Matt has been stuck in the mud for seven years

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This podcast was produced on the lands of the Wabakal and Gadigal people.

G'day, this is if you're listening.

I'm Matt Bevan.

I have been making this show for more than seven years now and there's this story that I've been trying to get into the show for pretty much that whole time.

It's about agriculture, soil, and water in Ukraine.

Now, I know that doesn't sound super interesting, but I

really think that it is, personally.

Remains to be seen whether anybody else does.

But the thing is that I've been writing this story into episode after episode, but four separate producers have all cut it out.

It was first cut out of an episode back in 2019 by Will Ockenden and Ruby Jones when we were making our third season.

I believe Will told me, you know, this isn't the country hour, right?

And ever since then, whenever I go on a long and seemingly pointless tangent in a script, Will says, oh, I see you've been writing about the greenfields of Ukraine again.

It was also cut out of an episode of season seven, and it was also cut out of last week's episode.

I should mention,

I'm not necessarily saying that any of the producers were wrong to cut this out.

It didn't really fit into the show of any of the episodes that I was trying to jam it into, but the reality is that I have now written this story three separate times only to have it cut out and I've finally snapped.

And so I'm going to subject Cara Jensen McKinnon to the full version of this story, whether she likes it or not.

Hi, Cara.

Hello.

Hello.

I'm ready to be convinced.

Look, the audience has more of an option

whether to listen to this or not, but you are locked in your studio.

Strapped in.

And strapped in.

Correct.

You know, the clockwork orange things holding your eyeballs open.

Yeah.

My ears are pinned open, and I am sitting here against my will listening to what I hope will be a very riveting story about mud.

Let's go.

Okay, I want to start by showing you a map, and I'll get you to describe it.

This is a map of the global distribution of a type of soil known as churnosum.

Chern meaning black and zem meaning earth, black earth.

So have a look at this map and tell me what you see.

Okay, it is just a map of the world.

Yep.

And most of it's grayed out.

There is kind of a band across the top of the map spanning from Western Europe, Russia, across.

Eastern Europe, yep.

Okay, sorry.

Sorry, I've never seen a map of the world before.

So this is the first time I'm looking at a map of Earth.

This is this planet.

This planet that we're on currently.

This is planet Earth.

I'm looking at a map of it.

There is a band of kind of yellow across Eastern Europe

and some of North America.

And then there are particular dark areas, I am assuming, which indicate that there is some high amount of this particular black mud.

Yes, that's right.

It's a map that shows all the different parts of the Earth that have this chernosum soil.

And you can see that it's not all that much of the Earth, but there's red spots that show particular density of this.

And the red spots are in Manitoba, Canada,

and in Ukraine.

Right.

Okay.

So, Chernosim is, as far as I can tell, the best soil there is.

You can basically spit a mandarin seed into this stuff and instant tree.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like magic stuff.

It's incredible stuff.

And it's not a coincidence that the two biggest concentrations of it are in eastern Ukraine, so the bit of Ukraine that the war has been in.

And Manitoba has a massive population of Ukrainians because they know how to grow stuff in this soil.

They love it.

They love it it is black black black soil right all of eastern ukraine is this stuff and it's unbelievably fertile in fact 56 of ukraine is arable land wow in comparison six percent of australian land is arable land

56 of ukraine ukraine keeps getting like invaded by other countries who are like man why are we scratching around in this stupid brown soil when there's this unbelievably good black soil over there we'll go and get that.

So, that's the soil.

But let's talk about the water.

So, what I've given you there is a map of European canals.

Get ready for another idiot reading of a map.

Coming up, okay.

Okay,

it's basically a map of Europe that shows there's a whole lot of canals.

There's so many canals, and they're all so interconnected.

Yes, that you can actually

sail a boat, you know, something you can get up a canal, not a very big boat, but a small boat, from Marseille in the south of France,

all the way through

France to Belgium and the Netherlands, and then all the way across Germany into Poland, and then all the way across Poland into Ukraine,

past the Chernobyl nuclear power station,

and then all the way down the Dnipro River to the Black Sea

inland without ever going like on an ocean or a lake which is crazy.

I mean that's that's a beautiful European summer.

It would be a lovely trip.

Yeah.

It would take an incredibly long time.

Couldn't be a less efficient way of seeing Europe, but it'd be fun.

One of the cool things about this is the Dnipro River, which is the river that is the central artery of Ukraine, the biggest river in Ukraine, it's the third biggest in Europe.

It is navigable by boats all the way up to Kyiv and then past it all the way to France.

