How it was 05/15/2000 (2000)

"The Turn of the Northern Rivers", 1984.

After the adoption of the Food Program in the Soviet Union, a project was prepared that could be called "the Project of the Century".

The main idea of ​​the authors was to transfer part of the runoff of the northern and Siberian rivers to the south of the country with the aim of irrigating drylands.

According to some scientists, this project could overnight transfer the USSR to the communist "tomorrow", according to others - to plunge the country into prehistoric chaos.

A huge number of design institutes and ministries were working on the project, it was expected to attract huge financial resources.

Among the opponents of the project were representatives of the creative intelligentsia: mathematician Lev Pontryagin, academicians Nikolai Krasovsky and Yuri Osipov, writers Vasily Belov and Sergei Zalygin, journalist Victor Yaroshenko and many others.

In the studio, people met who took the most active part in exposing the project: scientists Mikhail Zelikin, Stanislav Zhukov, Alexei Reteium, Boris Iskakov, Vera Bryusova.

They managed to prove scientifically the groundlessness of the arguments of the defenders of the project.

In their opinion, the implementation of the project threatened the inevitable salinization of fertile land in the south, the loss of agricultural land in the middle belt, Climate and the complete destruction of monuments of history and architecture in the north, that is, in fact it was a geopolitical blow aimed at destroying the entire country.

The program uses cadres of harvesting chronicles in the early 1980s, newspaper articles devoted to the turn of rivers, interviews with the chairman of the Kargopol The Regional Council for Nature Protection in 1984 by Vladimir Gromov and the former secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, Alexander Yakovlev.