Kakhovka Dam: A Short Story of Double Crime
Almost a month has passed since Russia destroyed Kakhovka Dam and power plant in Ukraine. The pictures of homes and streets under the water were replaced with ones of dried land. The Dnipro River started to look like in the middle of the 20th century — before the Kakhovka Hydropower Plant was constructed.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Dnieper River didn’t have dams. There were only Dnieper Rapids (or porohy in Ukrainian) between today’s Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro — underwater rocks that made navigation very dangerous. The first dam and power plant, Dniprohes, was constructed in 1932. Soviet propaganda widely celebrated this event while “forgetting” the fact that construction would be impossible without Western engineers and technology. During WWII, Dniprohes was destroyed and rebuilt twice — by the Soviets and Nazis. It was very important for infrastructure at that time: the power plant provided new factories with cheap electricity and the dam made navigation throughout the Dnieper easier.
After the war Soviet authorities embarked on a new project — the huge network of channels and reservoirs that were to irrigate the southern Ukraine, including Crimea. The original design involved the construction of hydroelectric stations and reservoirs on the Dnieper and Molochna Rivers as well as two big channels — Northern Crimean and South Ukrainian. After Stalin’s death, the project was changed. New authorities agreed with the scientists’ opinion that the South Ukrainian Channel and the reservoir on the Molochna River would be a complete failure because of the sandy soil that would absorb the water. But the other part of the project became a reality.
The construction process started in 1950 and lasted five years. “As a result, 2,800 hectares of arable land, 36,000 hectares of meadows and hayfields were flooded, and worst of all, almost a hundred villages with 37,000 people. At the bottom of the reservoir was the historical area of Velykyi Luh, known as the location of several Zaporizhzhia Sich. Obviously, no one asked the residents if they wanted to leave their homes. They were simply obliged to move to new villages on the banks of the reservoir”, the Ukrainian media Localna Istoria says.
Ukrainian film director Oleksandr Dovzhenko witnessed the construction process and wrote about it in his diary. In fact, it was the destruction: Soviet authorities didn’t care about Ukrainian villages and peasants whose homes were at the bottom of the future reservoir. They were simply ordered to move to a new place:
In reality, no one in Pokrovske announced at a general meeting to the people that half of the village had to be moved. No general explanatory work was done. They simply went into people’s yards, measured, took notes, and informed everyone individually about the flooding and the need to move out. Moreover, anyone who did not have time to move by a certain time was told:
- If you don’t move out by that date, we warn you, we will bulldoze your house, whether you live there or not.
Soviets didn’t care about Ukrainian cultural heritage as well. There were several archaeological sites in the area because Velykyi Luh was inhabited by Zaporizhian Cossacks in the past. However, scientists had no time for research. Only now, when the reservoir is a landmass again, we see these remnants of our history. But it’s very hard to do any research when war is ravaging nearby…
Kakhovka HPP was officially unveiled on October 18, 1955. Its electricity was supposed to provide new factories and irrigation networks. But it turned out soon that the water is not enough for channels. So new reservoirs on the Dnieper River were constructed. Sure,southern Ukraine was irrigated but the price was huge. New villages and fields of fertile soil were flooded by water from new reservoirs.
As years passed the south of Ukraine became more and more dependent on Kakhovka Reservoir. Agriculture needed its water for new crops (especially rice), and cities needed it for utilities and factories. Even the nuclear power plant in Enerhodar used water from the Dnieper for its cooling pond. Destroying the Kakhovka Dam, Russia caused a disaster which has unpredictable consequences both for the region and Ukraine as a whole. The construction of the dam became a crime against nature and Ukrainian culture; its destruction became a new crime, even crueler than the previous one…
