Elie, Coping With The Black Dragon

Articles
Coping with the “Black Dragon”

Mudflow Hazards and the Controversy over the
Medeo Dam in Kazakhstan, 1958–66
Marc Elie
The People, of course, is its own savior,

The People itself erected the dam’s powerful rampart.
But folks remember: you, Leader,
Signed the decision on the explosion.
You took a risk,
But lived in great faith
And thought not of your own fate,
Uniting in yourself the qualities of
Leader and engineer.1
Visitors to Almaty, Kazakhstan’s former capital, are commonly offered a trip up

the Malaia Almatinka River to the Medeo Dam, a 150-meter high, 530-meter
long, and 800-meter wide rock pyramid barring the gorge. If one climbs the
842 steps to the top (1,900 meters altitude), the dam offers a vista over a famous
skating rink downstream. It is not only a place of tourism, sport, and leisure
for Almaty’s inhabitants and visitors; it is one of the symbols of the city’s short
history: as a defensive wall against the unbridled forces of nature, the rock-
filled dam saved the capital of Soviet Kazakhstan from destruction in 1973 by
catching a disastrous mudflow rushing down the valley.
It is hard to imagine now that the dam that saved the city was once,
in the first half of the 1960s, a highly controversial project in Soviet Alma-
Ata. As authoritarian as the republic’s leadership may have been, it could not
Early drafts of this paper were presented at the American Association for the Advancement of
Slavic Studies (AAASS) annual convention in Washington in 2009 and at the Carson Fellows
Workshop “Dramas of Ecology,” March 2011, RCC, Munich. My thanks go to Klaus Gestwa,
Isabelle Ohayon, Roger Depledge, Julie Hessler, and to the reviewers and Kritika’s editors.
1
Dzhuban Muldagaliev, Sel´: Poemy, trans. V. Savelév (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel´, 1980),
115.
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 14, 2 (Spring 2013): 313–42.
314 MARC ELIE
immediately impose the dam on the inhabitants, even though the project was
deemed urgent. Eight years elapsed from the approval of the definitive design
until the beginning of the dam’s construction (1958–66). The dam project
developed against a set of uncertainties that account for the hesitation and
substantial postponement. First, the last years of Nikita Khrushchev’s rule
proved unstable for the Kazakhstani political establishment. Between 1960
and 1964, the post of first secretary of Kazakhstan’s Communist Party changed
hands three times. The competing candidates for power in Kazakhstan were
so split on the dam issue that they could not enforce any definitive decision
on it. Second, although Alma-Ata’s inhabitants lived under the growing fear
of destruction by a massive mudflow, no one could precisely forecast when
this would occur. Everyone was expecting the “big one” soon. The dam
offered a possible solution, but in the view of some its brutal construction
method—directional blasting—and the fact that it concentrated protection
on one spot might turn out to be even more dangerous to the city than no
dam at all. In this context of both urgency and uncertainty, politicians were
reluctant to take definitive responsibility for mudflow protection. Third, both
the political instability and the anxiety about the natural hazard engendered
a lively discussion on the pros and cons of the dam and alternative projects.
Since civic concerns about major projects could become matters of public
concern in the more relaxed atmosphere of the Khrushchev Thaw, from 1959
on, scientists and citizens in Alma-Ata and Moscow opposed the Medeo Dam
project submitted by the Kazakhstani leadership and proposed a lighter and
more complex protective system based on small dams and embankments.
Opposition to the dam was typical of the reemergence from the 1950s on of
groups of scientists and other members of the intelligentsia warning publicly
of the potential for environmental damage to natural resources caused by
large transformational development projects.2 The argument between
proponents and opponents of the dam involved the pragmatic question of
the most effective protection for the city from a scientific and engineering
point of view. It revealed opposing conceptions of the city’s relationship to
its natural environment and diverging views of the environmental costs of
disaster protection.
Yet for all of this, a new context emerging between the Khrushchev
and Brezhnev periods enabled the Kazakhstani leadership eventually to
impose certainty and to silence protesting voices. This article contends that
a technocratic alliance united the rising republican leader Dinmukhamed
Akhmedovich Kunaev, top scientists, and planners backed by the political
2
Douglas R. Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to
Gorbachev (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 355–73.
COPING WITH THE “BLACK DRAGON” 315
leadership in Moscow.3 The end of the dam controversy parallels Kunaev’s rise
to power and the demise of the relative plurality permitted by the political
instability of the late Khrushchev years in Kazakhstan. The dam was the
personal project of Kunaev—the “Leader” praised by the poet in this article’s
epigraph. The first secretary manipulated a sense of urgency and ambitious
engineering promises to clear away uncertainties in mudflow theory and to
impose the dam on the republic’s capital.
This article seeks to understand how the relationship between the center
and the republics evolved in the post-Stalin USSR in such a way as to grant
republican leaders more room for maneuver and to enable the formation of
technocratic alliances. For this purpose, it elaborates on three topics that are
usually treated separately: the greater autonomy given by Khrushchev and
Leonid Brezhnev to regional secretaries; the consequent rise of first secretaries
to the status of leaders of their republics; and the growing significance
of technical expertise in political decisions, especially with regard to
developmental and environmental issues.4 The article shows how these three
processes became intertwined at the republican level in the 1960s–70s, when
political figures sought to take bold initiatives in transformational projects to
establish their authority as leaders.
The first secretaries had extended their prerogatives during Khrushchev’s
decentralization drive, and even more under Brezhnev’s “trust in cadres”
policy.5 Republican leaders were able to build a strong power base in their
republics and gained the financial means to develop social and municipal
infrastructure in their fiefs.6 Kazakhstan had been led by Russian envoys
3
The expression “technocratic alliance” was coined by Klaus Gestwa in Die Stalinschen
Großbauten des Kommunismus: Sowjetische Technik- und Umweltgeschichte, 1948–1967
(Munich: Oldenbourg, 2010), 561—reviewed in this issue of Kritika.
4
The promotion of republican first secretaries to national leaders is usually linked in the
literature to their effort to promote cadres from the titular nationality, a process known as
“second indigenization.” This article addresses the growing free hand of republican leaders, but
not indigenization. The Medeo case reveals that in Kazakhstan, at least, the two processes—
republicanization and indigenization—which are usually understood as correlated, were
actually distinct.
5
On the competence transfer to the republics under Khrushchev, see Nataliya Kibita,
“Moscow–Kiev Relations and the Sovnarkhoz Reform,” in Khrushchev in the Kremlin: Policy
and Government in the Soviet Union, 1953–64 (New York: Routledge, 2009), 94–111. On the
“trust in cadres” policy in the regions of the Russian Federation, the newest contribution is
Yoram Gorlizki, “Too Much Trust: Regional Party Leaders and Local Political Networks under
Brezhnev,” Slavic Review 69, 3 (2010): 676–700.
6
Uwe Halbach, “Nationalitätenfrage und Nationalitätenpolitik,” in Handbuch der
Geschichte Russlands, 1945–1991: Vom Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs bis zum Zusammenbruch der
Sowjetunion, vol. 5, pt. 2, ed. Stefan Plaggenborg (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 2003), 694. On the
declining dependence of national first secretaries on the center, see Philip G. Roeder, “Soviet
316 MARC ELIE
from the beginning of the Virgin Land Campaign (1954) until 1959. One
of those viceroys had been Brezhnev himself. After reaching complete power
within the republic by 1964, Brezhnev’s protégé Kunaev presented himself as
the sponsor and patron of the dam and thus as the protector of Alma-Ata’s
populace threatened by the unpredictable forces of nature. Together with
other republican leaders, Kunaev rose above the role of Moscow’s prefect in
his province to the status of a leader with his own power base and popular
support.7
However powerful Kunaev had become within the party, he nonetheless
needed the participation of experts, both to pass the project through sometimes
skeptical review boards of the Soviet government and to gain political and
social support for the dam more generally. The history of the Medeo Dam
project shows that the relationship between center and periphery should
not be oversimplified as involving merely questions of cadres and party
hierarchy, however important they were.8 This article accordingly focuses also
on the controversy between opposing experts on the dam and stresses how
important these actors had become for buttressing the political legitimacy of
republican leaders. Experts, either through their institutional position within
governmental bodies or through media exposure and personal ties to leaders,
had significant influence on decision making about the dam. Ironically, Kunaev
found himself opposed on the dam issue by the Kazakhstani community of
experts on mudflow, to whom he needed to prove his commitment to find
a scientifically based solution to the mudflow problem. As a consequence,
Federalism and Ethnic Mobilization,” World Politics 43, 2 (1991): 212; and Graeme Gill and
Roderic Pitty, Power in the Party: The Organization of Power and Central–Republican Relations
in the CPSU (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).
7
Tetsuro Chida, “ ‘Nationalizing’ the Soviet Republics: Centrifugal Tendency of the
Republican Politics in Soviet Central Asia during the Brezhnev Era,” in The Caucasus and
Central Asia Twenty Years after Independence: Questioning the Notion of “South Countries.”
Conference Proceedings, 26–30 (http://lodel.ehess.fr/cercec/docannexe.php?id=1705, accessed
29 March 2013); Halbach, “Nationalitätenfrage und Nationalitätenpolitik,” 695, 781–82;
Ronald Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet
Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 117–20.
8
Before the 1990s, most accounts of the relationships between center and periphery relied
heavily on quantitative cadre policy because of problems involving access to documentation,
as Gorlizki recounts. Since then the cadre question within the Party has remained at the center
of the studies of Soviet decision-making policies. See Gorlizki, “Too Much Trust,” 676–77;
Grey Hodnett, Leadership Recruitment in the Soviet National Republics: A Quantitative Study
of Recruitment Policy (Oakville, ON: Mosaic Press, 1978); John P. Willerton, Patronage and
Politics in the USSR (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Jerry F. Hough and
Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union Is Governed: An Extensively Revised and Enlarged Edition
by Jerry F. Hough of Merle Fainsod’s How Russia Is Ruled (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1979).
he had to look for expert support for his pet project from outside the
republic. Those Soviet scientists who supported the dam—the mathematician
Mikhail Alekseevich Lavrentév and the seismologist Mikhail Aleksandrovich
Sadovskii were among the most prominent—were not specialists in mudflow
issues but nonetheless had considerable scientific prestige and political
influence at the union level. This article confirms the findings of scholars
who maintain that the growing stature of influential scientists was a typical
feature of post-Stalin politics and society.9 What those scholars describe for
the central level—that scientists could enter the Kremlin and directly submit
an issue to Khrushchev—was true for the republican level, too: Kunaev was
eager to build personal ties with top Soviet scientists to garner support for
the dam, and they in turn were eager to enter his circle to influence him.
Compare this to the dam’s opponents, who, deprived of strong personal
contacts, could use only the regular, institutional procedures to influence
decisions—for example, writing letters to the authorities and participating in
official public and scientific meetings. The war of words between advocates
and detractors of the dam could barely mask an unequal power game between
top scientists linked to the political leadership, on the one hand, and the local
intelligentsia and Soviet mudflow specialists, on the other.
Besides the support of prestigious scientists and the rise of Kunaev, a
third element proved decisive in the victory of the dam’s advocates over their
opponents. Lavrentév and Sadovskii did not lobby for the dam per se but
rather for the explosions that were designed to enable its construction. The
fascination with huge explosions not only reflected a general preference for
prestigious and seemingly easy, quick, and inexpensive solutions to problems
associated with development—a preference that was by no means limited to
the Soviet Union—but also represented a promising field of research in those
experimental sciences directly linked to the military, such as seismology. They
were viewed as an important technical achievement in great construction
projects and as an eye-catching way to advertise them. In comparison,
specialists in mudflows appeared to work on second-class applied issues.
They offered unexciting and laborious solutions to counter mudflows. Thus a
9
Paul R. Josephson shows that under Khrushchev top physicists could drastically influence
the political agenda (Red Atom: Russia’s Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today [Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005], 10–11). On the role of Khrushchev as patron of science
and his relationship to Lavrentév, see Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the
Siberian City of Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 8–9, 263, 278–
79. Along the same lines, see Laurent Coumel, “The Scientist, the Pedagogue, and the Party
Official: Interest Groups, Public Opinion, and Decision-Making in the 1958 Education
Reform,” in Soviet State and Society under Nikita Khrushchev, ed. Melanie Ilić and Jeremy
Smith (New York: Routledge, 2009), 66–85.
318 MARC ELIE
preference among some influential experts for dramatic and visible solutions
to major problems also played its role in determining the fate of the dam
project.
Protecting the Kazakhstani Capital

