Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Author:Ryszard Kapuscinski [Kapuscinski, Ryszard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5071-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-07-24T04:00:00+00:00

BUT BEFORE I had the time to look around in Moscow, get some information, have several important and instructive conversations, the news exploded that a large city of a million inhabitants, situated between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains—Ufa—had been poisoned. It wasn’t just effluvia, combustion gases, and so forth, for these are commonplace; the city had been poisoned severely, dangerously, mortally.

“A new Chernobyl!” commented a friend who relayed the news to me.

“I’m going there,” I replied. “If I can get a seat, I’m flying tomorrow.”

Everyone in Moscow who was boarding the plane to Ufa was loaded with bottles, cans, canisters of water. For Ufa had been poisoned by phenol. Anyone who drinks the local water, my friend told me, will get sick or die.

Ufa is the capital of the Bashkir Republic, an autonomous republic at the western foot of the Urals. To the south stretches Kazakhstan, to the east Siberia, and to the west Tatarstan. Nature was once beautiful here, mountains covered with forests, six hundred rivers and streams, thousands of lakes. Hordes of all kinds of quadrupeds, clouds of bustling birds, swarms of industrious bees. Until the advent of chemicals. Bashkiria was transformed into a chemical practice range, into the center of the chemical industry of the former USSR. Smoke obscured the sky; dust hung in the air; phenol flowed down the rivers. Phenol, as I read in the encyclopedia, is a brown, extremely poisonous acid necessary for the production of explosives, plastics, dyes, tannins, and a hundred other things. Because chemical plants are shoddily built here and because the proper filters and cleaners are regarded as the fabrications and whims of ecological purists, the phenol was continuously leaking into the rivers, but it was leaking quietly, so that the poisoning of people could be spread out over time, so that the pestilence would not suddenly fell the entire city.

But that is precisely what had happened now. Turning on their faucets, people saw a rust-colored, opaque substance dripping from them and smelled their apartments filling up with an atrocious odor. Phenol! Phenol! It spread from house to house, from street to street.

Still, there was no visible panic. People here accept all misfortunes, even those caused by the soullessness and stupidity of those in power, as the excesses of an omnipotent and capricious nature, on the order of floods, earthquakes, or exceptionally cold winters. The thoughtlessness or brutality of the authorities is just one of the cataclysms that nature so liberally dispenses. One must understand this; one must resign oneself to it.

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