


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