krai = administrative district.
Miass is in the Urals; it's an old iron-working settlement set in beautiful ravines and forests.
Astrakhan of course is terribly polluted now, since it is downstream from Volgograd, being situated where the Volga flows into the Caspian (itself recently declared to be the planet's most polluted sea, altho a huge new western financed oil industry is getting underway; the caviar sturgeon will almost certainly become extinct.)
It is impossible to say what might have happened if the USSR had not been encircled and forced to develop heavy and defence industries; in the 1930s the ideas of living in harmony with nature were stood on their head and the 'conquest of nature' was proclaimed as the essence of socialist construction, amid huge canal and dam projects.
Who can deny that the rape of Soviet nature so well documented by Murray Feshbach in 'Soviet Ecocide' and other works, was the direct result of the Soviet siege by world capitalism?
Lou, this is really wonderful stuff. Sources?
Mark