LOSERS^497oases of warmth and culture in tiny flats and rooms. Many more
drowned disappointment and despair in vodka.
Still, nature's gifts remained. The greatest asset of the revolutionary
regime was the unspoiled natural treasures it inherited from a late-
developing economy. It ran these down with the recklessness that
comes with self-proclaimed virtue.
One place and one event stand for the whole. The place is the Aral
Sea, once the fourth largest body of fresh water on the face of the
earth, today a dying hole—half the original surface, a third of its vol
ume, reeking with chemicals, fish gone, air hot and poisoned. Children
in the region die young, one in ten in the first year. Decades of inso
lent plans, haste and waste, tons of pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer,
false economies such as unlined irrigation trenches enabled the Soviet
Union to grow lots of cotton ("white gold"), while reversing gains in
life expectancy and leading the way backward.^5
Aral, moreover, was not unique, though it was a worst case. In gen
eral, Soviet projects for diversion and reversal of water and for con
struction of industrial plants in previously clean settings took no
account of environment. Priority went to virtual jobs and economic
growth, and the bigger and more costly the task, the more ennobling.
Siberia especially was seen as a tabula rasa, empty tundra, space and
more space, to do with as one pleased: rivers to be turned backwards,
the snows of the north to water the deserts of the south. Creation cor
rected: communism saw itself as antireligious and scientific, but it
aimed at making gods of men. The biggest of these megalomaniacal
schemes, which would have altered global climate, had to be aban
doned. Prometheus fortunately re-bound.
Aral was the place. The event was the meltdown of the atomic power
reactors at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986. The fire burned out of
control for five days and spread more than 50 tons of radioactive poi
son across White Russia (Belarus), the Baltic states, and parts of Scan
dinavia—far more than the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
combined. The prevailing winds blew north-northwestward, but no
one will convince those Turks who later came down with blood dis
eases or the thousands of pregnant women from Finland to the Adri
atic who had precautionary abortions that they were not victims too.
Among the unquestioned casualties were the brave men sent in to fight
the fire and clean up afterwards. They were promised special compen
sation and did not always get it. Relief funds disappeared down the
local party maw. The workers' exposure was systematically understated,
so that they did their job at the price of a lingering death. (Could they