The Water: Lake Baikal

Lake Baikal

Perhaps, when you think about water pollution in Russia today, a first thing that comes up to your mind is the case of world-famous lake Baikal. 

Lake Baikal is the largest freshwater lake in the world, with a maximum depth of 1,642 meters. It is covering 31,500 square kilometres which makes it larger in size than Belgium state. It is fed by 336 rivers and was formed around 25 million years ago, long time before human history has even begun. 

The unique chemistry that occurs here (due to it’s relatively low oxygen content, and it’s unique tectonic origin) have not only produced crystal clear waters but also created an isolated aquatic environment. As a result, more than two-thirds of the 2,400 different plants and animals living in the lake are found nowhere else in the world.

Some of these species have been hunted by humans which put them under the threat of extinction. For example, the nerpa (Pusa siberica) is a unique freshwater seal, which is able to swim for over 70 minutes and dive up to 300 metres below water surface. Sadly enough, it is highly valued for it’s meat and skins. 

Nerpas are also affected by the intensive industrial pollution of the lake. In 1980s, thousands of these animals have been reported to die from a morbillivirus, an outcome of immune system worsening due to the heavy metals exposure.

Nerpa baby

Nerpa baby - 2

Scientific Value

The Lake Baikal is a highly precious site for the scientists. The Baikal rift zone has never been glaciated which led to accumulation of over 7500 m of sediment, which can be used to reconstruct the past environmental change in the lake from as far as 5 million years ago. 

Threat Of Pollution

Baikal is threatened by three types of pollution: 

1) Because of the problems with the sewage system in Ulan-Ude, the city dumps almost 500 tons of nitrates into the water—70 percent of all nitrates entering the basin. Baikal Pulp and Paper emitted 32 million cubic meters of wastewater directly into Baikal in 1987. To make the case worse, there are hundreds of small enterprisers around the lake that have to wastewater management capacity at all. As a result, Baikal has been accumulating large quantities of phenols, petroleum-based substances, detergents, suspended particulates, and other substances.

2) Due to intensive timber exploration, there has been an increased rate of erosion and runoff from surrounding lands. In the post-World War II era, the Soviet government facilitated the rapid exploitation of the region’s agricultural and forest resources with the expansion of traffic along the Trans-Siberian Railway to the south of Lake Baikal, and construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railroad to the north. As a result, the soil has tended to become compacted and prone to erosion because of overgrazing and the cultivation of pastureland.

3) Industrial plants situated along the Angara River churn out aluminium, wood and paper products, and chemicals. Cities such as Irkutsk, Angarsk, Shelekhov, and Bratsk suffer high concentrations of formaldehyde, benzopyrene, nitrogen oxides. These pollutants are then blown over the lake and its watershed by the prevailing winds, further contributing towards Lake Baikal pollution. 

Important Lesson For The Whole World

  It is clear that Lake Baikal is an environmental experiment which determines the extent of the spread of manmade pollutants. Although, taking into account the levels of pollution, Lake Baikal remains in fairly pristine condition. This is largely the result of its tremendous size.  Its size, however, is what led to the pollution in the first place.  For years, many Soviet officials believed that factories would not harm the lake; its size would dissolve the chemicals harmlessly.

Today, however, the issue around Lake Baikal pollution continues to exists. In 2010, former Prime Minister and current President of Russian Federation Vladimir Putin came first as "Baikal's worst enemy" in the contest organised by the Greenpeace. Putin's victory can be explained by his role in the re-opening of the Baikalsk Paper and Pulp mill, which emits 100,000 cubic metres of waste into the lake every year. Instead, what environmentalists suggested is that Lake Baikal should be turned into a tourists attractions with campsites and health resorts in the surrounding area. 

Baikal has become a symbol of environmental dangers and international participation and funding are crucial to salvaging the Siberian Pearl. The experience we have from the lake Baikal case encourages the world to combat water pollution elsewhere.

The Water: Mother Volga

There is a river system in Russia which deserves particular attention of my readers and it is infamous «Mother Volga». Not everyone realises that Volga is the largest European river, accounting for the area, which is two and a half times size of France.

