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The Politics of Multiplicationin a Failed Soviet IrrigationProject, Or, How Sasyk HasBeen Kept from the SeaTanya Richardsona

a Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, CanadaPublished online: 19 Aug 2014.

To cite this article: Tanya Richardson (2014): The Politics of Multiplication in aFailed Soviet Irrigation Project, Or, How Sasyk Has Been Kept from the Sea, Ethnos:Journal of Anthropology, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2014.940990

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2014.940990

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The Politics of Multiplication in a Failed SovietIrrigation Project, Or, How Sasyk Has BeenKept from the Sea

Tanya RichardsonWilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada

abstract Between 1976 and 1980, a Soviet agro-industrial project turned the Sasykestuary in southern Ukraine into a freshwater irrigation reservoir. While the projectfailed to produce irrigable water, it had many negative environmental consequences.Despite two decades of activism, this water body persists in its freshwater state. Tounderstand how this situation persists, resources need to be conceived as materialitiesemergent in and distributed across assemblages of human and nonhuman elementsrather than pre-existing substances. This move helps reveal a politics of multiplicationthat has enabled officials to sustain the resource potential of Danube–Dnister Irriga-tion System waters. As recognition of Sasyk as polluted and valueless increased, offi-cials mobilized linkages that consolidated Sasyk as a fish reservoir, and its maincanal as irrigable and drinking water, thereby stymieing activists’ restoration campaign.

keywords Natural resources, water, materiality, infrastructure, environmentalism,Ukraine

The water is green. Its foul stench is choking us. Before they closed Sasyk off from thesea, it was good here. Now we have no health, no estuary, and no mud healing facili-ties. (Resident of Borysivka, Tatarbunary District, Ukraine, 13 August 2010)

In 1976, construction began on a giant, multi-phase agro-industrial project inthe south-western Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. One component ofthis project, the Danube–Dnister Irrigation System (DDIS), was a scheme

to turn the 210 km2 Sasyk lyman (estuary) in Tatarbunary District (OdessaOblast) into a freshwater reservoir that would be used to irrigate the surrounding

ethnos, 2014 (pp. 1–27), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2014.940990

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steppe. This involved the construction of a 14 km dike to close the estuary offfrom the Black Sea, a 13.5 km canal to transport fresh water from the DanubeRiver, pumping stations, and smaller irrigation canals. The scheme was analmost unmitigated disaster. High levels of salinity in the reservoir’s waterdamaged thousands of hectares of irrigated land. Village wells became saline.Homes were abandoned as the water level rose half a metre. Therapeuticmuds became saturated with heavy metals. Toxic algae blooms flourished.Villagers experienced an increase in rashes and gastrointestinal, circulatory,and respiratory diseases. In spite of this catastrophe, irrigation continued onsome lands until 2000.

The environmental, economic, and health consequences of this failedscheme did not go unopposed. Even in the Soviet period, environmental acti-vists and some state officials mobilized against the project. In 1996, an NGOcalled Vidrodzhennia (Renaissance) was formed to respond to residents’ con-cerns and campaigned to ‘return Sasyk to the sea’ (povernemo Sasyk moriu!) –to dismantle the dam and restore the saltwater ecosystem. Between 1997 and2009, activists led by Iryna Vykhrystiuk (b. 1971 Tatarbunary) accumulatedscientific, engineering, and economic expertise, demonstrating that Sasyk istoo polluted to use and too expensive to maintain, and that a restored saltwaterSasyk would generate more economic value. While they nearly achieved theirgoal in 2009 when the Odessa Oblast Council passed a resolution calling forSasyk’s rehabilitation, this process was shut down after Viktor Yanukovichwas elected president in winter 2010 and has been stalled ever since. Thirtyyears after the DDIS’s initial failure, 29,000 hectares of land are still registeredas being irrigated by it, even though irrigation ceased in 2000. Meanwhile in2003, Lake Sasyk officially became a fish-harvesting reservoir. The DDIS con-tinues to receive state funding even though many of its pumping stationshave been stripped of equipment and the main pump (which moved waterinto the main canal and the Black Sea, thereby ensuring circulation) nolonger functions.

This paper’s puzzle is that of the activists: What explains the persistence andcontinued state funding of a broken and partially dismantled irrigation systemconnected to a toxic and saline body of water? A close examination of the waysin which Sasyk continues to come into being as a freshwater resource can illu-minate the system’s obduracy. Activists explain the DDIS’s persistence in termsof individual and departmental financial and political interests. While I do notdisagree, my aim is to demonstrate how the achievement of these interestsinvolves complex networks and alliances among humans and nonhumans.

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I argue that avoiding a priori distinctions between nature and society, scienceand politics, subjects and objects (Latour 1993; Descola & Palsson 1996)allows for conceiving natural resources not as pre-given substances but as mate-rialities whose existence is emergent in and distributed across assemblages ofhumans, substances, infrastructures, documents, expertise, and regulation(Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014). This makes it possible to see a politics ofmultiplication that has enabled irrigation and water authority officials tosustain the resource potential of DDIS waters. As activists weakened thearrangements holding Sasyk together as an irrigable water resource, officialscreated and suppressed connections with fish, toxins, scientists, pipes, canals,fishing firms, and politicians that brought into being other versions of freshwater as a resource (drinking water and fish reservoir). This created intransigentobstacles to the activists’ restoration campaign.

I first learned about this conflict in June 2008, when I began researching thepolitics of conservation in the Danube Delta. This paper is based on annualinterviews and conversations with key Tatarbunary-based activists untilAugust 2013, and on news bulletins, reports, letters, and newspaper articlesfrom Vidrodzhennia’s files. I also interviewed Danube Biosphere Reserve scien-tists and administrators, a former senior bureaucrat from the Odessa StateWater Department, an economist from the Institute of Market Problems(IMP), a fishing firm director, three employees of the DDIS, and attended ameeting in August 2010 where Iryna Vykhrystiuk briefed 25 villagers. Irynafigures prominently in the paper because she has kept the campaign goingsince 1996 while other activists have come and gone. I focus on activists’ engage-ments with scientists and state officials rather than translations between activistsand villagers, the sociality of activism (Pink 2008), differential political capital(Connor et al. 2009), or the formation of activist subjectivities (Phillips 2005).While the social aspects of activism are important, by analysing the distributedmateriality of interests, I can best engage with activists as knowledge producers(Paley 2001; Berglund 2006) in order to deepen the understanding of sharedmatters of concern.

