Sakharov: Who Murdered Lake Baikal?

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At a meeting of the Council of Ministers, Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin, who was handling the Baikal project, asked Mstislav Keldysh, president of the Academy of Sciences, "What does the academy recommend? If the safeguards aren't reliable, we'll stop construction." Keldysh quoted a report that the water-purification system and other safeguards were completely reliable. He may have been acting in good faith. Still, my feeling is that his stand was greatly influenced by the academy's dependence on the bureaucratic machine, and that he was predisposed to respect the wishes of this machine and to ignore the warnings of whistle blowers.

Only a couple of years after these events, a Komsomol expedition brought back photographs showing the massive destruction of Baikal's fish and plankton caused by toxic wastes. No accidental discharges had been logged. As always, everything was fine on paper.