On June 6 2023, the Kakhovka Dam on the lower Dnipro River in eastern Ukraine was blown up by a powerful internal explosion. The evidence points to the deliberate destruction of the dam by Russian forces, which were in control of the location. As the dam collapsed, it released the stored water from the Kakhovka reservoir, which extended over 150 miles upstream from the dam, reaching as far as the Zaporozh’e nuclear power plant.
The destruction of the dam and reservoir is a major blow to the economy of eastern Ukraine, which depended on them for hydropower, river traffic, irrigation for cropland, and not least, cooling water for the Zaporozh’e four nuclear reactors. The lowering of the reservoir level forced the drilling of groundwater wells; these have enabled the powerplant’s operators—today mostly Russian—to resume generating nuclear power.
The Kakhovka dam was one of six built on Ukraine’s largest river, the Dnipro, which runs through central and southeastern Ukraine and empties into the Black Sea below Kherson. The Kakhovka dam was the last and largest of the series; it was completed in 1956, three years after Stalin’s death.
The hydropower program was designed primarily to provide electricity for the growing heavy industry of Kherson Province and the neighboring Donbas. Agriculture was largely disregarded, and over 12 million acres of prime cropland were put under water, adding to the already considerable damage done to Ukrainian agriculture during the prewar collectivization.
But by the time the Kakhovka dam was completed, important changes had begun to take place in Soviet policy. Under Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet leaders began to give greater attention to agriculture, especially irrigation. The previous political primacy of hydropower was downgraded. Hydropower construction continued, but no longer in Ukraine; instead the focus moved to East Siberia, where it supported new industry, notably the rise of aluminum.
Under Leonid Brezhnev, the priority of agriculture continued to recover. The Soviet Union spent fortunes on irrigation and reclamation, much of it in the so-called “Non-Black Earth Zone,” including Ukraine, where droughts were a perennial problem. The program was run from Moscow in classic Soviet-style, with typical inefficiency and corruption, but it resulted in a large irrigation system, fed by the Kakhovka reservoir.
Hydropower and irrigation are inevitably competitors in the allocation of scarce water from a dam. Farmers need water in summer, but the power system needs it in winter, when electricity demand is high. Right up to the end of the Soviet period, the operation of the Dnipro dams was the subject of constant quarrels between Moscow (which demanded more electricity), and the republic government in Kyiv (which favored irrigation and other uses). It was only at the end of the Soviet period that control over the dams came under the sole authority of Kyiv, and the Dnipro system finally came into its own as the basis for a more diversified economy. After independence, irrigation based on the Kakhovka made an important contribution to the development of Ukraine’s grain exports.
The destruction of the Kakhovka dam and reservoir stands as a symbol of the senseless vengefulness of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine’s Western allies are currently considering devoting Russia’s frozen foreign reserves to the reconstruction of Ukraine, when peace allows. There would be no more fitting place to start than with the reconstruction of the Kakhovka Dam.
P.S. On a personal note: I was a witness to some of the changes that began in Soviet Ukraine in the 1970s, when I was an exchange student at the Department of Geography of Kyiv State University under the IREX program in 1972-73, and subsequently at the Institute of Geography of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow. My topic was the politics of water and environment.
IREX, the International Research and Exchanges Board, was a joint program of the US and Soviet governments established in 1968, under which hundreds of graduate students and young faculty studied and did research in one another’s countries. It is no longer active in Russia, but has since broadened its activities to include over 100 other countries, including Ukraine.
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Thane Gustafson is the author and co-author of eight books on Russian affairs, including most recently Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia (2012), The Bridge: Russian Gas in a Redivided Europe (2020), and Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change (2021), all with Harvard University Press. This series of Substack posts is part of a project for a new book, tentatively called The Devil’s Dance. I am grateful to many friends for their kind and helpful advice on this project.
© 2023 Thane Gustafson
Thanks for a yet another interesting piece!
The Kakhovka Dam is in Kherson, not the Donbas.