Mudflows—in Russian sel´ or sil´—received greater attention from Soviet
political leaders and scientists as industrialization and urbanization put more
and more infrastructure—railroads in particular—and homes within reach of
dangerous mountainous valleys in Crimea, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.10
Following developments in the United States, especially in Los Angeles, planners
and engineers began conceiving and designing protective dams and dikes at the
beginning of the 1930s.11 In Alma-Ata, formerly Vernyi, a Russian fort built
in 1854 to establish imperial authority in Central Asia and control the route
to China, the awareness of mudflow exposure grew after the city was partially
destroyed in 1921 by a mudflow. Following intensive rain, an immense water
mass had accumulated in the heights of the Malaia Almatinka River basin,
below the Tuiuk-Su Glacier (at an elevation of 3,400 meters, 15 kilometers
south of Alma-Ata). On the night of 8–9 July a torrential flood rushed down
the Almatinka gorge carrying mud and boulders up to 10 m3 in size. Destroying
everything on its path, the mudflow killed some 500 people.12
At the end of the 1940s, Dinmukhamed Kunaev, later general secretary of
the Kazakhstani Communist Party, was deputy chairman of the Kazakhstani
Council of Ministers and in charge of the mudflow issue.13 A well-known
Moscow architect and specialist in mudflow protection, Professor N. S.
Diurnbaum, was the scientific and technical adviser for a comprehensive
anti-mudflow program for Alma-Ata’s watersheds.14 To avoid a repetition of
10
Sel´ is the colloquial designation for all disastrous mountain flows in Russian, which I
render in English with “mudflow.” The technical term for the particular type of sel´ that is at
the center of this paper is “debris flow” (in Russian, griazekamennyi potok). A debris flow is
an extremely dense mixture of sediments and rocks that flows like fresh concrete or lava. See
Matthias Jakob and Oldrich Hungr, eds., Debris-Flow Hazards and Related Phenomena (Berlin:
Springer, 2005).
11
On the protection against mudflows in Los Angeles, see John McPhee, The Control of
Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989), 183–272.
12
V. D. Gorodetskii, Prichiny Alma-Atinskoi katastrofy 8 iiulia 1921 g. (Alma-Ata: Obshchestvo
izucheniia Kazakhstana, 1936).
13
Daniiar R. Ashimbaev and Vitalii N. Khliupin, Kazakhstan: Istoriia vlasti. Opyt rekonstruktsii
(Almaty: Credos, 2008), 452.
14
N. S. Diurnbaum had led an expedition of the Academy of Municipal Works in the
Trans-Ili region in the 1930s. He had published a complex protective scheme for Alma-
Ata in an authoritative book on mudflow protection (Zashchita naselennykh mest ot selevykh
(griazekamennykh) potokov [Moscow and Leningrad: Izdatel´stvo Ministerstva kommunalńogo
khoziaistva RSFSR, 1949]).
the 1921 disaster, Diurnbaum’s elaborate scheme involved the construction

of deep mudflow traps at the bottom of the Malaia Almatinka Valley, where
it forks into the Vesnovka River. These cavities, situated on the alluvial fan,
would retain the mud and rocks that the mudflows carried from the whole river
basin. Separated from its heavier parts trapped in the pits, the torrent would
continue down the valley, causing no harm to city infrastructure and homes.
To achieve this effect, the riverbed had to be cleaned up and straightened to
remove all obstructions. In addition, Diurnbaum recommended planting trees
along the valley to prevent erosion. His plan included further construction
all along the valley: check dams, embankments, diversion canals, and so on.
Notwithstanding the creation of a Kazakhstani agency—the Special
Construction Direction (Osoboe stroitelńoe upravlenie, Osobstroi)—to
organize and oversee anti-mudflow construction works, for an entire decade
(1949–59) not a single practical advance was made in mudflow protection.
This happened in part because the measures advocated by Diurnbaum were
unwelcome to a growing Alma-Ata: the “exclusion zone” that he proposed
would ensure that no home remained within the hazard radius along the
riverbed. This zoning implied that hundreds of households would have to
be resettled at a time of severe housing shortages. The extensive afforestation
plan—though a universally recommended method for fighting erosion and
mitigating mudflow—similarly met with objections: the city needed wood
and space for its development. The concern for forest conservation had led
to the creation of a protected area (zapovednik) in 1931, first for the Malaia
Almatinka Valley, then encompassing the whole Trans-Ili mountain range
(857,000 hectares). Beginning in 1939, the protected area was steadily
reduced; and it disappeared altogether in 1951, together with many other such
areas in the Soviet Union.15 Confronted by general hostility to Diurnbaum’s
proposals, Osobstroi was paralyzed.16 A further problem was the lack of
expertise and scholars trained in the subject in Kazakhstan. Diurnbaum’s
plan, deemed too expensive at 20 million rubles, was abandoned in 1954.17
15
Roman Iashchenko, ed. Zapovedniki Srednei Azii i Kazakhstana (Almaty: Thetys, 2006), 30.
On the history of zapovedniki, see Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation,
and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); and
Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom.
16
The city council (gorispolkom) refused to give it office space, so that it was “on the street.” The
Ministry for Communal Works refused to deliver money and commodities to the directorate.
See Tsentralńyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Kazakhstana (TsGAK) f. R-1137 (Sovet ministrov
KSSR), op. 25, d. 757, ll. 38–41 (Letters of Kravchenko to chairman of the Kazakhstani
Council of Ministers Undasynov and his deputy Kunaev, 18–19 April and 22 June 1950).
17
For the sake of clarity, all prices are expressed in post-1960 rubles. A 1960 ruble equals 1/10
of a 1959 ruble.
320 MARC ELIE
Yet the threat remained, and Kunaev accordingly sought out a cheaper and
simpler design. In 1954, a central agency of the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture
specializing in irrigation work (Giprovodkhoz) offered to build a 94-meter
dam not in the alluvial cone of the Malaia Almatinka, where Diurnbaum
had recommended locating the main containment structures, but further
upstream, at the Medeo Gorge. There the valley was still narrow enough to be
barred with a dam, although this structure would not encompass the whole
river basin. Alma-Ata would be protected without anti-erosion reforestation
and home relocation—in a word, without impeding the authorities’ local
planning efforts. Diurnbaum had advised against high dams on account of
their cost, design difficulty, and exposure to hazards: if a mudflow struck the
dam during its construction, its force and volume would only spike. The
vulnerability of such a dam to earthquakes was a further concern: the region
is susceptible to devastating quakes, ranking 10 on the 12-point Mercalli
intensity scale, capable of destroying most city buildings. But Giprovodkhoz
came up with the fascinating idea of building the dam by using directional
explosions instead of engineering. Blasting the rock sides of the gorge into the
valley would ensure the immediate and earthquake-proof building of a high
dam between two mudflow seasons at a fraction of the cost of a concrete dam.
After four years of design work, Giprovodkhoz submitted a project to the
Kazakhstani leadership, which quickly approved it, at one-quarter the cost of
Diurnbaum’s scheme.18
The Dam of Discord

