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Shevchenko often wrote
about the broad Dnipro
and its great rapids,
rushing to the Black Sea:
“The mighty Dnipro roars and groans,
an angry wind blows hard above,
driving willows to the ground,
raising a mountainous wave.”
It started in early 1926,
when Trotsky lobbied
the Politburo to take over
the mighty river.
“The Dnipro runs,” he said,
“through the best industrial lands,
wasting the prodigious weight
of its pressure, playing
over age-old rapids.
It’s waiting for us to harness
its stream, curb it with dams,
and compel it to give light.”
Compel it they did.
In 1927, Stalin began to build
the Dnipro Dam on “vacated land”
in the central Dnipro Valley.
That’s double speak for
hundreds of villages,
old kozak lands,
forcibly evacuated
and disappeared from history.
The station was to bring power
to several aluminum plants
and iron & steel plants
that hadn’t yet been built.
Meanwhile, farmers were labeled
kulaks and their lands seized.
The dam came online in 1932
as the Holodomor peaked,
the countryside starving
from the Dnipro to Kharkiv.
In 1945, the dam was blown up
to stop the Germans,
and then rebuilt.
In 1950, the lowest stretch
of the once-mighty Dnipro was
dammed, too,
for the Kakhovka reservoir
to cool a nuclear power plant,
irrigate southern Ukraine,
and bring drinking water to Crimea.
In 2023, the barbarians are
on the march again.
blowing up the last dam.
Nearly two centuries ago,
Shevchenko foretold this:
“When the blood of hateful foes
starts to flow
from Ukraine
to the blue sea,
that’s when I,
parting with hill and plain,
shall leave it all behind
and fly to the throne of God
to pray...
But until that day,
I shall pray to no god.”
June 07, 2023
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