Yenisei River Ruined By Dams, Radiation, Soviet Abuse

KRASNOYARSK, Russia - Memories of a Siberian boyhood:

It is late in 1963, still a few hours before daylight, and the people lined up outside the shuttered bread store are stomping to foil the cold. Sergei Merinov, just turned 11, is huddling close to his elderly grandfather.

"Bread was in short supply back then," Merinov recently recalled in Krasnoyarsk, "and people started lining up in the wee hours to make sure they could buy some."

Suddenly the line is electric with news: President Kennedy has been shot. Some of the old ladies are clearly grief-stricken, but the more palpable emotion is anxiety. Could this mean war?

"The first reaction was, he was killed because he was trying to improve relations between our two countries," Merinov said. "Everyone on line was soon talking about this."

A few blocks away, the mighty Yenisei River is already sealed over with ice. The stage is set for Merinov's other indelible memory from that bitter Siberian winter - "one of the last real winters before they ruined the river," he likes to say.

He is fidgeting with delight on the left bank of the Yenisei, watching with his mother, brother and sister as a brand-new car slowly chugs closer and closer across the frozen ice.

The man behind the wheel is his father, and the gleeful Merinovs have just become one of the first families in hard-pressed Krasnoyarsk to take title to their own automobile.

"There wasn't even a bridge across the river in those days," said Merinov, 41, now a Moscow journalist. "There was a pontoon structure people could walk across, but nothing you could drive a car on. The only way to get our new car home was to bring it over the ice."

Today the Yenisei, one of the world's great rivers, no longer freezes over in the winter in the Krasnoyarsk area.

It is also poisoned with radiation and other pollutants for much of its 2,500-mile course as it flows north into Arctic waters. The Yenisei's once-thriving salmon and sturgeon populations have been decimated.

Like most of Siberia's other large rivers, the Yenisei is sick, befouled and diminished after merciless abuse during the Soviet era.

Not since the mid-1960s has the Yenisei been locked securely under a thick ceiling of ice from late fall to early spring - not since they built a massive dam about 20 miles south of Krasnoyarsk for what was then the world's largest hydroelectric station.

"The temperature of the river changed after that," explained Vladimir Koryenkov of the Siberian Institute of Biophysics. "The winter temperature increased just about 1 degree, but that was enough to keep the river from freezing in this area."

To make matters worse, summer temperatures were also adversely affected because the dam constantly sucks water from the bottom of the river, which in summer is always the coldest. Now the Yenisei is too chilly to swim in even on hot days. The water never gets above the mid-50s.

"The recreational potential of the river has been lost in this area," Koryenkov complained. "To find good fish today, you have to go 600 kilometers (about 360 miles) north of here. The hydroelectric station undermined our lifestyle."

Unfortunately, that was just the start of the damage it wreaked. With the station churning out a steady barrage of electric power, dozens of industrial monsters soon appeared on the Yenisei's banks: the world's largest aluminum factory, sprawling munitions and chemical plants, paper mills and other relentless polluters.

One of the Soviet Union's so-called secret cities - sites for the most sophisticated defense research - was carved out of the mountains north of Krasnoyarsk. Among its missions: the production of weapons-grade plutonium.

The reactor at the secret city, known only as Krasnoyarsk-26, was recently shut down, Russian officials insist. But for decades previous, it had dumped radioactive waste willy-nilly into the luckless Yenisei.

And when an even larger hydroelectric station was later built farther up the river, the terrible abuse of the Yenisei only worsened.

"By the late 1980s, there already were about 100 big dams throughout the former Soviet Union, about half of them in Siberia," according to Sviatoslav Zabelin of the Moscow-based Socio-Ecological Union. "But they still wanted to build 200 more dams."

The collapse of the Soviet economy finally killed most of the unpopular plans. But there is still pressure to build dams on two still-unspoiled rivers, the Amur and the Katun in the far east.

The federal government opposes both efforts, Zabelin said, but local officials are searching out possible financing. "The big fear is that China will pay for these projects," Zabelin added. "China needs the energy."