Aral-88: Catastrophe, Critique

and Hope
WILLIAM WHEELER

Introduction
Swollen with white-red salt, the bottom of the Aral Sea lay before us. The
sea had retreated from its former ports by sixty, seventy, in some places
even ninety kilometres. Dozens of rusting, decaying fishing trawlers,
cutters, motor-boats, schooners, launches remained in the former ports,
which are now being filled with sand. [] On our journey we constantly
encountered women and children, gathering cotton from dawn till dusk.
In the Kyzylkum and Karakum deserts we would often stumble upon lakes
filled with salty drainage water. The majority of them do not have a name.
But they should, perhaps, for clarity, be labelled one hundredth, one fiftieth
or one twentieth of Aral. For in them is now accommodated a good half
of all the waters of the Aral Sea. And these lakes are useful for absolutely
nothing. 1
In 1988, the prominent Soviet literary journal, Novyi mir, and the
Central Asian journal, Pamir, organized Aral-88, an expedition drawing
together well-known Soviet writers, journalists, academics, scientists and
philosophers. Their goal was to understand the reasons for the destruction
of the Aral Sea. The lines above, by the director of the expedition,
Grigorii Reznichenko, describe what they saw. The description evokes a
profoundly unsettling sense of Soviet modernity gone catastrophically
wrong. Principles of rationality and utilitarianism are confounded by the

William Wheeler is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology Department, Goldsmiths

College, University of London.
Research for this article was carried out as part of an ESRC-funded PhD project. I
would like to thank Pauline von Hellermann, Frances Pine, Catherine Alexander, Niccol
Piancola and the anonymous SEER reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts.

1
Grigorii Ivanovich Reznichenko, My znaem, chto nyne lezhit na vesakh, Novyi mir,
1989, 5, pp. 18294 (p. 183). All translations from Russian are my own.

Slavonic and East European Review, 94, 2, 2016

296 WILLIAM WHEELER
absurdity of nameless and useless lakes scattered across the desert, filled
with sterile drainage water. The urban and modernist claims of the Soviet
Union are refuted by the picture of women and children picking cotton.
We witness the ruins of a once-thriving fishing industry and the ruins of
the sea which supported it. Salt, rust, sand: Soviet modernity has brought
not progress but catastrophe.
The catastrophic story of the desiccation of the Aral Sea is now well
known. Once the fourth largest inland body of water in the world, lying in
the deserts of Soviet Central Asia, the Aral Sea was fed by the Amu Daria
and Syr Daria, which flowed from the glaciated peaks of the Pamirs and
the Tien Shan. The sea supported an important fishing industry famed
throughout the USSR. But from the 1960s, the sea began to shrink. The
cause was Soviet policies of cotton and rice cultivation, for which water was
extracted from the seas feeder rivers to irrigate vast tracts of arid steppe.
As the sea shrank, salinity levels rose, killing off native fish species. The
fishing industry collapsed. The health of local populations also suffered as
water supplies became polluted and storms of toxic dust became frequent.2
In the late 1980s, public awareness about the Aral in the Soviet Union
was growing. In early 1988 the disaster was shown for the first time on
television.3 But the facts were not clear: precisely what had happened,
who was responsible, and how this had come about was not known to
the Soviet public. Hence the expedition: on behalf of the public, the
participants wanted to see the disaster with their own eyes; and they were
accompanied by a team of scientists who were to generate trustworthy
data to replace official distortions. The Aral Sea was just one of a range
of environmental crises impinging with various degrees of severity on
Soviet citizens at the time, including Chernobyl, which had revealed the
disastrous effects of official secrecy and obfuscation. The political context
2
While a vast amount has been written on the desiccation of the Aral Sea, the broad
parameters of accounts are similar. For a comprehensive account of Soviet irrigation
policies and their effects on the water balance across the Aral Sea basin, see Philip
P. Micklin, Managing Water in Central Asia, London, 2000. For detailed accounts of
different aspects of the environmental crisis, as well further insights into its causes see, for
example, the edited volumes Philip P. Micklin and William David Williams (eds), The Aral
Sea Basin, New York, 1996; Michael H. Glantz (ed.), Creeping Environmental Problems and
Sustainable Development in the Aral Sea Basin, New York, 1998; Jacques C. J. Nihoul, Peter
O. Zavialov, and Philip P. Micklin (eds), Dying and Dead Seas: Climatic Versus Anthropic
Causes, Dordrecht and London, 2003; Andrey G. Kostianoy and Aleksey N. Kosarev (eds),
The Aral Sea Environment, Heidelberg, 2010.
3
Nikolai Vasilevich Aladin, Plotina zhizni ili plotina dlinoiu v zhizn. Chast pervaia.
Prolog ili pervaia piatiletka (19881992 gg.), Astrakhanskii Vestnik Ekologicheskogo
Obrazovaniia, 3, 2012, 21, pp. 20616 (p. 206).
 ARAL-88: CATASTROPHE, CRITIQUE AND HOPE 297
of perestroika and glasnost was crucial to the expedition: since public
opinion, long suppressed, was to be given a voice in structural reforms, the
participants positioned themselves as representatives of a broader public,
criticizing the apparatus and outlining directions for necessary reforms.
Indeed, the expedition aroused widespread interest, with members of the
public phoning the offices of Novyi mir asking where they could donate
money to help the Aral Sea.4 Unsurprisingly, it also elicited both hostility
and obfuscation from the apparatus: water management officials publicly
contested their findings, and accused the expedition of distortion and
misleading the public.5
The leading participants in the expedition were intellectuals and
scientists born in the 1920s and 1930s, of the same generation as Gorbachev
himself. Most were from Moscow, Leningrad or other European parts of
the USSR, though there was also a number of Central Asian intellectuals.
Some participants were longstanding members of the environmental
movement, such as Sergei Zalygin, editor of Novyi mir, former hydrological
engineer, author and vocal critic of the states hydrological projects. But
others were relatively new to environmentalism. Reznichenko, for example,
was a longstanding member of the editorial board of Novyi mir, who had
last seen the Aral Sea when it was full, in 1962, from the air, as a journalist
covering the construction of a gas pipeline in the region. He had been
unconnected with environmentalism until the early 1980s, when he wrote
an article for Novyi mir about the proposed scheme to divert Siberian and
northern rivers the article was censored.6
In 1989, three texts about the expedition were printed in Novyi
mir, which form the basis of my analysis in this article.7 The first, by
Reznichenko, is entitled We know what now lies in the balance.8 After
an overview of the expedition route, the text comprises a series of diary
entries, interspersed with reflections on the different aspects of the
disaster. As we follow the expedition from the glaciers of the Pamirs, across
the massive cotton plantations of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, across the rice
paddies of South Kazakhstan to the former port of Aralsk, down to the