In USSR, the emphasis was put on developing industrial clusters. One of such clusters is Volga basin, which is now the most economically developed region of Russia, accounting for 40% of the Russian population, 45% of the country’s industry and 50% of it’s agriculture.

Mother Volga Monument

The water quality problems in this region are most severe in Russia, as constant toxic contamination coming from industrial wastewater and domestic and agricultural sewage water started many decades ago (see my previous blog entry). The Volga basin account for 1/3 of all water pollution in Russia, however the issue has not received a very widespread coverage in Russian scientific media so far.

- Industrial, Agricultural and Domestic pollution

The Volga is being polluted right from the very upstream reaches. There is a number of large cities located along it’s stream such as Astrakhan, Volgograd, Saratov, Samara, Kazan, Ulyanovsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl and Tver. As you move down the stream, every town and factory within it further adds up to the poisoning of the river. The overall pollutant load in 1997 consisted of 1.6 million tonnes of sulphates, 169,500 tonnes of particulate matter and 126,000 tonnes of organic compounds. Volga still remains severally polluted today. In 2001 the river received the following quantities of pollutants: oil products - 2 370 tonnes; suspended matter - 164 540 tonnes; sulphates - 736 460 tonnes and many other components of Mendeleev table.

Volgograd

Furthermore, every year there are some records about accidental oil spills appearing on the news. For instance, in 2008, a 1 kilometer-long oil stain was detected in the Chernoyarsk region of Astrahanska Oblast, which weighted over 32 kg. In July 2009, 2 tons of fuel oil were spilled as a result of a tanker wreck in Samara Oblast, forming a 10 kilometre oil stain on the water’s surface. 

Agricultural discharge from the nearby farms adds even more mineral, organic and toxic pollutants, which enter the main stream through the minor tributaries.

Hydroelectric Dams

Construction of hydroelectric power stations was accompanied by creation if over 300 reservoirs, adding up to a total volume of 110 cubic km. The Volga has been transformed from a free-flowing river into a long chain of water reservoirs, which caused water exchange within the drainage basin to slow down by 12 times. Just imagine that before the construction work began the water from the river source reached Volgograd in 50 days, however, by the 1990s it took 400-500 days to pass the same distance. 

The slow pace causes toxic pollutants to accumulate in the 8 main reservoirs and to settle on the riverbed - some parts of the river exceed the allowable limit of petroleum byproducts concentration by 100 times. This often trigger a process called «self-pollution», which means that even after the pollutant discharged has been stopped, the pollution continues due to the large amounts of of industrial, agricultural and domestic wastes stored at the bottom of reservoir. 

Effects of Pollution

Predictably, such changes in hydrological regime led to decreasing fish populations in the river. Large dams along the river eliminated many spawning grounds of transitory fish such as Caspian lamprey, shads, sturgeons, inconnu as well as worsened the conditions for survival. 

Fish are also known to be highly sensitive indicators of aquatic environment and ecosystem health. Pathological changes in fish organs help to determine the toxicity of water contaminants and the potential dangers. The chronic exposure of fish to the numerous toxic substances in the water led to the different types of pathology and dysfunction in their organisms.

The recent data collected by UNEP in 2007 shows that 90% of fish residing in Volga were mutant, while in 2008 the number increased to 100% for some kinds of fish.

In 2011, Russian regional parliamentarians addressed an official letter to then-president Dmitriy Medvedev requesting to take an action on «saving the Volga». However, even after having spend hours and hours browsing through official data, whether any investments into combating this issue will be made, remains very unclear to me.

Medvedev Taking Bath In River Volga

The Water

Stalinist industrialisation put a great pressure on the urban infrastructure. Nevertheless, as the inflow of workers into cities grew significantly, none of the investments were diverted into improving urban environments. 

Only some of the major Russian cities had sewerage systems, while everywhere else around the country human and animal excrement was left to wash away during the rain. But even sewerage systems often didn't help, as the water was being discharged back in the river with no treatment at all. 