Sasyk’s Resource Materialities and the Politics of MultiplicationExplaining Sasyk’s continuing existence as a resource requires an acknowl-

edgement that natural resources are much more than the substances weknow as, for instance, water, land, or oil. Recent anthropological approacheshave countered scientistic and economic understandings of resources assources of energy, raw materials, and land ‘provided . . . freely by nature and

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Politics of Multiplication in a Failed Soviet Irrigation Project 3

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geology’ (Barbier 2011: 6) by conceiving resources as irreducibly social. Ferryand Limbert define resources as ‘objects and subjects produced from naturefor human enrichment and use’ (2008: 3). Following Locke, they stresshuman appropriation as key to the making of resources, an act, they assert,that positions resources between nature and society. However, the nature/society and subject/object distinctions underpinning these notions make it dif-ficult to understand the ways in which DDIS water exists as a resource by virtueof networks that span these very divides. It is by attending to these webs ofrelations and how they constitute resource substances that we can better seehow an anti-resource – a case where water destroys rather than generatesvalue – can paradoxically exist as a resource.

The DDIS’ obduracy can thus be better explained by examining resources asrelational phenomena that are ‘spatially extended and ontologically dispersed’(Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014). Weszkalnys and I have proposed ‘resourcematerialities’ to capture the mutually constituting social and material dimen-sions of natural resource environments (Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014).Here, materiality does not refer to ‘matter’ as an autonomous substrate ontologi-cally distinct from discourse, thought, and symbols as is common in Marxistthinking (Maurer 2006). We draw on scholars in anthropology and sciencestudies who insist that persons, things, and materials are the outcomes ofrelations, networks, and practices (Law 2002; Mol 2002; Strathern 2004;Latour 2005). Resource materialities involve more than the specific materialsnamed as resources (i.e. water) and encompass (1) resource ontologies, orassumptions about their nature, affordances, and effects; (2) different ways inwhich specific resources come to be known; (3) infrastructures constructed toextract, refine, and transport resources; and (4) the ways resources are experi-enced and embodied by people who handle them. The term aims to moveaway from an exclusive focus on human appropriation in the formation ofnatural resources. However, our point is not simply that things – such as apump or water – have ‘agency’ in a similar fashion to humans.1 Rather, in treat-ing resources as relational, we wish to focus our analytical attention on therelations and practices that bring people and things into being as having particu-lar capacities (including recalcitrance), and that give them their relative promi-nence in stabilizing a particular resource assemblage.2

This paper treats versions of DDIS waters as toxic and valueless, productive forfishing, and useful for irrigation and drinking as the outcomes of differently con-solidated assemblages of substances, people, expertise, and regulation. The term‘politics of multiplication’ builds on and adds to an emerging anthropological and

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geographical literature that examines how water is entangled in and constitutiveof social and political life and that is also attentive to questions of materiality andmultiplicity (Bakker 2004; Strang 2005; Orlove & Caton 2010; Anand 2011; Li2013). This work is characterized by a tension between scholars who see materials’affordances existing independently of relations and practices and those who seethem as an effect of relations and practices (Ingold 2008). For Strang (2005)water’s mutability, connectivity, and multi-scalar existence explain in part thediversity of meanings water has and their commonality across cultures. Orloveand Caton (2010) characterize water as a Maussian ‘total social fact’ because itsfluid materiality enables it to connect different domains of human life and linkshumans and nonhumans in collaborative and conflictual relationships. Linton(2006) stresses that water’s multiplicity, its capacity to do so many things,makes it distinct from other resources. These authors suggest (advertently orinadvertently) that although water can mean and do different things, certain ofits properties are given.

In contrast, other scholars argue that water not only means different things, itcan also be different things depending on how it is known (Helmreich 2011: 133)and the assemblages it is part of (Barnes & Alatout 2012). This strand engageswith relational ontology approaches that start from the premise that allobjects are heterogeneous (Law 2002: 3; Mol 2002: 82) and that the apparentsingularity or coherence of objects in modernity (e.g. the disease atherosclerosisor an aircraft) is the product of coordination and distribution of practices, exper-tise, people, and things. Thus, in contrast to scholars who suggest that water hasparticular properties such as multiplicity, Law, Mol, and their followers arguethat all modern objects are multiplicities and that no object is inherently moremultiple than another (Mol 2002; Law & Singleton 2005). In the Sasyk case, Iargue that if we assume in advance what water is and what its properties are,we can see neither how it comes to be connective or disconnected, fluid or stag-nant, singularized or multiple, nor the practices and relations that make it existin one way and not another.

This paper analyses political struggles over what Sasyk is (lyman or lake) andwhat it should be. Its semi-fresh, semi-salt water has generated what I call a poli-tics of multiplication.3 The initial coordination and distribution of people, prac-tices, expertise, and materials in the DDIS did not produce water suitable forirrigation (Law 2002: 3; Mol 2002: 83–85). Consequently, Sasyk has become a‘matter of concern’ (Latour 2004), a controversy outside of which scientistsare unable to stand and generate consensus with their knowledge. While Moland Law’s work helps capture how water’s heterogeneity plays a role in this

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conflict, it is less helpful in specifying the politics of how it does so. Their projectof ontological politics is to expose the tensions that arise in coordinating objectsin order to show how reality might be ‘done’ differently. However, their sym-metrical approach to relations among humans and nonhumans shifts attentionaway from the ways in which asymmetries among humans may affect whichreality can exist. In order to account for asymmetries in the exercise of powerand the practice of politics, I turn to Andrew Barry (2001) for whom ‘the politi-cal’ refers to how ‘artefacts, activities or practices become objects of contesta-tion’ and ‘open up the space of politics’ (2001: 6). In analysing EU air qualitymonitoring schemes, Barry (2001) emphasizes ‘dirty’ bargains, governmentgrants, financial deals, and publicity through which particular socionaturaland sociotechnical arrangements are made durable (155). I use ‘politics of multi-plication’ to simultaneously pay attention to water’s heterogeneity and to antag-onism and asymmetrical power relations in maintaining and challenging Sasyk’sdifferent versions. Thus, whereas the DDIS’s failure provoked an activist politicsof singularization aimed at creating and breaking certain links in order to estab-lish freshwater Sasyk as polluted and valueless, as Sasyk began to cohere as atoxic water body it generated a politics of multiplication. Through the multipli-cation of relations composing DDIS waters – that is, making connectionsamong a series of other actors (fish, documents, officials, canals, and pipes) –officials brought into being new versions of freshwater resources thereby sty-mieing the restoration campaign.