4
G. I. Reznichenko, The Aral Sea Tragedy: The Diary of an Expedition (with additional
material and commentary), Moscow, 1992.
5
Ibid., pp. 3840, 6465.
6
Ibid., p. 25.
7
Although in many ways they are radical, they could perhaps have been more radical
still: the earlier censorship of Reznichenkos article on the rivers diversion project indicates
that the stakes were high, and that there would have been a degree of self-censorship at the
very least.
8
Reznichenko, My znaem.
298 WILLIAM WHEELER
southern port of Muinak and along the Karakum canal into Turkmenistan,
a complex picture emerges of intricately interwoven ecological, economic,
health and social crises. The climax of the piece comes in a section entitled
Who destroyed the Aral?, in which the disaster is blamed squarely on the
command economy.
Next are the proceedings of a round-table discussion including speeches
by expedition participants.9 A hapless representative of the Ministry of
Water Management (Minvodkhoz) who has accompanied the expedition
also makes a defensive speech where he states that quality of drinking
water should be the first priority and improvement of irrigation efficiency
the second, and he notes the progress underway.10 But other participants
explicitly deny that Minvodkhoz could or should play a role in solving the
problems it has created. Various technical solutions are proposed, ranging
from water pricing to artificially increasing rainfall over Central Asia;
one speaker explicitly calls for the public to play a role in such solutions,
not Minvodkhoz.11 Participants draw comparisons with Lake Baikal, the
Caspian and of course Chernobyl: since it is now known who is to blame
for Chernobyl, it should also be known who is to blame for the Aral.
Many criticisms of various aspects of the command economy tally with
the observations and analysis of Reznichenko. Academics from Central
Asia in particular deplore the effects of cotton monoculture on nature
and people alike. For many, the Aral disaster points to deeper malaises
in the Soviet Union the problem of regional specialization; the crisis of
overproduction of unnecessary goods; the crisis of agriculture in general;
even, as the Central Asian writer Chingiz Aitmatov puts it, the problem of
putting economic expediency before human lives.12 The discussion closes
with a rousing call to arms by Zalygin.13
The final text, by Vasilii Seliunin, Time for action,14 is an essay
comprising systemic analysis of the causes of the disaster and holistic
solutions for the problems of the region and of the whole country. Like
Reznichenko, Seliunin did not have a history of environmental activism: he
was an economic journalist who, during perestroika, became increasingly
radical in his calls for far-reaching reforms. In a famous article published
just before the Aral-88 expedition, he argued that bureaucratic management
9
Sergei Nikolaev and Grigorii Reznichenko (eds), Kruglyi stol zhurnalov Novyi
mir i Pamir po rezultatam ekspeditsii Aral-88, Novyi mir, 1989, 5, pp. 194212.
10
Ibid., p. 197.
11
Ibid., pp. 20203.
12
Ibid., p. 204.
13
Ibid., pp. 21112.
14
Vasilii Seliunin, Vremia deistvii, Novyi mir, 1989, 5, pp. 21341.
 ARAL-88: CATASTROPHE, CRITIQUE AND HOPE 299
and social inertia were persistent but not insuperable obstacles throughout
Russian history.15 He was later to become a Duma deputy from 1993 until
his death the following year, consistently calling for further liberalization
of the economy.
Copies of these texts were distributed to the relevant ministries, and
the participants were hopeful that their intervention might influence
politics. Indeed, they date from the high point of Soviet environmentalism.
Even before perestroika, criticism of the regimes environmental policy
had been permissible; during the perestroika period, the environmental
movement grew and became a major force of mobilization. In the Aral-88
texts, beneath the bombastic rhetoric and moral outrage characteristic of
the time, the catastrophe prompts a re-reading of the Soviet past and gives
rise to a coherent, holistic critique of the Soviet system. Such ideas are
not unique to these texts, but because the catastrophe acts as a powerful
symbol for everything that is wrong with the Soviet Union at the time, it
becomes a catalyst for change. Hence, despite everything, hope emerges
and a better future is proposed.
After 1989, environmental issues dropped off the political agenda and
the movement was marginalized. In 1992, Reznichenko published the
diary of the expedition in full, with a poignant foreword and afterword,
in which he reflects on the impact of the expedition: despite the interest
it aroused, and despite the many projects he has been involved in since,
nothing has changed, and no more water is reaching the sea. While he
expresses his determination to go on working for the sea, the tone is one
of despair. The sense of hope which pervaded the 1989 texts has gone:
the sea is doomed.16 Today, the Aral Sea basin remains the problem of
the five Central Asian successor states, and of a range of international
agencies. While environmental problems have been addressed by a range
of technical projects and the political economy of the region has been
radically restructured, crucially, monoculture persists in Uzbekistan
and Turkmenistan, for whom cotton is a source of foreign exchange and
a means of social control.17 Thus although recently, a limited technical
project has partially restored the North Aral Sea, and the fishing industry
has recovered somewhat, the region is far from an integrated solution to its
water problems.18 Overall, the sea has continued to shrink.
15
Vasilii Seliunin, Istoki, Novyi mir, 1988, 5, pp. 16289.
16
Reznichenko, The Aral Sea Tragedy.
17
Erika Weinthal, State Making and Environmental Cooperation: Linking Domestic and
International Politics in Central Asia, Cambridge, MA, 2002.
18
Philip Micklin and Nikolay V. Aladin, Reclaiming the Aral Sea, Scientific American,
300 WILLIAM WHEELER
So despite the stir it created, the long-term impact of the Aral-88
expedition was slight. Nevertheless, because these texts date from the
moment when interest in environmental issues was at its height in the
Soviet Union, they suggest some reasons why the environment proved such
a powerful mobilizing issue at that moment. In particular, they cast light
on the discursive power of catastrophe: how, at that particular historical
juncture, does catastrophe give rise to critique and sustain hope? I shall
argue that the material causes and effects of the seas desiccation are
discursively constructed as a catastrophe, through what I term catastrophic
vision. Such vision extends beyond the specifics of the Aral, to reveal
knowledge about the Soviet Union as a whole. The language of catastrophe
furthermore serves to locate this knowledge temporally, as future-oriented
knowledge, which highlights the urgency of change. However, critical
analysis of the future proposed by Seliunin will also suggest that there
is an important limitation of catastrophic vision in its blindness to the
local, which thus renders the urgency of change problematic. At a time of
increasingly catastrophic warnings about global climate change, the value
of looking at the power and limitations of catastrophic vision should be
evident.

Historical context: environmental activism in the USSR and perestroika

The cavalier attitude of the Soviet authorities to the environment and
its disastrous effects are well documented.19 But less well known is
the extensive tradition of environmental activism, autonomous of state
structures. The historian Douglas Weiner has explored the roots of the
tradition in pre-Revolutionary Russia.20 Scientists believed that pure
science should stand above the worldly concerns of politics and economics.
Despite the efforts of the Bolsheviks to harness science to their own
ends, this ideology of pure science never quite went away, and scientists,
presenting themselves as representatives of nauchnaia obshchestvennost,
the scientific public, continued to defend a pure ideal of nature.

298, 2008, 4, pp. 6471. The project, funded by the World Bank and the Kazakhstan
government, involves modernization of water infrastructure, and a dam to prevent the
North Aral Sea leaking into the much larger South Aral Sea. It has not involved any
reduction in irrigation.
19
See, for example, Ivn Vlgyes, Environmental Deterioration in the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe, New York, 1974; John Massey Stewart (ed.), The Soviet Environment:
Problems, Policies, and Politics, Cambridge, 1991; Philip R. Pryde, Environmental
Management in the Soviet Union, Cambridge, 1991.
20
Douglas R. Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin
to Gorbachev, Berkeley, CA and London, 1999.
 ARAL-88: CATASTROPHE, CRITIQUE AND HOPE 301
Although initially concerned most with conservation, in the Khrushchev
period, as Laurent Coumel shows, scientists began to articulate a more
holistic view of the environment, and to propose a new paradigm of
economic development though with no success.21 Another strand
in the environmental movement was the nineteenth-century tradition
of student activism, which resurfaced in the 1960s in the druzhiny po
okhrane prirody, student brigades for protecting nature, which organized
expeditions and actions. Oleg Ianitskii also highlights the civic initiatives
in new urban areas, aimed at improving the immediate environment to
create more comfortable living conditions; although indirectly influenced
by the Partys encouragement of civic activism, such initiatives like
the scientists and the druzhiny were autonomous of the apparatus.22
Finally, as Stephen Brain and Jane Costlow have shown, there was the deep
spiritual connection posited by Slavophile thinkers between the Russian
people and nature, especially the forest.23 This would feed into Russian
nationalist ideas about the environment in the late Soviet period. A notable
example of the alliance between scientists and nationalist intellectuals was
the campaign against a hydroelectric installation in the Baikal basin and
the industrialization of the shore of the lake: scientists sought to defend
the purity of nature, while writers and others saw the very purity of Russia
under threat. The Baikal issue thus became a symbol for the bureaucracys
myopia and callous disregard for the environment.24
Perhaps most surprisingly, such activism was not only tolerated, but was
even, on occasion, successful (if not in the case of Baikal). Furthermore,
Brain highlights the remarkably progressive legislation passed in the 1960s
to protect nature, to argue against the idea that the Soviet authorities were
wholly antagonistic to nature.25 Of course, these standards were seldom
matched in practice and, crucially, there was no state organ concerned
exclusively with the environment until 1988. Nevertheless, when activists
opposed policies, they could claim to be holding the authorities to

