Industrial Deserts: Industry, Science and the Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union

Abstract

SEER,Vol.85,No.2, April2007 Industrial Deserts: Industry, Science and the Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union PAULJOSEPHSON Powerfuland terrible Are the Iron Urals The Sacred Vow You gave to Stalin, Is, like the steel itself, armoured, That Vow is unbreakable. We will be the first On the front of Labour.' Prologue: WhattheSoviet Industrialization Paradigm Wrought From Perm to Nizhnii Tagil, from Sverdlovsk to Cheliabinsk to Magnitogorsk, and east to Novokuznetsk and Kemerovo, a vast, toxic rust belt of chemical, metallurgical and nuclear factories and extractive industries spewed smoke, acid and poison into the air, water and land over decades of Soviet power. In Berezniki, a centre of potash and fertilizer production, children under fifteen today are eight times more likely to suffer from blood diseases than their contemporaries in I21 other badly polluted Soviet urban areas. Nizhnii Tagil is 87 per cent industrial plant, the rest housing and stores, so the atmosphere is filled with twice the limit of ammonia and formaldehyde as are the residents' homes. In Karabash, a foundry dominates a township of I8,ooo people, putting out i62,000 tons of soot, sulphur, lead, arsenic, tellurium and other metals and gases annually.2In Magnitogorsk,at one time Joseph Stalin's showcase iron and steel centre, one-third of the adults and two-thirds of the children under fourteen have suffered from respiratory infections, and between I980 and I990 birth defects doubled. In I990 Magnitogorsk still used open-hearth furnaces to produce sixteen million tons of steel annually and twenty tons per Paul Josephson teaches Russian and Soviet history at Colby College, Waterville, Maine, USA. 1A World War II homage to increasing industrial production. 2 Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr., Ecocidein the USSR, New York, 1992, pp. 102-05- PAUL JOSEPHSON 295 capita annually of atmospheric pollutants.3 Soviet gulag prisoners joined other poorly equipped workers to build thirty-fourindustrial cities in the Arctic and Subarticregionsthat poured pollutantsinto the air and water, notablyNorilskin north centralSiberia,and Nikel, as its name implies, a smelting enterprisealong the Norwegian border. The authorities forcefully moved indigenous peoples Jakuts, Nenets, Khanti and others away from theirhomelandsto bringthe glorious, industrial,socialistutopia to the permafrost.By the end of the Soviet era, life expectancy for males had decreased to fifty-eightyears, infant mortalityexceeded that for many developing nations, and respiratory, cardiacand other diseaseshad become epidemic, in largepart because of the Soviet industrializationparadigm. Of all regions of the formerSoviet Union, the southernUrals region was the most heavily polluted. Each year more than 3 million tons of heavy metal wastesenteredthe atmosphere,or roughly3 kgper person per year. The number of sourcesof pollutionquadrupledbetween I975 and I988, most of them in factories built with rudimentarypollution control equipment. Releases from copper smelting enterprises alone had completely denuded ioo,ooo hectares of all vegetation. Within the buildings themselves dangers lurked. For construction materials, cement with slag and alkaliwas used which found its way into lakesin which Cheliabinskresidentsloved to fish. The levels of alkaliwere ten to IOOtimesabovenorms.4 Smoke, dust, run-offand leaks led to deep and irreversibledestruction of flora, erosion, ruining of microclimates, and the formation of what several Soviet scientists euphemistically referred to as 'unique geochemical regions'. I call them industrialdeserts. The archetypical Soviet industrialdesert is CheliabinskProvince in the southern Urals Mountain region. Yet only under Mikhail Gorbachev in the late I98os could Ural scientistspublicly addresswhat was common knowledge of the devastation.Wrote one, 'Cheliabinskprovince has become a zone of ecological devastation',a region 'degraded'from bottom to top.5 Industrialdeserts are human constructs,regions that arose because of the concentrationof industryand its unabatedpollution. Since land was poisoned by industry, agriculture was pushed into poorer and poorer soils. Agronomists tried to make up for the poor soils with copious applications of chemical pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers. They did not so much push the land to produce as kill it. Extensive 3Ibid., pp. 92-93. On Magnitogorsk, see Stephen Kotkin, Steeltown USSR, Berkeley, CA, I949I. G. P. Viatkin, 'Chernaia tochka na karte oblasti', Nauka Urala,50, 22 December I988, p._2. 5 Ibid.,p. 2. 296 INDUSTRY, SCIENCE & NATURE IN THE USSR devegetation,the fellingof forestswithout the pretence of reforestation, a decline in wildlife and the poisoning...