How Soviet Engineering Led to Modern Day Cotton Slavery
By: Grant Piper
Tags: Technology, Slavery, World, History, Industry

If you open up a current list of the world’s largest lakes, you will immediately see some familiar names like Lake Michigan, Lake Malawi, and Lake Superior. You will not find the name of the Aral Sea on this list. In the recent past, the Aral Sea was the fourth-largest lake by area in the world. At its peak, it was larger than Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, stretching over 26,300 square miles. Now it is almost gone.

In place of the lake arose a system of forced labor, a booming cotton industry and the hubris of men. While there are many people alarmed over the rapid disappearance of one of the world’s largest lakes, many people are connected to this region, not by an ecologic crisis but rather by the clothes on their backs.

This is a tragic two-fold story that highlights humanity’s ability to rapidly destroy our planet and the specter of slavery which still stalks cotton fields around the world.

The great irrigation project

1936 map of the USSR, note the Aral Sea in the bottom left. (Public domain)

The Soviet Union (USSR) fell nearly thirty years ago and sometimes it is easy to forget that, at the height of its size and power, it was a venerable modern empire. The USSR was not much different from many of the other great empires of history. It encompassed a massive amount of territory, held a great number of different peoples in it and committed great atrocities in the name of the empire. Like the Romans, the Soviets also engaged in massive and often unprecedented engineering projects that used their ample manpower to great effect.

Maintaining control over such large swaths of territory that often featured many disparate and varying landscapes was no easy task. The Soviets had often struggled with food production and agricultural output quotas were a large part of many people’s lives during the communist era. In order to boost agricultural output, engineers were eyeing the area around the Aral Sea as a potential source of water for irrigation.

The Aral Sea was a massive body of water fed by two large rivers, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya. The Soviet Union went to work on digging massive irrigation trenches from the feeding rivers to the Aral Sea in order to divert large amounts of fresh water from their natural course, into the irrigation system in an attempt to make formerly arid land fertile for crops.

The goal was to flood land that had formerly been desert pasture in an attempt to create suitable fields for rice and cotton. Rice to feed the people and cotton to serve as a cash crop.

The trenches were dug, the switches and levees rose, and soon the titanic flood of the water that poured out of the mountains was being redirected to places it had never been before.

If you think such an outlandish proposition was doomed to fail, you would be wrong. The Soviets approved a plan of water distribution that flooded the deserts of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan creating ample opportunity for new agriculture to blossom at the expense of the Aral Sea.

Land which had only been able to support small family farms and grazing herds rapidly transformed into centrally planned, communist mega-farms which quickly began growing tons and tons of rice and cotton.

The plan had been a success. At least for now.

The demise of the Aral Sea

The Aral Sea in 1989 on the left, 2014 on the right (Credit: NASA / Public domain)

It did not take long for the massive redirection of water to begin to affect the terminus. The Aral Sea, which had been around for thousands of years before, immediately began to shrink. The Soviet government had not approved a moderate amount of redirection of water, but rather, nearly the entire volume of water that had previously flowed into the Aral Sea.

In the ten years between 1960 and 1970, the lake began to fall at a rate of around eight inches per year, a rate which would begin to increase exponentially.

In the 1970s, the water began falling at an astounding two feet per year. In the 1980s, the water was falling at nearly three feet per year. The shrinkage was noticeable and soon, everyone knew the lake was doomed to die.

The Soviets were not stupid, they knew that the lake would vanish over time, they just didn’t care. Any engineer with a modicum of knowledge or experience could look at the amount of water being directed away from the Aral Sea and quickly do the math.

What is more astounding is that the Aral Sea was not a barren or lifeless body of water. It was a vibrant part of the geologic landscape which was critical to the region. Just before the irrigation project began damaging the lake’s integrity, it was home to a massive fishing industry.

According to a New York Times article from 2002, the fishing industry in the Aral Sea employed nearly 40,000 fishermen and countless local trappers. One in six fish caught in the Soviet Union for consumption was caught in the Aral Sea. Yet, the lake was sacrificed in the name of agriculture.

What could be so important to destroy one of the world’s largest bodies of water and destroy tens of thousands of jobs?

Cotton.

White gold.

The rise of Central Asian cotton

Early 20th century cotton field (Credit: Library of Congress)

One of the main goals of the Politburo was not only to create a more sustainable food source for their Central Asian peoples but also to create a valuable export crop that they could profit off of. The target for this plan was cotton, which is still one of the world’s largest cash crops.