21
Laurent Coumel, A Failed Environmental Turn? Khrushchevs Thaw and Nature
Protection in Soviet Russia, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 40, 2013, pp. 16789.
22
Oleg Nikolaevich Ianitskii, Evoliutsiia ekologicheskogo dvizheniia v sovremennoi
Rossii, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 1995, 8, pp. 1525.
23
See Stephen Brain, Song of the Forest: Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism,
19051953, Pittsburgh, PA, 2011; Jane Costlow, Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing in
the Nineteenth-Century Forest, Ithaca, NY, 2013.
24
See Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom, ch. 16.
25
Stephen Brain, The Environmental History of the Soviet Union, in J. R. McNeill and
Erin Stewart Mauldin (eds), A Companion to Global Environmental History, Oxford, 2012,
pp. 22243.
302 WILLIAM WHEELER
account, hence the political acceptability of the movement. Given the
prohibition of other forms of civic organization, Weiner convincingly
argues that, throughout the Soviet period, environmental activism acted as
a surrogate for politics. But he also suggests that the authorities tolerance
of such activism depended on its marginality and its focus on specific
issues: broader critique of, and opposition to, the Soviet system would have
been unacceptable.26
Although the campaign to save Baikal was less than successful,
opposition to other Soviet water projects grew from the 1970s onwards.
Particular attention was paid to the project of the century, a twin scheme
to divert the Sukhona to the Volga basin, and to divert various Siberian
rivers including the Ob to Central Asia, partly for irrigation, and partly
to renovate the Aral Sea. In 1974 a group called Living Water was set
up, involving scientists and journalists. In the spirit of the druzhiny, the
group organized a number of expeditions to assess the countrys water
problems and the authorities proposals. In an important precursor of
the Aral-88 expedition, in 1978 the group travelled the length of the Amu
Daria, drawing important conclusions about the failings of Central Asian
irrigation and the inadvisability of the diversion project; the Aral-88
participants would build on the work of the Living Water group in their
critique.27
In the perestroika period, growing public awareness of environmental
problems contributed to a reassessment of all aspects of Soviet modernity.
At the same time, the pressing nature of many problems and greater
political freedom led to a growth in environmental activism in many
parts of the country.28 People formerly unconnected to the environmental
movement now took up environmental causes, prompted in part by the
movements legitimacy in the eyes of the public and its organizational
resources autonomous of the state.29 Notably, opposition to the project

26
Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom.
27
Ibid., pp. 41719. Viktor Iaroshenko, the journalist who led the Living Water group,
also accompanied the Aral-88 expedition.
28
See, in particular, Joan DeBardeleben, The New Politics in the USSR: The Case of the
Environment, in John Massey Stewart (ed.), The Soviet Environment: Problems, Policies,
and Politics, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 6487. Pryde, Environmental Management in the Soviet
Union, ch. 14. Environmentalism was most developed in European parts of the Soviet
Union, particularly in the Baltic; it was considerably less prominent in Central Asia itself
despite the Aral Sea crisis and widespread degradation across the region.
29
Ianitskii, Evoliutsiia ekologicheskogo dvizheniia, pp. 1718; Carole Sigman, The End
of Grassroots Ecology: Political Competition and the Fate of Ecology during Perestroika,
19881991, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 40, 2013, pp. 190213.
 ARAL-88: CATASTROPHE, CRITIQUE AND HOPE 303
of the century intensified. A campaign was waged against the scheme
in the media, in particular in Novyi mir, Literaturnaia gazeta and Nash
sovremennik. Strikingly, specific objections to the river diversion began to
morph into more fundamental criticisms of the system itself.30 The scheme
was indefinitely postponed in 1986, because of financial constraints as
well as the widespread opposition to the project.31 Zalygin wrote a defiant
article, Povorot (Turning), referring both to the river diversion project
itself, and to the overturning of state policy. In it, he celebrates the triumph
of the first ever instance of obshchestvennost taking on the entrenched
self-interest of the bureaucracy, and he expresses his hope for the future.32
Nevertheless, Weiner asserts that even after this victory, no branch of
the environmental movement was able to articulate a critique of the system
rooted in political economy or to offer a clear picture of an alternative way
of organizing economic life.33 Indeed, the rapid marginalization of the
movement after 1989 would seem to support this interpretation. This is
not to deny the importance of the environmental movement in the early
perestroika period: after all, the first mass demonstrations were about
environmental concerns, and when elections were held in 1989 for the
Congress of Peoples Deputies, environmental issues played a major role
in election campaigns. But they played little to no role beyond that point,
and certainly no paradigm shift in the way the economy was run was ever
seriously discussed by the newly elected deputies.34
30
See Nicolai N. Petro, The Project of the Century: A Case Study of Russian
National Dissent, Studies in Comparative Communism, 22, 1987, pp. 23552. Petro
stresses the renewal of spiritual, especially national and religious, values, in reaction to
scientistic and economistic values of the project supporters. However, while these values
were undoubtedly important, his evidence suggests that many opponents of the project
actually critiqued the project from the perspective of science: that is, they argued that
the scientistic/economistic values of the regime were flawed, but this did not amount to a
rejection of science itself.
31
Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom, pp. 41428.
32
Sergei Pavlovich Zalygin, Povorot: Uroki odnoi diskussii, Novyi mir, 1987, 1, pp. 318.
33
Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom, p. 17. In fact, as Weiner himself shows, much of
the criticism of the river diversion scheme did tend towards systemic critique; for example,
he mentions an open letter of Zalygin to the Minister of Water Management, where
Zalygin critiques the whole economics of water and resource use in the USSR (ibid. p. 423).
34
Interpretations of the movements rapid marginalization from 1989 vary. Ianitskii
argues that the movement undermined itself by adopting instrumental political goals
of winning elections, and that it was also hijacked by nationalists (Ianitskii, Evoliutsiia
ekologicheskogo dvizheniia, pp. 1820), while Sigman contends that in the political games
before the election, environmentalists were sidelined by other politicians, particularly young
Party members, who adopted ecological slogans instrumentally to oppose the gerontocracy
(Sigman, The End of Grassroots Ecology); Weiner also points to the deepening economic
crisis which rendered environmental issues less pressing to ordinary people.
304 WILLIAM WHEELER
However, the later marginalization of environmental issues does not
mean that environmentalist discourse itself was always inherently limited
indeed, the strength and broad base of the movement up to that point
suggests that ostensibly environmental concerns resonated far beyond a
concern for pure nature.35 The Aral-88 texts, building on the tradition of
environmental activism, are one instance where a holistic critique of the
system is articulated, and an alternative is offered.36 Ecology is neither
marginal to, nor a mere surrogate for, politics: it offers a way into talking
about politics. On the basis of what they have witnessed, the participants
represent the public at large. Technical solutions to the problem are put
forward, but for many of the participants they are not enough: holistic
solutions, restructuring the entire political economy of the region, are
needed. How, then, does the Aral catastrophe give rise to systemic critique?
A similar question arises when we place these texts in the context of the
perestroika period. Intellectuals, at last given real voice, were to be key actors
in Gorbachevs attempts to reform the system from above. Nevertheless,
Moshe Lewin stresses the inadequacy of the many intellectuals in this
role; in particular, he highlights their tendency to exaggeration, inflating
the countrys present woes to apocalyptic proportions, accompanied
by the most dire predictions.37 It was a hysterical discourse thick both
with despair and with irrational hopes of eschatological transformation.
Additionally, the policy of glasnost released a flood of hitherto suppressed
information about the past. But this re-reading of the past was driven by
a cataloguing impulse and failed to make narratological sense of the past,
a phenomenon which Lewin terms negationism: An unending list of
atrocities and injustices committed under Stalinism was not followed by
analysis. 38
Nancy Ries, in her ethnography of intellectuals in the late perestroika
period, takes these arguments further. She argues that perestroika discourse

35
Thus while Ianitskii and Coumel point to the organizational resources of the
movement to explain its growing popularity, and Weiner highlights the low risk associated
with environmental activism, I would add that the wider resonance of environmental
issues was also a factor.
36
I do not suggest it is the only instance: Coumel, for example, suggests that such
alternatives were proposed, unsuccessfully, in the Khrushchev era (Coumel, A Failed
Environmental Turn?). What is interesting here is the role of catastrophe in formulating
urgent, radical proposals.
37
Moshe Lewin, RussiaUSSRRussia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate, New York,
1995, p. 301.
38
Ibid., p. 302.
 ARAL-88: CATASTROPHE, CRITIQUE AND HOPE 305
was inherently self-limiting, undercutting its utopian goals.39 Although her
analysis is centred on oral discourse, she highlights the role of television
and print media, including Novyi mir, in fuelling this discourse, since the
flood of information unleashed by glasnost was presented in the media as
litanizing and lamentation or catastrophic predictions, rather than critical
and constructive analysis. In particular, she identifies the widespread
genre in the media of folk-tales of perestroika, which fuelled everyday
lamentations; as an example, Ries cites the tale of a Tajik cotton-picker who
is unable to buy a cotton shirt for her grandson from a Latvian trader. Such
tales highlighted real problems in the absurdly dysfunctional economy,
but failed to analyse or evaluate them: This kind of discourse about
production and distribution was not focused on the real, systemic source
of the difficulty; it was not a utilitarian discourse but a mythical and moral
one.40
This is not, of course, to say that works of systemic critique were
entirely absent. Indeed, as Sonja Schmid shows, activists and journalists
after Chernobyl developed critiques not only of the specific institutions of
the nuclear industry, but of the state itself. Chernobyl therefore became a
catalyst for a far-reaching reassessment of the relationship between state,
scientific experts and the Soviet public.41 Similarly, against the background
noise of litany, lament and negationism, the Aral-88 texts reach towards a
systemic analysis and constructive critique, and intellectuals are able to
speak for the public. They present the Aral catastrophe as more than just
a folk-tale of perestroika. Like the discourse analysed by Ries and Lewin,
the texts are thick with a sense of apocalypse, of total, final disaster or
redemptive transformation. But because concrete reforms are proposed,
logically grounded in the critical analysis of the texts themselves, the sense
of hope which emerges is not irrational. Again, the question arises: what
is it about catastrophe that so powerfully opens up the often self-limiting
discourse of perestroika to systemic analysis and utopian hope?

