Coping with the “Black Dragon”: Mudflow Hazards and the Controversy over the Medeo Dam in Kazakhstan, 1958--66 (2013)
Elie, Marc (Author)
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History
Volume: 14
Pages: 313--342
The dam project developed against a set of uncertainties that account for the hesitation and substantial postponement. First, the last years of Nikita Khrushchev's rule proved unstable for the Kazakhstani political establishment. Between 1960 and 1964, the post of first secretary of Kazakhstan's Communist Party changed hands three times. The competing candidates for power in Kazakhstan were so split on the dam issue that they could not enforce any definitive decision on it. Second, although Alma-Ata's inhabitants lived under the growing fear of destruction by a massive mudflow, no one could precisely forecast when this would occur. Everyone was expecting the big one soon. The dam offered a possible solution, but in the view of some its brutal construction method---directional blasting---and the fact that it concentrated protection on one spot might turn out to be even more dangerous to the city than no dam at all. In this context of both urgency and uncertainty, politicians were reluctant to take definitive responsibility for mudflow protection. Third, both the political instability and the anxiety about the natural hazard engendered a lively discussion on the pros and cons of the dam and alternative projects. Since civic concerns about major projects could become matters of public concern in the more relaxed atmosphere of the Khrushchev Thaw, from 1959 on, scientists and citizens in Alma-Ata and Moscow opposed the Medeo Dam project submitted by the Kazakhstani leadership and proposed a lighter and more complex protective system based on small dams and embankments. Opposition to the dam was typical of the reemergence from the 1950s on of groups of scientists and other members of the intelligentsia warning publicly of the potential for environmental damage to natural resources caused by large transformational development projects.2 The argument between proponents and opponents of the dam involved the pragmatic question of the most effective protection for the city from a scientific and engineering point of view. It revealed opposing conceptions of the city's relationship to its natural environment and diverging views of the environmental costs of disaster protection. This article seeks to understand how the relationship between the center and the republics evolved in the post-Stalin USSR in such a way as to grant republican leaders more room for maneuver and to enable the formation of technocratic alliances. For this purpose, it elaborates on three topics that are usually treated separately: the greater autonomy given by Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev to regional secretaries; the consequent rise of first secretaries to the status of leaders of their republics; and the growing significance of technical expertise in political decisions, especially with regard to developmental and environmental issues.4 The article shows how these three processes became intertwined at the republican level in the 1960s--70s, when political figures sought to take bold initiatives in transformational projects to establish their authority as leaders.
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