To the surprise of the Kazakhstani leaders, scientists and citizens of Alma-Ata
objected to the Giprovodkhoz proposal. Echoing the protest that scientists
and journalists had brought up the year before against the blasting of the shore
of Lake Baikal, Alma-Ata’s scientific intelligentsia petitioned the Kazakhstani
authorities for the withdrawal of the Medeo Dam project.19 At the end of
1959, three well-known mudflow specialists of the Kazakhstani Academy of
Sciences—led by the most prominent and respected Kazakhstani hydrologist,
Academician Vadim Petrovich Zakharov—expressed their criticism of
Giprovodkhoz’s technical solution for Alma-Ata’s protection in a memo to
18
The dam alone swallowed up one-third of the total project budget. See TsGAK f. R-1137,
op. 25, d. 758, ll. 1–9 (decree of the Kazakhstani Council of Ministers “On Measures to
Protect Alma-Ata from Mudflows,” 25 July 1959) and l. 13 (Conclusions on the Technical
Project of an Anti-Mudflow Dam up Alma-Ata, 29 April 1959).
19
Gidroenergoproekt engineers working on the Angara Cascade planned to breach the Lake
Baikal shore to raise the water discharge into the river. This plan provoked the ire of scientists
who published an open letter in Literaturnaia gazeta in 1958. See Josephson, New Atlantis
Revisited, 163–203; and Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom, 355–73.
Kunaev, then chairman of the Kazakhstani Council of Ministers and the rising
star of Kazakhstani politics.20 They reminded Kunaev that the dam project had
no scientific support. The authoritative Mudflow Commission of the Soviet
Academy of Sciences had held a meeting in Alma-Ata in 1956 to review the
dam project and had given no formal approval, considering it insufficient to
protect the city.21 They thought the main error in Giprovodkhoz’s idea was to
concentrate protection on one object, the Medeo Dam: given the lacunae in
mudflow knowledge, nobody was able to calculate the parameters of a dam
able to restrain a mudflow, let alone of a dam built by blasting. The unknowns
were simply too numerous at every stage of designing and building the dam.
The scientists advocated instead the principles laid down by Diurnbaum and
sanctioned by the mudflow specialists at the union level: to be effective, the
scheme had to be “unconcentrated” (rassredotochennyi ), which meant that it
needed to consist of numerous smaller works spread along the whole valley. In
accordance with the dominant representation of mudflow at the time as water
flow plus debris, Zakharov and his colleagues saw the function of the dam
network in clarifying the flow: in contrast to massive solid dams that would
only dangerously accumulate all mudflow material, grid dams could retain
the hard part of the flow (alpine debris) and let the water flow downstream.
Even freed of boulders and clay, the water flow was potentially excessive
and therefore dangerous. To protect cities from flooding, the river had to
be separated into several artificial beds. Reforestation and slope protection
would reduce erosion, preventing material from being added to the flow.22
Not only established scholars opposed the project. A second trio wrote
at the same time to Kunaev to ask for cancellation of the dam proposal.
Their leader was Aleksandr P. Berggrin, deputy chairman of the Kazakhstani
branch of the Geographical Society of the USSR and a member of the
Commission for the Protection of Nature of the Kazakhstani Academy of
Sciences. Berggrin’s institutional position was decidedly modest, as was his
rank-and-file party membership. As a candidate of agronomic sciences, he
20
The two scientists led by Zakharov were G. K. Siniavskii, famous for his life-size mudflow
experiments on the Bol´shaia Almatinka River and I. S. Sosedov, who educated a generation
of Kazakhstani glaciologists.
21
The situation was confused. Zakharov, who chaired the 1956 meeting, insisted that the
commission did not approve the dam scheme. To his surprise, the published papers of the
meeting that came to light belatedly in 1959 entailed a half-hearted approval of the dam by
the participants. See TsGAK f. R-1137, op. 25, d. 758, ll. 72–137 (Transcript of a meeting
with Deputy Chairman of the Kazakhstani Council of Ministers Z. S. Omarova, 27 November
1959); Materialy IV Vsesoiuznoi konferentsii po selevym potokam, Alma-Ata 19–23 noiabria
1956 (Alma-Ata: Izdatel´stvo Akademii nauk Kazakhskoi SSR, 1959), 230–31.
22
TsGAK f. R-1137, op. 25, d. 758, ll. 62–68 (Zakharov, Siniavskii, and Sosedov to
Kazakhstani Council of Ministers, 20 October 1959) .
322 MARC ELIE
also had no scientific legitimacy in mudflow and dam issues. He was, above
all, a fascinated connoisseur of the Kazakh mountainous regions, a lover of
the alpine landscapes of the Tian Shan Mountains, and an experienced hiker
and camper. With an acute sense of observation and wide scientific reading,
he was able to understand and take a position on the controversial mudflow
issue, down to the most technical details. He kept posing awkward questions
to the engineers, scientists, and politicians in charge of the project and
demanded clear answers.23 With the Medeo dispute, Berggrin rose to become
an environmentalist keen to protect the Kazakh mountains from industrial
and agricultural assault. As a typical “citizen activist,” to use Douglas Weiner’s
term, Berggrin was a petitioner relentlessly mobilizing public opinion among
the intelligentsia and demanding transparency and fairness in the settlement
of the controversy.24
In his letter to Kunaev, written together with a geologist and an official
of the Soviet Labor Union Office for Tourism in Central Asia, Berggrin
did not mince his words. Ignoring the usual paternalistic Soviet petition
language, he gave frank assessments of the dam’s design, calling it “faulty”
and “inadequate.” For reasons similar to Zakharov’s, Berggrin dismissed the
project as yet “another experiment” that put “at risk the lives of thousands
of inhabitants.” He rejected the view that nature was a mere input at the
disposal of humankind: mudflows obeyed the “laws of nature,” and their
causes “cannot be removed by man.” Unable to eliminate mudflows, Alma-
Ata had to adapt to them, Berggrin argued, and build the alternative,
“unconcentrated” protection scheme of Diurnbaum.25
Apart from the controversy over the best protection scheme for Alma-
Ata, another concern turned Berggrin and his co-writers against the dam:
it would not only make the city less safe but also deface the valley. First, the
massive explosions would destroy fauna and flora on thousands of square
meters of slopes. The road running along the bottom of the valley had to be
shifted up the slopes to pass above the giant dam, thus contributing to the
destruction of the rare Tian Shan pine, already heavily cut back. Second,
the Medeo Gorge was itself a spectacular landscape offering great vistas. The
100-meter high wall and the new road would “mutilate and disfigure the
picturesque Malaia Almatinka Gorge.” Third, the zone above the dam would
23
Berggrin asked the planning and designing agencies for the blueprints and requested from
the political organization the verbatim reports of meetings to which he had not been invited.
Usually he obtained them. See ibid., d. 761, l. 1 (Berggrin to the director of the Construction
Department of the Kazakhstani Council of Ministers I. Ia. Davydov, October 1963).
24
Vladimir Proskurin, “Don-Kikhot al-Matinskii,” Stolitsa, no. 31 (1994).
25
TsGAK f. R-1137, op. 25, d. 758, ll. 40–43 (Berggrin, V. Andreishin, and V. Gerasimov to
Kunaev, earlier than 2 November 1959).
be transformed into a “dump of mountainous trash”: unlike a dam built to

produce hydroelectricity, no reservoir was planned at Medeo; alpine debris
would accumulate at the foot of the dam. Berggrin put forward the tourist
potential of the valley, which was already becoming an important recreational
complex in the 1950s with the Medeo skating rink, the Gorelńik ski
resort, and the Tuiuksu alpine camp as the main highlights. Berggrin saw
opportunities for further developing tourism: there were thermal springs next
to Gorelńik. He concluded that the “whole nature complex of the Malaia
Almatinka Gorge is an inestimable gift of the Tian Shan’s nature, and our
obligation is to conserve and improve this national heritage not only for the
present, but for following generations.”
In Berggrin’s view, the natural treasures of the valley had to be made
accessible and enjoyable to a wide public.26 Whereas the dam opponents
from the Kazakhstani Academy of Sciences expressed their discontent in
a “report” to Kunaev, using the authorized institutional and hierarchical
vectors of influence without appealing to a wide audience, Berggrin worked
to raise protest against the dam outside the scientific establishment, among
conservationists and alpinists.27 Despite these different starting points, events
would soon bring scientists around Zakharov and activists around Berggrin
together in a broad intelligentsia coalition denouncing the dam project,
including university faculty, academy members, engineers, and nature
protection officials.
The controversy between the advocates of the “unconcentrated scheme”
and the proponents of the dam reveals two opposing visions of desired
development for the city within its natural environment. In the opinion
of Kunaev and the representatives of Giprovodkhoz, the mudflow had to
be stopped before it entered the city: Alma-Ata would be a fortress securely
protected by a wall against the external aggression of a natural enemy.
The city was to grow unimpeded under the protection of the giant dam,
without having to modify its layout and infrastructure. In contrast, the dam
opponents were committed to combining the life of the mountain rivers and
the urban life of the city. They advocated adapting to a controlled hazard,
which meant changing the way everyone lived in Alma-Ata by integrating the
city’s vulnerability into its town planning: higher bridges, broader canals, an
alarm system, a ban on construction, reforestation, zoning, and small dams
26
Ibid.
27
At the end of November, Berggrin inspired a letter from the Alma-Ata Voluntary Association
for the Defense of Nature and Tree Planting. In December 1959, he wrote a letter to Kunaev
on behalf of the Kazakhstani Hiker Federation. See ibid., ll. 50, 139–40.
324 MARC ELIE
everywhere. The city had to adapt to the valley’s conditions as much as the
mudflow had to bend to the city’s existence.
Berggrin and other dam opponents dreamed of taming the “Black
Dragon,” as one tames a wild horse. The mudflow was as much a natural
element as Tian Shan pines and wild mountain goats. If one knew how to
handle it, one could render it not only innocuous but useful. The mudflow was
dangerous when humans or nature put obstacles to its course (like a massive
dam) or added material for it to carry in the riverbed. Berggrin dreamed of
Alma-Ata riding the mudflow, sitting astride the valley reconfigured into a
succession of smooth curves and floodplains to welcome the mudflow. The
torrent, rather than a threat, would become a useful auxiliary for the city
inhabitants, carrying building material from the upper mountains to the
city. The valley, center of a National Park of Kazakhstan (Natsionalńyi park
Kazakhstana), would become a recreational space for hiking, skiing, and
spas.28
“Our Civic Duty” Versus “Their Professional Honor”

