History of Human Interaction with the Lake

Although the lake was well known to nomadic Mongol and Turkic peoples (legend has it that Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan was born by the lake), Russian adventurers reached the shores of Baikal and the lake's Olkhon Island only in 1643.

One early Russian description of Baikal was that by the exiled archpriest Avvakum, who crossed the lake in July 1662 returning from exile in Dauria (Transbaikalia). With the development of the salt mines at Nerchinsk and Shilka in the nineteenth century, the region around Baikal became a major destination for exiled convicts and political prisoners.

These prisoners included Decembrists (people who took part in the failed uprising against Czar Peter I in December 1825), Poles exiled after the revolts of 1830 and 1863, populists, and socialists. One of the best-known Russian songs, "Slavnoe more, sviashchennyi Baikal" (Glorious Sea, Sacred Baikal), commemorates an exile's escape across the lake in the waning days of the czarist empire.

Under Czar Peter I (the Great) the Siberian expedition of Daniil G. Messershmidt, which set out in 1724, produced the first map of the lake. Later exploration was conducted by the Second Northern (Kamchatka) Expedition (1733-1743) and that of Peter Simon Pallas (1768-1774).

In the late nineteenth century scientific stations were established at the lake for the systematic study of its geology and biology. A. V. Voznesenskii, the director of the Irkutsk Geophysical Observatory, organized eleven hydrometeorological (relating to the study of water in the atmosphere) stations at Baikal (18961901) at existing lighthouses. Previous measurements of lake levels and temperatures were collected in the period 1868-1872.

In 1916 the Academy of Sciences selected a permanent site for its research station at the lake. By the late Soviet period, the following institutes were among those operating at Baikal: the Limnological Institute of the Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR; Kotinskaia Biological Station of the Institute of Biology of Irkutsk State University; Barguzinskii zapovednik (inviolable nature reserve); Baikal'skii zapovednik; Baikal National Park; stations of the Siberian Institute for the Study of Earth Magnetism, the Ionosphere, and the Propagation of Radiowaves; Baikal branch of the Institute of Toxicology of the Ministry of the Paper and Pulp Industry; Baikal Institute for Fish Farm Planning of the Ministry of the Fishing Industry; and the Buriat Republic Academy of Sciences.

Soviet scientists first perceived a threat to the lake's integrity in 1957, when they learned of a plan developed by S. Ia. Zhuk's Gidroenergoproekt (Hydropower Construction Agency) to blow up the mouth of the Angara River. The explosion would have lowered the level of Baikal by several meters and would have been 50 percent greater than the atomic explosion at Hiroshima during World War II. The goal of the plan was to allow greater water flow from Baikal to the hydroelectric power stations downstream on the Angara River, where the lake emptied.

That same year the Soviet military sought to build two factories on Baikal's southern shore and main tributary, the Selenga River, to make viscose (a solution made by treating cellulose with caustic alkali solution and carbon disulfide) cord for airplane tires using the lake's pure water. The public was not told about the strategic nature of the proposed factories; rather, the factories were depicted as dedicated to producing high-quality paper goods, which, ironically, they eventually did.

The battle against these threats initially was waged on the pages of the pioneering publications Literatur- naia gazeta, Oktiabr', and Komsomol'skaia Pravda. Prominent scientists and others wrote to the USSR Council of Ministers warning of the devastating consequences of an earthquake at the proposed factories' sites.

A collective letter to Komsomol'skaia Pravda of 11 May 1966, entitled "Baikal Waits," was signed by some of the most important scientists and writers and described decision makers as having "taken a risk of unheard of scale, turning Lake Baikal into an experimental basin for the trials of a pollution abatement system that has never been tested in actual production conditions and which is not suited to the severe climatic conditions of the Transbaikal region" (Lapin 1987, 80).

In its editorial commentary to the letter, Komsomol'skaia Pravda asked, "Have we really learned nothing from the countless examples when economic bureaucrats in the name of the plan devastated waterways and lakes and poisoned their currents?" (Lapin 1987, 82).

In 1966 the Baikalsk factory started up, and the Selenginsk factory was running by the following year. Hundreds more factories, many of them related to the military and the opening of the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railroad, also began operation in the Baikal basin during the 1970s. Other threats to the lake's natural conditions include the dumping of untreated sewage into the Selenga River and other tributaries, large-scale logging and consequent erosion on the slopes of the mountains surrounding the lake (to keep the pulp and paper factories supplied with raw materials), contamination of regional soils by toxic industrial and radioactive wastes, agricultural waste runoff, and habitat destruction.

The protests of scientific and literary public opinion, which continue to the present day, have failed to close the factories or force them to delay production until all pollution-abatement facilities were running. Decades of resolutions and promises of a clean-up by the Soviet and Russian governments have been met with skepticism.

The USSR Academy of Sciences had cautioned in 1977 that Baikal was facing irreversible degradation, and although no one knows precisely the tolerances of the lake's life-forms to the growing array of toxic effluents, thermal changes, and changes in dissolved oxygen and other gases, the threats to this natural laboratory of evolution are real.

Evidence indicates that economic activity has already affected the productivity of the lake. The omul catch, which reached 9,000 metric tons in 1945, fell to 1,200 metric tons in 1967. A major die-off of nerpa seals in 1987 has not yet been explained but is conceivably related to the decline in the omul.