Industrialization reached Russia later than Western Europe and North America, and one of the few large scale dams dating from the Tsarist era is on the Volkhov near St Petersburg (opened 1926). However with Lenin's declaration Communism is Soviet Power Plus the Electrification of the Whole Country (22 December 1920), dam building began in earnest, to a more functional design. One of the first was the Dneprovsk dam in on the Dnieper in Ukraine completed in 1932 using US generators. Important for rendering the Dnieper navigable, it was destroyed by the retreating Soviet army in 1941 but rebuilt along with many new dams in the post-war period. The Dnieper now has six major hydroelectric dams and the larger Volga river has nine, each up to 50m high with shipping locks and generating up to 3000MW.

In the post-war period, Soviet engineers rose to new challenges, not only designing dams in Soviet Central Asia and Siberia which are among the largest in the world, but also advising on schemes around the world, notably the Aswan Dam and many schemes in China. Today, dams in the new Central Asian Republics are of particular significance: the electricity they produce represent badly-needed natural resource, while the control of scarce water may prove a source of conflict. Recent political and economic turmoil has put several projects years behind schedule and some of those completed are being poorly maintained, potentially dangerously so. The former USSR now has a total hydroelectric capacity of around 60,000MW, about 20% of electricity use (varying from 0% in Belarus to 89% in Georgia). The larger dams are tabulated below.

¹Several dams this size on the Volga.
²Still under construction.
³At 169km³, the "Dragon Lake" is the world's largest artificial reservoir (until Three Gorges Dam is operational).

External Links

• Chirkey Dam photo
• Bratsk Dam photo
• Sayano-Shushenskaya Dam photo
• Central Asia - Further Reading