Although the Kazakhstani leadership largely ignored the problems for the
environment and tourism raised by Berggrin, it paid close attention to
the alleged inefficiency and danger posed by the dam. Kunaev organized a
meeting in November 1959 between proponents and opponents of the dam.29
The opponents were shocked by the planners’ and designers’ nonchalance.
Giprovodkhoz had neither expertise nor experience with mudflow protection.
It saw the mudflow problem in Kazakhstan in terms of the standard hydraulic
jobs it was used to doing: flow stabilization, power generation, and water
diversion. Giprovodkhoz “thinks hydrotechnically” and “creates standard
hydroschemes,” as Berggrin aptly stated at a later meeting.30 The meeting also
made it clear that financial pressure endangered the reliability of the dam.
The costs for the dam were not to exceed the damage of the 1921 disaster,
28
Ibid., ll. 40–43, here 42, and ll. 166–78, here 176–78 (Berggrin to Chairman of the
Kazakhstani Council of Ministers Zh. A. Tashenev, 29 February 1960). Berggrin, a fervent
upholder of the zapovednik cause, was here advertising the U.S. model of nature preserves
in which leisure was a central constituent, probably in the hope that tourism could grant
some level of protection to the Malaia Almatinka Valley at a time in which the capital was
undergoing rapid growth. In contrast, the reestablishment of a Soviet zapovednik, a corner
of pristine nature exclusively dedicated to scientific research, seemed an unattainable prospect
(Weiner, Models of Nature, 10–15).
29
TsGAK f. R-1137, op. 25, d. 758, ll. 144 (Omarova to Kunaev, 14 December 1959).
30
Ibid., d. 759, ll. 11–39 (Transcript of a meeting with Deputy Chairman of the Kazakhstani
Council of Ministers K. M. Simakov, 30 November 1961).
evaluated at only 6.3 million rubles, when Alma-Ata was a small town.31
The representative of Gosstroi, the construction agency of the Kazakhstani
Council of Ministers, optimistically declared: “We cannot assert that there
will surely be a mudflow within the next 100 years. So why should we invest,
given the tight [financial] situation in the country, more than we can receive
from [the dam] tomorrow?”
Uncertainty in mudflow forecasting served the cause of saving money. As
the designers admitted, the budget limit forced them into compromises on
the dam’s solidity and security.32 The impression left on dam opponents was
even more distressing since Kazvzryvprom, the establishment charged with
designing and fulfilling the blasting scheme, seemed to be unaware of the risks
of blasting. Its representative evaluated the danger zone around the epicenter
of the explosion (6,700 tons of ammonal) at only 350–400 meters.33 He
ridiculed concerns about toxic gases: “gases disperse”; “the time of year will
be irrelevant [for security],” whereas in fact meteorological parameters were
crucial in deciding the right time for the explosion to prevent gases from
polluting the city.34 Dam opponents feared that the explosion would trigger
landslides on the slopes. For the officials responsible for the project, a central
issue was to secure financing. One million rubles had already been spent on
designing the dam. If the project was stopped, the design agencies would lose
1.4 million rubles earmarked in the state budget for 1960. As the minister
of the communal sector, D. F. Kononenko, put it, as a result “we won’t be
able to fulfill any measures to protect Alma-Ata for many years, and the
Council of Ministers and the minister of communal works will again become
objects of criticism.” This confession, far from calming the opposition, made
Zakharov, Berggrin, and their colleagues aware that Giprovodkhoz’s design
was an irresponsible and dangerous one, and that the Council of Ministers’
support for such a faulty project was rooted in the bureaucratic face-saving
practices of “upholding professional honor” (sokhraniat´ chest´ mundira) and
securing funding at the expense of the city’s security. The dam opponents, in
contrast, claimed to be protecting the public good by fulfilling their “civic
duty” (grazhdanskii dolg).
31
Reevaluated at 40 million by Gidroproekt a few years later. See ibid., op. 27, d. 763, ll.
228–37, here 229 (Conclusions of Deputy Director of Glavgosekspertiza K. Smirnov on the
Mudflow Catcher Project at the Medeo Gorge, 8 December 1964).
32
Ibid., op. 25, d. 758, ll. 72–137.
33
In 1966, the exclusion zone had a 9-km radius, and buildings located at a distance of 400
meters were destroyed.
34
As a meteorologist stated in 1964, “The gas is the most serious [issue]” related to the
explosion at Medeo. See ibid., op. 27, d. 761, ll. 116–56 (Transcript of a meeting with
Simakov, 23 January 1964).
326 MARC ELIE
As Berggrin, a fine observer of bureaucratic procedure, remarked, the

officials who organized the 1959 meeting “directed [it] toward the creation of
support for continuing construction [of the dam],” and not toward examining
criticism and alternatives.35 Berggrin, who was taking at face value the promises
of Stalin’s Kremlin heirs for more public participation in the country’s
politics, contested the sequence and the results of this first meeting in a fierce
letter to the Council of Ministers. He denounced the “obstruction” through
“shouting and remarks” to which dam proponents exposed his critical speech.
The “unbusinesslike and unhealthy atmosphere” discouraged those present
from expressing criticism of the dam, he said. Democratic procedure was not
respected, as the chairman permitted only a “semblance of a vote, without a
vote count and a disclosure of the number of abstentions.”36 Last, he accused
the organizers of politicizing the dam issue: V. G. Maianskii from Gosstroi
tacitly compared dam opponents to the infamous “anti-party group” that
Khrushchev disbanded at a 1957 Central Committee meeting in Moscow: he
borrowed Pravda’s notorious phrasing for the “anti-party group”—“Molotov,
Malenkov, Kaganovich, joined by Shepilov”—to portray the dam’s opponents
as the group of “Zakharov, Siniavskii, joined by Berggrin.” Berggrin did not
appreciate the humor and denounced it as a “political attack.”37 Whereas
Berggrin declared mudflow protection a civic issue requiring a transparent
procedure, higher functionaries tried to marginalize him by underlining his
status as a nonspecialist joining a technical discussion.
Publicizing Risk and Uncertainty?

At a time of relative openness, the opponents were able to air their views
not only in closed meetings among scientists, engineers, and planners but
also in the local and central press. In 1960, Berggrin published a devastating
article in the main Kazakhstani newspaper, Kazakhstanskaia pravda, in
which he claimed that the dam would not protect the city.38 This was the
35
Ibid., op. 25, d. 758, l. 166.
36
The undemocratic character of the meeting is confirmed in the stenographic account and the
report written by meeting chairman Omarova, who claimed that the “majority” dismissed the
ideas of the dam opponents and that “the unanimous (sic) recommendation of the assembly of
specialists was to confirm the correctness” of the project (ibid., l. 144). Allowing the expression
of dissenting voices but at the same time ignoring them was typical of bureaucratic meetings
at the time, whereas Berggrin valued the democratic procedures enjoyed in the naturalists’
association (Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom, 5).
37
TsGAK f. R-1137, op. 25, d. 758, ll. 268–75 (Berggrin to Kazakhstani Council of Ministers,
15 December 1959).
38
A. Berggrin, “Sel´—na zamok! Ob odnom spornom proekte ‘Giprovodkhoza,’ ”
Kazakhstanskaia pravda, 13 April 1960; a complete Russian bibliography on mudflows gives
A. Iu. Vlasov, Selevye iavleniia na territorii SSSR i mery bor´by s nimi: Ukazatel´ literatury,
first serious examination of the options available to protect Alma-Ata in the

press. Berggrin revealed to the public data about the concurring projects (the
costs and construction time), thus allowing for a comparison of the pros and
cons. The leadership, in contrast, was very reluctant to disclose any specific
information on mudflows or mudflow protection.
The disturbing article was discussed at a closed meeting in Alma-Ata with
dam defenders and opponents: should the dam controversy be allowed to
find its way into the press? Was the dam issue a merely technical question or
one with broader public significance? The editor-in-chief, Iakov Belousov,
defended the “voice of the public.” He noted that a number of people—
among which were a deputy from the city council, the director of the newly
restored zapovednik, and members of the Kazakhstani Union of Artists—
had responded positively to Berggrin’s article.39 The meeting chairman—
Zhumabek Akhmetovich Tashenev, who was also the chairman of the Council
of Ministers—on the contrary, ridiculed Berggrin and his supporters, as the
following exchange reveals:
Tashenev: Who was that? Mambaev? A great expert, he doesn’t even
know the [Theory of the] Strength of Materials [sopromat ].
Belousov: They voice support for Alma-Ata’s surroundings. The director
of the zapovednik… .
Tashenev: He is a good-for-nothing, he just lies around there. I’ve met
him.
Belousov: This is the voice of the public, to which we must listen. They
are admittedly not experts [in dam building].
Tashenev: My dear man, you’re a knowledgeable person. It’s possible to
believe an agronomist, but such a person is incapable of judging geodesy,
architecture, public works.
The bureaucrat Tashenev, himself an engineer by training, drew a classical
line between experts, who were allowed to take a position on the dam issue,
and nonexperts. The latter, like the agronomist Berggrin, had not taken
sopromat at the university, a course in mechanics that was reputed to be very
demanding and was required for students in a broad range of engineering
specialties. The dam was a technical problem for engineers to discuss behind
closed doors. The editor, in contrast, refused to accept the reduction of the
dam to a merely technical issue and invoked the voice of the intelligentsia
izdannoi v 1968–1991 gg. (Piatigorsk: Mezhregionalńaia obshchestvennaia organizatsiia
“Selevaia assotsiatsiia,” 2008).
39
The new zapovednik did not include the Malaia Almatinka Valley in order not to impede
the city’s development upstream (Iashchenko, Zapovedniki Srednei Azii i Kazakhstana, 30).
328 MARC ELIE
to generate a broad discussion on the value of the dam. The meeting rapidly
turned into an accusation against the Kazakhstanskaia pravda editorial board,
who had “made an error” by releasing an article with a “panicky character.”
Geologist N. F. Kolotilin, from the Kazakh Academy of Sciences, asked for
preliminary censorship in the dam matter: “Before publishing major material,
it is necessary to take advice from experts… . [Such material] has to undergo
some kind of approval.” He was backed by Tashenev, who declared succinctly,
“Before printing one has to ask properly.”
The defenders of the project, among whom were the representatives of the
Kazakhstani Gidromet, agreed that Giprovodkhoz’s project was not perfect,
but they also denied that perfection was attainable. As they admitted, “We
cannot say that we calculated everything with absolute exactitude and that
there is not any doubt. Nobody says that, and there may be doubt in every
project.” They suggested accepting the uncertainty and proceeding with the
chosen project. They were exasperated by the endless discussion. Medeov, a
geologist, declared: “Instead of arguing endlessly, let us do something at some
point! … Berggrin is an aesthete.” Indeed, Berggrin’s insistence on protecting
nature made him an easy target for attacks from an ethical stance. Kolotilin
thus remarked: “Berggrin ranks beauty higher than people’s lives. This is as if
you would refuse someone the amputation of a gangrenous member to save
their beauty.”40
The call for censorship had no effect. Within the Party and the
government the fight for power was in full swing at the turn of the decade,
with the first-secretaryship of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan and
chairmanship of the Council of Ministers changing hands quickly. This
situation of political instability allowed the dam controversy to continue
unabated in the largest newspapers. The protest against the dam and the
proposed explosion reached its height in a collective letter to the editor of
Kazakhstanskaia pravda, almost certainly composed by Berggrin and signed
by 15 leading figures from Kazakhstani universities, mostly academicians
from the Kazakhstani Academy of Sciences and professors at the Polytechnic
Institute and the state university, with technical profiles in construction,
mining, hydro-engineering, geography, and biology.41 This protest, published
in the newspaper in September 1962, froze the blasting project for almost
a year. Kazakhstan’s leadership was neither willing nor able to oppose the
40
TsGAK f. R-1137, op. 25, d. 758, ll. 194–228.
41
The title “Lock the Explosion” was an allusion to Berggrin’s 1960 article “Lock the
Mudflow!”: “Vzryv na zamok! Pis´mo v redaktsiiu,” Kazakhstanskaia pravda (23 September
1962).
scientific community directly at the very time when it needed scientists most
in order to expand Kazakhstan’s scientific and technological infrastructure.42
The Issyk Shock