Catastrophe as revelatory crisis

Anthropologists Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna Hoffman have
observed that large-scale environmental disasters act as revelatory crises:
as totalizing events whose impact is felt in all spheres of social life, they lay
39
Nancy Ries, Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika, Ithaca, NY
and London, 1997.
40
Ibid., p. 173.
41
Sonja D. Schmid, Transformation Discourse: Nuclear Risk as a Strategic Tool in Late
Soviet Politics of Expertise, Science, Technology & Human Values, 29, 2004, 3, pp. 35376.
306 WILLIAM WHEELER
bare otherwise unseen societal structures; as abnormal events, they cast
light on normality itself.42 In this vein, the material aspects of the Aral
catastrophe lay bare for the expedition participants structural problems
in the Soviet Union as a whole. They find that the desiccation of the sea
is just the most visible aspect of a dense web of social, economic and
ecological crises across the entire region of Central Asia crises which
can be accounted for only by systemic analysis. The material grounding
for their critique and the emphasis throughout these texts on witnessing
and vision is part of what distinguishes it from the hysterical discourse
identified by Lewin and Ries.
I extend this evocative notion of revelatory crisis in two ways. First,
the catastrophe is always more than a set of physical impacts.43 It is not
just what the participants see that matters, but how they see it, and how
they represent it. As Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer show, scientific
knowledge may map onto objective reality, but it is also socially produced,
through witnessing, and as a social artefact it acts in the social world.44
Thus the physical impacts, as documented by the expedition and bolstered
with scientific data, are certainly real; but the catastrophe is also produced
through the way in which the participants witness and bear witness;
attention should be paid to how they account for the physical impacts and
to the connections which they make. In particular, the materiality of the
disaster proves to be a rich metaphorical resource in the texts, such that the
physical impacts reveal both directly and symbolically. At the same time,
as it is produced in a particular way, the catastrophe acquires a discursive
power, which lends authority to the participants voice in representing the
public and proposing reform. For example, the use of scientific data is a
way of viewing which positions the participants on the side of objective
science, against official distortions. In sum, the physical impacts of the
Arals desiccation invite a particular mode of viewing, what may be termed
catastrophic vision. To view in catastrophic mode is to view beyond the
physical impacts: it is to view the connections between them and the
42
Susanna Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith, Introduction: Why Anthropologists
Should Study Disasters, in Susanna Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith (eds), Catastrophe
& Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster, Santa Fe, NM and Oxford, 2002, pp. 322.
43
Anthony Oliver-Smith, What Is Disaster? Anthropological Perspectives on a Persistent
Question, in Susannah Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith (eds), The Angry Earth:
Disaster in Anthropological Perspective, New York and London, 1999, pp. 1834 (p. 22). While
Oliver-Smith argues that disasters may be defined either as a set of physical impacts or as
social constructions, I would suggest that they are always both.
44
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and
the Experimental Life: Including a Translation of Thomas Hobbes, Dialogus Physicus de
Natura Aeris by Simon Schaffer, Princeton, NJ, 1985.
 ARAL-88: CATASTROPHE, CRITIQUE AND HOPE 307
structures behind them; and this catastrophic vision gives the participants
the authority to speak for the public.
Secondly, catastrophic vision reveals not only knowledge about the
present, but knowledge about the past too. It opens up a history which is
diametrically opposed to that familiar from official ideology. This other
history leads not to the bright Communist future, but to catastrophe. This
catastrophic re-reading of the Soviet past is distinct from the negationism
discussed by Lewin and Ries: the history which is revealed is more than a
senseless catalogue of woes. In apocalyptic and eschatological traditions,
a catastrophe is a turning-point, after which either total devastation or
salvation ensue. Such ideas are familiar from various critical moments of
Russian history, and these texts, though thoroughly secular, draw on them
to locate the catastrophe temporally. As a result, the body of knowledge
which catastrophic vision reveals is prospectively oriented: it opens the
future as a question. By revealing the present as a turning-point, it also
reveals alternative futures. Thus if hope is, as Hirokazu Miyazaki suggests,
a radical temporal reorientation of knowledge,45 catastrophic vision is,
paradoxically, a hopeful vision.
In these texts, then, catastrophic vision is revelatory, and reveals a
knowledge which is prospective, using the past to look pragmatically
to the future. Nevertheless, I do not approach these texts uncritically:
catastrophic vision is revealing, but it has its own problematic, its own
myopia, as we shall see.

Waste, departmentalism and localism

Reznichenkos starting-point is the material aspect of the problem, which
is simple: too much water is being withdrawn. Water withdrawals are far
higher than claimed by the Ministry of Water Management and Land
Reclamation (Minvodkhoz). The excessive consumption of water relates
directly to the desiccation of the Aral Sea: water which is extracted for
irrigation fails to reach the Aral Sea. But over-consumption of water has
still broader consequences for the region as a whole:

As a result, the water does not enrich the land, but destroys it. It destroys
it because of backward technology, defective watering methods and a low
awareness of irrigation. It is paradoxical, but it is a fact: in Central Asia
there is not a lack of water, but a surplus.46
45
Hirokazu Miyazaki, The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian
Knowledge, Stanford, CA, 2006, p. 5.
46
Reznichenko, My znaem, p. 185.
308 WILLIAM WHEELER
The participants find that few canals are lined with concrete, so water is
lost through the earth walls; they are uncovered, so further water is lost to
evaporation. No one knows how much water is needed, or how much water
is lost. This situation is dangerously compounded by the lack of proper
drainage. Because of intensive use of pesticides, run-offs from the fields are
polluted and salinated. This polluted water is then re-used, which in turn
pollutes the soil, meaning that yet more water the expeditions scientists
estimate 45000m3/year is needed to flush the chemicals out. In turn,
the fertility of the land decreases, and productivity falls. Meanwhile,
Minvodkhoz prioritizes expansion of the total area under irrigation over
qualitative investment in repairing existing irrigation networks, claiming
that reconstruction is not profitable.
But ecological crisis is just one thread of Reznichenkos text. Connected
to it is an economic crisis. Not only is water wasted, but so is money, as a
diary entry makes clear:

Money is spent/wasted [tratiatsia] here just like water. In Uzbekistan it

would be difficult to find a rayon or oblast where in the past ten, fifteen
years, some new [administrative] building hasnt been constructed [].
What houses of political enlightenment we saw! Like a fairy-tale! But
theyre empty. So too the many Palaces of Culture stand empty, on which
were spent/wasted [zatracheny] millions of national roubles.47

Water proves a powerful metaphor for money: both are being squandered.
Just as swathes of reclaimed land over which water has been poured lie
salinated and useless, so too the follies of elites on which money has been
spent stand empty, useful to no one.
Wasted water is, however, more than an analogy for wasted money.
In a section entitled Mismanagement, Reznichenko discusses drainage:
poor drainage leads to salination, which leads to falling productivity. Thus
many farms, despite receiving heavy investment, are bringing in financial
losses: mismanagement wastes both financial and water resources. This
connection between the different types of waste reveals a common
systemic cause, which is spelt out in the next section of Reznichenkos text,
where he discusses the consequences of cotton monoculture:

From year to year, concealing the actual state of affairs in its projects,
the USSR Minvodkhoz reported that new lands had been given over to
exploitation. The Ministries of Agriculture of the Central Asian republics
47
Ibid., p. 187.
 ARAL-88: CATASTROPHE, CRITIQUE AND HOPE 309
in turn also reported (including by pripiska)48 on the fulfilment of
plans and obligations to deliver raw cotton to the state, thus covering
up the unseemly actions of the water management organizations. One
hand washes another []. Damage worth billions has been dealt to the
national economy. These losses include also the cubic kilometres of
water which have been taken away from the Aral. By the most moderate
estimates, from 28 to 32 cubic kilometres of moisture are lost overspent
[pereraskhoduetsia].49

