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Soviet Union [USSR] Environmental Concerns
In spite of a series of environmental laws and regulations
passed in the 1970s, authentic environmental protection in the
Soviet Union did not become a major concern until General Secretary
Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to power in March 1985. Without an
established regulatory agency and an environmental protection
infrastructure, enforcement of existing laws was largely ignored.
Only occasional and isolated references appeared on such issues as
air and water pollution, soil erosion, and wasteful use of natural
resources in the 1970s. This lack of concern was prompted by
several factors. First, after collectivization in the 1930s, all of
the land became state owned and managed. Thus, whenever air and
water were polluted, the state was most often the agent of this
pollution. Second, and this was true especially under Joseph V.
Stalin's leadership, the resource base of the country was viewed as
limitless and free. Third, in the rush to modernize and to develop
heavy industry, concern for damage to the environment and related
damage to the health of Soviet citizens would have been viewed as
detrimental to progress. Fourth, pollution control and
environmental protection itself is an expensive, high-technology
industry, and even in the mid-1980s many of the Soviet Union's
systems to control harmful emissions were inoperable or of foreign
manufacture.
Under Gorbachev's leadership, the official attitude toward the
environment changed. Various social and economic factors helped
produce this change. To maintain economic growth through the 1980s,
a period in which the labor force had been declining significantly,
intensive and more prudent use of both natural and human resources
was required. At the same time, glasnost' provided an outlet
for widespread discussion of environmental issues, and a genuine
grass-roots ecological movement arose to champion causes similar to
the ecological concerns of the West. Public campaigns were mounted
to protect Lake Baykal from industrial pollution and to halt the
precipitous decline in the water levels of the Caspian Sea, the Sea
of Azov, and, most urgently, the Aral Sea. A grandiose scheme to
divert the northern rivers southward had been counted on to
replenish these seas, but for both economic and environmental
reasons, the project was canceled in 1986.
Without this diversion project, the Aral Sea, once a body of
water larger than any of the Great Lakes except Lake Superior,
seemed destined to become the world's largest salt flat as early as
the year 2010. By 1987 so much water had been siphoned off for
irrigation of cotton and rice fields south and east of the sea that
all shipping and commercial fishing had ceased. Former seaports,
active as late as 1973, were reported to be forty to sixty
kilometers from the water's edge. Belatedly recognizing the gravity
of the situation for the 3 million inhabitants of the Aral region,
government officials declared it an ecological disaster area.
With respect to air pollution, mass demonstrations protesting
unhealthful conditions were held in cities such as Yerevan in the
Armenian Republic. Official reports confirmed that more than 100 of
the largest Soviet cities registered air quality indexes ten times
worse than permissible levels. In one of the most publicized cases,
the inhabitants of Kirishi, a city not far from Leningrad,
succeeded in closing a chemical plant whose toxic emissions were
found to be harming--and in some cases killing--the city's
residents. Finally, separate, highly publicized cases of man-made
disasters, the most prominent of which was the Chernobyl' nuclear
power plant accident in 1986, highlighted the fragility of the manproduction -nature relationship in the Soviet Union and forced a
reconsideration of traditional attitudes and policies toward
industrialization and development.
As part of the process of restructuring
(
perestroika-- see Glossary), in the 1980s concrete
steps were taken to strengthen
environmental protection and to provide the country with an
effective mechanism for implementing policy and ensuring
compliance. Two specific indications of this were the inclusion of
a new section devoted to environmental protection in the annual
statistical yearbook and the establishment of the State Committee
for the Protection of Nature (Gosudarstvennyi komitet po okhrane
prirody--Goskompriroda) early in 1988.
Despite these measures, decades of environmental degradation
caused by severe water and air pollution and land abuse were
unlikely to be remedied soon or easily. Solving these critical
problems will require not only a major redirection of capital and
labor but also a fundamental change in the entire Soviet approach
to industrial and agricultural production and resource exploitation
and consumption.
Data as of May 1989
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