The Soviet Union lagged some 30 to 50 years behind such countries as Britain, France or Germany, compensating instead the absence of adequate level of sanitation by immunisation and antibiotics against water-borne diseases (e.g tuberculosis, pneumonia, gastro-enteric infections).

Apart from the risk of catching disease, the urban residents in USSR had to cope with the difficulties associated with the lack of indoor piped water. The routine tasks such as laundering, washing and cooking required significant amount of time and energy, adding to already difficult living conditions ( e.g. working long hours in the under-heated factories and walking long distances to work, in the absence of adequate public transport).

By the end of the 1930s the impact of industrialisation on country’s water supplies was beginning to attract attention. Unfortunately, not because of it’s harm to human health, but because of the economic damage it was causing to the factories and fishing industry. 

For instance, in winter, the chemical pollution in Oka, Northern Donets and Viatka was so strong, that fish would die from oxygen starvation while the discharge from a single factory like the Nizhnii Tagil coke-oven products factory could eliminate fish in the River Tagil over a 200-300 km radius.

Northern Donets

Furthermore, the organisation of water supplies in the Ural region was so inefficient that the pollution of rivers by upstream factories made them unusable for the ones downstream, not talking about the health impacts it implied.

However, none of the attempts by Soviet government to instal anti-pollution equipment succeeded. Waste treatment considered to be of a minor importance to the ones in power, so often the installation process could not be completed due to lack of building materials or labour power. 

Christopher Burton’s «Destalinization as detoxification? The expert debate on industrial toxins under Khrushchev» highlights that often Soviets were guided by two misleading environmental concepts:

1. A belief that powerful rivers are «self-cleansing» and able to dilute industrial waste, and
2. the idea that there was a maximum allowable concentrations of toxins (предельно допустимые концентрации).

These concepts ignored the facts that any amount of toxins tend to build up over time in surrounding flora and fauna and that toxins can interact to produce even more dangerous substances. Whether the Soviet Government truly believed in their truthfulness or used these theories as excuse - remains an open question. 

The main point here is that the policies and behaviour regarding water pollution back in Stalin era could be responsible for an ecological catastrophe that occurred later in 1980s and still persist today.

Reference:

Filtzer, Donald (2009) "Poisoning the Proletariat : Urban Water Supply and RiverPollution in Russia's Industrial Regions during Late Stalinism,1945-1953"

Introduction

If we compare the planet with a communal apartment, we occupy the dirtiest room.

—Aleksei Yablokov, environmental adviser to President Boris Yeltsin

Regions of Environmental Degradation Within Former Soviet Union

The story of Russian ecology goes back to the past at the times when a former Soviet Union was a world’s largest state as well as the world’s most ambitious government which felt that pollution control was an unnecessary hindrance to economic development and industrialisation. 

Soviet poster representing a female worker and the "Day by day happier life" slogan

The Soviet society adopted the anthropocentric worldview which implies that the natural resources are merely a building material for everybody's "better future".

The environmentally threatening incidents (e.g the Siberian pipeline sabotage or Kyshtym radiological disaster) received no public notice due to censorship. The remedial measures taken were mostly slow, as government believed that the land could easily absorb any level of pollution. 

Therefore, it comes as no surprise that after the Soviet Union collapsed and the documents were finally revealed to the public, Russia had to admit that it was around 40% of it’s territory to be considered as under high risk of ecological stress. 

The citizens of the former Soviet industrial centres (e.g Magnitorsk, Novokuznetsk, Astrakhan) have now been struggling from tremendous air and water pollution, deforestation and the various skin diseases as well as disruption of metabolic processes among children, all as a result of environmental degradation. 

Magnitorsk

This blog is going to look at the number of case studies and research papers in order to understand the challenge that Russia is facing today. The topics to be covered include water and air quality, radioactive contamination, soils and forests. 

Even though some of the conditions that occurred in Russia are truly unique, if we were to put this situation in the global context it would become clear that the similar problems are faced by most of the countries around the world.