Paul Goble
Staunton,
June 24 – The increasingly polluted Volga River is creating ahealth crisis for
the 60 million Russian citizens who live in its enormous and economically
important basin, but the Russian government has not been independently
monitoring this situation since Vladimir Putin disbanded the State Ecology
Committee in 2000.
In
the current issue of “Argumenty nedeli,” journalist Denis Terentyev surveys the
damage, noting that few officials appear to care although people living along
Russia’s great river can see the increasingly negative impact of pollution on
the river, its wildlife, and on themselves (argumenti.ru/toptheme/n393/262603).
One of the
reasons that the Volga has become so polluted is that since the 1930s it has
been less a river than a string of reservoirs created by dams, an arrangement
that means the speed of its flow is ten to fifteen times less than it was a
century ago, reducing the ability of the river to cleanse itself.
But
the most important reasons lie elsewhere with oil spills and the continued dumping
of industrial waste into the river, leaving it with contamination eight times
greater than the average for Russian rivers and 350 times the rate for the Lena
River to give but one example, according to research by University of
California scholars.
In
recent years, such wastes have become a less significant contaminant of the
Volga than fertilizers which flow into the river either because of irrigation
or rain. This new threat means that
concentrations of the chemicals contained in such fertilizers are now 50 times
above health norms, according to Saratov’s Green Patrol ecology movement.
And
adding to the problems that industry and agriculture as causing is the
longstanding practice of allowing ships, barges, and even oil tankers that have
ended their useful life to sink in the waters of the river, with all the
obvious contaminants they contain. There
are now about 2500 such abandoned vessels in the river, with 800 of them being
in the Astrakhan area alone.
There
may be other sources as well, Terentyev says, but to give one example, “no one
has studied the consequences of the 26 peaceful nuclear explosions which were
carried out in the Volga basin in Soviet times.”
Obviously,
all these contaminants have an impact on the ecology of the river and its
basin. First to react to the poisoning of the river have been the various
species of fish there. A generation ago
only six to seven percent of the fish there had mutations; now among some
kinds, they have risen to 90 to 100 percent. Indeed, some residents even
collect these mutants.
First
and foremost, experts say, it is absolutely essential that no one and
especially children drink untreated Volga water, but unfortunately some of the
cities along its course still do. One of
them is Ulyanovsk. The consequences: According to a survey in 2009, cancer
rates there were 20 percent above all-Russian averages.
In
2011, then-President Dmitry Medvedev called for a national problem “to save the
Volga.” But he said Moscow would invest only 300 million rubles (less than nine
million US dollars), an amount that experts say is far too small given the
task: As Terentyev notes “it is 2000 times smaller” than the Russian government
says it has spent for the Sochi Olympics.
Boris
Aleksandrov, a human rights activist, says that this is a clear “demonstration
of priorities. For the authorities the Volga is not valuable in and of itself
but only as a suitable artery for the export of resources and as a source of
fish and electrical energy. Tey are much less interested in the people who live
in the Volga basin and drink water from the river.
Thus,
for them and the problems the pollution of the Volga is causing, “there is not
attention and no money.”
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