History of fishery development of the Krasnoyarsk Hydroelectric Power Station reservoir

The construction of hydroelectric power plants on the rivers of the Soviet Union was accompanied by the creation of reservoirs, which were supposed to be used for the development of water transport, irrigation of fields and meadows, and also for fish farming. After the end of the recovery period, when the country's top leadership proclaimed a course for the accelerated development of the eastern regions of the country, in order to create their energy base, the construction of the Irkutsk hydroelectric power plant on the Angara in 1950, the Bratsk hydroelectric power plant on the Yenisei in 1956 was started. The USSR Ministry of Energy and Electrification was supposed to simultaneously with the damming of rivers at the expense of estimates for the construction of power plants, put into operation fish farms on the created reservoirs. In 1962, responsibility for the development of fish farming in the Krasnoyarsk Hydroelectric Power Station reservoir was assigned to the Yenisei Basin Administration for the Protection, Reproduction of Fish Stocks and Regulation of Fisheries (Yeniseirybvod), established in the Krasnoyarsk Region. The complexity of fish farming in the Krasnoyarsk Hydroelectric Power Station reservoir was due to the fact that no forests were cut down during the preparation of its bed for flooding and 0.47 million m³ of wood was submerged. Decomposition of wood, products of economic activity, erosion of the coastline and many other factors had a negative impact on the quality of the water. The paper considers measures to study the reservoir, stock it with different species of fish, create artificial reservoirs, and conduct experimental catches of introduced fish. As practice has shown, the results of fish catch predicted by research organizations turned out to be overly optimistic. Despite the attempt to exterminate roach and perch in order to preserve the food supply for more valuable fish introduced into the reservoir, by the end of the period under review, the Krasnoyarsk Reservoir remained a low-productivity roach-perch reservoir.