After the 1917 revolution, and especially with the rise of Joseph Stalin, water projects became a major instrument of both economic development and the assertion of the power of the Soviet state. Beginning in the early 1930s, and primarily using forced labour, Stalin and his engineers reshaped Soviet rivers. His plans came to their greatest expression in the late 1940s, and the Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature. Marshall Goldman traced this to "an almost Freudian fixation. Nothing seems to satisfy the Soviets as much as building a dam or draining a swamp." (Pearce, The Dammed, p.3). Such projects had an essential ideological function, according to Ze'ev Vol'fson: "The more such projects contradicted the laws of nature, the more highly they were regarded… the more brilliantly the illusion of their success demonstrated the power and wisdom of the new leaders of the country." (Pearce, The Dammed, p. 101).

Some of the more extreme examples of the effects of this "fixation" are the drying of the Aral Sea, as a result of the redirection towards irrigated fields of rivers that once flowed into it; the conversion of the Volga and Dneiper from free-flowing rivers into chains of wide lakes behind hydroelectric dams; and several huge hydroelectric projects on Siberian and Central Asian rivers. With the ongoing economic crisis in the post-Soviet republics, the pace of this development has slowed.

Sources:
o Ellis, William S., "The Aral: A Soviet Sea Lies Dying," National
Geographic, February 1990, Vol. 177(2): 70-93.
o Pearce, Fred, The Dammed, pp. 100-114.
o Weiner, Douglas, Models of Nature, (on changing Soviet perceptions
of nature during the time of Lenin and Stalin).