The protests in Alma-Ata prompted the leadership to stop construction and
ask Gidroproekt, the other Soviet dam design agency, to review and rework
Giprovodkhoz’s scheme. The main impact of Gidroproekt’s critical conclusions
was to discredit Giprovodkhoz as the designer of the anti-mudflow scheme.43
Contrary to what one might assume, there was no institutional rivalry over
Medeo between the agencies: neither wanted to step into this difficult and
uncertain matter. Gidroproekt and its superior, the Soviet Ministry of Energy
and Electrification (then a state committee) refused to take up Giprovodkhoz’s
design, claiming a lack of design experience and specialists in mudflow
protection.44 The Soviet Ministry of Agriculture, to which Giprovodkhoz
belonged, insisted on withdrawing from the project after the design had been
turned down.45 A mudflow disaster with terrible consequences soon offered
the Kazakhstani leadership a way out of the deadlock.
On a bright Sunday afternoon in July 1963, a mudflow of unprecedented
power emptied picturesque Lake Issyk (at 1,760 meters) and destroyed the
town of the same name, killing large numbers.46 The town of Issyk lies only
50 kilometers east of the Kazakhstani capital, in a neighboring valley of
the Trans-Ili Alatau. The mudflow began in a glacier up the Zharsai River,
a tributary of the Issyk River. It shot down the Zharsai and Issyk valleys.
When it hit the lake, it created tsunami waves up to 12 meters high, killing
holidaymakers in boats and on the shores. The mass of debris filled the lake
and spilled over its northern bank, eventually bursting this natural dam. All
the 18 million cubic meters of the water plus 1–2 million cubic meters of
debris from the bank spilled down the valley discharging up to 10,000 m3 per
second. This torrential flood annihilated the town of Issyk.
42
The number of scientists within the Academy of Sciences of Kazakhstan grew by 60 percent
between 1960 and 1967. See Eugène Zaleski et al., La politique de la science en URSS (Paris:
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, n.d.), 222–23. On scientific
public opinion, see Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom, 8–11.
43
TsGAK f. R-1137, op. 25, d. 759, ll. 187–96, here 193 (Kunaev to the Presidium of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, not earlier than 7 July 1963).
44
Ibid.; ibid., ll. 126–27 (Kazakhstani Gosplan to Kazakhstani Central Committee and
Council of Ministers, 8 June 1963).
45
Ibid., ll. 133–38 (Transcript of a meeting at USSR Gosstroi, 15 June 1963).
46
As usual in the postwar Soviet Union, the number of victims was never made public. Two
weeks after the disaster, Kunaev declared 48 casualties and 5 million rubles in damages to the
Soviet Council of Ministers. He did not specify the number of missed and injured persons. See
ibid., op. 27, d. 760, ll. 199–200 (Kunaev to USSR Council of Ministers, 31 August 1963).
330 MARC ELIE
The incident caused serious alarm among Alma-Ata’s inhabitants, who

were in the habit of spending weekends on the shores of Lake Issyk. Now the
beautiful turquoise lake was gone, leaving a muddy hole behind it. Aleksei
Kosygin, the Soviet premier, happened to be visiting Lake Issyk when the
disaster occurred and escaped death by a couple of hours.47 The head of the
city administration, Esen Duisenov, was aware of the heightened mudflow
risk and urged action, knowing that the city had absolutely no protection.48
“Alma-Ata’s inhabitants begin to worry in May [and worry until] October,” he
warned. Up the valley in the mudflow zone “live some 2,000 people and it is
not possible to resettle them now.”49 Although he had welcomed the rejection
of the blast dam before Issyk, he was now pressing the Kazakhstani leadership
to have the dam built as soon as possible to guarantee at least a minimum
of protection for the city.50 Kunaev sounded the alarm and manipulated the
sense of emergency to impose the deadlocked blast dam. He summoned
representatives from Gidroproekt and scholars from Moscow to Alma-Ata
for a meeting. He made sure local dam opponents were not invited. For him,
it all came down to “solving the problem in a big way” (kapitalńo), “on a
big scale” (v bol´shom plane), by building a big dam.51 At the end of August
1963, Kosygin told Petr Stepanovich Neporozhnyi, Soviet minister of energy,
to have Gidroproekt rework the project.52 In short, the Issyk shock broke the
logjam and committed the republican and Soviet leadership to build the dam.
An Unequal War of Experts: Seleviki vs. Vzryvniki

For all that, builders and planners in Moscow still greeted the Medeo
Dam project unenthusiastically. The reluctance of officials from the central
construction agencies contrasts with the victorious tone of the dam proponents
in Alma-Ata and Moscow. This is explained by the polarity of experts for and
against the dam. Both the officials in charge of the dam project, Kunaev
47
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. R-5446, op. 100, d. 270, ll. 1–3,
here 1 (Zakharov et al. to Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers A. N. Kosygin, 17
August 1965).
48
He traveled to foreign countries to study mudflow protection and published a monograph
on the issue: Esen Duisenov, Selevye potoki v zailiiskom Alatau, ed. A. F. Litovchenko (Alma-
Ata: Kazakhstan, 1971).
49
TsGAK f. R-1137, op. 27, d. 761, ll. 116–56 (Transcript of a meeting of the Kazakhstani
government, 23 January 1964).
50
Duisenov worried that the explosions could induce seismicity. See Esen Duisenov, Alma-
Ata segodnia i zavtra (Alma-Ata: Kazgosizdat, 1963), 50; and TsGAK f. R-1137, op. 27, d.
760, ll. 191–93 (Decision of the Alma-Ata City ispolkom “On Urgent Measures to Fight
Mudflows,” 19 July 1963).
51
TsGAK f. R-1137, op. 27, d. 760, ll. 147–90 (19 July 1963).
52
Ibid., op. 25, d. 759, ll. 133–38.
and his deputy Kaium Mukhamedzhanovich Simakov, and the scattered

opponents of the dam, gathered around the hydrologist Zakharov and the
environmentalist Berggrin, sought support for their views in Moscow. The
latter looked for help among the mudflow specialists, the seleviki, from the
Academy of Sciences’ Mudflow Commission. Its successive chairmen—Mikhail
Andreevich Velikanov, Maksim Feofanovich Sribnyi, and Semen Moiseevich
Fleishman—were all against the giant dam. For them, Gidroproekt’s design
was not based on the principles of the emerging mudflow science. “There
is not any possibility to foresee with certainty the ‘scale’ of the mudflow,
the frequency of its occurrence and so on,” for unlike regular water floods,
“mudflows do not obey the laws” of hydraulics and meteorology. Thus the
parameters of the dam could not be calculated accurately. The only scheme
that the Mudflow Commission deemed viable consisted in “regulating the
flow” by organizing a “complex of deconcentrated anti-mudflow works.” The
explosion dam occupied an unjustifiably large place in the protective scheme
proposed by Gidroproekt: “The project considers big mudflow catchers of the
dam type as fundamental and sufficient, so to say, as ‘definitive’ anti-mudflow
works.” However, the dam could not be considered a long-term solution:
with every new mudflow, the reservoir would fill up with earth and rocks,
diminishing the capacity of the dam.53
Kunaev found a sympathetic ear among the vzryvniki—that is, physicists
and mathematicians who specialized in explosions, such as Academician
Lavrentév, mathematician, vice-president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences,
and founder of the scientists’ city Akademgorodok.54 Other members of the
group included Academician Sadovskii, seismologist and physicist of nuclear
explosions, director of the Institute of Earth Physics; Academician Nikolai
Vasilévich Melńikov, a scholar specializing in opencast mining; General-
Major Georgii Iosifovich Pokrovskii, a well-known explosion specialist; and
Mikhail Moiseevich Dokuchaev, the main engineer of Soiuzvzryvprom,
the Soviet agency for explosion engineering. In 1959–61, Sadovskii and
Lavrentév had declared the explosion safe for Alma-Ata and recommended
having the dam built.55 Those “prominent scientists” bypassed and ignored
53
The belief that the reservoir would fill naturally in 150 years rests on a fallacious probabilistic
calculation. It filled unacceptably within a decade, forcing Alma-Ata’s authorities to raise the
dam by 40 meters. See ibid., op. 27, d. 763, l. 232 and 239–42 (Observations of the USSR
Academy of Sciences on the project to protect Alma-Ata, 4 December 1964).
54
M. Sadovskii and V. Rodionov, “Lavrentév i vzryv,” Za nauku: Organ partkoma,
rektorata, profkoma i Komiteta VLKSM Moskovskogo ordena trudovogo krasnogo znameni fiziko-
tekhnicheskogo instituta, 19 November 1970.
55
TsGAK f. R-1137, op. 25, d. 759, ll. 40–45, here 42 (Kazakhstani Gosstroi to Simakov, 29
November 1961).
332 MARC ELIE
the Mudflow Commission, the recognized expert body on mudflow. For

