Russia has turned the Dnipro into a major weapon of war: Paul Josephson

Kyiv and the Dnipro River on January 7, 2024. The river has frozen due to sub-zero temperatures. Seen in this photo from iStock are The Motherland (Sculpture), the Flag of Ukraine, and the Kievan district of Pechersk Lavra

It was on February 24, 2022, that Russian troops invaded Ukraine on the express orders of President Vladimir Putin. These two years have seen tremendous damage done to the lives of the Ukrainian people. Thousands have been killed and many more are falling prey to the war and its associated impacts.

One of these impacts is on the Dnipro or Dnieper river, that flows through the heart of Ukraine and divides the country into right-bank and left-bank, both of which have been often compared in academic research regarding the country.

The mighty river has been chronicled in folklore, art and literature ever since civilisation itself began in this region. Scythians, Greeks, Varangians, the Kievan Rus, the Russian Empire, the Soviets and the Nazis — the river has been witness to several monumental events in Eastern Europe’s history.

Down To Earth spoke about the impact of the invasion with Paul Josephson. A specialist in Soviet and Russian history, the history and politics of twentieth century science and technology, and environmental history, Josephson first visited the USSR in 1984 and has conducted research in the former Soviet Union including in Ukraine, and in Siberia and the Arctic, for a total of three years.

He is the author of 15 books including Nuclear Russia and scores of articles and chapters. Edited excerpts from the conversation:

Rajat Ghai (RG): Why is the Dnieper or Dnipro river so important for human civilisation in Eastern Europe? For the benefit of our readers, please give a socio-cultural, historical and political perspective on this great body of water.

 

Paul Josephson (PJ): Rivers have been essential to Ukraine and to the Russian Empire, into which Ukraine was incorporated centuries ago dating to the founding of the Kievan Rus in the 900s and 1000s.The rivers served as trade routes, as ways for military detachments to move up and down. The forests were dense and thick. Rivers provided an opportunity not only when they were unfrozen but also in the winters, when they were frozen over heavily and could be used with sleighs. Contact between the Rus, Ukraine and the rest of the world was largely through rivers, as parts of these trade routes.

They continued to be important through the Late Tsarist Period, both as locations of economic importance to peasants during earlier agricultural eras and also as sources of water for industry, power production and trade once Russia and Ukraine began to industrialise in the 19th century.

The rivers in the Soviet and Tsarist periods ran essentially north-south, with other forms of transportation providing help for the east-west route. But those were poorly developed. For example, the Trans-Siberian Railroad was completed only in the early 20th century.

So, the Dnipro and other rivers in east-central Europe (Ukraine and Russia) were crucial for military reasons, national identity, agriculture, industry, economy and culture.

RG: You noted in your essay, Rivers as Battlefields, for the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society (October 2023) that “attempts to alter the ecology of the Dnipro began much earlier than the Soviet Era”. What were these efforts and why were they initiated?

PJ: Beginning in the 1700s and not just in the Tsarist Empire but around the world — China, North America, England and what is today Germany — the state began to put resources into the transformation of river basins in support of its purposes that centred around the economy, agriculture, transport, military and ultimately, public health.

In the case of the Dnipro, this involved the first stages of straightening the river, dredging it to enable ships with deeper draft to pass and also developing east-west routes such as the Bug Canal.

These state efforts to support geoengineering of rivers became crucial by the late 19th century and became mass scale in the 20th century. India was a world leader in this regard, along with China, Brazil, the United States and of course, the Soviet Union, with massive hydroelectric power stations, irrigation systems, transport canals and so on.    

RG: You also note in Rivers as Battlefields that “nature for the Bolsheviks was the archfoe of socialism. Only the harsh intervention of the Communist Party could make ‘capricious’ nature succumb and force it to act according to the Five-Year Plans”. Is this elucidated by (Karl) Marx himself in his works or was it a later creation of leaders such as Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin?

PJ: If you read through the works of (Friedrich) Engels and Marx, you don’t really find much about nature, geoengineering, environment and so on. So, it is really much more a product of the Soviet state and other Soviet regimes after Marx and Engels, who sought to put Marxist theory into practice. In doing so, they built upon Marxism but they also extended it and changed it a great deal.

Once the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, they were struck immediately by the difficult economic problems that they faced, one of which was to recover industrial production which had fallen to less than 1914 levels. They succeeded in reaching 1914 levels only in 1926.

In order to have an advanced economy — as Marx and Engels anticipated for a country with a revolution to stand up to what they saw as hostile capitalist encirclement — and to transform peasants into conscious proletarians, the Bolsheviks embraced large-scale technological systems, including those involved with river geoengineering.

This begins in the early 1920s and really takes off under Stalin, with attendant changes in the ideological underpinnings to pursue these goals.

RG: What, in your view, has been the impact of the two-year-long Russian invasion of Ukraine on the Dnipro basin? Does it still ‘roar and bellow’ as Taras Shevchenko wrote? What about its future?

