PART I

To answer this question, I’ll write briefly about the geological and geographic setup of the Aral Sea, discuss the importance of cotton production to the Soviet Union, and then talk a bit about fisheries in the Aral Sea, plus what the Soviet government considered doing about the sea drying up.

A little background to the Aral Sea. The Aral is (or more properly was) an endorhetic lake (a lake with no outflow access to the ocean) that was fed by two main rivers: the Amu Darya and Syr Darya (or respectively the Oxus and Jaxartes to Classicist). These two rivers flow through seven of the current states in Central Asia. The Aral itself, at its greatest extent in historic times, was the fourth largest lake by area, although this perhaps is a little deceptive because it was relatively shallow (a maximum depth of 69 meters, and an average depth of 16 meters), which means it was very sensitive to any changes in river outflow and surface evaporation. At its historic maximum extent the water was brackish, with a salt level of 10 g/l, or about a third the salt content of ocean water.

Central Asian civilizations utilized irrigated agriculture for thousands of years, and the construction and destruction of irrigation canals in historic times influenced the Aral. Genghis Khan’s Mongol forces destroyed canals in Khorezm (the delta region of the Amu Darya) in 1221, which rerouted the river away from the Aral and towards the Caspian Sea to the west. Timur the Great (aka Tamerlane) similarly diverted the Amu Darya to the West to flood the city of Urgench in 1406. The Amu rediverted to the Aral and the sea regained its size in the 17th century. These and earlier diversions of the Amu Darya had caused shrinkage of the Aral and increased salinization – this was something known to Russian and Soviet geologists and archaeologists from the beginning of the 20th century . What caused the push from Moscow to divert water from the Aral to increased irrigation was, in short, “white gold”, ie cotton. The croplands of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are exceptionally suitable to cotton production, and the Russian Empire had conquered the area in the mid-19th century in part to capitalize on the world shortage of cotton during the American Civil War. This economic development was taken up with gusto by the Soviet government as early as 1918, when Lenin signed the decree “On the Allocation of 50 Million Rubles for Irrigation Needs In Turkestan.” This was technically before the area was secured by the Red Army in the Civil War, but once the region was conquered, the Administration for Irrigation Works in Turkestan (IRTUR) led by such Soviet engineers as Georgii Konstantinovich Rizenkampf set to work on vast new irrigation projects. Such projects received official approval from Lenin with a (much quoted) remark:

Irrigation is needed most of all, and more than anything else it will recreate the region, revive it, bury the part and strengthen the transition to socialism. Once collectivization became Soviet policy in the late 1920s, cotton production was made a priority. The original goal was to achieve “cotton autonomy” for the Soviet textile industry by eliminating the need for cotton imports. Collectivization and dekulakization, much as in other parts of the USSR, created massive expropriation of lands and persecution and dislocation of peasants who resisted. By the 1930s, Stalinist persecution expanded to the “bourgeois-saboteur specialists” (ie, the engineers who were specialized in irrigation) as well, with the result that quickly most of the officials in charge of the irrigation projects had little technical knowledge. In addition to achieving “cotton autonomy” increased cotton production meant that the Soviet government could begin to export cotton on the world market, and therefore earn valuable hard currency. Soviet cotton exports began in 1929, and despite ups and downs during collectivization, it eventually began to increase as an export product by the end of the 1930s. The completion of the new “TurkSib” railway meant that Russia could send wood and grain to feed Central Asia in exchange for the region’s increasing cotton monoculture

Cotton production expanded immensely beyond the Amu Darya and Syr Darya regions with a massive diversion project undertaken in the 1950s: the Karakum Canal, which stretches from the Amu Darya across the middle of Turkmenistan. By 1962 the canal reached the republic capital of Ashgabat, and the project was hailed:

To subjugate and develop the boundless plains of empty lands , to give them moisture, to cultivate huge massifs of Soviet cotton on them, to decorate gardens, vineyards, and pastures with green – this task has the Soviet people set itself constructing the Karakum Canal. Agricultural land increased in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan from 6.4 million hectares to 15.9 million hectares. The canal was supposed to lead to new heights of cotton production, but actual yields were below planned production. The canal itself was supposed to lead to the Caspian Sea, but the project stopped in the 1970s far short of this objective. Because of a lack of trained personnel in Turkmenistan, the canal was mostly designed by engineers from the Soviet center, and had massive maintenance issues involved. Massive seepage from the (mostly hand-built) canal caused swamps to develop along the canal route – something like a fifth of the canal’s water is lost from seepage and evaporation. Water actually making it to collective farms was often wasted, and poor drainage caused massive salinization problems (something like half of Uzbek cotton land was estimated to have salinization problems by the 1960s).

For all the importance of the Uzbek cotton industry to the Soviet Union, this did not spare it from massive corruption, especially in the Brezhnev era with the so-called “cotton scam”. In essence, the Soviet central government would call for vast increases in cotton production, the Uzbek authorities would falsify figures to comply, and the Soviet central planners would pay the Uzbek authorities such as Sharan Rashidov for the supposed production figures (the surplus funds for fictional cotton would then be pocketed). Just to keep things secure, the Uzbek party leaders would then pay off Brezhnev and his associates to keep everyone happy.