.
.+-
Description
Great Construction Works of Communism and the Remaking of Nature is a pamphlet by Professor V.A. Kovda, Doctor of Geologo-Mineralogical Sciences and Stalin Prize Winner, on the postwar construction projects of the Soviet Union to transform nature itself to serve human necessities as part and parcel of the Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature. While Western countries, espousing Malthusianism, left humanity at the fate of nature, the USSR, guided by the practice of Michurinism, stated that it is not enough for humanity to wait for favours from nature, that it must wrest them from her. Planned projects in this vein included gigantic hydroelectric stations along the Volga, serving most of the Eastern European Soviet territory; the Main Turkmen Canal, to divert water across deserts in Turkmenistan to supply water to the peasants; the Don-Volga Canal, linking up the two great Soviet rivers; and many others. With the Stalin plan bringing prosperity to the workers and peasants, Kovda notes that historically exploitative social systems especially have had no regard for making nature serve humanity in colonial countries, noting the European eradication of Aztec irrigation and the oases in the Libyan desert. Making nature yield to humanity today poses itself as one of life’s prime questions, and the old social system has never had and will never have any regard for it — only the modern working class can take it up.