this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2026
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one of the ussr's biggest fuckups imo, hopefully the prc can help to undo it
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.
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.
mb ig I shouldn't apply modern environmental standards to a developing nation from half a century 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.
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.