During the USSR this was not any bigger of an issue than say, pollution in China in the 90s and 00s. Not good but not the catastrophe it became after the USSR dissolved.

And China managed to turn its ecological problems around within less than a decade. If the USSR was still around they would probably have already completed a megaproject to bring the entire sea back.

Development always comes with a cost. Sometimes it is necessary to make a short term environmental sacrifice in order to lift millions out of poverty.

If the USSR had not built the vast irrigation network in Central Asia, these countries could not have developed modern agriculture on the scale that exists there now, without which the level of urban and industrial development they have now would have been impossible.

[–] Comprehensive49@lemmygrad.ml 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Agree. Also, the bulk of the loss occurred after the USSR collapsed because none of the surviving bourgeois countries around it bothered to care about it, while continuing to make money from farming irrigated by its waters (irrigation also built by the Soviets). The Soviets were tabling massive megaprojects to fix it before the USSR was destroyed.

This complaint is the same kind of bullshit as the Baltic states' whining about Soviet oppression, even though their entire modern economies exist only because the Soviet Union elevated them to sapience.

This shit is also the kind of liberal anti-extractivism that is applied only to Global South countries, where liberals get pissed at any Global South country using its own natural resources to advance productive forces in order to elevate living standards and, one day, reverse any environmental degradation created in the process. Apparently, green liberals just want people in Third World countries to live as cavemen forever so that the environment stays pristine.

[–] dazaroo@lemmygrad.ml 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

mb ig I shouldn't apply modern environmental standards to a developing nation from half a century ago

[–] demeritum@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 1 week ago

Environmentalism wasn’t as big as it is now and for example marx understood in more of a “farmer not having the foresight to care about his agricultural practices running the soil fertility” type of way.

[–] cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Actually, in a lot of ways the Soviets were far ahead of their time in ecological conservation efforts, like Stalin's ecological initiatives

Unfortunately Soviet policies also changed with time and some of the later periods saw a regression in environmental policies.

[–] demeritum@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The Megaproject the reroute the arctic rivers into central asia?

[–] cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Maybe. My point is that, considering the scale of other projects that the USSR was able to achieve, i'm sure they would have found a solution. Mobilizing resources and manpower at a huge scale is something a socialist planned economy is uniquely good at.

The USSR under Stalin had already implemented a huge ecological program of planting thousands of kilometers of forest belts to protect fields from adverse climate effects like erosion, mitigate droughts, etc.

This program is something not a lot of people nowadays – not even many communists – know about anymore, but almost a century later Stalin's ecological initiatives still continue to define the landscape all across Russia, Ukraine and other Soviet Republics with immensely positive effects, and the scale of this project was huge, almost comparable i would say to China's current Great Green Wall.

Unfortunately a lot of these initiatives were stopped immediately by Khrushchev as soon as Stalin died, forest belts began to be partially destroyed, and afforestation and conservation measures were never re-adopted to the same scale as under Stalin.

[–] demeritum@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 1 week ago

Just one of the many reasons I hate Khrushchev.