Northern river reversal

The Northern river reversal or Siberian river reversal was an ambitious project to divert the flow of the Northern rivers in the Soviet Union, which "uselessly" drain into the Arctic Ocean, southwards towards the populated agricultural areas of Central Asia, which lack water.

Research and planning work on the project started in the 1930s, and was carried out on a large scale in the 1960s through the early 1980s. The controversial project was abandoned in 1986, primarily for environmental reasons, without much actual construction work ever done.

The project to turn Siberian rivers goes back to the 1830s when tsarist surveyor Alexander Shrenk proposed it when the big canal engineering projects were conceived (i.e. the Suez and Panama canals).

The project of turning some of the flow of the northern rivers to the south was discussed, on a smaller scale, in the 1930s. In November 1933, a special conference of the USSR Academy of Sciences approved a plan for a "reconstruction of the Volga and its basin", which included the diversion into the Volga of some of the waters of the Pechora and the Northern Dvina - two rivers in the north of European Russia that flow into the seas of the Arctic Ocean. Research in that direction was then conducted by the Hydroproject, the dam and canal institute led by Sergey Yakovlevich Zhuk (Russian: ). Some design plans were developed by Zhuk's institute, but without much publicity or actual construction work.

In January 1961, several years after Zhuk's death, Nikita Khrushchev presented a memo by Zhuk and another engineer, G. Russo, about the river rerouting plan to the Central Committee of the CPSU. Despite the ousting of Khrushchev in 1964, talks about the projects of turning the major rivers Pechora, Tobol, Ishim, Irtysh, and Ob resumed in the late 1960s.

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