their inadequate scientific competence on mudflow, the vzryvniki substituted
their scientific and administrative authority and direct personal contact with
people in power. Lavrentév’s prestige was immense in the Soviet Union.
Kazakhstani Premier Tashenev retorted to dam opponents: “I was in China
and I have seen the honors with which the Chinese welcomed Lavrentév. If
you compare your director [of the zapovednik] with Lavrentév, the whole
Soviet Union will vote for Lavrentév.”56 Sadovskii’s research in seismology
was of considerable military relevance. After years of secret work he came to
the fore in 1960 as director of the Institute of Earth Sciences, one of the main
research centers in Cold War sciences.57 The vzryvniki were regularly invited
to Alma-Ata, where Kunaev and other members of the government would
receive them personally. They were asked and readily agreed to write in the
local press and to give talks explaining why the dam should be built and why
explosions were so exciting.58 To be sure, Lavrentév and his friends Sadovskii
and Dokuchaev had to accept the formalities of academic discussion and
political decision making. Given their political weight, however, they did not
need to debate in order to advance their project. They organized the Medeo
blast from behind the scenes, in direct discussion with the Kazakhstani
and Soviet leadership.59 Lavrentév demanded that Kunaev build the dam,
constantly waving the possibility of a mudflow annihilating Alma-Ata.60
Kunaev formed a direct relationship with these scholars and liked to pretend
he was one himself. He had been the president of the Kazakhstani Academy
of Sciences in 1952–55 and had wanted to lead its Mining Institute in 1962.61
56
Ibid., d. 758, ll. 194–228.
57
As in the United States, climatology, geology, oceanology, seismology, and other earth
sciences gained primary military significance and were heavily militarized in the USSR during
the Cold War. See Ronald E. Doel, “Constituting the Postwar Earth Sciences: The Military’s
Influence on the Environmental Sciences in the USA after 1945,” Social Studies of Science 33,
5 (2003): 635–66.
58
Pokrovskii wrote two articles in 1966 for the Kazakhstani press on the upcoming explosions
at Medeo (TsGAK f. R-1137, op. 25, d. 767, l. 177). His and Lavrentév’s interviews were used
at length in a documentary film to celebrate the dam and humiliate its opponents: A. Kulakov,
Vzryv sozidatel´ (Kazakhfil´m, 1970).
59
Lavrentév could access Nikita Khrushchev at all times. See Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev,
Vremia, liudi, vlast´ (Vospominaniia) (Moscow: Moskovskie novosti, 1999), 4:223; N. A.
Pritvits, V. D. Ermikov, and Z. M. Ibragimova, eds., Vek Lavrentéva (Novosibirsk: Izdatel´stvo
SO RAN, filial “Geo,” 2000), 151–52.
60
In the words of Kunaev’s deputy, Simakov. See TsGAK f. R-1137, op. 25, d. 764, ll. 199–
223 (Transcript of a meeting with Simakov, 23 April 1964).
61
After losing the position of Kazakh Central Committee secretary in 1962, Kunaev asserted
his readiness to return to the academy in the modest position of director of the Mining Institute
(Ashimbaev and Khliupin, Kazakhstan, 531).
The Kazakhstani Academy was a nest of dam opponents, organized around

academicians Zakharov and Nikolai Vasilévich Pavlov. In 1967, Kunaev
removed the president of the academy, Shafik Chokinovich Chokin, a dam
opponent.62 The Medeo controversy was an unequal power game between
authoritative scholars linked to political circles, on the one hand, and
powerless local scientists, backed by Moscow colleagues without influence,
who tried in vain to arouse public anger against the project, on the other.
Removing the Political Uncertainty

In October 1964, as Gidroproekt’s most recent technical scheme for the dam
was under review in Moscow, Kunaev invited two “leading scientists of the
country” and the explosion enthusiasts Lavrentév and Pokrovskii, to convince
the Kazakhstani Central Committee (CC) of the necessity of “forcing”
(forsirovat´ ) the construction process: this meant resuming preparations for
the explosion during the review process without waiting for Moscow’s official
sanction. The other CC members did not share Kunaev’s and Lavrentév’s
enthusiasm for the explosion dam. In fact, the CC was so split over the issue
that it had not taken a decision on the dam since the Issyk event the year before.
Kunaev was neither ready nor able to take the responsibility for the dangerous
undertaking alone: he had lost his party chairmanship in December 1962
to Nikita Khrushchev’s protégé, Ismail Abdurasulovich Iusupov. Kunaev was
once again heading the Council of Ministers, until Leonid Brezhnev returned
him to party leadership in December 1964 following Khushchev’s ouster. At
the time of the meeting though, on 1 October 1964, he had to share power
with Iusupov, who was wary of the dam. The tensions were considerable
within the CC: Iusupov, Second Secretary Mikhail Sergeevich Solomentsev,
and Kunaev, who had retained his CC membership, were all enemies of one
another in the fight for power.63
At the meeting, a self-assured Lavrentév took the lead of the campaign
for the dam. Invoking the specter of Lake Issyk (“no need to take the risk a
second time”), he suggested a bold risk estimation to guide policy makers
through mudflow theoretical uncertainties. The dam, he claimed, “removes
the overall danger. Concerning the possibility of having a mudflow not of 3.5
million, but of 5–10 million [m3], this is improbable… . We have to stave off
the main danger. If there is a mudflow, and it is not that big, the proposed
62
Kunaev managed the academy like his own child, appointing and removing its presidents
unceremoniously. He replaced President Esenov with his own brother in 1974 (ibid., 560,
588). There seems to have been no national divide on the dam issue, as we find Kazakhs and
non-Kazakhs among both opponents and proponents of the dam.
63
Ibid., 531, 542 .
334 MARC ELIE
dam should save the city.”64 For Lavrentév, the protective design had to take
into account the most probable mudflow volume, not the most improbable
one, although it remains unclear how he calculated the volume’s probability.
Gidroproekt was planning a dam for a disastrous mudflow of 6 million m3
(once in 10,000 years), whereas Lavrentév thought Gidroproekt’s dam was
actually able to handle only a bit more than half of it. Notwithstanding this
open contradiction, Lavrentév pushed to hold the explosion as quickly as
possible. “We can’t wait,” he declared.
Party leaders worried about and were sensitive to the arguments raised
by the dam opponents. “What about the concerns of the comrades?” one
CC member asked. Lavrentév derided the opposition: “There is no serious
objection. Objections have generally come from botanists, foresters, hunters,
nature lovers”—that is, lay people who had not taken sopromat at university,
in Tashenev’s words.65 Ignoring the objections from the actual mudflow
specialists within the Mudflow Commission and the Kazakhstani scientific
community, he made an artificial distinction between serious scientists, on
the one hand, and “botanists,” or would-be experts concerned with mere
environmentalist aspects of the problem, on the other. Iusupov disapproved
of the attacks against the dam opponents: “Each of them takes care of our
nature… . Truth is born in dispute.” Georgii Alekseevich Kozlov, another
secretary of the Kazakhstani CC, added that the objections made by the
dam’s opponents against Giprovodkhoz’s scheme in 1959–61—and these
were well-known to the leadership thanks to the press, the petitions, and the
various meetings—were “right and necessary” and had been integrated into
the project reworked by Gidroproekt.
“What about solidity?” one of the secretaries asked. The Issyk disaster
had shown that a natural dam that withstood thousands of years could break
one day. The tunnel projected to let the Malaia Almatinka River flow under
the dam was a matter of particular concern: what if it was cluttered and
the reservoir filled by a catastrophic mudflow? Should not an open spillway
be constructed in addition? Engineer Chomin from Gidroproekt reassured
them: mudflows occur “once in 100 years” and would gently filtrate through
the tunnel and not accumulate behind the dam. Both assumptions were
blatantly erroneous.
With the support of Simakov, Lavrentév, and Kunaev, Chomin and
Dokuchaev were pressing to be allowed by the CC to charge the galleries
dug in the rock with explosives for the controlled blast before Gidroproekt’s
64
Arkhiv Prezidenta Respubliki Kazakhstana (APRK) f. R-708, op. 37, d. 213, l. 4 (Transcript
of a meeting of the Kazakhstani Central Committee, 1 October 1964).
65
Ibid., l. 20. On Lavrentév’s sarcasm, see Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited, 7.
technical project received the definitive approval of Gosstroi’s experts in

Moscow. The other CC members fiercely opposed the suggested “forcing.”
Kozlov reacted indignantly: “This is a totally wrong point of view; you’re not
allowed to place charges. This is a very serious and responsible matter. We
can’t, without a project and its review by experts, by scientists, engage such
expenses and risk such a big enterprise [delo].”66 The CC members repelled
the attempts of the dam’s proponents to create certainties in a matter where
uncertainty prevailed. On paper at least, the design could in fact be passed in
Alma-Ata, for its cost was slightly below the 50 million-ruble limit beyond
which Moscow’s approval was required. But Kunaev and the CC members
agreed that the project was so dangerous that Moscow should confirm it:
“This is the kind of project that we are not allowed to sanction, regardless of its
cost,” Iusupov summed up.67 It took Kunaev’s rise to power over Kazakhstan a
couple of weeks after the meeting to put an end to the hesitations within the
leadership, with all other competing leaders quickly removed.68 Yet however
undisputed the political position of Kunaev had become within Kazakhstan,
he still needed to convince the Soviet scientific and planning establishment of
the advantages of the dam. The new political and technological context of the
post-Cuba Cold War proved instrumental in rendering the dam attractive.
Medeo as Scientific Prowess: Staging the “Creative Explosion”