PJ: The countries that formed the Soviet Union were largely peasant and agrarian societies. The regions of what became Soviet Central Asia — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan today — also had large nomadic pastoral populations tending to a variety of livestock.

The changes that occurred in Ukraine with forced collectivisation and rapid industrailisation, changed the Dnipro, which had flowed relatively peacefully from its origins in Belarus to its delta, from a 19th century river into a 20th century engine of economic growth so that those people who lived along its floodplains were forced to give up their settlements especially as six major power stations were built along the Dnipro, with huge reservoirs rising behind the dams that were built.

Peasants were pushed away from the shores although water was stored for state purposes in collectivised farms and for irrigation in areas that had inadequate rainfall for the kinds of agriculture that the Soviets envisaged.

So, all at once over a 20-25 year-period, the Dnipro became a transport, agricultural and power-production machine to serve the state, rather than the peasant or the proletariat as initially envisaged at least in Marxist theory that the worker benefits, not necessarily the state.

The Dnipro is the fourth-longest river in Europe after the Volga, Danube and Ural. From an environmental point of view, one could say it has been ‘overdeveloped’ like the Rhine, Danube and Volga.

In the Soviet case, sufficient legal foundations to enable the public to interfere with the development process — for instance, to bring suit against developers for violating (limited) environmental laws — were absent.

And so, what we have seen is tremendous pollution. Dams and hydropower stations alter the chemistry of rivers and have tremendous impacts on the flora and fauna. For example, by slowing river flow, they decrease the amount of oxygen in the water. Building dams causes silt to gather behind them and lowers the efficiency of the hydroelectric power station that has been built.  

Thus, the dam building caused pollution and degradation, which were exacerbated by war. As the Wehrmacht invaded the USSR after June 1941, the Soviets destroyed as much technology as they could so as to make them unavailable to the German invaders and occupiers. This included the Dnieper Power Station which was destroyed by the Soviets themselves, without warning to people who lived downstream. This led to deaths and destruction of many of the economic objects that had been built under Soviet power.

What is really disturbing to me is to see this happen again when the Russians destroyed the Kakhovka Dam under the pretext of fighting ‘Nazis in Ukraine’, which is a complete lie. One would even say that the Russians became Nazis themselves by destroying the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station, leading to inundation of villages downstream. As soon as this happened in June 2023, one could see human corpses and animal carcasses floating on the water as well as petrochemicals released from onshore plants floating downstream.

Crucially, Zaporizhzhia, the largest nuclear power station in Europe has six 1,000 megawatt nuclear reactors built by the Soviet Union. Ukraine is dependent on Russia for fuel for these reactors although it is pursuing other ways of dealing with issues concerning supply of fresh fuel and disposal of waste fuel. But by destroying Kakhovka, the Russians threatened the water supply for Zaporizhzhia, which is needed for cooling the reactors and the spent fuel which is still onsite at the station. So here, Russia has turned the Dnipro and the power station into a major weapon of war.

What remains after the war is difficult to say. It would be very expensive to rebuild everything. The Russian attacks have been indiscriminate and immoral. The hydropower stations along the Dnipro would require upgrade. We are talking billions of dollars to see Kakhovka and other economic-industrial objects of the Dnipro built according to proper modern standards.

RG: Can humanity ever come out of the mindset to mechanise and weaponise nature?

PJ: In systems which permit greater participation of the public in the technology assessment process, it should be easier to understand and work against those dreadful and significant impacts on the environment that go along with climate change.

They should therefore permit a much more rapid abandonment of carbon economies for alternative ways of producing electricity that all peoples of the world now expect.

They should make it more possible for those countries to refuse to turn technologies of nature transformation into objects of war — the way that Russia has done in Ukraine with nuclear and hydroelectric power stations and so on. Unfortunately, war since the beginning of the 20th century has involved civilian populations, much more so than in the past. Objects that were considered ‘immoral’ and ‘inappropriate’ to touch have become precisely those that warring parties have tried to destroy. Russia, in fact, has been attacking electrical transport, hospital and other infrastructure in Ukraine to bring great suffering to the masses.

I would like to be hopeful. But it is only possible to be hopeful when the regimes in question tend to be more open and pluralistic and less beholden to economic interests — the oligarchs in Russia and oil companies in other countries.

I would say that even the nuclear industry which touts itself as ‘green’, is actually not in many ways. The fuel system remains highly polluting. The stations are massive. When there are accidents, we don’t consider them as part of pollution. But surely, Fukushima and Chernobyl tell us that we cannot ignore that possibility as well.

All of this, if I may say so, is important for India today. It is a hydroelectric and nuclear power, buying power from Rosatom in Russia. It has a knowledgeable public that attempts to intervene in technology assessment although the state is often unwilling to hear them.

I hope that the lessons of Ukraine are important for all of the world’s people —Indians, Americans, Germans, Chinese, not just Ukrainians. And hopefully someday, Russians too.