Sasyk as a Matter of ConcernContemporary maps (including Google) identify Sasyk as a ‘lake’. Ukraine’s

Danube Basin Administration includes Sasyk and its feeder canal as part of theDanube Watershed because the river water flows into it. The proponents ofSasyk’s restoration, however, insist that Sasyk is really a lyman. Lymans arelakes, bays, or estuaries on the northwest Black Sea coast and the lowerDanube, which form at river mouths where the flow is blocked by a bar of sedi-ments. Sasyk was the southernmost and largest of a series of saltwater lymanslocated between the Dnister and Danube on the Black Sea’s northwest coast(Figure 1). Lymans’ pulsating character and dynamic hydrological regimemean that their depth and salinity varies over decades. Some lymans’ sandspits have openings allowing water to circulate (as with pre-DDIS Sasyk)while some do not. Around Sasyk, fresh ground water existed in the uppersoil and rock layers, and settlements had many springs and wells (Vlasenko &Polishchuk 2008: 4). Further, there are layers of hyper-saline water in lens-like

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Figure 1. Mapof Lake Sasykand surroundingdistrictshighlighting keycomponents ofthe DDIS. Mapby IrynaIakovlieva.

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formations underneath Sasyk that rise through springs and enter the lyman fromunderground. When Sasyk freezes in winter, dark holes in an expanse of whiteice reveal these springs’ location, and – according to activists – Sasyk’s truenature.

Agriculture, fishing, and tourism were the primary economic activities inTatarbunary District before the DDIS’s construction. The Budzhak Steppe sur-rounding Sasyk receives an annual rainfall of 400 mm and periodically enduresdroughts. When this area (called Bessarabia) was part of Romania before WorldWar II, goat herding predominated although agriculture was beginning toexpand around Sasyk. Collectivization after World War II (when this areabecame part of the USSR) brought more land under cultivation; these farmsgrew corn, sunflowers, grapes, and drought-resistant strains of wheat. Theprimary productive catch for collective farm fishing brigades was atherina,used primarily in fishmeal. Other freshwater and saltwater fish were caughtfor personal consumption and to sell at regional markets. The village of Bory-sivka was also home to one of the top five mud-healing sanatoria in the SovietUnion. Elderly residents recalled beaches packed with visitors during summermonths. Ivan Maksimchuk, a Tatarbunary-based activist in his early 50s (seebelow), said visiting relatives described the air near Sasyk as ‘good enough toeat’. Ivan, Iryna, and other residents over the age of 40 spoke about the pleasuresof summer swims in Sasyk’s warm, shallow water and their regret that theirchildren had been denied this. They cited stories of relatives and friendswhose ailments Sasyk had cured. Simplifying Sasyk (Mitchell 2002) to an irrig-able water resource severed the relations that made Sasyk a provider of daycare,leisure, recreation, pleasure, healing, and certain fish.

The DDIS’ origins can best be understood by considering Soviet land recla-mation policies during the 1960s and 1970s and how they pertained to southernUkraine. Under Brezhnev, the Ministry of Land Reclamation and WaterResources (Minvodhosp) came to dominate the development process anddesigned a number of projects involving inter-basin water transfer to increaseagricultural productivity (Bressler 1995: 247). The Siberian River DiversionProject, which aimed to divert the north flowing Ob and Irtash rivers and trans-port the water over 1550 miles to Central Asia, is the best known example (240).4

In southern Ukraine, Soviet development strategy focused on agricultural inten-sification and chemicalization. Predominant dryland farming techniques wereseen to be inefficient because some land always remained fallow and pro-ductivity was rainfall dependent (Vlasenko & Polishchuk 2008: 5). Ukraine’sMinvodhosp conceived the Danube–Dnipro Complex to divert 16 km3

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annually from the Danube through a canal system to a series of reservoirs, ofwhich Sasyk would be one. This water would be used to irrigate 8.7 million hec-tares of land. Multiple research institutes were enrolled in preparing the project.

The first stage – the DDIS – was initiated in 1976. It began with the construc-tion of a concrete and stone dike that cut Sasyk off from the sea, and a 5 m deep,100 m wide, and 13.5 km long canal to bring fresh water from the Danube. Sasykwas to be turned into a fresh water reserve by pumping its salt water into theBlack Sea and ‘washing out’ the basin with fresh (though extremely turbid)Danube water. It was thought that three ‘washes’ over 18 months wouldensure a level of dissolved salts one gram per litre (Rusev 1996: 10). Sasykwould then be used to irrigate 29,000 hectares of land in Tatarbunary andSarata districts. The project was also originally meant to provide infrastructureto pipe water for domestic and technical uses to local villages, but this com-ponent was later dropped as a cost-saving measure. The dike, canal, andmain pumping station were completed in 1978. A series of open, concrete-lined water transportation canals, hundreds of kilometres of pipes, and pumpswere constructed on Sasyk’s east side. The DDIS’s creation brought a varietyof new nonhumans into play (e.g. pipes, canals, freshwater from the Danube,dike, pumping stations, and land), radically reconfiguring and redistributingthe area’s resource materialities. The most radical and consequential redistribu-tion involved bringing Danube water to the Sasyk Basin and the soils of theBudzhak Steppe. After the pomp of initial display, the new reservoir with itssupporting infrastructure was meant to settle quietly into the background as a‘matter of fact’ (Latour 2004).

Things did not go according to plan. Engineers were only able to pump 80%of the water out because salt water continued to enter the basin from springsconnected to underground caverns. Even after being washed out, Sasyk wastoo saline for irrigation. Planners then raised the level by half a metre bypumping more water in from the Danube. Although tests on the first 5000 hec-tares showed that levels of dissolved salts – in which sodium chloride predomi-nated – were too high (at 1.6 grams per litre instead of one g/l) to irrigate thesouthern chernozem soils, and did not have a pH level acceptable for the soil(8.5 instead of 7), in 1981, 18,800 hectares were irrigated (Rusev 1996: 17).5 Resi-dents described how ‘the land resisted’. A former collective farm worker recalledhow after the first year of irrigation a tractor sunk so deep in the soil that only itscabin was visible.

The effects of Sasyk’s ‘uncooperative’ water (Bakker 2004) generated criti-cism during the Soviet period. Residents, scientists, and some district agrono-

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mists raised concerns about irrigating with it as early as spring 1982 (Rusev 1996:17). During the 1980s, different commissions produced critical reports. In 1984, areport to the Central Committee of the Communist Party (USSR) was used by aPolitbureau member to sharply criticize Ukraine’s Minvodhosp for permittingirrigation with saline water (1996: 10). Another commission from the Councilon the Study of Productive Forces of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences(CSPF) reported on changes in the land, salinization of wells, the departureof 3000 people from the irrigated zone, and the loss of therapeutic mud. It rec-ommended that irrigation be stopped, that irrigation water be drawn from theDanube not Sasyk, that the dike be opened, that measures be taken to restorethe degraded lands, and that Minvodhosp compensate affected farms (1996:11). The head of Ukriuzhgiprovodkhoz (the institution that oversaw theDDIS’s creation) was fired but irrigation continued. Minvodhosp was given per-mission to try to ‘correct’ the water to mitigate its impact on the soil by addingacid (to lower the pH) and gypsum (to bond with the sodium ions) to the irri-gation canals. Although this caused further damage, this assemblage of man-agers, technicians, scientists, and equipment funded by Minvodhosp was ableto coax crops from the damaged lands, albeit at a lower rate of productivitythan unirrigated lands.

