A Soviet sea, killed by an obsession with 'white gold'

The mighty inland sea lies stricken now, caught in the grip of some evil chemistry as its waters dry to salt and blow away as noxious dust to strike the people with illness and death. 

It has never happened before within the time frame of a single generation, the disappearance of such a large body of water; but the Soviet Union's Aral Sea, once larger in area than any of the Great Lakes save Superior, is vanishing from the face of the earth. As the waters continue to recede, final destruction of the Aral—26,000 square miles in 1960—could occur before another 30 years have passed. 

The desiccation is taking place not only at a rapid pace but also with stealth, and in silence: the way a stallion plunges his muzzle into a bucket of water and drains it. Wide concern was late in coming and was delayed until now, when there is little that can be done to save the sea. 

Before the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev as the head of the Soviet government and his policy of glasnost, or openness, the calamity was not widely reported or even discussed in the Soviet Union. Rather, it was blurred to the public eye by the myopia of previous regimes. Ecology was not a primary concern. The well-being of a huge body of water sitting in the desert wastes of the Soviet Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan was subordinate to the good of the state, to the successful fulfillment of plans and quotas.

And so it was decreed in 1918 that waters of the two great rivers feeding the Aral would be drawn off to irrigate millions of acres for cotton production. There was a Soviet obsession to be self-sufficient in cotton. In 1937 the Soviet Union became a net exporter of what planners had come to refer to as "white gold." 

But the cost of that self-sufficiency and of export profits would be nothing less than one of the most extraordinary violations of the environment in modern times. 

"I doubt if there has ever been an environmental problem of this magnitude," said Philip P. Micklin, a leading authority on the Aral Sea and a professor of geography at Western Michigan University. "Certainly as a regional problem affecting 35 million people, it is unprecedented." 

For ten thousand years the Aral has drawn its life from those two rivers, the 1,578-mile-long Amu Darya and the 1,370-mile-long Syr Darya. In classical times they were called the Oxus and the Jaxartes, but by whatever name they are streams of strength and character, celebrated in verse and in the rich history of the times when Tatar horsemen rode the dry steppes.

The rivers come down from the mountain ranges to the southeast, flowing north to the Aral, and the routes they follow through deserts called the Kyzyl Kum and Kara Kum are like lifelines to which millions cling. The waters of the rivers are given to melon patches and fields of cereal, but most of all to 90 percent of all the cotton grown in the Soviet Union. 

The great rivers serve too to wash some of the despair from the soul of a people, the mostly Muslim Uzbek, for whom equality in their own country is elusive. They are dying of throat cancer amid dust from the drying sea and birthing children plagued with a host of illnesses related to the sacrifice of the Aral to the growing of cotton. In northwest Uzbekistan the infant-mortality rate is the highest in the Soviet Union. 

The plight of the Aral is widely mourned in the Soviet Union now, for it has been adopted as a cause célèbre by environmental activists. But it is in Uzbekistan that people care the most. They care enough to erect large signs in the streets, such as the one in the city of Nukus that reads, "The Aral Will Live Again." And the words chalked on the rusting hull of a large fishing boat sitting now on the dry bed of the sea: "Forgive us Aral. Please come back." 

Such sentiments, however, are not enough for a person with the fires of social protest raging inside. "You cannot fill the Aral with tears," said Mukhammed Salikh, a young poet who lives in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent. "The measures taken by the government to correct the problem are insufficient. First of all the government should acknowledge that cotton is the reason for what has happened to the Aral Sea. Once they do that, they can start to develop concrete proposals for doing all that can possibly be done." 

Salikh sits in an office in the Uzbek Writers Union building, under a portrait of an obscure Soviet poet who, he said, "suffered under the oppression of Stalin." As a member of a committee of scientists and writers organized to work for survival of the Aral, he devotes much of his time to speaking and writing about the tragedy.

"Even to be able to do that is something," he told me. "Before, it was almost impossible to publicize the problem, but everyone knew about it. Some say nothing was done because of discrimination, because this is happening in Muslim Uzbekistan. I can't say if that is true, but certainly there is a lack of official interest. For example, I can't understand why it is so difficult for foreign journalists to get permission to go to the sea." 