In Kunaev’s view, explosions would transform the slow, dangerous, and
costly process of building the mudflow dam into an exciting, quick, and
cheap endeavor. With dam failures all over the world at the turn of the
decade, many grew wary of big dams.69 Dams were still coveted solutions
to development bottlenecks in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, but the cost
of their construction and the unexpected consequences of their exploitation
became subjects of concern.70 “Peaceful explosions” were deemed capable of
alleviating these anxieties.
After Great Britain, the USSR, and the United States agreed to ban
nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, in space, and underwater in the
66
APRK f. R-708, op. 37, d. 213, l. 12.
67
Ibid., ll. 17, 20.
68
In July 1965, the Kazakhstani Council of Ministers, after the approval of the Soviet
Gosstroi, resumed construction. See GARF f. R-5446, op. 100, d. 270, l. 4 (Information to
Kosygin on a memo by a group of specialists and scientists from Alma-Ata, 1 December 1965).
69
Dam opponents and even planners in the Kazakhstani government closely considered two
dam failures: Malpasset, France (1959), and Vajont, Italy (1963). Furthermore, they cited the
tragedy of the St. Francis Dam in California (1928).
70
Patrick McCully, Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams (London: Zed
Books, 2001), 118–19; Gestwa, Stalinschen Großbauten, 510–30.
336 MARC ELIE
Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the “peaceful atom” (mirnyi atom, the use of
nuclear energy for producing electricity and heat) and the “peaceful explosion”
(mirnyi vzryv, either conventional or even nuclear explosion, for alleged civil
engineering use) became important fixtures of public parlance.71 The media
went into raptures about the paradoxical nature of “peaceful explosions”:
blasts intended to destroy in capitalist wars were turned into constructive
forces by Soviet science. Explosions, devoid of their harmful reputation but
maintaining their iconographic attractiveness, were to serve the construction
of communism.72 Filmmakers were called to exploit their cinematographic
impact. The Creative Explosion, a Kazakhstani movie produced to celebrate the
dam as a victory over mudflows, features approximately ten minutes’ footage
of the Medeo blasts and of several other grandiose civil engineering blasts, like
the Kapchagai hydroelectric scheme. Explosions were celebrated for offering
massive economies in time and labor in the post-Stalin USSR, when for the
most part great dams could no longer be built by a Gulag workforce.73
The use of controlled explosions for civil works was a scientific and
technical challenge: explosions were able in a few seconds to shift enormous
amounts of earth. Their significance for excavation work was known since
the invention of dynamite. But calculating and influencing the direction
of the earth movements in order to have them settle in the desired fashion
was an intricate issue for mathematicians and physicists. The 1950s and
1960s saw the culmination of scientific research on the use of directional
blasts for construction in the Soviet Union. Leading scientists—vzryvniki like
Lavrentév, Sadovskii, and Pokrovskii—played an important role in civilizing
explosions and making them attractive to public opinion. In return, they
used the newly declared importance of “peaceful explosions” to further their
own scientific agenda. For them, the blast at Medeo was one challenging
71
Both in the East and in the West, the concern about nuclear destruction receded in the
media after the climax of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Test Ban Treaty (Paul Boyer, Fallout:
A Historian Reflects on America’s Half-Century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons [Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1998], 210–11). In the Soviet Union, the Cold War nuclear
rhetoric was equally “tamed” at the same time, according to Vladislav Zubok and Konstantin
Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1996), 236. On the growing relevance of the peaceful use of nuclear power
under Khrushchev, see Josephson, Red Atom, 3–4.
72
Aleksei Iurévich Khegai, Ukroshchenie “chernogo drakona” (Alma-Ata: Kazakhstan, 1988),
25–26. In 1967, city dwellers were invited to the Kok-Tiube Hill to admire a second wave of
explosions at Medeo (G. Gukasov and B. Konovalov, “Simfoniia vzryva,” Izvestiia, 14 April
1967, 4).
73
Kulakov, Vzryv sozidatel´, did not compare Medeo with the Ministry of Internal Affairs’
dams but, more subtly, with the “Cheops Pyramid, built by thousands of slaves in a thousand
years.”
experiment among a series of real-life scientific pinpointed explosions of

engineering significance they had been carrying out for years. The Medeo
blast was to be the biggest to date.
The Medeo explosion was presented as a complex experimental field
interesting not only to vzryvniki but to other scholars, too.74 Like space
travel and nuclear tests, explosions were clusters of scientific interest. Animals
were shackled within the destruction zone for scientists to observe the effect
of detonation and fire on their bodies.75 Seismologists built earthquake-
resistant houses to see the effect of the seismic wave on their structure.
Official propaganda boasted that the Medeo blasts proved that skyscrapers
could be built in Alma-Ata.76 The experimental aspect of the explosion,
heavily criticized by the dam’s opponents, was presented as one of its main
justifications by its supporters.77 The explosion was labeled “audacious”
in official discourse. It was a “grandiose,” “unique,” “advanced,” “supreme
experiment” of Soviet science that purportedly opened new perspectives for
construction. Controlling the energy of “peaceful explosions,” the Soviet
people was already engaged in diverting the course of the Siberian rivers and
would soon be able to return Lake Issyk to its pristine beauty. In a word, the
USSR was “taming and transforming nature,” as the propaganda boasted,
invoking the old transformist rhetoric.78 The rhetoric of the “unique explosion”
implied the capacity to transcend the uncertainties otherwise associated with
mudflow theory.79
Against Technocracy
Lavrentév had signed a petition in April 1962 to oppose the construction
of a cellulose plant on the shores of Lake Baikal.80 In the case of Alma-Ata’s
74
Esen Duisenov, Alma-Ata (Alma-Ata: Kazakhstan, 1968), 87.
75
TsGAK f. R-1137, op. 27, d. 766, ll. 112–15, here 114 (Proceedings of the Governmental
Commission for the Construction of the Anti-Mudflow Dam, 18 October 1966).
76
Ibid., d. 769a, l. 104 (Press release on the second explosion, 15 February 1967).
77
GARF f. R-5446, op. 100, d. 270, ll. 12–15, here 14 (Statement of Rozhdestvenskii at the
meeting of the Department of Earth Sciences of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 30 November
1965).
78
Kulakov, Vzryv sozidatel´.
79
This rhetoric was not always well received. At a meeting in Moscow, someone interrupted
Pokrovskii’s epic description of the “unique engineering building built by a method that is
cutting-edge in the world” and “where scholars will stream from all over the world”: “I need
a calm life, not a unique building!” See Arkhiv Rossiiskoi akademii nauk (ARAN) f. 1605
(Department of Earth Sciences), op. 1, d. 84 (Transcript of a meeting of the Commission for
the Protection of Alma-Ata from Mudflow, 26 July 1966), l. 20.
80
Earthquake risk was one of the arguments against the plant. Before, Lavrentév had taken
the defense of the Kronotskii zapovednik on Kamchatka (Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom,
307, 362).
338 MARC ELIE
mudflow protection, he contradicted the dam skeptics. The dam was just a
wall. It built no reservoir to flood the valley; it did not even divert or modify the
small Malaia Almatinka River. The typical negative processes triggered by big
dams would simply not be at work in Alma-Ata. He was quoted saying “that
artificial construction works [inzhenernye sooruzheniia] don’t spoil nature but
embellish it.”81 Berggrin, one of the “botanists” despised by Lavrentév, shared
the latter’s belief in humans’ ability to improve and embellish nature. But he
worried with other dam opponents that the explosion and construction works
would strike the ecosystem and aesthetics of the Medeo Gorge a devastating
blow, a concern Lavrentév never addressed.
Berggrin fiercely attacked Lavrentév in his letters to the authorities. He
dismissed the dam as the personal project of the academician, who “abused his
position and, longing to use the explosion for his scientific work, undertook
decisions in matters to which he has no relation whatsoever.” Lavrentév was
not qualified on mudflows, as he “only engaged in calculations of how much
rock would be produced by the explosion for the formation of a rock-filled
dam.” But Lavrentév had little competence to deal with the critical question
of the efficiency and opportunity of a dam for mudflow protection in general
and in Alma-Ata in particular. Writing in 1962, Berggrin dared to refer to
the political situation of the Cuban missile crisis: “The role of Academician
Lavrentév can be compared with the role of an expert calculating the warheads
for our missiles on Cuba. Yet if such an expert were to start demanding that
these rockets be launched, he would swiftly be brought to his senses and put
in his place.” Berggrin rejected technocracy: Lavrentév should stay within
the limits of his scientific capacities, however great they might be, and be
prevented from interfering with political decision making, for his scientific
prestige was not transferable into political power without formidable danger.
In Alma-Ata, mudflow protection was for Berggrin a civic issue to be decided
by everyone among the intelligentsia, not just by technocrats meeting behind
the scenes with politicians.82
Berggrin understood that Lavrentév was more than just a brilliant
and famous scientist. He was a political heavyweight. After the authorities
finally confirmed the explosion scheme, Berggrin had to acknowledge: “He
is … the president of the commission for the use of powerful explosives in
the economy. This is his bread… . He behaved simply … from a position
81
ARAN f. 1605, op. 1, d. 84, l. 20.
82
TsGAK f. R-1137, op. 25, d. 759, ll. 102–13 (Berggrin to Kazakhstani Council of Ministers,
25 December 1962).
of force.”83 Berggrin stressed that Lavrentév was not genuinely concerned

with Alma-Ata’s security. The vice-president of the Academy of Sciences had
approved Giprovodkhoz’s first dam project, which was then turned down
by the leading dam builder Gidroproekt for blatantly underestimating the
associated risks.
The dam’s opponents saw that the mudflow issue was undergoing a shift
in discourse. First, the discussion on the best protection against mudflows was
being replaced by simple admiration for great dams; and then consideration
of the dam itself was receding before the fascination for “unique” explosions.
This “replacement of the concept [podmena poniatiia] of the ‘function’ of
the dam by the concept of its ‘feasibility,’ ” in the words of leading dam
opponents, created, as if by magic, a new equation: mudflow protection =
dam = explosion.84 The question of the feasibility of the explosion replaced
the question of the feasibility of the dam, which in turn had replaced the
question of whether a dam was actually the most effective method of mudflow
protection. This shortcut allowed the leadership to shift the center of gravity
of the discussion from civic questioning (what is best for the city?) to mere
technical-scientific details (how to blast?).
“Explosions Work for Communism”