Thus the financial and material waste are not just metaphorically but
systemically connected, stemming from the elective affinity between
Minvodkhoz and the Central Asian republican elites.
This systemic failing is the subject of Seliunins analysis. He asserts
on the basis of archival research that Minvodkhoz engineered the
water deficit in the region so as to necessitate the project of the century,
the Siberian rivers project. Seliunin waxes lyrical on the heroically callous
mentality of these planners:

One wants to talk about them with solemn words, such as in his time their
ideological teacher [Lenin] himself attested: these are people of a particular
makeup, they are made of a special material, and there are no fortresses
that they would not be able to take. The Aral is just the Aral. Aside with it!
The Ob falls into view divert it to Tartary!50

These lines, evoking an image of a planner poring over a map, are

reminiscent of James Scotts characterization of the optic of high modernist
ideology: a schematic, synoptic viewpoint blind to local complexity on the
ground.51 Yet if Scott locates this optic in a monocular state, Seliunin more
subtly relates the optic to the departmental structure of the Soviet Union.52
The tendency of Minvodkhoz planners towards large-scale projects is,
ultimately, structural:

48
Pripiska was the practice of falsifying accounts.
49
Reznichenko, My znaem, p. 188.
50
Seliunin, Vremia deistvii, p. 215.
51
James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed, New Haven, CT and London, 1998.
52
Seliunins approach may thus be likened to recent critiques of Scott, such as that of
Tania Li, who questions Scotts assumption that the state is a unified source of intention
(Tania Murray Li, Beyond the State and Failed Schemes, American Anthropologist, 107,
2005, 3, pp. 38394 [p. 385]).
310 WILLIAM WHEELER
I didnt hear anything about the present minister soliciting canals when
he was first secretary of Belgorod Obkom []. Did he get spoilt in his
new role? Unlikely. He had been entrusted with land reclamation, and it
would have been miraculous if hed turned up at the Supreme Soviet and
said: give our sector less money, there are more important concerns for the
country. I dont remember such speeches. Everyone considers his branch
most important (otherwise why would he be a minister?), and judges
logically: if I hold back, others will seize the treasury money.53

The argument is simple: because Minvodkhozs domain is water

management and land reclamation, they receive funding for water
management and land reclamation projects. The bigger the project, the
more money they receive. This, then, is the source of the megalomania, the
synoptic viewpoint, of the planners.
But the issue goes beyond Minvodkhoz and the problem of
departmentalism. The wastage of water and money is set against a
backdrop of inter-republican discord, where different republican elites
blame each other for catastrophic failings. This discord was conventionally
viewed as a problem of localism, a failure of central oversight, exacerbated
by nationalist tendencies. But in Seliunins analysis, the problem is the role
of the centre itself in the command-administrative system: as the source
of financial distribution, it sets the republican leaders at odds with one
another, competing for investments from the central government pot. It is
for this reason that there is an elective affinity between Minvodkhoz and
the republican elites:

It is customary to oppose departmentalism and localism. The deepest

error! That same Minvodkhoz extorts money for projects, which it intends
to implement not on the moon, but in clearly known regions. The bosses
of the regions no less vehemently want to receive free capital investments
in their estates. The logic of the matter throws the master [khoziain] of
the region and the master [khoziain] of the sector into mutual embrace.54

Thus departmentalism and localism are, respectively, the sectoral and

spatial manifestations of the competition for centrally allocated resources
which the command economy engenders. Grand projects, which will
waste both financial and material resources, are as much in the interests
of republican elites as in those of Minvodkhoz bureaucrats. But, as
53
Seliunin, Vremia deistvii, pp. 21617.
54
Ibid., p. 218.
 ARAL-88: CATASTROPHE, CRITIQUE AND HOPE 311
Reznichenko showed, pouring money and water over the land leads to
salinization and falling productivity.
In sum, the catastrophe provides a powerful insight into the destructive
effects both ecological and economic of the command economy.
Although the excesses of Minvodkhoz and the Central Asian elites
stand out in their catastrophic effects, the analysis of departmentalism
and localism is general. It is worth noting that Seliunins analysis tallies
with Fehr, Keller and Mrkuss account of departmental and territorial
competition for resources in an inherently scarce command economy:
both departmental and territorial hierarchies favour capital-intensive
investments so as to increase their own power.55 The textual construction
of catastrophe thus reveals a truth about the command economy as a
whole.

Social crisis
Reznichenko elaborates a range of acute social problems stemming from
ecological disaster. The fishing industry on the sea has collapsed. The ports
of Aralsk and Muinak are beset by unemployment. Worse still, the toxic
chemicals, washed downstream and now lying on the exposed sea-bed,
are blown up in vast dust-storms, and the toxic dust is found as far away
as Latvia and Belarus, with disastrous effects on public health. Drinking
water across the region is polluted. Child mortality rates are soaring and
infectious diseases are rife.
But in addition to the social effects of the ecological crisis, the direct
social impact of cotton monoculture is equally disastrous. Officials have
justified the disaster on the grounds of the economic benefits of increased
cotton production. But what the expedition participants witness turns this
logic on its head. If justifications take the form of a cost-benefit analysis, for
Reznichenko the benefits are negligible and the costs unacceptably high.
Year by year, cotton production targets rise, but Reznichenko highlights
the irrationality of over-production: very little cotton is exported owing to
its poor quality; and what little hard currency is gained from export simply
goes into feeding the local cotton-growing population. Indeed, no one even
knows how much cotton the country actually needs:

There is no limit to waste! Metal for the sake of metal; machines for
the sake of machines; cotton for the sake of cotton. Our economy is

55
Ferenc Fehr, Agnes Heller and Gyrgy Mrkus, Dictatorship over Needs, Oxford,
1983.
312 WILLIAM WHEELER
rabid! So it transpires that the higher the economic indicators, the worse
it is for human beings.56

Reznichenkos diary entries present an eerie picture of the cotton-

picking season, when everyone from children to old men is engaged
in picking cotton, and even schools and institutes close down. Coercion is
rife. Every year, more cotton is grown according to the plan, but because
agricultural prices are set low by the central bureaucrats, increasing
production brings no prosperity. Yet there is no other work in the region.
The population suffers malnourishment because they cannot produce any
agricultural products except for cotton. This contradiction between ever-
increasing production and the dire state of the local population allows
Reznichenko to confront directly the cost-benefit justifications for the
disaster:

But surely the more cotton, the happier and richer the country! And in
fact? In fact the ubiquitous diseases and poverty of people is the fee for the
welfare and blooming of a handful of immoral careerists.57

The complex interwoven crises and their impacts on the population reveal
the absurdity of a cold cost-benefit analysis. The whole notion of economic
growth on which state socialism is built is revealed as bringing not progress
but disease and poverty.
The disaster thus punctures myths about Soviet modernity itself.
Reznichenkos text reaches a climax in a bleak diary entry in Nukus,
Karakalpakstan, which affords a revelatory re-reading of the Soviet history
of the region:

Cotton has brought people no happiness. And the town offers nothing.
Dont look for water pipes here, dont ask about central heating, gas, dont
count on any other conveniences or even insignificant social welfare.
Theres none of that here. And never has been. Not at that time when Stalin
announced that in our country socialism had conquered, nor at that time
when Khrushchev promised the generation of the 60s that they would live
under Communism. Socialism did not even come here when Brezhnev
declared that it was developed and real.58

56
Reznichenko, My znaem, p. 193.
57
Ibid., p. 187.
58
Ibid., p. 192.
 ARAL-88: CATASTROPHE, CRITIQUE AND HOPE 313
Reznichenko leaves open the question of whether socialism can be
equated with material markers of progress the urban provisioning and
social welfare which metropolitan areas would have enjoyed. But in this
peripheral region even such material markers are absent. Everyone knew
that the utopian promise of Communism had never been delivered; but
catastrophic vision further reveals that even the material progress, which
approximated to socialism in the metropolitan regions, is absent here.
The plight of the rural population and the divide between rulers and
ruled is central to Seliunins critique of the system. Whatever the formal
legal structure of a collective farm, Seliunin argues, de facto ownership
is in the hands of the managers, and workers are alienated. Stemming
from this is intense inequality across the region: Seliunin describes in
sensationalist detail the lavish mafia-like lifestyles of the Central Asian
elites, and contrasts them with the abject poverty of the population at
large. But he is sceptical about present attempts to narrow this inequality
through reforms:

But if every last privilege were cancelled (which is not yet scented), under
the command-administrative system the schism in society would be
preserved in its most important hypostasis: labour and governance would
still be divided by it, the inferiors would still as before be the instrument
in the hands of superiors.59