The DDIS’ failure played a part in the emergence of late Soviet environment-alism in the region similar to the way the Chernobyl disaster and hydroelectricdams in Ukraine and Hungary galvanized national environmental movements(Fitzmaurice 1996; Petryna 2002; Harper 2005). Ivan Rusev, a former residentwith a candidate degree in biology who had participated in expeditions study-ing the effects of the DDIS, founded a group to challenge this and other projects.Following reforms in 1989 that allowed non-Communist Party members tostand for election, he and his colleagues were elected to the Oblast Counciland appointed to the commission on natural resources. They prepared areport that repeated the recommendations made previously. Despite theeffort to make the DDIS into a major controversy, it endured these challengesand continued to irrigate, while officials planned for its expansion.

The DDIS became a full-blown ‘matter of concern’ after the end of the SovietUnion in 1991 and the emergence of Ukraine as an independent nation-state.Because of the fiscal crisis and the liberalization of prices for items like electri-city, the DDIS could no longer afford to operate the main pump that circulatedSasyk’s water. Toxic algae blooms intensified.6 When villagers voiced concernsabout dramatic increases in rashes, respiratory illnesses, and certain cancers totheir Parliamentary Deputy, he gathered village activists and founded the

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local environmental organization ‘Vidrodzhennia’ to press for information fromrelevant ministries. Iryna Vykhrystiuk, an engineer by training who had workedin the Tatarbunary District Ecological Inspection for six years, took on theNGO’s leadership and has been its driving force ever since. She becameinvolved because her attempts to answer residents’ questions about theimpact of the condition of water and fish on health while working in the Eco-logical Inspection were thwarted by her superiors, who told her ‘this is a stateproblem, it’s not your affair’. To this day, she feels an obligation to the womenwho turned to her for help in understanding the cause of their children’s ill-nesses and death.

Although Iryna did not know what an NGO was when she agreed to leadVidrodzhennia, she quickly embraced the role of advocate. Early on, shespoke extensively with agronomists, doctors, local and oblast-level officials,and villagers, some of whom were her relatives. She participated in American,EU and WWF-funded training opportunities, which included trips to theUSA and Austria. These gave her models for building an advocacy organizationand enabled her to form connections with other Ukrainian environmentalorganizations with which she collaborates on other campaigns. Iryna character-ized Vidrodzhennia’s political philosophy as ‘constructive radicalism’ in con-trast to other Ukrainian environmental organizations’ focus on education andwillingness to cooperate with authorities. Grants from Ukrainian, US, and Euro-pean foundations for projects on sanitation, organic farming, river restoration,and solar energy helped her sustain an office and three to four employees,and build relationships with teachers, farmers, doctors, and students in affectedareas who help in organizing meetings and demonstrations concerning Sasyk.

Ivan Maksimchuk is one of 20 people Iryna has attracted to work in Vidrodz-hennia and his recruitment was similar to other activists. He explained thatVidrodzhennia activists are all people willing to challenge the authorities. Aveterinarian by training, Ivan returned to Tatarbunary from Odessa in the early1990s to farm in a chemical-free, non-mechanized manner. In the early 2000s,he fought a court case to the highest levels to ensure he and a group of farmersgot the state farm shares to which they were entitled. Iryna convinced him towork on the organic farming project after they campaigned together duringthe 2004 presidential elections. His farming connections also enabled him toplay an important role in organizing Sasyk-related meetings and demonstrations.

The NGO’s founding also coincided with the passage of two Cabinet ofMinisters’ resolutions that activists and experts would later cite. Passed in1995 and 1996, respectively, one included Sasyk in an expanded list of Ramsar

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protected wetlands and the other included it on a list of water bodies with thera-peutic muds that should be protected. The USSR’s disintegration thusunleashed a host of unanticipated events in the life of freshwater Sasyk (expens-ive electricity, new forms of politics, and new environmental legislation) thatreconfigured its resource materialities and generated new forms of struggle.

Challenging Sasyk as a Freshwater ResourceThe NGO leaders began their campaign by consolidating a public and a

nature on whose behalf the leaders would speak. Iryna explained: ‘Weneeded to make it clear whose interests we were representing . . . We turnedto science to find out what people were drinking, breathing, and eating.’ Shealso created a news bulletin to publicize information about Sasyk. Villageheads conducted a survey of 5000 residents of affected villages in Tatarbunarydistrict (Trapivka, Lyman, Hlyboke, Borysivka, and Bilolissia) about whatshould be done. Ninety-seven per cent were in favour of ‘returning Sasyk tothe sea’ (Vidrodzhennia 1998: 1).7 A letter sent by Borysivka’s Village Head toVidrodzhennia in May 1997 with completed survey forms stated:

Those who made Sasyk into a freshwater reservoir wanted to do something useful forpeople but produced the opposite result. Instead of irrigated lands and a freshwaterreservoir we have a foul-smelling water body. . . . We request your help in resolvingthis problem since the lives and health of many people depend on it. It is our obli-gation to return Lake Sasyk’s lost beauty. We need to act. Otherwise the damagewill only grow and our children and grandchildren will not forgive us.

Since the details of a 1994 state-commissioned expert study remained inac-cessible, in 1997 the NGO commissioned an independent expert study of fishpathologies, the presence of heavy metals in water and mud, and Sasyk’s hydro-chemical condition. Using a $500 grant from the US Initiative for Social Actionand Renewal, Iryna turned to an ichthyologist and a biochemist from the Mol-dovan Academy of Sciences. She did not trust Ukrainian scientists because oftheir involvement in creating the DDIS and their inability (in her view) toadmit a mistake. In generating expertise to demonstrate the link betweenSasyk’s condition and residents’ health problems, Vidrodzhennia resemblescitizen groups around the world (Leach et al. 2005; Choy 2011) who seek outscientists as ‘reliable witnesses’ to substantiate their claims. However, Vidrodz-hennia did not initially challenge science’s status as expert knowledge in con-trast to activists elsewhere who were more ambivalent about science as a wayof ‘knowing nature’ (Berglund 2001).

