Bart Schultz
The article had been accepted for presentation at the symposium. At that time, if you were a civil servant traveling to the Soviet Union for work, you needed permission from the Foreign Affairs Department of the Ministry you worked for. I also wanted to take the opportunity to visit the polders around Leningrad. This had to be requested through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I submitted my application nine months before my departure. A few days before departure, I received permission for the visit. After arriving at the symposium in Leningrad, I immediately showed the organizers the letter about the visit. They said they would review it and arrange a meeting about it.
I attended the symposium and presented our article under Lenin's watchful eye. It was quite an experience. I was told that I could speak with some people involved with the polders on the penultimate day of the symposium. The conversation was friendly, and I was told that there are indeed polders near Leningrad, and that they are agricultural polders. Maps were not shown, because at that time, maps were classified material in the Eastern Bloc countries. I experienced this later in Romania as well, but there they did show the maps and we were allowed to photograph them.
At the end of the conversation, I asked how we were going to see the polders. I was told that they were about two hundred kilometres from Leningrad and that they could not arrange a visit. So my request had essentially been in vain.
In 1992, after the political changes of the late 1980s, I visited Moscow. There was a kind of collaboration between Russian and Dutch urban planners, with involvement of the former director of the Almere Project Office of the IJsselmeerpolders Development Authority, Dirk Frieling. We were supposed to speak with Russian urban planners about urban development in Russia after the political changes. It turned out to be an interesting visit.
I spoke with an Amsterdam Municipal Works Department employee and Russian colleagues involved in water and infrastructure development in and around Moscow, as well as elsewhere in Russia. They told us that after the political changes, they actually wanted to get rid of as many high-rise buildings as possible and build more detached houses, because Russia was very large and had plenty of space. They had designed a new urban quarter of Moscow with plots averaging 1,500 square metres per house.
We felt it was far too large, and we had a lengthy discussion about how it would be unaffordable due to the extensive public utilities and network connections per house. Only after we prepared a rough estimate for them based on local unit prices they did understand it, and they agreed to adjust the plans on a more solid financial basis.
Another interesting point of discussion was that, until then, new urban developments in Russia had always been designed from Moscow based on more or less average conditions. This also happened along the rivers, of which there are quite a few in Russia. They were therefore regularly affected by flooding. Now polders came into the picture, and there must have been quite a few of them as well. We then had a lengthy discussion about what safety level should be applied to urban development in flood-prone areas.
I'm actually quite curious what they ultimately did with it, because I haven't yet been able to figure it out. However, I did later discover that the Polder Compendium, created by the Group Polder Development at Delft University of Technology in 1982, includes a map of the polders and proposed polders in the former Soviet Union. The map is of rather poor quality, but I was still able to identify the locations where these polders are supposed to be. It also mentions a total area of over 175,000 hectares, almost twice the size of Polder Flevoland in the Netherlands. It seems to me that the actual area must be considerably larger. I hope to find the real figures someday.
Although not directly located in a polder, St. Petersburg itself has regularly experienced flooding over the years due to wind uplift from the Baltic Sea and the obstructed flow of the Neva River, which flows through the heart of the city. In 2011, a 25 kilometres long enclosing dam was completed to protect St. Petersburg from flooding. After the Saemangeum Dam in South Korea (33 kilometres) and the Afsluitdijk (32 kilometres) in the Netherlands, this is perhaps the third enclosing dam in length along a coast. I will continue to follow developments with interest as much as possible.
