“Soviet Atlantis”: the story of the city of the USSR flooded by Stalin

Andriy Mastrienko still remember the day when had to leave forever the house where his family lived for generations, near the Dnieper River, in Soviet Ukraine. “They told us: ‘we are going to build a hydroelectric power station and we need you to leave your house because this area will be flooded.”, he told the BBC.

His people, like 200 others in Ukraine and hundreds more throughout the Soviet Union They were inundated on Stalin’s orders for the construction of a socialist megaproject, be it a hydroelectric power station, a canal or a dam.

And it is that as part of the Soviet efforts to demonstrate the superiority of the socialist system over capitalism, the USSR has devised an ambitious program to achieve an advanced industrial economy. But many of these ambitious projects have had catastrophic consequences: massive human displacement and deaths to environmental damage to some of the most conserved ecosystems in Eastern Europe.

The memory of the forced relocation and destruction of their homes haunts survivors 70 years later.

“The authorities didn’t explain much why people had to be relocated. There was only one message: it is necessary for the development of the economy “, underlined the BBC Svietlana Sliusarenkio, that she was a girl when her parents had to leave their village.

Many of those who lived it are already dead, but all over Russia and many former Soviet republics there are still church towers, walls or abandoned buildings that stand out like masts above of a water bed.

They are the last vestige of a dark age of authoritarianism and repression, the last testimonies in stone of what has been called “Soviet Atlantis” (in reference to the mythical submerged city).

Since the end of the 1930s, the government of Stalin devised a new conception of the “Soviet model” of communism which sought to demonstrate by all possible means the greatness of the system in the face of its iron adversary, capitalism.

They gave way to what some historians have called “gigantomania”, an obsession with building colossal buildings that they reported inside and outside the “glory of the Soviet Union” and its “power over nature”, sometimes at the cost of the lives of thousands of people.

5,000 square kilometers of land were inundated and over 660 villages and the town of Mologa, founded in the 12th century, were completely submerged. In all, some 130,000 people had to be relocated and large areas of agricultural land and forests were destroyed along the Volga.

The chain of reservoirs which continues to build continues to flood the cities and becomes what was also for years the largest hydroelectric power station on the planet (which is still the largest in Europe): the Volga GES.

Declassified records after the end of Stalinism show that construction was carried out mainly by prisoners from the Volzhsky prison camp, where those who refused to move were also sent. The scenes were repeated throughout the Soviet Union.

The end of World War II marked the start of Soviet economic recovery and, also, the beginning of the cold war. It was then that Stalin devised a plan known as “Great projects for the construction of communism“, Which encompassed a series of hydroelectric power plants and risk channels throughout the Soviet Union.

Some, like the main channel of Turkmenistan, they were never finished, but others are still standing. The Kremenchug power station, to which the Mastrienko and Sliusarenkio families were moved, was inaugurated in 1960.

An area three times the size of the city of Chicago was flooded for these purposes and more than 130,000 people were displaced. “If anyone refused, they would send bulldozers on the date set for departure to demolish the houses.”Recalled Sliusarenkio.

“They had no alternative, no one could question anything. It was an order and it had to be carried out, ”he added.

As Sliusarenkio recounted, a year before the scheduled flood, the authorities began to visit the villages to tell them that they should and they valued the houses: they paid a little more for the older ones.

The houses were then marked with paint on the facades: They wrote in big letters and numbers the date its inhabitants had to leave it forever. The authorities provided transport for the families, but the cattle had to move on foot, often hundreds of kilometers.

“My wife was milking cows and she had to walk all the way with the animals,” Mastrienko said. Sliusarenkio, for his part, said that residents gave them the opportunity to remove the remains of their dead from cemeteries cities that would be flooded and take them everywhere with them.

“If they couldn’t or wouldn’t dig up their dead, they asked them to remove the crosses and the bulldozers came by to level the arches with the ground so that the remains did not float when the graves were under water, ”he said.

The official history of Russia does not collect names hundreds of people who are said to have drowned because they refused to leave their homes before being flooded.

The memory of “Soviet Atlantis” and the hundreds of towns and villages that formed it has also faded as the last witnesses of those years die and for the Russian authorities’ lack of interest in delving into a past which could harmmore so, the image of a Soviet leader that Putin admires.

However, over the years, seasons and droughts, the headlines of the new remains of submerged villages emerging sporadically appear in the Russian press.

And new tourism companies are doing excursions on yachts and cruises to “Atlantis” a new destination of nostalgia.

BBC Mundo