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In 1997, activists sought to link the properties of Sasyk’s air, water, and mud,and the pathologies suffered by human and other organisms in order to appealto state authorities to protect citizens’ right to a safe environment. Toxicologicaltests conducted in Chisinau, Moldova translated polluting elements in the land,water, mud, and fish invisible to the human eye into figures that could be com-pared with state standards (Callon 1986). Levels of zinc, lead, cadmium, nickel,copper, and chromium in Sasyk’s muds were several times higher than theaccepted norm and were elevated in fish. Nitrate levels in the water were alsohigher than the sanitary norm for fish harvesting water bodies. When I encoun-tered this expert study in Vidrodzhennia’s file, I was surprised by its unassumingappearance. The biochemist’s report was a single word-processed sheet withthree tables specifying (a) different forms of nitrogen and phosphorus in mg/l; (b) heavy metals in mg/l of filtered water; and (c) heavy metals in the sus-pended sediments of water in mg/l. A hand-drawn map in the corner indicatedwhere the samples had been taken. Nevertheless, this modest, independentexpert study allowed activists to expand connections and consolidate aversion of Sasyk as a highly polluted water body unsuitable for irrigation, athreat to human health, and therefore in need of restoration. This in turnattracted other, more prominently positioned experts. In February 1998, Irynasent her results to Serhii Dorohuntsov, head of the Institute of IndependentExperts in Kyiv and the CSPF, who had criticized the project in the late1980s. Dorohuntsov sent researchers specializing in agricultural economics,the economics of water systems, and soil sciences. Their study establishedother links between the composition of Sasyk’s water and soil damage, andbetween its hydrological regime and erosion, and highlighted economic pro-ductivity issues (Vidrodzhennia 1999). In his capacity as deputy, Dorohuntsov(with Iryna’s help) petitioned the Cabinet of Ministers to respond to the situ-ation. Although the meeting organized in response only called for moreresearch, for Vidrodzhennia this meant official, national-level recognition ofan ecological problem that had so far been elusive. This was importantbecause a Cabinet of Ministers’ resolution is required to open the dike.

The production of this new information indirectly challenged assumptionsthat freshwater Sasyk was a resource and the web of relations that sustainedit. In commissioning expertise, the activists began to coordinate Sasyk as afailed resource. This counter-singularizing act sought to demonstrate thatSasyk was not what its managers claimed it was. Now in possession ofadditional evidence and official recognition, Iryna and her colleagues attractedattention from prominent national media outlets. Presence of heavy metals was

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translated into ecological harm, which made possible collaboration with localauthorities. Images of toxic green-blue algae, deformed fish, eroded shorelines,and floating gravestones were particularly evocative. These conditions, activistsargued, were the result of the water’s inability to circulate, while elevated levelsof sodium and chloride ions were evidence that Sasyk was really a lyman and nota lake or reservoir. Using this evidence, in 1999–2000, the activists worked witha supportive Tatarbunary State Administration (TSA) and succeeded in passinga Tatarbunary District Council (TDC) resolution calling for Sasyk’s restoration.Activists and TSA head Ivan Panchyshyn used this resolution to pressure oblastand national authorities.

In the early 2000s, Vidrodzhennia began to dispute more directly Sasyk’sstatus as a freshwater resource. The NGO considered how and for whomSasyk could generate economic value in its freshwater and saltwater states.This occurred after a roundtable in 2000 that discussed a report commissionedby the Oblast State Water Department (OSWD) evaluating existing studies onDDIS expansion (see below) (Vidrodzhennia 2000: 2–3). OSWD officials cau-tioned against opening the dike because no one had modelled what wouldhappen (Vidrodzhennia 2000: 4). According to Iryna, they frightened villagersby claiming that opening the dike could produce another disaster. Althoughactivists continued to gather statistics demonstrating links between the toxinsin Sasyk and health problems, and to press the authorities to fund more exten-sive research, they shifted their focus to the potential of saltwater Sasyk toimprove the district’s economy and modelling the impact of opening the dike.

In 2002, Vidrodzhennia obtained funding from the Kyiv Regional Ecologi-cal Foundation to hire an engineering firm to produce a technical-economicreport ‘Renaturalizing the Ecosystem of the Sasyk Lyman’ (ProektgidroStroi2002). The report responded to OWSD officials’ disaster warnings andsought to buttress the recommendations of the Restoration and SustainableDevelopment Program for Sasyk and its Surrounding Territories commissionedby the Odessa Oblast Council from the Academy of Sciences IMP inAugust 2001 (the author of a 1993 report justifying renaturalization). ProektGi-droStroi’s report not only provided a model for opening the dike and pipingwater to Sasyk’s east side, but also compared the likely costs with those ofmaintaining the irrigation system. The IMP’s development programmefocused on tourism, mud therapy, biodiversity conservation, organic agricul-ture rather than freshwater Sasyk’s obsolete, expensive-to-maintain technol-ogy. These economic arguments exposed the drain on state finances interms of salaries and infrastructure maintenance and demonstrated how a

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restored Sasyk could generate economic value for significantly more people.However, the Oblast Council deputies’ response was a cautious call formore investigation while neither the head of the OSWD, nor the new headof the TSA, nor the head of the TDC came to the meeting despite repeatedattempts to coordinate the date. The Oblast Council passed an economic andsocial development initiative, one article of which aimed at alleviating theproblems near Sasyk (Bondarchuk 2003a: 1). This allowed authorities tofunnel resources into maintaining the DDIS (see below). Vidrodzhenniawrote letters to the President, Prime Minister, and Minister of Environmentand in 2004, the Ministry of Environment commissioned a report from itsKharkiv-based institute. This 200-page, state-funded, official expert study pro-vided extensive data on the hydrological, ecological, and toxicological situ-ation that supported Vidrodzhennia’s claims.

The activists thus established links and built alliances that undermined thewebs of relations of people and things that secured Lake Sasyk as a fresh-water resource. According to Iryna, their independent expert study ‘set every-thing in motion’. The field and lab studies enabled them to consolidatelinkages among previously unrecognized elements, disease, and algaeblooms. These other scientific studies established relations between thewater’s salinity and soil damage, and between the existence of the dike andshore erosion. This helped secure national-level recognition of a problem, aresolution on restoration at the district level, and eventually a state-fundedexpert report (to which the government is required to respond). Thestudies’ exposure of these relations helped consolidate a version of Sasyk asstagnant, polluted, and valueless because it did not circulate and was discon-nected from the sea. The emergence of toxins and elevated levels of sodiumand chloride ions and their connection with human illness and soil damageindirectly undermined Sasyk’s capacity to be a freshwater resource of anykind. The NGO then engaged more explicitly with issues of economicvalue to tackle counterarguments that saltwater Sasyk would be worthlessand that opening the dike would produce another disaster. Through politicaland scientific practices of demonstration (Barry 2001) the activists and theirallies began to materialize Sasyk as a restored lyman by developing a planto break the dike and an economic development programme. By mobilizingscientific practices Vidrodzhennia established linkages and networks – a kindof politics of counter-singularization – to prove to the authorities that Sasykis a useless, harmful water object, not the productive water body its managersclaim it is.

