Word: pechora
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...long ago as 1830, a czarist surveyor named Alexander Shrenk suggested a way of easing this imbalance by diverting the northerly-flowing Pechora River into the Volga, the great river that sustains much of southern Russia. But even in the 1930s, the Stalinist heyday of dam building and hydroelectric construction, the scheme was considered no more than a mammoth pipedream...
Grandiose may be an understatement. The enterprise involves two separate sets of river diversions. On the European side of the Urals, the volume of the Volga would be increased by funneling into it the flow of three major northern rivers, the Onega, the Northern Dvina and the Pechora. Officially sanctioned by President Leonid Brezhnev in his speech on agricultural goals two weeks ago, the European grand scheme is scheduled to be launched next year. The rerouting would require the building of 25 dams and numerous pumping stations. As the barriers go up, they would raise river levels a section...