In the southern USSR, an expanding agriculture competes for scarce water not only with hydropower, as we saw in the last chapter, but also with industry and municipalities. These have long been accustomed to using water as a free good to dilute and evacuate their wastes. The only way to liberate additional water for irrigated agriculture is to make industry and municipalities use less and clean what they use. Therefore, the implementation of the southern strategy in the Brezhnev plan depends in part on whether the clean-water program launched in the early 1970s can actually be made to work. That will not be easy. Until quite recently, as we saw in Chapter 3, the Soviet Union had no environmental program worthy of the name (at any rate outside the two or three largest cities). Starting virtually from scratch, a skeptical industry and a newly formed enforcement bureaucracy are being asked to develop a major program in a hurry.

How well is it working? According to Soviet sources, water quality has already improved slightly in the areas of highest priority. The deterioration of the Volga has been halted. In Moscow, water quality has improved “somewhat” in the last ten years. Some sources claim that waste-treatment capacity is already catching up with the growing volume of industrial wastes nationwide. It is hard to tell, however, which claims are real and which are inflated or overoptimistic. And if we cannot establish that, how can we judge the real priority and prospects of the water-quality program? Fortunately, we can get a better answer by looking at the system of planning, implementation, and enforcement.