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The Politics of MultiplicationDDIS and OSWD officials tried to thwart freshwater Sasyk’s consolidation

as polluted and valueless by concealing information, producing test results atodds with those demonstrating the presence of pollutants, changing Sasyk’slegal status to a fish-harvesting reservoir, and continuing to demonstrate howthe Danube–Sasyk canal could be used for drinking and irrigation purposes.They also intervened with public statements about the threat of water scarcitysuch as ‘this is the Budzhak Steppe – the Tatar-Mongols didn’t even stop herebecause there was nowhere to drink, nothing to eat, and no pastures’ (Vidrodz-hennia 2000: 3). While water authority officials initially tried to suppress andestablish ties that would maintain Sasyk as an irrigable water resource inorder to keep state funding, they later collaborated with Fishing Committeeofficials to reconfigure property relations in ways that enabled them toinclude commercial actors as well. I dub their efforts a politics of multiplicationbecause the forging of connections created multiple, overlapping resourceassemblages (actual and potential) from DDIS waters.

TSA head Ivan Panchyshyn’s introductory remarks during an NGO-organized roundtable in December 2000 demonstrate the authority OSWDofficials felt they wielded in establishing ‘matters of fact’ in the face of contra-dicting data. The roundtable was held to discuss an OSWD-compiled expertstudy in support of maintaining the DDIS that had been commissioned inresponse to the TDC’s restoration resolution. Iryna discovered that many ofthe participating scientists’ signatures had been falsified, while other scientistswere pensioners who had not participated. Ivan Panchyshyn stated:

It’s troubling that 19 respected men signed a dubious document, possibly withoutreading it. We come to this conclusion from the statement: ‘The reservoir is usedfor irrigation.’ A 21,000 hectare reservoir is used to irrigate 150 hectares. They alsowrite: ‘The fish catch has been increasing annually and Sasyk can be consideredone of the most productive water bodies in the world.’ If 15 kg of fish from onehectare of water is the most productive in the world, then I really don’t have anythingto add. . . . What are we fighting for? . . . An object that we can dump state money into sup-porting? . . . An object we don’t know what to use for, except that we know it can’t be used forirrigation? (quoted in Vidrodzhennia 2000: 1–2, emphasis added)8.

OSWD officials also mobilized politically and technically to concealelements in the water, soil damage, and data about cancer rates, acts aimed atunmaking links between freshwater Sasyk, health concerns, and lowered econ-omic productivity. Iryna was unable to get an official letter from the head doctor

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of the Cancer Institute for Children confirming the treatment of children fromTatarbunary, even though doctors had asked why so many children from thedistrict were there. In 2001, the NGO commissioned additional tests on fish,in which samples were sent to labs in Odessa and five neighbouring countries.Foreign tests all demonstrated elevated levels of heavy metals, whereas theOdessa lab tests showed normal levels. During my 13 August 2010 visit, a Mol-dovan graduate student explained that Odessa lab technicians had responded tohis questions about their results as follows: ‘We need money. They pay. Weprovide the results they need.’ Agronomists told Iryna they were forced toswitch data on the productivity of irrigated and unirrigated fields. In contendingwith dissolved salts, chemicals, and tests and documents revealing their exist-ence, Irrigation and OSWD officials undermined the formation of arrangementsthat could solidify Sasyk as valueless.

As Panchyshyn indicates, state funding rather than profits from selling wateror fish is the main way DDIS employees generate economic value from Sasyk.Roughly 150 people work in the DDIS itself even though no land is irrigated.Some, as of August 2013, were still employed to guard pumping stations thathave not worked since 2000 and have been stripped of metal. According toOleg Rubel, an IMP economist, a large part of DDIS funding – one milliondollars annually – goes towards salaries. Because the district’s economy isone of the more depressed in Odessa oblast, this money is important in reducingsocial tensions and as a source of income for the district (salary deductions flowinto the district budget). This makes the local state administration a strongDDIS ally.

Shoreline erosion, aging equipment, and the Danube–Sasyk canal’s siltationalso helped the DDIS obtain additional funding to build protection walls,dredge the canal and rivers, and renovate some equipment. Indeed, in March2002 the OSWD director was elected to the Odessa Oblast Council where, ashead of the ecological committee, he allocated funds intended for nature protec-tion to restore the pump and deal with erosion. Commenting on this situation,Vidrodzhennia activist Oleksandr Bondarchuk wrote, ‘To advance your career,you need money. The easiest place to get money is the state budget’ (2003b: 2).This individual also oversaw the dismantling of much of the above-groundequipment and its sale as scrap metal. A few pumping stations are maintainedto show visiting officials from Kyiv that the system is in working condition.The theft of the system’s materials intensified again in fall 2011 when some50 km of metal pipes were dug up and removed.9 However, the resource poten-tiality of the DDIS waters over the longer term, and the system’s capacity to

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generate benefits for a group of people, hinges on the possibility that its canalsand pipes might still be used to transport water, if not from Sasyk, then directlyfrom the Danube via the 13.5 km canal. How much can be dismantled before thepotential for irrigable water really does cease to exist? If all the undergroundpipes are dismantled would Sasyk’s capacity to be an irrigable water resourcefinally dissipate?

Though Sasyk as a freshwater irrigation resource might dissipate withthe pipes’ disappearance, changing Sasyk from a ‘water reservoir’ to a ‘fish-harvesting reservoir’ stabilized a different version of freshwater Sasyk as thesite of a productive fishery. This created additional allies for the DDIS andthe OSWD and new obstacles to the dike’s removal. Faced with mounting evi-dence of the unsuitability of Sasyk’s water for irrigation, the cost of maintainingthe DDIS, and the declining fish catch (10 kg/hectare instead of 40 kg), in 2003

the heads of OSWD and the State Fishing Committee (SFC) and the Governorof Odessa Oblast changed Sasyk’s status so artificial stocking could be renewedand commercial fishing enhanced (Vykhrystiuk 2010). A commercial fisherywas not a component of the original design. However, when Sasyk wasdiked, it was stocked with Asian Carp to control water plants. Soon variousDanube fish species (carassius, cyprinus carpio, sander lucioperca) became charac-teristic of the waters and various collectives began to fish. After an initial spike infish populations in 1987, fish stocks, particularly the more valuable fish, declinedthrough the 1990s (Vlasenko et al. 2004: 134– 135). At the December 2000 round-table, SFC representatives claimed ‘Sasyk is useless in its natural state becausethe catch would decline from 400 tons annually to zero.’ Activists counterthat a Black Sea mullet fishery could be renewed and that mullets fetch amuch higher price per kilogram than freshwater fish species. In changingSasyk’s status, usual procedures requiring various agencies to check water andfish quality were bypassed. This suppressed relations that would expose fishpathologies and render the water body unsuitable for raising fish. How didthe DDIS and OSWD benefit? According to Iryna: ‘They get paid twice toclean the main canal. From the OSWD. And the SFC. Small money interestsof different people.’

