The Politics of Multiplication in a Failed Soviet Irrigation Project,Or, How Sasyk Has Been Kept from the Sea

Between 1976 and 1980, a Soviet agro-industrial project turned the Sasyk estuary in southern Ukraine into a freshwater irrigation reservoir. While the project failed to produce irrigable water, it had many negative environmental consequences. Despite two decades of activism, this water body persists in its freshwater state. To understand how this situation persists, resources need to be conceived as materialities emergent in and distributed across assemblages of human and nonhuman elements rather than pre-existing substances. This move helps reveal a politics of multiplication that has enabled officials to sustain the resource potential of Danube–Dnister Irrigation System waters. As recognition of Sasyk as polluted and valueless increased, officials mobilized linkages that consolidated Sasyk as a fish reservoir, and its main canal as irrigable and drinking water, thereby stymieing activists' restoration campaign.