He can consume so much because rice is a profitable staple of local diets, and water, at about 65 cents per swimming pool, is ridiculously cheap. Arid Kazakhstan grows an astounding 160,000 acres of rice -- 250 square miles of nothing but flooded paddies.

Uzbeks grow almost as much.

An obvious solution to such excess is to raise the price of water. But that could wipe out an entire class of small farmers who comprise a future capitalist class, while enriching the already wealthy. Moreover, controls over water use are so loose, thanks in part to ramshackle equipment, that fee dodging would probably be rampant. ''If you were trying to save water, you wouldn't grow rice,'' said Philip Micklin, a retired University of Michigan geographer and a specialist on Central Asian water. ''But look, it's a management problem. Everyone makes choices. And sometimes it's not even choices, it's who grabs the most.''

A Regional Trade-Off

That is not how things were supposed to work. Instead, the Kremlin conceived an elegant trade-off, linking the mountains rich in wild rivers and glaciers with the arid plains, rich in gas, coal and oil.

And so, in the winter, the plains would send fuel to the mountains; in return, the mountains would hoard river water, then send it downstream for crops in the spring and summer.

The desert blossomed -- and the Aral Sea became starved for water. A fishing industry that had employed 40,000 workers and supplied one-sixth of the Soviet catch also evaporated. So did a trapping industry that had netted a half million muskrat pelts a year from the lush Syr and Amu deltas.

Even so, central planners judged that the trade-off was a success, with its bounty from 10 million new acres of crops.

''It was part of the five-year plans, approved by the council of ministers and the Politburo,'' said Aleksandr Asarin, an expert at the Russian State Hydroproject Institute who angered his bosses by predicting, in 1964, that the sea was headed for catastrophe. ''Nobody on a lower level would dare to say a word contradicting those plans,'' he said, ''even if it was the fate of the Aral Sea.''