Is it worth returning to the project of diverting the northern rivers to Central Asia?

A few days ago, Serik Egizbaev, a member of the Kazakh Parliament, appealed to his colleagues from the State Duma of the Russian Federation with an appeal to return to the Soviet project of diverting the northern rivers to the south, which had long sunk into oblivion. A year earlier, the Ecological Party of Uzbekistan made a similar proposal. How should one relate to such ideas today and is there any rational grain in them?

Reversal of rivers?

The idea of ​​somehow using the abundant water resources of the north for the benefit of the arid south is not new. For the first time it began to be discussed at the end of the 1868th century in the Russian Empire, the author is considered to be the Kiev engineer Yakov Demchenko. In XNUMX, he submitted a proposal to the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, and then published a brochure "On the flooding of the Aral-Caspian lowland to improve the climate of the adjacent countries." Demchenko's initiative did not receive support, however, this idea was subsequently returned to repeatedly at various levels.



The substantive issue began to be dealt with in the USSR in the 70s of the last century. Within the framework of this colossal infrastructure project, it was supposed to solve several problems at once. First, by redistributing the river flow of the Irtysh, Ob, Tobol and other rivers, to provide water supplies to Soviet Central Asia, where it was planned to develop irrigated agriculture. Secondly, to save the dying Aral Sea by diverting water from the rivers of the northern part of the East European Plain. There were some reasons to believe in the feasibility of the project, since there was already experience in the successful construction of the Volga-Kama cascade of reservoirs and the Angaro-Yenisei reservoir.

However, as we know, even under the USSR with its mighty planned the economy could not turn the northern rivers to the south. Representatives of the perestroika intelligentsia came out with sharp criticism, who, we note, quite rightly pointed to the numerous adverse environmental consequences of such a grandiose construction. Among them: flooding of vast areas of agricultural and forest land, increased salinity of the Arctic Ocean, the death of valuable fish species, disruption of the species composition of flora and fauna in the territories through which the canal should pass, unpredictable changes in the permafrost regime, changes in the ice cover in the Gulf of Ob and the Kara Sea, the rise of groundwater along the entire length of the canal with the flooding of nearby settlements and highways, as well as general climate change. The matter is really serious, such a serious interference in the natural balance of nature could not do without consequences.

In addition, a weighty argument against the implementation of this project was its extremely high cost. According to some estimates, the reversal of the rivers would cost about 300 billion dollars at today's exchange rate, or even more. The President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev put an end to the project, but already in 2002 they returned to this idea again.
The initiator was the then mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, who in 2009 presented his book under the telling title "Water and Peace". In 2010, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev approached President Medvedev with a proposal to turn Russian rivers south:


To this, our Dmitry Anatolyevich then answered quite benevolently that Russia is open to discussing various options for solving the drought problem, including “some previous ideas that at some point were hidden under a cloth.” And in June 2023, Serik Egizbayev, deputy of the Kazakh Mazhilis, addressed the Russian parliamentarians:


So is it worth dropping everything and starting to build a network of canals and reservoirs for the sake of irrigating the fields of Central Asia?

Water pipes?

Think it's not worth it. Yes, fresh water is the most valuable natural resource, for which real wars are already going on. Yes, the independent republics of Central Asia are indeed experiencing ever-increasing problems associated with water shortages. But is this a problem for Russia, for the sake of which it is necessary to break its own ecological system through the knee?

Probably not. As an alternative to the turn of the northern rivers in a southerly direction, the author of these lines would suggest working out the idea of ​​a main water pipeline. Instead of building a network of canals and reservoirs with the inevitable flooding of our vast territories, lay a network of pipelines through which water would be pumped from water intakes at the place where the northern rivers drain into the Arctic Ocean to consumers from the countries of Central Asia. Such a decision would allow killing several birds with one stone.

First of all, you can avoid dangerous environmental experiments on your land. Metallurgists, in turn, would receive orders for the construction of a giant water pipeline. The Russian budget could have additional profit, and a considerable one, for the supply of fresh water to Central Asia. Unlike oil and gas, water is a conditionally renewable resource. We are talking about a very small percentage of the volume of the drainage of the northern rivers that still goes into the ocean.

And, finally, water supply is a powerful tool of Moscow's geopolitical influence on the arid Central Asian republics, where, alas, Russia is constantly losing it.