Muzzled in Alma-Ata since Kunaev took power in 1964, the dam’s opponents
eventually turned to the central government.85 In August 1965, they sent a
petition to Prime Minister Kosygin.86 At the same time, Literaturnaia gazeta,
an influential newspaper covering controversial environmental issues at the
time, published an article criticizing the dam.87 This appeal to the center
83
ARAN f. 1605, op. 1, d. 83, ll. 45–48 (Berggrin to President of USSR Academy of Sciences
M. V. Keldysh, 15 October 1966).
84
TsGAK f. R-1137, op. 27, d. 762, ll. 157–68 (Pavlov, Brichkin, Glagolev, and Serdiukov to
the editor-in-chief of the magazine Prostor, I. P. Shukhov, 25 June 1964).
85
The quotation in the section head is from Gukasov and Konovalov, “Simfoniia vzryva.”
After Issyk, the Kazakhstani press stopped publishing articles against the dam. See GARF f.
R-5446, op. 100, d. 270, l. 2; and TsGAK f. R-1137, op. 27, d. 764, ll. 142–43 (Berggrin to
Iusupov, 20 April 1964). The Kazakhstani government did not include dam opponents in its
Mudflow Commission for alarm and evacuation (ibid., l. 53 [Berggrin to Iusupov, 24 March
1964]).
86
Zakharov, Pavlov, Brichkin, and Berggrin signed the letter (GARF f. R-5446, op. 100, d.
270, ll. 1–3). Two more petitions signed by 22 and 17 protesters from Alma-Ata’s intelligentsia
were sent to the Soviet Council of Ministers in 1963 and 1966 (ibid., ll. 5–7 [Zakharov et al.
to Kosygin, 16 January 1966]; TsGAK f. R-1137, op. 27, d. 763, ll. 72–82 [Serdiukov et al. to
USSR Council of Ministers, 23 December 1963]).
87
Anuar Alimzhanov, “Razmyshleniia pered vzryvom,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 19 October
1965. On the role of the official organ of the Writers Union in covering sensitive environmental
issues, see Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom, 358–59. A. P. Berggrin published a critical article
340 MARC ELIE
proved successful: it prompted Kosygin to have all parties gather to discuss

the Medeo Dam project once again. Berggrin and Zakharov were invited to
Moscow to take part in an Academy of Sciences meeting on 30 November
1965. The seleviki Sribnyi and Rozhdestvenskii and vzryvnik Sadovskii were
there too. The dam’s opponents did not succeed in convincing the meeting
of the danger of the blast. However, the majority of speakers agreed that the
dam was a suboptimal solution and that Alma-Ata urgently needed a general
protection plan in which the dam would be only one element. Glaciologist
Grigorii Avsiuk, the meeting’s chairman, declared the dam an unsatisfactory
but necessary “emergency” measure given the growing probability of a
destructive mudflow and the total vulnerability of the city. It was agreed that
after the dam had been built a whole set of works, of the type suggested
by the dam’s opponents would be undertaken to protect Alma-Ata. This
new conception of the dam—as a stopgap measure meant to be replaced or
superseded by a complex protective scheme—was very different from the idea
of the dam as a definitive wall against mudflows. Yet this half-hearted approval
and the vague promise to conciliate the opponents gave the vzryvniki carte
blanche to execute their big experiment.88
On 28 November 1966, academicians Melńikov, Sadovskii, and
Lavrentév observed the blast at Medeo. Melńikov informed Academy
of Sciences President Keldysh by telegram of the successful operation that
created a 60–65-meter-high rock-fill dam blocking the Medeo Gorge: “I
congratulate you on this exploit of Soviet science.” He stressed that no city
building suffered from the explosion and boasted that “even stopping the
construction work now, the dam would protect the city for a minimum of
50 years.”89 The news on the radio and in the newspapers exaggerated this
enthusiasm: “Within seconds, a 100-meter-high dam has been erected to
close the road to mudflows forever.”90 In fact, such optimism was premature:
the dam lacked the capacity to sustain even a smaller mudflow. A second blast
in a famous Soviet popularizing monthly (“Seli v zailiiskom Alatau,” Priroda: Ezhemesiachnyi

populiarnyi estestvenno-nauchnyi zhurnal AN SSSR, no. 5 [1965]: 67–69).
88
ARAN f. 1605, op. 1, d. 83, ll. 1–8 (Transcript of a meeting of the USSR Academy of
Sciences on the protection of Alma-Ata from mudflows, 30 November 1965). In July 1966,
the Soviet Academy of Sciences submitted its conclusions on the project after a last meeting
that did not include Alma-Ata’s scholars. See GARF f. R-5446, op. 100, d. 270, ll. 24–25
(Decree of the USSR Academy of Sciences “On the Fundamental Position toward the Project
of Protection of Alma-Ata against Mudflows,” 29 July 1966).
89
ARAN f. 1605, op. 1, d. 83, l. 123 (Telegram of Melńikov to Keldysh, 28 November
1966).
90
Gukasov and B. Konovalov, “Simfoniia vzryva.”
and seven more years of intense earth-moving works were needed to complete
the initial scheme.
Conclusion
The Medeo Dam differed from earlier large projects in the republics in being
a local initiative, not a central scheme imposed on the locals like the Virgin
Lands Program.91 In fact, the central government proved reluctant to give
its approval to the dam project: in the 1960s, it showed more restraint in
dam engineering than at the time of the “Great Construction Projects of
Communism.” In the mid-1970s, Kazakhstan became one of the leading
republics in mudflow science and engineering and was able to design dams
and protection works on its own without help from the center.92 The re-
routing of Siberian and northern rivers to the thirsty cotton fields of Central
Asia was yet another illustration of this shift from a centrally driven approach
to development toward projects undertaken as republican initiatives: whereas
the central authorities were split on the value of this massive geo-engineering
scheme, republican leaders, planners, and engineers in Uzbekistan,
Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan were its most fervent advocates.93 The Medeo
Dam illustrates the dramatic change in the relationship between Moscow and
the republics in the 1960s. First party secretaries established their power on
the basis of technological achievements made possible by the accumulation
of engineering prowess, city planning, and scientific capabilities within the
republics.
The technocratic alliance of scientific, technological, and political powers
was at the core of the Soviet system as it was reshaped after the Thaw. In this
sense, the choice of the dam was at the same time a choice of a certain model
of power relations in Kazakhstan built on the sole leadership of Kunaev. The
construction of the big dam marked the triumph of a group of powerful
91
Michaela Pohl, “The Virgin Lands between Memory and Forgetting: People and
Transformation in the Soviet Union, 1954–1960” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1999),
125–28; Z. G. Saktaganova, Istoriia osushchestvleniia sovetskogo opyta ekonomicheskoi
modernizatsii v Kazakhstane (1946–1970) (Karaganda: Izdatel´stvo KarGU, 2004), 143–47.
92
After the 1973 disaster, Kunaev founded a Kazakhstani authority for mudflow monitoring
and engineering, Kazglavselezashchita. It rapidly became leader in anti-mudflow damming.
In 1978, Kazakhstani engineers designed and built a large dam on the second mudflow-prone
valley crossing Alma-Ata, the Bolshaia Almatinka River. See Marc Elie, “Gouverner par les
aléas: Maîtrise des coulées de boue et mise en valeur touristique des montagnes à Alma-Ata
(Kazakhstan), 1966–1977,” in Le gouvernement des catastrophes, ed. Julien Langumier and
Sandrine Revet (Paris: Karthala, 2013), 33–72.
93
Julia Obertreis, “Der ‘Angriff auf die Wüste’ in Zentralasien: Zur Umweltgeschichte
der Sowjetunion,” Osteuropa 58, 4–5 (2008): 37–56; Chida, “ ‘Nationalizing’ the Soviet
Republics,” 28–29.
342 MARC ELIE
academicians over local scientists backed by powerless Moscow colleagues.

Alma-Ata scientists did not succeed in making Medeo a cause célèbre of
bureaucratic shortsightedness.94
Just after the construction work on the dam was completed, a major
mudflow starting from the foot of the Tuyuk-Su Glacier hit the Malaia
Almatinka Valley: a wave of millions of cubic meters struck the Medeo
wall on 15 July 1973. The mud mass almost overtopped the dam by a few
meters and threatened to breach it. Deploying huge efforts day and night
for two weeks, thousands of workers and military personnel saved the dam
from destruction—and consequently Alma-Ata itself. With this “victory
over the Black Dragon,” the Medeo Dam entered the city’s history and
landscape, becoming in the 1970s a significant tourist hub for winter sports
and mountaineering in the Malaia Almatinka watershed. The huge Medeo
pyramid that dominates Almaty remains an ambivalent achievement for
many inhabitants. With growing concern about seismic events and climate
change, voices are now being heard reconsidering how the former capital
should accommodate its security and the environment.95
CERCEC EHESS-CNRS
44 rue de l’Amiral Mouchez
75014 Paris, France
marc.elie@cercec.cnrs.fr
94
Unlike the Lake Baikal case (Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom, 443).
95
Vladimir Tretíakov, “Sushchestvuiushchie plotiny Alma-Atu ot selia ne spasut?”
Komsomol´skaia pravda Kazakhstana, 12 February 2005 (http://vernoye-almaty.kz/nature/
nespasut.shtml, accessed 1 May 2012); Boris S. Stepanov and Roza K. Iafiazova, “Kontseptsiia
zashchity ot selei g. Almaty v usloviiakh izmeniaiushchegosia klimata,” Gidrometeorologiia i
ekologiia, no. 1 (2006): 67–79.

Elie, Coping With The Black Dragon

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Articles

Coping with the “Black Dragon”

The People, of course, is its own savior,

Visitors to Almaty, Kazakhstan’s former capital, are commonly offered a trip up

Protecting the Kazakhstani Capital

the 1921 disaster, Diurnbaum’s elaborate scheme involved the construction

The Dam of Discord

be transformed into a “dump of mountainous trash”: unlike a dam built to

“Our Civic Duty” Versus “Their Professional Honor”

As Berggrin, a fine observer of bureaucratic procedure, remarked, the

Publicizing Risk and Uncertainty?

first serious examination of the options available to protect Alma-Ata in the

The Issyk Shock

The incident caused serious alarm among Alma-Ata’s inhabitants, who

An Unequal War of Experts: Seleviki vs. Vzryvniki

and his deputy Kaium Mukhamedzhanovich Simakov, and the scattered

the Mudflow Commission, the recognized expert body on mudflow. For

The Kazakhstani Academy was a nest of dam opponents, organized around

Removing the Political Uncertainty

technical project received the definitive approval of Gosstroi’s experts in

Medeo as Scientific Prowess: Staging the “Creative Explosion”

experiment among a series of real-life scientific pinpointed explosions of

of force.”83 Berggrin stressed that Lavrent´ev was not genuinely concerned

“Explosions Work for Communism”

proved successful: it prompted Kosygin to have all parties gather to discuss

in a famous Soviet popularizing monthly (“Seli v zailiiskom Alatau,” Priroda: Ezhemesiachnyi

academicians over local scientists backed by powerless Moscow colleagues.

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