The Greening of the U.S.S.R.

By Dick Thompson

The Soviet Union is anenvironmentalist's nightmare. The industrial city of Nizhni Tagil, some 700 miles east of Moscow, is sometimes wrapped in clouds of gaseous wastes so thick and toxic that drivers must turn on their headlights at noon and children walking home from school get skin rashes. Every year 700,000 tons of toxic substances are spewed into the city's air. Not only Nizhni Tagil but more than 100 other major cities, including Moscow, also have air-pollution levels ten times as high as the acceptable standards set by the Soviets.

The land and water are not in any better shape. The riverbed of the Neva, which meanders beside the magnificent Hermitage in Leningrad, is covered with a thick layer of oil. Ill-advised dam construction and inappropriate irrigation projects have caused the level of the Aral Sea to drop 40 ft. It is possible that this body of water, the world's sixth largest sea, will not exist in 20 years. Siberia, once pristine, is laced with wastes from steel, chemical and coal industries. Worrisome numbers of dead sturgeon are floating atop the polluted Volga River, threatening the Soviets' prestigious caviar supply. Resorts along the Black Sea have banned swimming after the government's warning that the waters are contaminated with dysentery and typhoid germs.

For decades the Soviet people accepted the situation in silence. But glasnost has made them less afraid to speak out. Citizens worried about the environment are demonstrating by the thousands and contributing to political unrest in the Baltic States. Elsewhere, budding environmental groups have even sponsored candidates for city elections.

Amid the turmoil the Soviet government has finally begun to move. The Kremlin has reorganized a number of departments into the new State Committee for the Protection of the Environment, Goskompriroda, and given it an impressive range of powers. "In this restructuring," said Nicholas Robinson, a Pace University professor and an expert on the Soviet environment, "the Communist Party Central Committee has decided that, after disarmament, environmental protection is the No. 1 world issue." An aggressive cleanup program has already begun. Projects are being re-evaluated in light of their environmental impact. Fines have been levied on some polluters, and criminal proceedings have been started against others.

Internationally, the Soviets are pushing for stronger accords to protect the environment and are seeking ways to integrate their atmospheric-research efforts with those under way elsewhere. For the first time since World War II, the Soviet Union and the U.S. may have found a common enemy: global climate change. Said President Mikhail Gorbachev in his speech this month to the U.N. General Assembly: "International economic security is inconceivable unless related not only to disarmament but also to the elimination of the threat to the world's environment."

One sign of the Soviets' willingness to join international environmental efforts was their presence at the TIME conference in Boulder. Fyodor Morgun, the recently appointed head of Goskompriroda, made his first trip to the U.S. (and only his second journey outside the Soviet Union) to attend the meeting. And he was startlingly frank about the situation in his country. "We have started too late," Morgun told the group. "Our air is not up to the proper mark, our soil is polluted, and our forests are affected. Drastic measures were taken in the West 15 to 20 years ago to improve the environment. Now my country must get to work on this as well."

The Soviet environmental disaster has been a long time in the making. Beginning in the days of Stalin, ecological concerns were shunted aside in the rush toward industrialization. Valovaya produktsiya, a phrase that translates into "gross output" and is abbreviated as val, was at the heart of the problem. Industry bureaucrats have long been evaluated -- and rewarded -- only in terms of gross output. Rivers were fouled and forests stripped in the rush to transform raw materials into material wealth. No premium was placed on efficiency, and no environmental concerns restrained val. Trucks in Siberia, for example, are still left running every hour of every day throughout the winter because the vehicles are very difficult to start in the cold, and diesel fuel is plentiful.

Nowhere are the consequences of unchecked industrialization more obvious than in Siberia's Lake Baikal basin. Nearly 30 years ago, Minlesbumprom (the Ministry of Timber, Pulp and Paper, and Wood Processing Industry) erected the Baikalsh pulp factory on the shores of this majestic body of crystal-clear water. The crescent-shaped lake holds 80% of the country's fresh water and 20% of the world's supply. Three-fourths of the lake's 2,500 fish and plant species, including the Baikal nerpa, a fresh-water seal, are unknown anywhere else in the world.

All that is under assault. Currently, the pulp factory produces 200,000 tons of cellulose fibers a year, and its effluent, discharged directed into the lake, has created a polluted zone 23 miles wide. Clouds of yellowish smoke belching from the factory's smokestacks have settled over 770 sq. mi. of Siberian wilderness and have killed an estimated 86,000 fir trees.

The environmental offenses at Baikal and elsewhere revived the deep relationship that the Soviets have with nature. "Please believe me," said Morgun, "the people have awakened." From Armenia to Zaporozhye, hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets to protest everything from air pollution to nuclear-power plants. In April 10,000 people demonstrated against the conditions in Nizhni Tagil. Protesters in Priozyorsk were successful in closing a major paper plant that had been dumping waste into Lake Ladoga, the source of drinking water for 6 million people. Many of the political demonstrations in the Baltic States are linked to the environment. Said Marshall Goldman, associate director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University: "In almost every republic in which there is a movement for independence or the assertion of political rights, it has been led by an environmental movement."

Gorbachev, whose background is in agriculture, has shown a special concern for the environment from the beginning of his reign. Early on, he toured the country and took care to detour from the carefully prepared showcase routes to inspect firsthand the polluted rivers and devastated forests. Funds for environmental protection, about $24 billion this year, are projected to reach $46.4 billion annually in the first half of the 1990s. At the same time, Gorbachev's regime has cracked down on polluters. Around Lake Baikal, about two dozen violations of ecological standards have been referred to prosecutors. In Nizhni Tagil the government has closed ten factories for failing to control toxic emissions and has begun criminal investigations against more than ten other plants.

But the Soviet leader may face a potential conflict between his desire for a cleaner environment and his hopes of rapidly raising the living standards and / consumption levels of his people. Without careful pollution control, boosting production will befoul the environment even more. And money that goes into antipollution equipment cannot be used for industrial expansion. In Boulder, Morgun emphasized that the Kremlin wanted to get around this dilemma by redirecting money from military spending into the civilian economy. That, he said, depended on continued progress in arms-control talks with the U.S.

From an international perspective, the most disturbing aspect of the Soviet economy is the enormous quantity of carbon dioxide it puts into the air. Because the machines in many Soviet factories are obsolete and inefficient, they consume an inordinate amount of energy, making the country one of the largest contributors to the greenhouse effect. The Soviets are aware of this problem and hope to solve it by importing technology designed to improve energy efficiency and pollution control. They hope that much of that technology will come from the U.S. Said Morgun: "We will go anyplace, over any mountain, over an ocean to get the technology. And if you offer some kind of technology, we will be glad to accept it. We would be most grateful."

That is a plea the U.S. should take seriously, by easing restrictions on the export of industrial technology to the Soviets. Unfortunately, the biggest barrier to such shipments is not export controls but the lack of hard currency. The U.S. cannot finance the Soviet drive to conserve energy and control pollution, but America should offer as much technical assistance as possible. The Soviets seem to be sincerely determined to clean up their act, and the U.S. should help out.

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Moscow and Richard Hornik/Washington