And before someone says Lake Karachay is an extreme example because of the nuclear arms race and secrecy: Take the vanishing Aral Sea, the oil and gas leaks, or the "there is no thermostat, just a radiator on 100% and an open window" heating system.

> there is no thermostat, just a radiator on 100% and an open window

Nothing wrong about it as water temperature in pipes is regulated based on the temperature outside if not at building-level (not uncommon) but at least at heat-station providing hot water to several buildings.

Cannot decide if sarcasm. If so: good one :)

The problem with USSR-style heating infrastructure isn't the heating (apart from unfiltered coal-fired powerplants), but the insulation. Commieblocks were made with almost none, and to this day in most of Russia and former USSR they are bare. It was cheaper to waste coal/gas/oil than to pay for proper insulation and they were built as "temporary solution to housing problem" after all.

When Poland got independent in 1989 and energy prices got real - everybody started buying cheap styrofoam and in a few years we cut our energy usage for heating 3 times. It was CRAZY inefficient because of the pricing of energy vs materials in Warsaw pact.

This "mass styrofoamisation" still haven't happened in Russia to that degree BTW. It's still wasting crazy amounts of energy in all these old commieblocks without insulation.

Fresh air and required heat isn't a bad combination. New York City radiator design was very similar after the 1918 flu.

Modern construction with heavy insulation certainly reduces energy use, but at the cost of air quality. Even more modern construction includes air exchangers, but there's a lot of buildings with insufficient airflow.

I wasn’t talking about industrial but your usual Ivan. Just think about how many garbage is produced by a family every day.

As for your article, I don’t have access to the PDF, so I cannot verify it.

The place I grew up sometimes I could see Elbrus even though it is almost 300 km away. That’s for air pollution.

> in the early 1990s the air pollution became an issue of great public attention

This as well may be the coordinated effort to bring down every remnant of Soviet industrial force. You have no idea how many factories have been deliberately bring to their knees and closed down by “effective” new management.

The same way “green” policy is used today for economic warfare (just to think Germany being so stupid as to close their nuclear plants).

Due to the curvature of the earth, it's unlikely you were able to see anything 300km away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_distance_observations#Gro...

The article reports several photographs of over 400km distance

You do understand that Elbrus is almost 6 km high? :-)

If you were standing on top of Mt. Elbrus (elevation: 5.6km above sea level), you could see the horizon roughly 271km away (assuming the horizon was at sea-level, there were no obstructions, atmospheric or otherwise, etc). The inverse of this is that if you were at sea level, 271km away from the peak of Mt. Elbrus, you could theoretically see the peak of the mountain.

So, assuming you weren't at sea-level, it's reasonable that you could see the peak of this mountain from 300km away.

However, seeing the peak of a mountain on the horizon isn't sufficient. You'd need to see a large portion of the mountain on the horizon in order to determine that it's actually the mountain you see in the distance, and not a closer peak that's less tall. This means that the observer would need to be at sufficient altitude themselves in order to view the mountain from this distance. I don't know enough about the math to calculate the necessary altitude required by the observer, but I would estimate an elevation of many hundreds of meters above sea level to be necessary. If anyone else can calculate this better, I would love to know how to find the answer myself.

Without knowing the general area of where you were, all I can say is that it sounds very unlikely.

Here’s visibility area: https://www.heywhatsthat.com/?view=EQT4CXUK

There have been photos even from Rize, Turkey 300km, albeit very-very blurry.

But I think you are most definitely right: I checked and it’s only 240 from the straight line in my case (my memories of something closer to 290 is more about road distance)