The reason that's possible is basically because Stalin in the 1920s was like, I'm going to show that we're the best in the world at like literally everything.

So, what's the craziest thing that we could do to show the world that we, the Soviet Union, are greater than anybody else?

And he decided that he would make the Dnipro River navigable from top to bottom.

And an American newsreel team went to Ukraine in 1932 just to see what he was up to and have a listen to what they found.

In the Ukraine, we find a healthy, robust type of people.

They are happy and active.

They are great lovers of music and the dance.

And at the least provocation, you will find groups that are gathering to sing to the accompaniment of their native violakas and to dance to the rhythms of their own folk songs.

I feel like that's what life would be like if you could grow a mandarin tree in three weeks, just dancing.

Yes, I know.

Rejoicing.

That's it.

They're just a happy, happy type of people.

So much food.

That's the sort of thing that happens when, you know, food just sort of grows in through your window on a vine and lands.

Cracks your house open and just lands on your plate.

Yeah, pops it on your plate by itself.

Somehow it's turned the fruit into a pie.

That's right.

So these people are very happy there in Ukraine.

Yeah.

And this is around this part of Ukraine, the Dnipro River.

But the problem was, while most of the river seemed pretty easy to sail on, there was a whole area of the river more than 100 kilometers long that was basically jagged rocks.

Have a listen to this clip.

Ten years ago, dangerous rapids blocked the central portion of the Dnieper.

With unceasing force, the waters plunged down over the jagged rocks.

These same rapids paralyzed shipping for over a distance of 100 miles.

They actually divided the river into two separate halves.

Here one of the great dreams, first of Catherine the Great and later of Lenin, has come true.

They dreamed of locking the foaming river with a gigantic wall of cement and steel, raising the water level to cover the rapids, and harnessing the great water pressure thus created to spin huge dynamos that would give electric light and power to the whole countryside.

Significantly less dancing in that video.

Yes, less dancing and more digging.

More ominous digging music.

Yeah.

So Stalin built this dam, the biggest dam in Europe, basically to bring the water level up over the rapids and the rocks.

To be clear, it went more than a hundred miles upstream.

So it was this unbelievably enormous dam with this unbelievably enormous amount of water behind it.

And they built this and they put a hydroelectric plant in it.

Not only was it the biggest dam in Europe, it was the third largest power plant in the world.

And for nearly a decade, it was like one of the Soviet Union's great achievements.

But then the Nazis invaded.

To get that sweet, sweet soil, they wanted some mandarins.

They wanted to grow their apples for strudels.

That's right, yes.

The mud, the aforementioned mud, was a nightmare for them.

One of the quotes from a journalist who was there at the time was: The Ukrainian mud in spring has to be seen to be believed.

The whole country is swamped.

The roads are like rivers of mud, often two feet deep.

So they were trying to, obviously, they had their tanks there.

They also needed to bring trucks full of all their supplies as they invaded, as they pushed across the country.

They tried to get the tanks to tow the trucks.

through the mud, just drag it.

But all the tank engines were exploding as they were doing this because it was too much strain on them.

Such a waste of a tank to like use it as a tow machine.

A tow truck machine.

Very expensive tow trucker tank.

Yeah.

You know, as we talked about in last week's episode, the Ukrainian mud is this unbelievable defensive weapon that just makes any invading force really wonder whether they need all that strudel after all.

That's right.

I'm just trying even to imagine two feet of mud on the ground.

You're like wading through that.

That's shin deep.

It's almost above your knees, I think, really.

And look, Nazi jack boots were big, but possibly it was even coming in over the top of those jack boots, getting wet socks.

And that's the worst.

Yeah.

Imagine they persevered, and when they reached the Dnipro River, Stalin decided that to try and slow them down even more, he'd make a bit more mud.

And I've got a clip of what he did.

Have a listen.

Planes claimed them all.

The giant dam at Dniprostroy.

into which had been poured not only steel and concrete, but five long years of Russian toil and Russian sweat to yield the miracle of electricity to the farms and people of the Ukraine.

Now, rather than let the power it generated fall to the enemy, they destroyed it.

Scorched earth.

The land they had lived on and worked on.

Their forests, their fields, their farms.

They surrendered them to the flames, but not to the invaders.

That was the scorched earth.

Wow.

That's sad.

It is sad.

They're burning all of the houses.

Yeah, it's a really sad.

The opposite of the dancing video, really.

Yeah, there's no dancing at all.

Not even a little bit of dancing, a lot of burning.

