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Water Being Brought to Kara-Kum Will Restore It to Life By Vera Golubeva N the Turkmenian language Kara- Kum means. “black sands.” The Kara-Kum Desert is a fearfully hot and arid region, a land of hot black sand hills. It is the source of the sand storms and burning dry winds whose scorching heat brings ruin to the grain fields of the Soviet land. But by the will of the Soviet people this huge lifeless desert will be covered with blossoming orchards and green pastures. The Kara-Kum stretches over a huge territory of approximately 195,000 square miles (including the adjacent Ust-Urt Desert) between the Aral and the Caspian Seas. It is next in size to the Sahara -— the largest desert in the world. This is what one of the participants of the Kara-Kum automobile run tells about this desert: “On my way, which stretched over more than 600 miles, I came across only four or five wells. Oh, they were not the oases one reads about in geography textbooks! Neither palms, nor grass, nor a fefreshing breeze. Merely a hole in the ground about a yard or two in diameter and from 15 to 100 yards deep with muddy and, in most cases, bitter salty water at the bottom. One very tarely comes across saksaul thickets — a plant with thick brittle OCTOBER 13, 1950 Approved For Release 2004/02/19 : CIA-RDP83-00415R006800050005-6 branches and without a single leaf! But lizards more than a yard long, poison- ous solpugida, scorpions, and poisonous black spiders whose bite causes death within two minutes are plentiful here.” Such is the Kara-Kum Desert which will soon be tackled by the Soviet peo- ple who are guided in their great peace- ful creative labor by the golden precept of the great naturalist Michurin: “We cannot wait for favors from nature; our task is to wrest them from her.” But the Kara-Kum was not always a lifeless desert. Geologists, historians, and archaeologists have proved that there was a time when the largest river in Central Asia —- the Amu-Darya — flowed not into the Aral Sea but into the ancient Khorezm Basin where the Caspian Sea now lies. The beds of the dried-up rivers Uzboi, Kelif Uzboi, Dar- Yalik, and the basin of the great Sary- kamish Lake (whose area is equal to that of Belgium) with its huge, fantas- tic underground passages — the river beds of some unknown underground rivers of bygone times which flowed from Ust-Urt into the Sarykamish Basin ——~ even now give an idea of what the Kara-Kum Desert was like in the past. In bygone times the banks of these riv- ers were full of life. Scientists have Desert found the remains of rich cities whose population raised cattle and worked in various trades. The inhabitants of the cities took their goods down to the Caspian Sea and from there to Persia and India. Many centuries have passed since then... Time and again men have pondered over the problem of finding means of returning life. to the desert. History tells us that as far back as the begin- ning of the eighteenth century Russia’s great reformer, Peter the First, sent to the Khiva khanate an expedition headed by Prince Bekovich-Cherkassky who was instructed “to determine whether it is possible to redirect its water (Amu- Darya’s) along its original course.” Although there were more than 6,000 soldiers and Cossacks under the prince’s command, the task proved too difficult for them. All other attempts to bring water to the desert likewise proved futile. For centuries lonely caravans of camels drearily con- tinued to pass across the sands, people continued to die of thirst, and the land remained barren. And it was only the Soviet people who, two decades ago, made the first attempt to solve this problem so vitally 581 Approved For Release 2004/02/19 : CIA-RDP83-00415R006800050005-6