Cotton fields were ordered and planted and soon, vast swaths of previously unused land were now growing large amounts of raw cotton. The plan was a good one in terms of location. China and India both had large and growing textile industries that required massive amounts of cotton in order to keep running. If implemented properly, the Soviets would have a constant supply of the fiber, that would always be in demand. Instead of having to export the materials halfway around the globe, they could easily export it to their close neighbors.

The plan worked at the expense of the Aral Sea. From 2000–2004, Uzbekistan was listed as the world’s sixth-largest cotton producer behind familiar names such as the United States, India and China. A small arid nation had been transformed by the vision of the Soviet government into a cotton powerhouse.

Cotton at a cost

Under communism, people were assigned to work at certain cooperatives and farms during certain periods of time. Strict quotas were introduced and regional governors would push their people to the breaking point in order to bring in the required materials to please the central planning boards of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union fell in 1991 but their legacy of forced labor, harsh quotas and a robotic demand to meet them did not.

As independent nations, many of the former soviets nationalized their primary industries. The quotas remained in place and in order to fill them, without the vast resources of the Soviet Union, they turned to child labor and worse in order to continue the production.

Cotton slavery is often seen as a relic of the past, tied forever to the bloody American Civil War, but is still happening today.

In 2012, the popular clothing chain H&M came under fire for using Uzbek cotton which had been harvested by child labor. A brief but glaring spotlight was thrown onto the Central Asian cotton industry and the results were disturbing. Children as young as five were forced to pick cotton, by hand, alongside dozens of other men and women every year during the harvest.

The international outrage was loud and, in response, Uzbekistan officially banned the use of children in the cotton fields.

That was in 2012.

The Uzbek government was not eager to damage one of their only profitable exports and instead they turned to a system of forced labor. Since the cotton industry is controlled by the government, they feel that it is in their right to press other government employees into the fields during the harvest.

The result is a system of forced labor that befalls all government employees in Uzbekistan during harvest time. Usually from October into November, everyone from teachers, doctors, government accountants and others, are forced into the fields to pick cotton by hand.

Each person is given a daily quota, some reportedly up to 60 kilograms, and turned out into the fields at the crack of dawn, not being allowed to stop until they have turned in their assigned amount.

It doesn’t matter if you are a fifty-year-old teacher with asthma or a sixty-year-old doctor with a bad back, everyone is required to participate. The official punishment for refusing is dismissal from your job but many say that the real punishments can be much more severe including prison time, torture, and or exile from Uzbekistan.

Despite some companies trying to take a stand against the use of Uzbek cotton, many tons of the fiber still make it into the factories that spin our clothes today. It is almost unfathomable to think but it is true. Cotton slavery is alive and well.

A destructive legacy

A propaganda map showing a web of military deterrence against the USSR 1961 (Public domain)

Ronald Regan called the Soviet Union the Evil Empire. As we continue to peel back the atrocities, intended or otherwise, committed by the Soviet government it is not hard to see why he said that.

From the late 1950s into the early 1960s, a simple idea led to a complete transformation of a region. Diverting all of the water from two of the regions largest rivers dried up one of the largest lakes in the world in mere decades. What was once a lush and fertile lake is now a lifeless salt pan.

The destruction of the Aral Sea has been called one of the greatest ecological catastrophes of all time, and it was caused entirely by man. Now, unless something dramatically changes, the Aral Sea will be completely gone in a few short years.

In its place, a new industry rose. Hundreds of new cotton farms appeared and consumed thousands of acres. The harsh quotas imposed by the Soviets combined with the world’s insatiable demand for cotton led to demeaning and dangerous working conditions that did not disappear. Children were used in the fields. Now, adults are conscripted into forced harvests.

The ex-Soviet nations are still fighting over the rapidly diminishing water resources of the Syr and Amu rivers. Many fear that their consumption and environmental mismanagement will create problems that last a generation or longer.

Sadly, it is very likely that there is an item, or many, of clothing in your possession which was spun from cotton picked by children or by forced slave labor. Yet, many have no clue. When you begin to mess with the natural order of things on such a titanic scale, the results are often unpredictable.

That is how an idea hatched by the Soviet Politburo led to an unprecedented irrigation project which, in turn, led to the creation of an artificial cotton state which now shelters a modern-day example of slavery and forced labor.

The more you know.