Inequality is shown to be merely the epiphenomenon of a structural

opposition. In such a system, coercion is essential. Seliunin narrates
at length the tragic tale of a self-immolation of a teenage girl who was
punished for failing to obey orders in the cotton fields. This shocking tale
serves to illuminate a truth about the system itself:

When labour does not feed, when a person is brought down to the function
of a talking instrument of production, a well-organized apparatus of
coercion is objectively necessary, constructed on a hierarchical principle:
each element of it answers only to its superior, getting freedom of action
with regard to its inferior. Otherwise the system cannot function.60

Recall the folktales of perestroika identified by Ries, a moral genre which

precludes systemic analysis. Seliunins shocking tale on the contrary goes

59
Seliunin,Vremia deistvii, p. 225.
60
Ibid., p. 222.
314 WILLIAM WHEELER
beyond the particular: it reveals coercion to be a necessary feature of the
system, because labour does not feed.
Seliunins analysis of the infamous cotton scandal points to a similar
conclusion. The cotton scandal was a well-known instance of massive
corruption, involving almost the entire population of Uzbekistan, right up
to First Secretary Rashidov himself.61 But Seliunins account reveals that
the source of the corruption was systemic. Officials had been manipulating
the statistics to generate surplus cotton fibre, so that the state paid more per
tonne of cotton. But, Seliunin stresses, after the elimination of this practice
in the perestroika era, prices are still fixed too low, so farms are now
making losses. The extra roubles not only fed the corrupt lifestyles of the
elites: they also sustained the farms, for whom otherwise cotton was not
economically viable. So, the expedition finds, managers are now resorting
to child labour to fulfil cotton targets: this is illegal, but, Seliunin stresses,
the plan cannot be met through legal means.
Alienation, inequality, coercion and corruption: Seliunins catastrophic
vision looks beyond these phenomena to reveal the fundamental
contradictions in the command economy itself. Hence the interest
of an economic journalist like Seliunin in what is ostensibly just an
environmental problem. The phenomena reveal that the economy is
inherently dysfunctional and alienating. His conclusion is, therefore,
radical:

I think it is clear: the managerial caste will never become a social base
for perestroika []. But when the now dumb performer feels this is my
power, this is a gift of life profitable to me, then perestroika will become
irreversible, then and only then will the frail shoots of democracy and a
state based on the rule of law start to gain strength, not in the hydroponics
of the metropolitan greenhouses, but in the powerful black earth of new
relations of production.62

The striking metaphor contrasts Gorbachevs experimental tinkering with

a truly revolutionary transformation. I shall examine Seliunins elaboration
of this transformation below.
Before progressing further, it is worth comparing Seliunins vision with
other accounts of state socialist economies. The inherent dysfunctionality
61
See, for example, Deniz Kandiyoti, How Far Do Analyses of Postsocialism Travel?
The Case of Central Asia, in Chris M. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and
Practices in Eurasia, London, 2002, pp. 23857 (pp. 24142).
62
Seliunin, Vremia deistvii, p. 227.
 ARAL-88: CATASTROPHE, CRITIQUE AND HOPE 315
of the command economy, the formal impossibility of fulfilling plans and
the concomitant necessity of informal practices are familiar from many
accounts of state socialism.63 But Seliunins vision of the fundamentally
coercive nature of the apparatus, and of the sharp division between rulers
and ruled, is more redolent of, say, Wittfogels evocation of the totalitarian
state.64 By contrast, Humphreys classic ethnography of a Siberian collective
farm suggests that the coercive capacity of farm managers was far more
limited than Seliunin asserts; crucially, kinship structures were entangled
with formal power structures, rendering any clear division into the rulers
and ruled, owners and labourers, questionable.65 This is by no means to
downplay the level of oppression and exploitation documented by Seliunin:
it is rather to suggest that power relations and property relations may have
been considerably more complex than he allows, that there is a limitation
to catastrophic vision in its blindness to the complexity of the local.

Ideology and nature

As we have seen, the catastrophe punctures myths of Soviet modernity as
progress. In a period of radical reassessment of the past throughout Soviet
society, the Aral catastrophe provides an optic through which to question
the very foundations of Soviet modernity, in particular the ideological
understanding of nature. Ideology is talked about extensively in the round-
table discussion, most explicitly by Iurii Chernichenko, a secretary of the
Union of Writers of USSR. Chernichenko outlines the Bolshevik theory
of nature as a hidden store of treasure. According to such a theory, the
treasures of nature belong to no one until they are found; those who exploit
natures wealth are therefore accountable to no one. Chernichenko blames
literary figures for propagating the ideology, singling out the avant-garde
poet Maiakovskii and the Socialist Realist author Konstantin Paustovskii
with his novel, Kara-Bugaz. Chernichenko proceeds to quote from a Civil
War-era poem by the symbolist Voloshin in which the poet prophesies that
Russias power will be broken by a slinking predator:

63
Jnos Kornai, Economics of Shortage, Amsterdam and London, 1980; Fehr, Heller
and Mrkus, Dictatorship over Needs; Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a
Civilization, Berkeley, CAand London, 1995; Caroline Humphrey, Marx Went Awaybut
Karl Stayed Behind, Ann Arbor, MI, 1998.
64
Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, New
Haven, CT, 1957.
65
Humphrey, Marx Went Away. See Kandiyoti, How Far Do Analyses of Postsocialism
Travel? The Case of Central Asia for the relevance of this analysis to Central Asia.
316 WILLIAM WHEELER
So her piles of grain shall rot
Her heavens shall be dishonoured
Her wealth gobbled up, her woods burnt
And her seas and rivers sucked out.66

For Chernichenko, the fate of the Aral Sea, along with other instances of
ecological degradation across the Soviet Union, reveal Soviet history to be
the catastrophic fulfilment of Voloshins prophecy. The Bolsheviks, with
their theory of nature as a treasure trove endorsed by popular writers, are
revealed to have been not Russias saviour, but the slinking predator.
Near the beginning of Seliunins text, the catastrophe not only reveals
the past, but acts as temporal indicator of the present:

In an old book, I dont now remember which, I once read: in a period of

blossoming, the country begets bards and heroes; in a period of decline
bureaucrats and lots of dust [mnogo pyli]. Why dust? What is dust doing
there? The word seems to have wormed its way into the maxim, out of
place. But no, the wise man isnt wrong. Think about it: half of the Aral
is left, and from the dried up sea-floor, scientists assert, 75mn tonnes of
minute particles of sand and salt rise per year. Dust storms have got more
frequent. There is no hiding or fleeing from them the dust strikes the
eyes, ears, wind-pipe; you dont have time to cough it up, it penetrates
tightly closed windows of houses, into the inside of a car, it eradicates every
living thing.67

The sensuously evoked materiality of the disaster here acquires a revelatory

power beyond its physical impacts. The proverb conveniently juxtaposes the
material effects of the disaster with the bureaucrats who caused it, and the
catastrophe thereby serves as a temporal indicator, revealing the country to
be in a period of decline.
But the proverb cited is revealing in another way too. The quotation is
from Paustovskiis Kara-Bugaz a text singled out by Chernichenko for its
role in propagating the treasure theory of nature. The novel is an optimistic
celebration of the Soviet conquest of nature in one of the most inhospitable
regions of the country, the deserts of Turkmenistan. The precise context
of this maxim in the novel is telling: a bard tells a legend about an old
man, Faireddin, who, on meeting Lenin, informs him that his country has
nothing because it has no water; when Lenin promises that the Bolsheviks
66
Nikolaev and Reznichenko, Kruglyi stol, p. 208.
67
Seliunin, Vremia deistvii, p. 213.
 ARAL-88: CATASTROPHE, CRITIQUE AND HOPE 317
will bring water to the country, Faireddin laughs and tells him that even if
a whole sea were diverted, the sands would suck it up. But later Faireddin
hears of iron camels arriving and lining the sand with concrete and water
is successfully brought to the region. The bard concludes his tale with the
proverb about heroes and singers and dust and officialdom, indexing the
period as one of national flourishing, the Bolsheviks as heroes and himself
(and, indirectly, Paustovskii too) as a celebratory singer.68 Re-reading this
novel in light of the Aral catastrophe, the irony is striking: for Faireddins
prophecy was absolutely accurate, the desert did swallow up the sea. It is not
just that the optimism of Paustovskiis period has vanished: it is the very
policies which are ostensibly celebrated in Kara-Bugaz that have led to the
disaster to the bureaucrats and dust which are indicative of decline.69
Seliunin and his readership would have grown up reading Paustovskii,
who remained popular throughout the Khrushchev era, and I would suggest
that Seliunins claim to have forgotten where he read it is disingenuous.
Indeed, his claim reads as a purposeful gesture towards a larger forgetfulness:
to have forgotten a certain optimism about the whole Soviet project. This
is, after all, a period of decline, beset by bureaucrats and dust. By evoking
Kara-Bugaz, and in particular this episode about bringing water to the
desert, the citation highlights the roots of the catastrophe in a pernicious
ideology of transforming nature.

