KHRUSHCHEV wanted to have his fallow lands under plow in Kazakhstan, Brezhnev his land of cotton in Uzbekistan. Both were very much attached to their ideas, and no one dared question what the cost would be in either case.
THE PICTURE of the land changed rapidly. The fields of rice and wheat, the green meadows, the stands of kale and paprika, the plantations of peaches and lemons, all vanished. Everywhere, as far as the eye could see, cotton grew. Its fields, its white downy sea, stretched for tens, hundreds, of kilometers.
Cotton grows for several months. Then comes the harvest.
During the period of the cotton harvest in Central Asia, everything dies down. For two to three months, schools, institutes, and offices are closed. Businesses and factories work at half-time: everyone goes to pick the cotton, to work beneath the burning sun. Schoolchildren, students, nursing mothers, old people, doctors, teachers. No one, on any account or under any circumstances, will be relieved of this obligation. We have a saying here: if you do not plant cotton, they will plant you [in prison], if you do not collect cotton, they will come and collect you. During harvest time everyone talks about cotton, everyone follows the news bulletins about the accomplishment of the plan. Newspapers, radio, television, everything serves one goddess — cotton. Around 20 million people live in the countryside in Central Asia. Two-thirds work with cotton and really with nothing else besides. Farmers, gardeners, orchard keepers have all had to change profession — they are now employed as laborers on cotton plantations. Coercion and fear compel them to work with cotton. Coercion and fear, for it surely isn’t money. One earns pennies harvesting cotton. And the work is tiring and monotonous. To fulfill his daily quota, a man must bend down ten to twelve thousand times. An atrocious, forty-degree heat [Celsius], air that stinks of virulent chemicals, aridity, and constant thirst destroy the human being, especially women and children. But, after all, the more cotton the happier and richer our country! And in reality? In reality people pay with their health and their life for the personal well-being and power of a handful of demoralized careerists. (Grigory Reznichenko, The Aral Catastrophe, 1989)
THE ALLUSION to demoralized careerists: it was common knowledge that Brezhnev’s people in Moscow and Rashydov’s in Tashkent served up mutually agreed upon, falsely inflated figures about the cotton harvest. It was all about propaganda and money — the two mafias, or, actually, the one cotton mafia, pocketed huge sums for the fictitious hundreds of thousands of tons of cotton.
THE MAFIOSI got rich, but millions of their kinsmen, the miserable cotton pickers, went begging. For work with cotton is only seasonal, lasting at most a quarter of the year; what is one to do after that? There are neither orchards nor gardens left, neither goats nor sheep. Millions of people are walking around without employment and with no chance of getting any. Life has dimmed, reaching a fever pitch only during harvesttime, in the fall, and then sinking again into a heavy, hot, stifling tropical deadness.
A TYPICAL colonial situation: the colony supplies the raw material, the metropolis manufactures ready-made products out of it. At most ten percent of the cotton gathered in Uzbekistan is woven in the Republic. The rest is sent to textile mills in the central sections of the Imperium. If cotton ceased to be cultivated in Uzbekistan, the textile basins in Russia would come to a standstill.
BECAUSE THE ORDER from Moscow was (as it still is) “More and more cotton,” the area under cultivation in Uzbekistan was constantly increased, as was the quantity of water poured out into the fields. Technology was out of the question — drains, pipes, canals, and all such inventions. Water was simply diverted from the rivers, and it spilled out over the fields. But before it reached the stands of cotton, a third of it was already lost, sinking uselessly into the sand.
IT IS A KNOWN fact that a dozen or so meters below the surface of every desert lie large deposits of concentrated salt. If water is conducted to it, the salt, together with the moisture, will begin to rise to the surface. And that is exactly what happened now in Uzbekistan. The concealed, crushed, deeply secreted salt started to move upward, to regain its liberty. The golden land of Uzbekistan, which was first cloaked in the white of cotton, was now glazed over with a lustrous crust of white salt.
BUT ONE DOESN’T have to study the ground. When the wind blows, one can taste the salt on one’s lips, on one’s tongue. It stings the eyes.
THE WATERS of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, instead of flowing into the Aral Sea, were, according to man’s will, squandered along the way, spilled over fields, over unending deserts, along an immense distance of more than three thousand kilometers. For this reason, the calm and broad currents of both powerful rivers — the only source of life in this part of the world — instead of swelling and intensifying in the course of their journey (as is customary in nature), began to decline, to shrink, to get narrower and shallower, until, short of reaching the sea, they were transformed into salty, poisoned, and muddy pools, into spongy and foul-smelling ditches, into treacherous puddles of duckweed, finally sinking below ground and disappearing from view.
THIS SETTLEMENT is called Muynak, and until a few years ago it was a fishing port. It now stands in the middle of the desert; the sea is sixty to eighty kilometers from here. Near the settlement, where the port once was, rusting carcasses of trawlers, cutters, barges, and other boats lie in the sand. Despite the fact that the paint is peeling and falling off, one can still make out some of the names: Estonia, Dagestan, Nahodka. The place is deserted; there is no one around.
During the last twenty years, the Aral Sea, which one cannot even glimpse from Muynak, has lost a third of its surface area and two-thirds of its volume. Others calculate that only half of the surface of the sea remains. Over this period, the water level has fallen by thirteen meters. The desert, into which its former bottom has been transformed, is already nearing three million square hectars. Every year, seventy-five million tons of salt and poisons from artificial fertilizers, deposited here earlier by the rivers, are thrown up from these deserts into the atmosphere by the winds and sandstorms.
IT IS A SAD settlement — Muynak. It once lay in the spot where the beautiful, life-giving Amu Darya flowed into the Aral Sea, an extraordinary sea in the heart of a great desert. Today, there is neither river nor sea. In the town the vegetation has withered; the dogs have died. Half the residents have left, and those who stayed have nowhere else to go. They do not work, for they are fishermen, and there are no fish. Of the Aral Sea’s 178 species of fish and frutti di mare, only 38 remain. Besides, the sea is far away; how is one to get there across the desert? If there is no strong wind, people sit on little benches, leaning against the shabby and crumbling walls of their decrepit houses. It is impossible to ascertain how they make a living; it is difficult to communicate with them about anything. They are Karakalpaks — they barely speak any Russian, and the children no longer speak Russian at all. If one smiles at the people sitting against the walls, they become even more gloomy, and the women veil their faces. Indeed, a smile does look false here, and laughter would sound like the screech of a rusty nail against glass.