One of the most important aspects of environmental history is the history of the development and transformation of aquatic ecosystems, which play an important role in human life and represent an essential condition for any stable state. In the USSR ideas for integral water resources management were studied for decades and various schemes of water resources reallocation were proposed. As the Aral-Caspian problem worsened/, specialists focused on the vast territory of the Ob-Irtysh interfluve which had the necessary characteristics. The article considers one of the most ambitious projects on the river runoff redistribution for economic purposes, i.e. the Yuzhsibreki project developed by A. Miller-Shulga. The project suggested a complex multi-stage water transfer scheme from the Ob, Irtysh, Ishim, Tom, Chulym, Yenisei, Angara and Lena to the Aral-Caspian region According to A. Miller-Shulga this project was to result in the creation of a «new socialist lake-river network». Most publications dealing with the Siberian rivers runoff redistribution have an emotional connotation and are often not based on primary sources. The author makes an attempt to compare different projects on the basis of published and unpublished materials in order to identify their similarities and differences. From the author’s point of view, it is important to track the dynamics in the process of setting and solving the problem of supplying the national economy with water recourses, as well as to consider the perception of river reversal problem by the project developers themselves.