The Soviets were so rushed in their retreat that they didn't warn anyone downstream of the dam that they were going to blow the biggest dam in Europe.

They didn't even warn their own soldiers who were positioned downstream.

So nobody had any time to flee.

Right.

Entire villages were swept away in the flood.

Somewhere between 20 and 100,000 people were killed.

As in, 20 and 100,000 Soviets were killed by the Soviets blowing up their own dam.

Jeez.

Guess there's no maths text alert in those times that you could have just sent everyone.

No.

So they had no time to retreat.

They were all killed.

So many of them were killed.

The Germans then rebuilt the dam

during their occupation of Ukraine.

But then the Soviets turned the tide of the war and they start invading back through Ukraine towards Germany.

And the Germans are like, well, time to blow the dam again.

And they did it again, killed more people.

Oh, my gosh.

Oh, my God.

So the destruction of the Dnipro Dam, the double destruction of the Dnipro Dam,

is genuinely one of the biggest man-made disasters in human history.

And we really didn't know about it for decades because the Soviets didn't tell anybody and they suppressed information about the flood for decades and decades, at least partially, because once they reclaimed Ukraine, they rebuilt the dam and then they built six more just like it up and down the Dnipro River.

Wow.

And for reasons I cannot possibly understand, almost all of the dams are right above a city.

So the city of Kyiv,

the capital of Ukraine,

has a giant hydroelectric dam holding back the amount of water that you would have in a small sea

sitting right above it that could be destroyed at any time.

Seems like not great planning.

Yeah.

But...

The officials said that the dams were strong enough to withstand anything but an asteroid impact or a deliberate detonation.

Okay, well, that's happened a couple of times now.

But who would ever do that?

Exactly.

When's that ever happened before?

Oh, three times.

It's this extraordinary thing, and that is, of course, exactly what happened then.

And then what happened during the Russian invasion in 2022.

They just have, you know, these seven swords of Damocles dangling over their heads at all times.

And as we saw, almost certainly Russia decided to blow up the bottommost dam in order to flood a large area and prevent a Ukrainian advance in 2023.

So ironically, one of the things that that destruction of that dam did was cut off the water supply for Russian-occupied Crimea, which doesn't have any of this soil.

Crimea is a desert.

Right.

And so their only water supply was blown up by the Russians.

Not ideal.

Which does sort of create a slight level of doubt, although, you know, know, basically all the information we have indicates that it was Russia.

But I did write this line, which someone cut out.

You don't think this one was cut out by you.

Okay.

But the line was, was it Colonel Khaki, Vladimir Zelensky, with the missile, or was it Professor Glum, Vladimir Putin, with the big pile of dynamite?

So that's the story, basically.

Ukraine...

has all this mud, it has all this water, and they repeatedly play massive roles in massive global conflicts.

And I thought that that was interesting.

Look, it's definitely interesting.

It's definitely interesting.

I think when you said to me, not in this conversation, but over text, that there were multiple bonus episodes in this Mud story, I was skeptical and I remain skeptical.

But I definitely think there's one story in the Mud story and I love it.

This is the Mud story and I'm glad you finally got to tell it because now it doesn't have to go in another episode.

That's true.

You don't need to cut it out again.

It's here.

It's out.

Finally.

I mean, you know, having told the story and spent, what, about 20 minutes doing it, I can understand why perhaps you and other producers have been slightly concerned about the idea of having a 20-minute tangent

about mud and water in an episode that is meant to be about 20 minutes long.

Corrudles.

Correct.

Exactly.

This is the thing.

It is very contra-hour.

If we did have an hour-long episode, then then yeah, we could have done it.

Usually when we finish these bonus episodes, we play out the if-you're listening theme, but I kind of feel like we should play the country hour theme instead.

Welcome to the country hour on ABC Radio.

See, that was interesting, wasn't it?

I feel vindicated.

Look, there are so many great stories like this that I just don't fit into the tighter format of a regular If You're Listening episode, so if there's anything that you ever find in one of our episodes that you want us to dig deeper on, send us an email at ifyoulistening at abc.net.au.

We might be able to look further into it.

We'll be back on Thursday with an episode about what on earth is going on with Iran and these bizarre anti-Semitic attacks that the Australian government says they've been orchestrating in Sydney and Melbourne.

It turns out that over the last few years, Iran has been bankrolling low-level attacks like this all over the world, from Australia to Sweden, and it involves some bizarre connections and some outrageous characters.

So, what's going on?

We'll tell you all about it on Thursday.