Hope
The Aral-88 participants are by no means the first to see either the failings of
the command economy or the darker side of Soviet history. But catastrophic
vision, rooted in the discursive context of perestroika, also reveals the
present to be a turning-point, opening up the future as a question, and here
lies the connection to hope. Broadly, the expedition participants see two
possible futures: either the status quo continues and the ecological crisis
will deepen; or there will be a utopian transformation in which ecological
damage will be mitigated and all the related crises will be resolved.

68
Konstantin Paustovskii, Kara-Bugaz, Moscow, 1933.
69
The intriguing question of how sincere Paustovskiis celebration of Soviet ecological
policy actually was is beyond the scope of this article. As a Socialist Realist writer who
found favour with the regime, Paustovskii has attracted little to no interest among
Western critics (though see the fascinating exploration of the relationship between
Stalinist writers and hydraulic engineers by Frank Westerman, Engineers of the Soul: In
the Footsteps of Stalins Writers, trans. Sam Garrett, London, 2010). I would suggest that,
while the text ostensibly celebrates Soviet policies, it simultaneously invites us to take
Faireddins prophecy seriously.
318 WILLIAM WHEELER
In his contribution to the roundtable discussion Zalygin assesses the
significance of the expedition, characterizing their findings as a negative
quantity:

We, ecologists, must now start from nothing. No, not even from nothing,
but from some negative quantity, so as to move forward.70

Unlike Lewins negationism, which leads nowhere, establishing the

negative quantity of what has been lost is the precondition of moving
forward. If catastrophic vision reveals the roots of the disaster in ideology
and bureaucratic logic, this very revelation enables the rejection of the
same, and the proposal of alternatives. The knowledge acquired by the
expedition thus acquires a prospective temporal orientation, infused with
hope.
This hope is not the same as optimism. Just after the expedition
got underway, a Central Committee of the CPSU decree was published
regarding the Aral Sea.71 There was limited acknowledgement of past
mistakes, and the decree enjoined the relevant republican governments
and Minvodkhoz to ameliorate the problem. Some significant steps
forward were made the Aral Sea was recognized as a water consumer,
and large-scale reconstruction of the irrigation infrastructure was ordered.
But the expedition participants are opposed to the decree, for several
reasons. First, it was not publicly discussed, despite their specific request
that it should be. Secondly, the decree is too local and too technical. Most
importantly, they object to the suggestion that Minvodkhoz which
caused the disaster should be responsible for sorting it out. The point is
not vindictive, but stems from the systemic analysis itself: if departments
like Minvodkhoz are squanderers by their (structural) nature, they cannot
be trusted not to pour more money away on the pretence of solving the
problem.
In short, for the participants, the decree represents more of the
same: there is no paradigm shift. And they are adamant that, without
such a paradigm shift, the catastrophe can only deepen an all-too
real possibility. But they are not wholly pessimistic. If Lewin argues
that many perestroika intellectuals exacerbated the situation with their
70
Nikolaev and Reznichenko, Kruglyi stol, p. 212.
71
Decree No. 1110 19 September 1988, On measures for the radical improvement in the
ecological and sanitary environment in the Aral Sea region, and for raising the efficiency of
the use of water and land resources in its basin, and for strengthening their conservation.
<http://www.lawrussia.ru/texts/legal_346/doc346a860x900.htm> [accessed 4 March 2014].
 ARAL-88: CATASTROPHE, CRITIQUE AND HOPE 319
dire predictions, in these texts the worse future which is foreseen serves
to underscore the necessity of change. The dire predictions are future
conditional: catastrophic vision also opens up a future optative. Oscillation
between predictions of total collapse and hope of utopian transformation
is of course characteristic of the eschatological strand in Russian thought.
Nevertheless, while eschatological hopes are irrational, and faith is placed
in outside agency, the hope which emerges here is logically grounded, and
provides a powerful motivation for political action.72
In the concluding section of his text, Reznichenko asks what awaits the
Aral Sea. The Aral, he states, has become a symbol for a whole catalogue of
impending ecological disasters all over the USSR a list which will soon
include mankind itself. But then he writes:

The Aral and, together with it, man too, can be saved by a new ecological
way of thinking and glasnost, which give hope albeit small, but urgent
for all of us; they offer a chance for survival.73

The more open political climate engendered by glasnost and the new
ecological way of thinking, embodied in the Aral-88 expedition thus suggest
the possibility of change. But Reznichenkos text ends on a questioning
note: Will we save the Aral? Will the public [obshchestvennost] succeed in
breaking the departmental-monopolistic mechanism for the annihilation
of nature? 74
The public which the participants claim to represent is a source of hope,
but its power against the departmental-monopolism is uncertain. Cotton
targets, he states, which had been lowered, have been raised again this
year, and more land is to be reclaimed. He concludes: So, will everything
go on again as before? Will the earth again be dug and the money buried?!
The USSR Minvodkhoz in the last twenty years has left tens of billions of
roubles in Central Asia. 75
The text is not optimistic. The answers to the questions he poses are by
no means given in advance. Indeed the evidence the increased cotton
targets, the tens of billions of wasted roubles suggests that the status

72
In her work on nineteenth-century Russian forests, Costlow cites a case of similar
oscillation between catastrophic warnings about deforestation and hope that disaster may
be averted through the power of obshchestvennost, which suggests that this tendency may
have deep roots in Russian environmentalist thought (Costlow, Heart-Pine Russia, ch. 3).
73
Reznichenko, My znaem, p. 194.
74
Ibid.
75
Ibid.
320 WILLIAM WHEELER
quo will prevail. It is the paradoxical nature of hope hope against the
evidence which lends it such critical urgency. Similarly, Zalygins closing
words to the roundtable characterize this hope clearly:

I do not wholly believe, I speak frankly, in a swift and positive result from
our action, our expedition. My experience of recent years shows that
we mustnt get carried away. But there is no need to be pessimists. I am
certain: while we possess public energy and civic conscience, we cant do
anything else. There is no other way out. And, directed by this conscience,
we will be able to extend our struggle further.76

Hope is thus poised between optimism and despair: scepticism as to its

fulfilment results not in abrogation of agency but in affirmation of the
necessity of action.

Seliunins future optative

In looking at Seliunins future optative, I am not asking what would have
happened had his precise proposals been enacted; the point is rather
to shed light on the limits of catastrophic vision. Of course, Seliunin
was just one member of the expedition, and, although his long article
forms the climax to the collection of articles in Novyi mir, his views
do not necessarily reflect those of all the members.77 Nevertheless,
critical assessment of how he reaches his conclusions shows up a certain
myopia to catastrophic vision. His proposals are threefold: land reform;
a realistic approach to mitigating the effects of the Arals desiccation
through phytomelioration; and decentralization of the economy through
deregulation of prices. But the centre-piece which I discuss here is
land reform. After all, a central plank of perestroika was improvement
of agriculture through re-empowering rural producers. As the long
discredited ideas of the agrarian economist Chaianov came briefly back
into vogue, re-peasantization had become an official goal in 1987 and
cooperatives were to be key to agricultural regeneration.78 But, like
76
Nikolaev and Reznichenko, Kruglyi stol, p. 212.
77
In fact, many policies in the post-Soviet period mirror Seliunins proposals closely,
particularly the liberalization of the economy. Indeed, the language of crisis lent a
particular urgency to the shock therapy carried out by Eltsins government; the more
disastrous results of shock therapy thus perhaps highlight the dangers of catastrophic
discourse.
78
Teodor Shanin, Chayanovs Treble Death and Tenuous Resurrection: An Essay about
Understanding, about Roots of Plausibility and about Rural Russia, The Journal of Peasant
Studies, 36, 2009, 1, pp. 83101.
 ARAL-88: CATASTROPHE, CRITIQUE AND HOPE 321
others in the late perestroika period who pointed to the limited results of
cooperatives, Seliunin turns not to Chaianov for guidance but to the pre-
revolutionary Westernizing reformer Stolypin.79
Seliunins solution to Central Asias woes is to rent land directly to
peasant families, and he gives a few examples of where this has happened,
with some success. Ownership [sobstvennost] would remain in the hands
of the state, while proprietorship [vladenie] would lie with the family. Thus
utopian hope is pinned on the family, as the kernel of society:

