FOUR MONTHS BEFORE PUTIN FOLLOWED STALIN'S EXAMPLE IN UNLEASHING THE THE DNIEPER'S WATERS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, THIS APPEARED IN
The Washington Spectator
There is also more to Ukraine’s energy story than fossil fuel.
Just as America tried to build its way out of the Great Depression with the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Hoover Dam, Soviet planners tried to use hydropower to leverage post-revolutionary economic growth. In 1927, Stalin broke ground near Kiev, for a series of massive dams descending the Dnieper to the Black Sea in a five-step cascade that still dwarfs the TVA.
A satellite image of the Ukraine plainly shows the results. A thousand-mile stretch of the Dnieper now consists of broad reservoirs rising behind hydroelectric dams so high that should one fail, a virtual tsunami could roll downriver to the Black Sea.
What a Victorian Congressman said of the Range Wars of the Wild West applies in paraphrase to the Ukraine, a place where vodka is for drinking, and water is for fighting over. Kyiv reacted to Putin’s 2014 annexation by building a dam across the Crimean Canal, cutting off much of the peninsula’s water supply. Russia reversed that move this past February 26th by blowing up the dam, an act that recalls what Putin’s predecessors did in 1941.
On August 14 of that year, Stalin reacted to the Nazi blitzkrieg roaring across the Ukrainian steppe by ordering the KGB’s predecessor, the NKVD, to dynamite the greatest dam on the Dnieper.
This did more than interrupt the German advance. An unannounced wall of water swept down the valley, drowning tens of thousands of Ukrainians and some 2,000 Soviet troops in the Dnieper delta. The dam was swiftly rebuilt, and just as swiftly blown up again by the retreating Germans in 1943.
— Russell Seitz , Letters , 23 March