Following months of waiting for permission, a National Geographic team was allowed to travel to the Aral. We came upon it from the south, by way of the former fishing center of Muynak, now a landlocked, forlorn town more than 20 miles from the water. Less than 25 years ago Muynak sat at the edge of the sea.

Since the 1960s, when the first symptoms of the problem appeared, the Aral has lost about 40 percent of its surface area, or nearly 11,000 square miles of what are now largely dry, salt-encrusted wastelands. At times the sunlight plays on the salt until all that once was the sea appears to be wrapped in lame. And it stretches to infinity, leaving only the mind's eye to see it as it was, wide and clear and heavy with fish. 

There has been time enough for some growth to have occurred on the dry seabed, but the sodium chloride and sodium sulfate there are too toxic for almost everything other than a small bushy plant called solianka. It has bright red flowers, and the contrast of the color with the setting is startling, like a blush on the gray cheeks of a corpse. 

The bed of the Amu Darya is dry where it reaches the sea; the water has been claimed for irrigation up the line. The greatest diversion is the Kara Kum irrigation canal, more than 500 miles away. It is a massive facility, stretching 850 miles, paralleling the boundaries of Afghanistan and Iran.

Waters of the Amu Darya began to flow into the canal, the world's longest, in 1956. But it wasn't until the 1960s that the delicate equilibrium between the inflow and evaporation of the sea (the Aral has no outlet other than through evaporation) fell apart. Since then production of cotton has doubled. 

Eventually some party officials in Uzbekistan and Moscow became involved in a scam to inflate production figures and divert government payments for recorded, but nonexistent, cotton. Among those later indicted was Yuri M. Churbanov, first deputy interior minister and son-in-law of the late Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev. He is now in prison, convicted of accepting the equivalent of more than a million dollars in bribes. 

Between 1926 and 1960 the two rivers delivered an average of 55 cubic kilometers (13 cubic miles) of water to the sea each year, enough to fill 232 trillion eight-ounce glasses. Now only a fraction of that reaches there. And sometimes there is not so much as the spit in a whistle.

There are few flights to Muynak now, and the faded sign on the terminal at the airport goes unread except by those who arrive by chartered plane, those who come shaken as much by the sight from the air of the dying sea as by the ride in the legendary relic of a biplane called the Antonov 2. The sign reads, "The City of Fishermen Welcomes You." Once there were 10,000 fishermen working out of Muynak, taking pike, perch, and bream as fat as piglets from the Aral. The town produced 3 percent of the Soviet Union's annual catch. There were 24 native species of fish in the Aral. Today there are none, and the commercial fishing industry is dead. 

The fishing boats sit now on the dry bed that was the sea. They sit where they were abandoned when the Aral receded from Muynak, taking the spirit of the place with it. Some of the vessels have been cut up for scrap, but several dozen remain, some with anchor chains played out across the sand and some gutted of all but the wasp nests in the wheelhouses. Cast in heavy coats of rust, all smell of the death of the sea and of themselves.

"We tried to stop what was happening here, but no attention was paid to us," Koshkarbai Aitniiazov said. "The water continued to go away while the salinity increased. The weather changed for the worse with the summers getting hotter and the winters colder. The people feel salt on their lips and in their eyes all the time. It's getting hard to even open your eyes here." 

Aitniiazov is the mayor of Muynak. He was also the last harbormaster. He explained that as the sea was shrinking, a canal was dug to link the harbor and the open water. "But we couldn't keep up," he said. 

Dzhetpisbai Ibragimov, 66, remembers how it was. He spent his life as a fisherman on the Aral: "Until the sea left, when I was forced into early retirement." 

He lives now in the village of Uchsay, not far from Muynak. A thousand families lived there until the mid-1970s; now no more than 200. The sand has pushed in and up, ringing the village with dunes. Dzhetpisbai and I went to the fishing boats in the sand. It was the first time he had seen the vessels like that, and when I asked him what he thought, he replied, "I'm an old man. I can't speak of how I feel." Then he recognized a boat as one he had skippered. "I was kap-i-tan," he bellowed while hoisting him self up and over the side.

