Coping with the “Black Dragon: Mudflow Hazards and the Controversy over the Medeo Dam in Kazakhstan, 1958–66
Coping with the “Black Dragon: Mudflow Hazards and the Controversy over the Medeo Dam in Kazakhstan, 1958–66
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应对“黑龙：泥石流灾害和哈萨克斯坦麦迪奥大坝的争议，1958-66
DOI：
10.1353/kri.2013.0028
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发表时间：
2013
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Marc R. Elie
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Marc R. Elie
人民当然是自己的救星，人民自己筑起了大坝的坚强堡垒。但是人们记得：你，领袖，签署了关于爆炸的决定。你冒了险，但生活在伟大的信念中，不考虑自己的命运，把领导者和工程师的品质结合在一起。(1)到哈萨克斯坦前首都阿拉木图的游客通常会沿着马拉亚阿拉木图河逆流而上，到达梅代奥大坝，这是一座高150米、长530米、宽800米的岩石金字塔，将峡谷隔开。如果一个人爬上842级台阶到顶部（海拔1,900米），大坝提供了一个著名的溜冰场下游的景色。对于阿拉木图的居民和游客来说，它不仅是一个旅游，体育和休闲的地方;它也是这座城市短暂历史的象征之一：作为抵御大自然肆无忌惮力量的防御墙，这座填石大坝在1973年阻止了一场灾难性的泥石流，使苏维埃哈萨克斯坦的首都免于毁灭。现在很难想象，在20世纪60年代上半叶，拯救这座城市的大坝曾经是苏联阿拉木图的一个极具争议的项目。尽管共和国的领导层可能是独裁的，但它不能立即将大坝强加给居民，尽管该项目被认为是紧迫的。从最终设计批准到大坝开工（1958- 1966），历时8年。大坝项目的发展是在一系列不确定因素的影响下进行的，这些不确定因素是导致犹豫和大量推迟的原因。首先，赫鲁晓夫统治的最后几年对哈萨克斯坦的政治体制来说是不稳定的。从1960年到1964年，哈萨克斯坦共产党第一书记的职位三次易手。哈萨克斯坦的权力竞争者在大坝问题上分歧很大，以至于他们无法强制执行任何明确的决定。第二，尽管阿拉木图的居民生活在对大规模泥石流破坏的日益恐惧之中，但没有人能准确预测这种情况何时发生。每个人都在期待“大事件”很快发生。大坝提供了一个可能的解决方案，但在一些人看来，它的野蛮建筑方法-定向爆破-以及它将保护集中在一个地方的事实可能对城市来说比没有大坝更危险。在这种紧迫性和不确定性的背景下，政治家们不愿意承担泥石流保护的明确责任。第三，政治不稳定和对自然灾害的担忧引发了对大坝和替代项目利弊的热烈讨论。由于在赫鲁晓夫解冻时期较为宽松的气氛中，公民对重大项目的关注可能成为公众关注的问题，从1959年起，阿拉木图和莫斯科的科学家和公民反对哈萨克斯坦领导人提交的梅代奥大坝项目，并提出了一个更轻、更复杂的保护系统，该系统以小型大坝和水坝为基础。反对大坝的声音是20世纪50年代以来科学家和其他知识分子团体重新出现的典型声音，他们公开警告大型转型发展项目可能对自然资源造成环境破坏。(2)水坝的支持者和反对者之间的争论涉及从科学和工程的角度最有效地保护城市的实际问题。它揭示了对城市与自然环境关系的对立概念，以及对灾害保护的环境成本的不同看法。然而，尽管如此，赫鲁晓夫和勃列日涅夫时期之间出现的新环境使哈萨克斯坦领导层最终能够强加确定性，并压制抗议的声音。这篇文章认为，一个技术官僚联盟联合了正在崛起的共和党领导人Dinmukhamed Akhmedovich Kunaev，顶级科学家和莫斯科政治领导层支持的规划者。…
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 rockfilled 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 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 leadership in Moscow. …