Rescuing Russia

Let us not be very hopeful about our human conquest over nature. For each such victory, nature manages to take her revenge.

-Friedrich Engels

For years, Soviet leaders ignored the warning. Dams were built, new farm lands opened, and the five-year plans rolled on one after the other-all proving that a country can industrialize in a great hurry. But as in other industrial nations, the cost to Russia's ecology has been great. For years Russia maintained a news blackout about the relentless exploitation of its natural resources. When Western journalists tried to confirm infrequent reports of ecological disruption, they met only bureaucratic doubletalk about Soviet laws, decrees and decisions to safeguard nature.

Now the news blackout is lifting. Soviet reporters and scientists have recently been allowed to describe-and criticize-Mother Russia's sins against Mother Nature with unprecedented freedom, presumably because the subject is essentially apolitical, and environmental troubles have become too serious to hide. The picture that emerges shows that centrally controlled economic planning is no guarantee of an unspoiled environment.

Impotence. Russia has a plethora of environmental laws, but they are not being enforced. The revelation clearly startles Russians. An official report from Estonia excoriates the republic's Economy Minister for "complete passiveness and impotence"; he did not make chemical and pulp plants install antipollution devices required by law. Izvestia is complaining about a metallurgical plant that has illegally "poisoned" the air of Rustavi, near Tbilisi. In Russia's far north, Pravda says, an oil-drilling crew did not take "the most basic precautions" to avoid polluting the Pechora River.

It is the old dilemma familiar to capitalistic countries: production v. pollution. Soviet managers are paid bonuses for reaching or exceeding official quotas on production. Thus a factory manager will gladly pay a small fine ($60 to $600) for polluting on the way to earning a generous premium ($6,000 to $12,000) for meeting planned goals. Even though the state, not the market, sets prices on goods, Soviet planners and managers are usually reluctant to raise costs of production by employing environmental safeguards.

The extent of damage rather than the causes seems to horrify Soviet reporters. Strip-mining, which accounts for about 75% of the U.S.S.R.'s manganese output and 30% of its coal, has become a favorite target. In the Ukraine, the Literary Gazette reports, one mine has turned its surroundings into "a lunar landscape." Another mine was described as so destructive that "to restore fertility would need 50,000 years." The article quotes a surface-mine manager as saying "We are waging an insane war with the earth."

Russian critics are also challenging timbering practices. "We used to care for our forests," a forestry official says in Pravda. "But now we are mainly lumberjacks." Even in a nation with 30% of the world's timber, the annual ov-ercutting, four experts warn, means that "the exhaustion of forests reaches farther north every year." The results: "Erosion is intensifying, river levels falling and climate changing for the worse."

Russia has its problems with water too. Dams and irrigation networks on the rivers feeding the landlocked Caspian and Aral seas have diverted so much water that the sea levels have dropped alarmingly over the past decade-by 10 ft. in the Aral alone. A scientist says that the only way to restore the Caspian Sea and to slake the "colossal thirst" of users along the way, is to turn rivers now flowing north to the Arctic Ocean southward. Some international scientists fear that without the usual supply of easily frozen fresh water reaching the northern seas, the polar icecap will recede-and the consequent melting will flood the world's seacoasts.

Cleanup. As if to stamp their approval on the new outburst of public concern, the Soviets have begun to take remedial action. Most recently they announced that Russia, like the U.S. and Great Britain, will set up an environmental-protection service to police air and water pollution throughout the nation. Beyond that, the government will spend over $1 billion to clean up the Volga and Ural drainage basins, $840 million for purifying facilities in 420 factories, and $360 million for sewage-treatment plants in 15 cities. At Irkutsk, new water-treatment plants have already made the Angara River, Mayor N.F. Salatsky says, "as clear as a woman's tears." It will be many years, however, before the same can .be said about other Russian rivers. Fifty years of headlong industrial development have left the Soviet Union with a gigantic cleanup problem.

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