Standing on the deck with his World War II medal, the Order of the Great Patriotic War, taking a strike of sunlight, he was once again and for a brief time only in command of the 55-foot boat. And then he seemed glad to be done with it. He would sail no more; nor would he likely see the Aral Sea again. 

Although the Aral had abandoned Muynak, the town remains dependent on fish. The processing plant remains open, giving work to 900 persons. To do that, Soviet planners have drawn on a scheme that excludes profit for the benefit of a community's survival. 

The fish to be processed that day came from 1,750 miles away, from the Barents Seaport of Murmansk. They are sent frozen in refrigerator trains. "It is not clear if this operation will continue," said Daulbai Berdshev, general director of the plant. "However, there is the possibility that dikes can be built on the dry Aral Sea bottom, and areas can be flooded, creating a series of lakes for fish. In that way the plant would once again have its own fish supply." 

Meanwhile, the people of Muynak continue to react with disbelief at what has happened. As much as anything, it is the wind and dust that stings them with the reality of the disaster. "Before this there were wind periods and calm periods," a government official in the town told me. "Now there's only the wind."

It has been calculated that 43 million tons of salty grit are whipped up from the dry seabed each year and carried away by the winds to harm the people and the land. Traces of salts have been reported as far away as the Soviet coast of the Arctic Ocean. In Muynak itself, the grit is raspy and thick, clogging the carburetors of cars. 

Throughout Uzbekistan, and especially in the Karakalpak Autonomous Republic, there have been sharp increases in certain types of illnesses. For example, the number of throat cancer cases has soared. "There have also been marked increases in respiratory and eye diseases," Khadisha Alimbetova, deputy director of the hospital in Muynak, told me. "Of those we can definitely say that the cause is the salt and the other materials blowing off the dry seabed."

There are other villains here. For decades the cotton fields have been so laced with pesticides that much of the land is unfit to grow anything else. There are reports that DDT and other harmful pesticides continue to be used despite official bans and that a chemical called Butifos, also banned, is sometimes used to defoliate cotton plants, making them easier to pick. 

Drinking-water supplies over a vast area have become polluted. At Nukus, 120 miles south of the Aral Sea, lack of drinking water has crippled life. Construction of a 125 mile-long pipeline to bring water in from a reservoir is now being rushed. But until the pipeline is completed, and until something is done to stop the saline dust from blowing off the seabed, it is not likely that there will be any change in the local infant-mortality rate for the Nukus area of 60 deaths for every 1,000 births. 

"The effects of the tragedy of the Aral Sea are being felt by everyone, from infants to old people," said Mels Kabulov. He is associated with a medical-research institute in Nukus. "As an example, there were 74 cases of throat cancer treated here in our clinic in 1959. Last year we had 366 cases, an increase of five times. The population, though, has increased only two and a half times during that period." 

Dr. Kabulov said that traces of pesticides were first found in the breast milk of some area women in 1975 and that the number of such instances has continued to rise. "We are approaching a medical emergency." The women picking cotton in the fields of Khalkabad state farm near Nukus know little of the causes of their ailments. They are among the poorest of the poor in Uzbekistan, a republic with an average annual income about half that of other parts of the Soviet Union.

About three-quarters of the 11,000 acres of the farm are given over to cotton. But the land is worn. In many places are large, bare areas crusted with salts and residues from the pesticides. 

"Our assignment this year is to produce 6,130 tons of cotton," said Perdebai Kurbanazarov, chief party secretary for the farm. "Following new guidelines, we will reduce our cotton production so that it takes up no more than 60 percent of the land." 

It is not just that cotton is cherished in the Soviet Union because cotton clothes are comfortable. Exported cotton happens to be a major earner of hard currency. 

Kurbanazarov led the way to a pleasant retreat on the farm, a shady glen by a stream where old men riding donkeys pass by. When he was ready to leave, I told him I'd stay awhile, and when he was gone, I sat beneath a linden tree and ate a melon swiped from a nearby patch. It was a gem of a melon with golden meat, and it was no less sweet for having failed to make it to market as part of the melon quota for 1989.

