No Return: The Cultural Construction of the Aral Sea Disaster

This paper examines how the desiccation of the Aral Sea came to be understood as a disaster in Soviet culture through the case study of novelist Jonrid Abdullaxonov. Soviet agriculture in Central Asia depended on water to feed crops, including, most of all, cotton. Beginning in the 1930s the Party-state initiated multiple irrigation projects diverting water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers that fed the Aral Sea. It would take decades for the consequences of these projects to be publicly acknowledged: only in the 1970s did Soviet scientists, and ultimately, the broader public, come to acknowledge the extent of the human-induced natural disaster. By the perestroika era of the late 1980s, post-apocalyptic images of the silted-over Aral, studded with beached ships, circulated widely in Soviet media as evidence both of the disaster and of the delegitimation of Soviet authority. This paper focuses on the work of Abdullaxonov, who was expelled from the Communist Party in the early 1960s after publishing an article in Soviet newspaper Trud, “Is the Amu Darya Our Friend?,” calling for a reevaluation of Soviet irrigation practices in the region. In the late 1970s, under changed political circumstances, he published a two-part novel, No Return (Borsa Kelmas), examining the fate of residents of the Aral Sea basin. Placing this author’s work in its broader context, and drawing on the insights of contemporary disaster studies, this paper shows how the Aral Sea came to be culturally constructed as a disaster zone long after its water began to evaporate.