← Terraforming · Water & diversion
Siberian river reversal
Turn the Ob and Yenisey south, refill Central Asia, tame the sukhovei. The Politburo killed the drawings in 1986. No canal was dug.
Jurisdiction: Soviet Union (West Siberia / Kazakhstan / Central Asia)
Years / status: Davydov-type schemes from 1949; design work in the 1970s-80s (Sibaral and European variants). Halted by Central Committee and Council of Ministers, 14 August 1986. Status: proposed: cancelled.
The plan
Successive plans would take part of the Ob, Irtysh and sometimes Yenisey: rivers that run to the Arctic: across the Turgay Gate toward the Aral and Caspian, to irrigate Kazakhstan and Central Asia, “stabilize” inland seas, and soften dry winds. M. M. Davydov’s late-Stalin version was openly a “transformation of nature” project. Later Soyuzvodproyekt variants were smaller and still continental.
Construction / status
Surveys, institutes and newspaper wars. Not a completed reversal canal. Cost talk in the 1980s ran to tens of billions of rubles or, in Western wires, about $40 billion. Chernobyl and a rare public environmental fight landed on the same decade.
What went wrong, or only partly worked
On 14-15 August 1986 TASS reported the Politburo halt: more study of ecology and economics, work stopped. Scientists had warned of Arctic and Siberian side effects that no one could run as a pilot. The Aral continued to die by other canals. Occasional post-Soviet revivals remain proposals.
Lessons
Cancelling a drawing can be the honest engineering decision. Continent-scale climate tinkering via river capture has no prototype. The Aral’s actual failure mode was ordinary irrigation, not a missing Siberian tap.
Sources
UPI 15 August 1986 on the Politburo halt; Ward 2013 on Sibaral’s life and death; Davydov 1949/1972 translation of the Yenisey-Ob-Aral-Caspian scheme.