The decision to reduce cotton acreage meets guidelines adopted by the Communist Party Politburo in September 1988 aimed at stemming further depletion of the Aral. It was decided that irrigation systems would be made more efficient by lining with plastic and concrete the ditches that have stood for many years as mere slashes in the ground. Also, new collector canals are to be built to send some of the used irrigation waters directly back to the sea. 

"With improvements to the irrigation system, we can give back to the Aral 21 cubic kilometers [5 cubic miles] of water a year by 2005. That is the best we can do," said Viktor Dukhovnyi, director of the Central Asian Scientific Research Institute for Irrigation. "We need water not only for the population and farms but also for industrial development. The intellectuals sitting at desks understand the ecological slogans, but they fail to understand the needs of the people working on the farms." 

Leading voices in the matter of the Aral Sea have tended in recent years to be harshly conservative and very old line or angry and demanding of reform. If Viktor Dukhovnyi speaks for the former, then Raushan Tuliagakov, a novelist and member of the Committee to Save the Aral Sea, and Nikolai Aladin, of the Leningrad Zoological Institute, do the same for the latter.

Said Tuliagakov: "We knew the problem as far back as 1960, but we were not allowed to speak out. When we did, the bureaucrats crucified us." And Dr. Aladin, who is researching the reintroduction of crustaceans into the Aral, said: "As soon as we destroy the present complex of water management, we will make progress with the Aral Sea." 

If nothing else, all agree that if the present level is to be stabilized, the Aral Sea will need half again the 21 cubic kilometers of water a year to be gained by the year 2005. The amount will not be obtained from the rivers unless a decision is made to reduce by half the nearly 18 million acres now under irrigation in the basin. 

"We could do that today—cut it in half. But we have to think of the people who depend on the irrigation for work. What will they do then? What will they eat?"

Polad A. Polad-Zade sat in his Moscow office and made an accounting for all the river waters. As first deputy minister in the Ministry for Water Management Construction Projects, he is in a position of authority. 

In talking with Polad-Zade and Dukhovnyi, it became clear that they intend to work for a solution giving priority to the people who depend on the irrigation. They know that the Aral is not likely to be, ever again, what it was before, and that the best that can be hoped for is some sort of stabilization of the sea and survival of the deltas of the two rivers. 

Aral Sea expert Philip Micklin also feels that the price for restoring the sea may be too high. "Just to stabilize it would require an immediate injection of 30 to 35 cubic kilometers of water. I can understand the feeling that attention should focus on the deltas."

Saving delta lakes and restoring some of those now lost could lead to new commercial fishing activity and to the restoration of animals such as the muskrat. The watery mazes once supported large populations of boar and deer. But most of the animals are gone now, even the egrets that applauded the show with great claps of wings. 

There is still some talk of a grand scheme to bring new water to the Aral by a diversion from the Ob and Irtysh Rivers in Siberia, 1,500 miles away. Environmentalists in the Soviet Union, for the most part, are opposed to altering the rivers, saying that this can only compound environmental problems. 

So the Aral continues to give itself to the sun and take little in return. Dr. Micklin has looked beyond the year 2000 when, if nothing is done, the end for the sea will arrive.

"That does not mean there will be nothing left at all," he said. "The worst scenario would probably find the Aral shrunken to an area of 4,000 to 5,000 square kilometers, as compared with the present 40,000 [15,500 square miles]. Two lakes would remain in the south, both four or five times as saline as the open ocean. Both would be dead, like, well, the Dead Sea." 

Who then, with the sea like that, will ever want to remember it in verse, as Matthew Arnold did in his epic work "Sohrab and Rustum":

The shorn and parcelled Oxus 
[Amu Darya] strains along 
Through beds of sand and matted 
rushy isles 
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed 
he had 
In his high mountain cradle 
in Pamere, 
A foiled circuitous wanderer: 
till at last 
The longed-for dash of waves is 
heard, and wide 
His luminous home of waters opens, 
bright 
And tranquil, from whose floor 
the new-bathed stars 
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.

 Ah, Matthew, if you could see it now.