Nigel Raab - All Shook Up: The Shifting Soviet Response to Catastrophes, 1917-1991

ALL SHOOK UP

ALL SHOOK UP

The Shifting Soviet Response to Catastrophes, 19171991

NIGEL A. RAAB

McGill-Queens University Press
Montreal & Kingston London Chicago

McGill-Queens University Press 2017

ISBN 978-0-7735-5002-5 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-7735-5003-2 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-0-7735-5004-9 (ePUB)

Legal deposit first quarter 2017

Bibliothque nationale du Qubec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

McGill-Queens University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Raab, Nigel A., 1968, author

All shook up : the shifting Soviet response to catastrophes, 19171991 / Nigel Raab.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-0-7735-5002-5 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-7735-5003-2 (pdf). ISBN 978-0-7735-5004-9 (epub)

1. Disasters Soviet Union History 20th century. 2. Disasters Social aspects Soviet Union History 20th century. 3. Disasters Political aspects Soviet Union History 20th century. 4. Soviet Union History 20th century. I. Title.

This book was typeset by True to Type in 10.5/13 Sabon

To my wife, Carolyn Peter

Contents

Figures

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

Take Interstate 5 north of Los Angeles to the junction with Route 166, then drive west, past Maricopa, and then a little further up the hill until you can take a right on Soda Lake Road. Drive about twenty minutes past abandoned farms and former cattle fields, and then turn right onto a dusty road. Continue a few minutes more and you will find a beautiful quiet picnic spot at which to write a thank you note right atop the San Andreas Fault.

Gone are the days of the isolated thinker waiting for that eureka moment a book only surfaces with the help and assistance of friends, colleagues, and the right environment. Thus, merci beaucoup to Lynda ODonnell, who controlled the wayward French; danke to Alice Raab, who ordered the German; and spasibo to Maria Lentsman for the Slavic touch. Where would this book be without the efforts of our interlibrary loan librarian, Orlando Penetrante, who made me feel as if our library had as many books as the Library of Congress? A special thanks to the state archivists in Moscow and Kiev who have been helping me for more than a decade. With utmost efficiency, they kept the documents coming without a glitch. And a big thank you to colleagues in the Department of History at Loyola Marymount University, who pushed for more clarity whenever cloudiness flowed from my pen. Klaus Gestwa in Tbingen and Marc Elie in Paris were instrumental with commentaries in earlier stages of the project, and Katja Doose in Berlin had ground-level insights into Tashkent. Of course, the wonderful anonymous reviewers made important suggestions: they didnt like everything and they still wont, but they vastly improved the pages that follow.

The experts at MQUP have been tremendous. A special thank you to Jonathan Crago and all the conversations we have had about what makes a book more than just a study of some academic topic. Joanne Richardson did a superb editing job, and David Drummond designed a wonderful cover. Ryan Van Huijstee kept the whole thing moving forward throughout the production period.

Since writing a book is not a disembodied experience, I had to be somewhere to put everything together. Liudmila Zhavoronkova had a warm place to stay in the heart of Moscow, and this enabled me to walk to the archives. The Gatineau River just north of Ottawa is also part of the story. Thanks to Joseph and Simone Maingot who provided me with a room with a view so I could wake up to a sunrise over an icy river before tip-tapping on my keyboard.

The unseen constant behind all of this much like the air we breathe is family. Ever since I first embarked on my historical journey, I received crucial support from my parents, and they are still there for me. My sister and her family have kicked in extra energy when my own has been lagging. And then there is the lady to whom this book is dedicated may she always be by my side.

Carrizo Plain, California

October 2016

ALL SHOOK UP

Introduction

Nature has its own ways. Despite tremendous human efforts to tame it, humans have not been able to dominate it. Throughout the industrial world confident men and women believed that the earth was theirs to conquer by channelling the energy of rivers, whether with cement on the bottom of the Los Angeles River or by implementing a revolutionary vision of technological advancement with a massive dam on a Ukrainian river. Yet these vast projects only touched upon a tiny part of the earths surface. Even if humans of the industrial age have polluted huge expanses, the projects themselves focus on limited areas. These visions of grandeur ignored the fact that nature still could do as it chose on all the oceans and almost all the land.

Only in the past two or three decades have scholars and activists concerned themselves with the limits of human control. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Haiti earthquake in 2010, and the Fukushima tsunami and nuclear meltdown in 2011, claims about control are ill-advised; rather, these disasters expose a non-responsive state and a racist legacy, a colonial pattern that goes back centuries, and an overconfident technological society forced to rethink basic energy assumptions. In looking at these recent disasters, it is difficult to tell whether our planet has become moodier shaking, spewing, burning, blowing but whatever the case, confidence has been undermined.

This applies to the Soviet Union as much as it does to other countries. In hindsight, the Soviet confidence in its ability to overcome nature was equally out of place. Not only did its engineering projects cause environmental harm, but even the best laid plans could not prevent natural disasters from spreading across vast spaces. Despite claims to the contrary, the Soviet Union was a very dangerous place. In the Far East, vast land masses were subject to flooding and regular subterranean tremours. In the Eurasian heartland, the rivers rose in the spring and the forests burned in the summer. At the Central Asian periphery, the earth shook and mountain streams were transformed into rushing mud flows as they raced to inhabited areas in the plains. In many instances, no impact was registered on human communities. The great Tunguska meteor, which demolished about two thousand square kilometres of Siberian forest a few years before the Bolshevik Revolution, had little bearing outside the expeditions of curious scientists. Unfortunately, however, this was not always the case: throughout the entire history of the Soviet Union, cities and villages suffered the terrible consequences of both natural and human-made disasters. From the smallest case of people getting lost in snowstorms, a classic trope so ably portrayed in Vladimir Sorokins recent novel