Word: baikal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...legendary ancestors, of predator and prey, produced a human being from whom all Mongols would claim descent. But such fantastical beginnings did little to ease the early life of the world conqueror--unless the myth was an omen for living like a wild animal in the steppes around Lake Baikal. His father Yesugei was poisoned by enemies and his widowed mother Hoelun chased away from their tribe with her brood, including her eldest, nine-year-old Temujin. The outcasts ate field mice and marmots even as they fought off thieves out for their horses, the most precious of nomad property...
...world, Central Asia and East Asia were experiencing a population boom, though the great Bronze Age civilizations of India, Japan and China were at least a millennium away. Nomadic hunters and fishermen appeared for the first time along the shores of the Caspian and Aral seas and Lake Baikal. On the Iranian plateau, farmed since at least the 6th millennium B.C., people lived in houses of sun-dried brick, while craftsmen in the city of Anau used the potter's wheel to turn out elaborately shaped and painted clay vessels. These prehistoric Persians carried on trade with small villages...
...poets have a special standing in the Soviet Union, and Raisa Gorbachev is reportedly one of his fans. He rails against the decline of "human values," and as an outspoken supporter of the nascent Green environmental movement, he is active in the campaign to save the purity of Lake Baikal. In light of his anti-Western, nationalist and anti-Semitic views, his appointment to the Presidential Council surprised many. Though Rasputin is not a member of the Communist Party, Gorbachev may view him as a communications link to an important segment of the population...
...meeting of the Council of Ministers, Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin, who was handling the Baikal project, asked Mstislav Keldysh, president of the Academy of Sciences, "What does the academy recommend? If the safeguards aren't reliable, we'll stop construction." Keldysh quoted a report that the water-purification system and other safeguards were completely reliable. He may have been acting in good faith. Still, my feeling is that his stand was greatly influenced by the academy's dependence on the bureaucratic machine, and that he was predisposed to respect the wishes of this machine and to ignore the warnings...
Only a couple of years after these events, a Komsomol expedition brought back photographs showing the massive destruction of Baikal's fish and plankton caused by toxic wastes. No accidental discharges had been logged. As always, everything was fine on paper...