Changing Sasyk’s status consolidated an arrangement of firms, farms, fish,and the SFC that actualized this new version of freshwater Sasyk. It corre-sponded with the SFC’s creation of ‘Specialized Commercial Fisheries’ thatallowed an organization to purchase exclusive rights (rezhim) to stock andharvest fish on artificial water bodies. The organization paid the SFC for therezhim, and the Southern Scientific Research Institute for calculating the

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catch, the fish to be stocked, and the number of boats and nets permitted.Initially, the Tatarbunary-based Association of Fishing Firms (comprising 28

firms) purchased the rezhim. The goal was to harvest 1500 tons by 2008 butonly 521 tons were harvested. When the catch fell short (because of waterquality), some fishermen began to reorient towards rehabilitating Sasyk, andthe arrangement began to unravel. The high cost of stocking Sasyk relative toprofits led to the closure of two-thirds of the Association’s firms (Vykhrystiuk2010). After the 2009 Oblast Council decision to restore Sasyk the Associationdid not stock fish to avoid further losses because all were to be caught whendike was opened. Not stocking fish meant the Association violated its contrac-tual obligations with the SFC. In 2010, the Association’s right to stock and catchfish was revoked and given to a single firm from outside the district. This firm’sexecutive director explained to me that the specifications for fishing (size ofcatch and number of nets) remained unchanged. One firm was thus allowedto monopolize the Sasyk fishery (Vykhrystiuk 2010). Although the fish werenot entirely reliable allies because they did not flourish as anticipated, thecatch was significant enough that some people could profit from it (particularlywhen the number of firms was reduced from 28 to 1). This enabled the fishingand water authority officials to challenge activists’ version of Sasyk as polluted.It reinforced linkages between fisheries scientists and officials, freshwater Sasyk,the Danube–Sasyk Canal, and the dike. The income from administering thefishery would be lost if Sasyk were renaturalized because ‘specialized commer-cial fisheries’ cannot operate on the sea.

The connection between the Danube and the Budzhak Steppe created by theDDIS canal and pipes enabled officials to conjure drinking water and irrigationwater, two additional versions of water that helped stymie restoration. InAugust 2008, Vidrodzhennia and village activists organized a large protest onthe dike. Five hundred people – local farmers, pensioners, teachers, schoolchil-dren, business people, heads of village councils, and some officials from the localstate administration – dug a channel through the dike’s sandy part to expressfrustration at oblast officials’ failure to dedike Sasyk. The demonstration even-tually led to the 2009 Oblast Council resolution on rehabilitation. Whenoptions to rehabilitate Sasyk were reviewed, OSWD officials insisted that itprovide irrigation water to Sasyk’s east side and drinking water to Sasyk’s vil-lages, and that it not disrupt drinking water supplies from the canal in Pry-morske (in the neighbouring Kiliya District). They pressed for a water mainto be built from the canal to supply water to the town of Tatarbunary (whichsuffered chronic shortages) and surrounding villages (which had no running

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water). A design combining dike-opening and drinking and irrigation water ismore complicated to get agreement on and more costly to fund. SFC andOSWD officials insisted on the coordination of these versions of freshwaterprior to restoration while simultaneously sowing divisions between villagersin neighbouring districts about drinking water. Iryna expressed exasperationabout these coordination difficulties while we ate dinner at her home in May2010. She insisted that oblast authorities could get funding from existing stateprogrammes (for village drinking water and for land reclamation) for each com-ponent separately, but that this was not being pursued. The oblast-allocatedfunds for the multi-component project were insufficient and so none wasdesigned.

In summer 2010, the oblast-level process was closed and transferred back tothe Cabinet of Ministers in Kyiv, which formed an inter-departmental commis-sion to reopen the question of whether rehabilitation should occur. ‘We have anew Communist Party’ Iryna said during my August 2010 visit. Yanukovich hadappointed Party of Regions members to all key positions in local, regional, andnational state institutions. Many officials she had worked with on the rehabili-tation project were gone. After explaining this to 25 elderly villagers who bravedthe 40-degree heat to attend the August 13 meeting, attendees spoke about ill-nesses and deaths, and Hlyboke’s village head reported how in his informalexperiment cattle that drank from Sasyk had diseases not present in thosethat did not. They shared information about district officials’ efforts to allocateland adjacent to Sasyk for commercial development, violating the Water Code.Iryna called on everyone to be ready to demonstrate.

In subsequent visits I learned that the inter-departmental commission metonce in fall 2010 but has not met since. The IMP was to collect expertisefrom different Academy of Sciences institutes and submit it to the Ministry ofEnvironment. Over the course of 2011, Iryna abandoned her efforts to ‘knockon doors’ because she realized she was wasting her time. When I visited Tatar-bunary in June 2011, Iryna called the Ministry to find out about their response tothe Academy of Sciences’ report. The official complained that the staff of hisdepartment had been cut and that the Academy of Sciences report did nothave the right signature. The report was later found to be inconclusivebecause not all the institutes concluded that renaturalization was the bestoption. A former senior administrator of the OSWD explained that none ofthe institutions are prepared to consider the problem outside their narrowdepartmental and financial interests.

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The politics of multiplying DDIS waters as a fish-harvesting reservoir, and asdrinking and irrigable water, involved the suppression and forging of linkagesthat congealed into materials such as water, heavy metals, equipment, docu-ments, and fish forming partially connected, partially overlapping resourceassemblages. As the arrangements holding Sasyk together as an irrigablewater resource were weakened, officials’ mobilization and suppression of alli-ances and connections brought new water resources into existence. Thecapacities of certain species of fish, the canal, pipes, and regulation linking theDanube and the Budzhak Steppe were important in consolidating freshwaterresource assemblages. The presence of fish – their ability to survive in sufficientif not substantial quantities – testified to freshwater Sasyk’s productivity and thenecessity of keeping the dike intact. The zoning of lands as ‘irrigated’ makespossible arguments for renewing irrigation. Moreover, as long as the canaland pipes exist they have the potential to carry water for irrigation or industry– a potential not readily dismissed – and can justify continued funding of theDDIS. Potential flows of drinking and irrigation water from the Danube thusdisplaced stagnant, polluted Sasyk as a matter of concern and caused a criticaldelay in the dediking process. A dual consideration of resources as distributedmaterialities and of the politics of multiplying DDIS waters helps explain thepeculiar obduracy of this failed system.