And if [the family] rents land it will simultaneously become a unit of

production, as durable as strong family ties. Individual, family and
production interests are indissoluble.80

Since the land must feed everyone in the family, Seliunin argues, no one
will deplete the land. In Russia the peasant class has been destroyed by
Soviet policies, but in Central Asia, fortunately, such a class has survived;
indeed, the large size of Central Asian families makes them particularly
well-suited to carrying out a range of agricultural jobs. In a tacit rejection
of Chaianovs economics of consumption-labour-balance, which precludes
a surplus, Seliunin foresees that over time there will be some stratification
[rassloenie] within villages, as some peasants will expand their holdings
while others will become a class of workers.81 As the population grows,
some will have to move to the cities, where jobs will need to be created for
them. But Seliunin is sanguine about these outcomes: the main point is that
if peasant families are directly renting land from the state, the apparatus
will become obsolete, farmers will not be alienated and agriculture will
accordingly become more efficient; free to choose what to grow, farmers
will diversify their crops away from the destructive cotton. In keeping with
the focus on the present as turning-point, Seliunin presents family rent
not only as a viable option, but as the only option and it is urgent. It is
in the climax of this section that Seliunin mentions Stolypin: Then [after
Stolypins reforms] a class arose, a layer of Russian farmers [sloi rossiiskikh
79
Similarly in his major article, Istoki, Seliunin had cited Stolypins reforms
approvingly, and characterized collectivization as a regression to the peasant commune
(Seliunin, Istoki, pp. 185186). Both articles are thus symptomatic of a broad shift in the
late 1980s away from the ideas of Chaianov towards other moments in Russian history and
towards Western models. On this shift, see Shanin, Chayanovs Treble Death and Tenuous
Resurrection, and Alessandro Stanziani, Chayanov, Kerblay et les Shestidesjatniki: une
histoire globale? Cahiers du monde russe, 45, 2004, 3, pp. 385406.
80
Seliunin, Vremia deistvii, p. 228.
81
Ibid., p. 230.
322 WILLIAM WHEELER
fermerov], whose farming in terms of efficiency could today too serve as
an example. 82
Seliunin thus looks to the pre-Soviet past, another moment of
modernizing reform, for guidance in the present. If Stolypins reforms
aimed to produce a layer [sloi] of individualist, entrepeneurially-minded
farmers [fermery] out of the backward peasant commune, Seliunin has
similar designs for stratification [rassloenie] among the alienated mass
of kolkhozniks; and the deregulation of prices and liberalization of the
economy he outlines elsewhere in the text provide the context for this
transition.83
Herein lies the problem with catastrophic vision. The hope which
Seliunin pins on the family is, arguably, naive, and his urgency thus
misguided. Indeed, by positioning the present as a turning-point and
highlighting urgency, catastrophic vision precludes the possibility of
debate and thereby delimits future options. Recall the Wittfogelian
account of the apparatus quoted above: at every level of the apparatus,
coercion is essential. Now we hear that the nucleus of society is the
family. The implication is clear: beneath the apparatus there exists society,
composed of families, currently oppressed and alienated from the means
of production. Sweep the apparatus aside, and the family will become
the basic unit of production. We noted that Seliunins account differed
significantly from ethnographic accounts of the collective farm, whereby
kinship and power structures were co-implicated. In light of such accounts,
Seliunins certainty appears misplaced: removing the apparatus would not
leave a pristine layer of society, for the two are, ultimately, inseparable; and
it is thus likely that any resultant stratification would take place along the
patterns of pre-existing hierarchies and tensions. If the more disastrous
outcomes of post-socialism across Eurasia have suggested anything, it is
this fundamental point.
Indeed, recent historiography on Stolypins reforms hints at the risks
of looking to Stolypin for guidance, for the parallels are striking. Judith
Pallot has argued that the utopian model imposed from above ignored the
local conditions of the peasant communes, especially their historical and
geographical particularities; hence the reforms exacerbated pre-existing
tensions in the communes, and provoked widespread resistance. Like the
82
Seliunin, Vremia deistvii, p. 232.
83
Seliunin himself insists that because peasants will truly own the land and will not be
alienated, it will be truly socialist, but reading between the lines, the implications of his
reforms are at least an embryonic rural capitalism. That he should not be explicit about
this doubtless reflects a degree of self-censorship on his part.
 ARAL-88: CATASTROPHE, CRITIQUE AND HOPE 323
kolkhoz eighty years later, the pre-Stolypin commune was in deep crisis:
but, Pallot argues, reforms ignoring local conditions only exacerbated the
crisis.84 It is no surprise that Stolypins reforms are taken by Scott as a case
in point of seeing like a state.85 Seliunin is not seeing as a state, but the
synoptic viewpoint of catastrophic vision has a similar blindness to the
local.
Thus the extensive travels of the expedition ultimately produce a picture
of a region in crisis which is more than the sum of its parts. Seliunin
briefly cites three local voices from Aralsk, whose grim comments add
credibility to the picture painted by Reznichenko; he also talks about a
Turkmen colleague, another intellectual, who supports his ideas about
family rent. But on the whole no space is given to local understandings
of the catastrophe or indeed to local coping mechanisms. Critically,
there is no sense that the oppressed cotton-pickers are part of the public
which the expedition represents. Rather, they are the passive object of the
catastrophic gaze, figuring now as victims, now as the vehicles of Seliunins
utopian hopes.

Conclusion: the limits of catastrophic vision

In conclusion, if, as Weiner suggests, Soviet environmentalist discourse
was often limited, Aral-88 is an instance where environmental concerns
do give rise to political economic critique. In the context of perestroika
intellectuals, these texts stand out against the noise of lament and
negationism. They are not unique in doing so, but it is the materiality and
visibility of the catastrophe that lend the critique its force: the large-scale
complex interwoven crises reveal systemic failings which give rise to holistic
analysis; the symbolic power of the disaster punctures myths, revealing a
darker history; and its temporal construction as a turning-point, a moment
of hope, opens up an alternative possible future. Neither the ultimate
marginalization of environmentalist concerns nor the frustration of the

84
Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 19061917: Peasant Responses to Stolypins
Project of Rural Transformation, Oxford, 1999. Pallots approach is grounded in a new
paradigm of studies of the nineteenth-century Russian peasantry, which rejects previous
portrayals of backwardness, in favour of a more anthropologically informed picture of
the internal coherence of the Russian peasantry. On the failures of Stolypins reforms, see
also, David Macey, The Peasant Commune and the Stolypin Reforms: Peasant Attitudes,
190614, in Roger P. Bartlett (ed.), Land Commune and Peasant Community in Russia:
Communal Forms in Imperial and Early Soviet Society, Basingstoke, 1990, pp. 21936.
Macey also draws attention to peasant reactions and the exacerbation of pre-existing
conflicts, but does not critique the utopianism of the reforms.
85
Scott, Seeing like a State, pp. 3944.
324 WILLIAM WHEELER
utopian promises of perestroika should blind us to the transformational
power of this catastrophic vision.
But the very power of the catastrophe begets new limits. Consider
again Seliunins striking metaphor of the black earth of new relations
of production versus the hydroponics of metropolitan greenhouses: the
black earth is out of place, evoking not the deserts of Central Asia, but
the agricultural heartlands of southern Russia and Ukraine. This is not to
impute ethnocentrism: rather, the metaphor reveals the distance of those
articulating the critique from the peoples of Central Asia. The public for
whom the participants speak so eloquently does not extend to the Central
Asian kolkhoz. The catastrophic vision is that of the intelligentsia, returning
once the expedition is finished to their metropolitan greenhouses. In
many ways, these texts are comparable to the far-reaching analyses that
came out of Chernobyl described by Schmid. But there is a difference.
Schmid tracks the process by which the public was constituted, first
through environmental activist groups who made their voices heard, and
then by the media, which started talking about the Soviet public. The
Aral-88 participants also speak for the public, but it is not the Central
Asian public, nor is their work building on local activism. Hence Seliunins
Wittfogelian description of life as a cotton-picker: total alienation. As
a result, his proposals are not grounded in all the complexities of local
society.
As a metonym for a regional socio-economic crisis, as a symbol for
total systemic failure, as a vehicle for hope of utopian transformation, the
catastrophe is weighed down by a burden of meaning which ultimately
transforms it. As the crisis of the entire Soviet Union, it can no longer
be a local disaster too. Such a conclusion is ironic, given the expeditions
painstaking research on the ground in a wide variety of locales across the
region, and their presumably sincere insistence that solutions are
not to be found in the metropolitan greenhouses. But if the strength of
catastrophic vision is that it constantly reveals beyond the local, beyond the
particular, this is also, perhaps, its greatest limitation.