ConclusionA 12 ton pump was stolen from a major pumping station near the village of

Trapivka a few weeks before I visited Tatarbunary in August 2013. While Irynaexpressed outrage publically, she considered the intensifying theft of materials apositive step towards Sasyk’s eventual rehabilitation. As Iryna and I chattedwith a former DDIS employee in the shade of Lyman’s market stalls on 2

August 2013 she said:

They [DDIS & OSWD] will not open Sasyk until they sell everything off. I’m satisfied.Let them steal it all. Then maybe someone will have an interest in restoring it . . .Maybe Rinat Akhmetov (Ukraine’s richest billionaire) will want to build a yachtclub. Then the head of the inter-departmental commission will be ordered to passa resolution. Why should Akhmetov pay to open the dike when he can get thestate to do it?

Iryna’s comment that the disappearance of the material components of thebroken infrastructure may shift alliances in favour of restoring Sasyk dovetails

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with a key argument of this paper. Natural resources are emergent in and dis-tributed among ever-shifting assemblages comprising humans, organisms, sub-stances, regulation, discourses, and technology. This approach contrasts withconceiving resources as produced exclusively through human acts of appropria-tion and labour. By exposing pollutants and commissioning expert models andeconomic calculations, activists engaged in a politics of singularizing Sasyk as atoxic water object devoid of the potential to be a resource for irrigation. In thisversion, the dike and the DDIS system became obstacles to ecosystem healthand economic development. However, Sasyk’s restoration has been stalled bya politics of multiplication that has created several versions of freshwater thathinge on keeping the dike intact. As long as some pumps and pipes remain,the DDIS’s existence can be rationalized in terms of its potential to supply irrig-able water. This has prevented activists from achieving a definitive decision toopen the dike. A relational approach to how resources come to be and how theyare maintained thus helps explain Sasyk’s puzzling persistence as a freshwaterresource.

Water has had many different existences in the course of this conflict, andthinking of water as a single pre-given substance with multiple meaningscannot resolve the puzzle of the DDIS’s persistence. Anthropological analysesthat essentialize water not only reinstate material-social and nature-societydivides (Helmreich 2011). They may also obscure the ethnographic specificityof the ways water exists in particular environments and of people’s entangle-ments with it – one of the main ways anthropologists can contribute tobroader discussions about water resources (Orlove & Caton 2010). In theSasyk case, while the activists tried to hold in place a version of Sasyk as value-less because it was disconnected from the sea, the water authorities’ actions hadthe effect of multiplying versions of freshwater resources and displacing fresh-water Sasyk’s toxicity as a matter of concern.

The term ‘politics of multiplication’ captures the antagonistic politics andasymmetrical power relations involved in struggles over Sasyk’s ontology –that is, whether it is a freshwater reservoir or a lyman. Though multiplicityfigures in this conflict, I depart from Mol and Law’s ontological politics,which seems to be underpinned by a liberal conception of politics. This isevident in hopeful language that once different realities are revealed, peoplecan debate and choose the better one (Mol 1999). In contrast to Mol andLaw, for whom exposing objects’ multiplicity is itself a political act ofworking against modern projects, in this case, the politics of multiplyingwater resources produces a situation where harm to human and animal

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health is ignored. Barry’s conception of the political, which allows for asymme-tries among actors and foregrounds antagonism, can be extended to considerhow illegality, deliberate obfuscation, and division play a part in coordinatingobjects’ heterogeneity. Water officials actively suppressed the linkages activistssought to establish to challenge Sasyk’s existence as a freshwater resource. Theirinsistence that restoration simultaneously accommodate these different waterscreated irresolvable coordination difficulties. Characterizing the situation inAugust 2012, Iryna stated: ‘One thing is woven into another. They havecreated such a snare (lovushka), they themselves don’t know how to get outof it.’ Anthropological research attentive to the politics of singularization andmultiplication – politics in which both humans and nonhumans are involved,albeit asymmetrically – can enhance work in science studies by providing amore robust account of how and why modern objects oscillate between singu-larity and multiplicity.

Finally, the story of Sasyk shows how analyses of late- and postsocialist poli-tics can be enriched by taking a materialist approach to the political, that is, byconsidering how things such as waste products (Gille 2007), urban heatingsystems (Collier 2011), and irrigation systems generate politics and are activein making particular realities. While this is a story of politically well-connectedfigures extracting benefits from the state and manipulating regulation to createcommercial opportunities, they would not be able to do this under just any con-ditions. Attending to the materialities of these interests – their distributed andrelational aspects – can enrich accounts of the late and postsocialist world. Ana-lysing alliance-building with nonhuman things provides greater specificity onhow particular arrangements are broken or endure.

AcknowledgmentsMany people have contributed to the writing of this paper. First and foremost,I thank Iryna Vykhrystiuk for her generosity and her patience in explaining the com-plexities of this case and answering my questions. In Ukraine, Sergei Dyatlov, VasiliyFedorenko, Oleg Rubel, and Aleksander Voloshkevich also provided valuable assist-ance in conducting this research. Comments from the following people substantiallyimproved this paper: Mario Blaser, Tim Choy, Marisol de la Cadena, Fabiana Li,Gisa Weszkalnys, two anonymous reviewers, the participants of the ‘Food forThought Group’ at University of California, Davis’ Center for Science and Inno-vation Studies, and the participants of the Engaging Resources Symposium heldat the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada. Louise Robertand Julia Serbina provided excellent research assistance. Finally, I am particularlygrateful to Derek Hall for being a generous and critical interlocutor as this paperhas gone through its many iterations.

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FundingThis research was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and HumanitiesResearch Council of Canada [grant number 210156].

Notes1. For the problems in early Actor-Network Theory see Taylor (2011).2. ‘Assemblage’ is a term from Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateeaus. It links ‘the

problematic of structure with that of change’ and emphasizes the ‘dynamic characterof the inter-relationships between heterogeneous elements of the phenomenon’(Venn 2006: 107).

3. Thanks to Tim Choy for suggesting this formulation.4. The relatively low-humus southern chernozems are less able to withstand elevated

levels of sodium and chloride ions in irrigation water (Vlasenko et al. 2004: 15).The level of dissolved salts in the water between 1981 and 2004 ranged from 1.3 to2.1 g/l (Vlasenko et al. 2004: 98).

5. The construction of large irrigation projects in the postwar period had a devastatingimpact on the Aral Sea (Rodina & Mnatsakanian 2012) and also threaten the AzovSea (Lagutov & Lagutov 2012).

6. Microsystis aeruginosa, microcysis pulverea, and microcysis marginata (Minichevaet al. 2000: 13, 25).

7. The survey posed three yes/no questions: (a) Should Sasyk remain in its freshwaterstate? (b) Should Sasyk be restored to its saltwater state? (c) Are you prepared to takepart in a lawsuit to claim moral or financial damages?

8. Panchyshyn was removed from this post and transferred to Odessa a few monthsafter this meeting and replaced with an ally of the DDIS.

9. 50 km of large steel pipes were dug up. Some were seized but vendors sold 50–60

million hryvnias worth (US$ 6,750,000).

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