Paul Josephson,Nicolai Dronin,Ruben Mnatsakanian,Aleh Cherp,Dmitry Efremenko and Vladislav Larin,An Environmental History of Russia

Reviewed by: David Moon, University of York, UK

‘The deadening litany of environmental disasters may have inured some readers to yet another story of profligate use of natural resources promoted by state officials in the name of ever-more inefficient Soviet practices’ (236). Indeed, connoisseurs of the damage perpetrated by human folly on the natural world in the name of progress will greatly appreciate this book. Some of the disasters – an exploding nuclear power station and a dried-up sea amongst them – are well known. Potential disasters, such as the threat to Lake Baikal, are examined to reveal deeper waters. In the mid-1970s, scientists reported that a tiny crustacean, the epishure, was dying ‘even in the supposedly purified effluents from the paper and pulp combine’. Its loss would have removed ‘the first link in the food chain that supported all the fauna of the lake’ (228), including the unique freshwater seals, and the ‘biological filters’ responsible for the water’s unique purity. The threat to Baikal provoked growing outcry among scientists and the public that prompted even the Soviet government, which prioritized production targets and propaganda over environmental protection, to act. The Baikal story, which was discussed in the Soviet media, illustrates the growth of environmental concerns in the Soviet Union from the 1960s.

Building communism entailed the construction of massive, heroic projects in a world before environmental impact statements. Lenin defined communism as ‘Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country’. Achieving this goal involved damming rivers and mining and burning vast quantities of fossil fuels. Party ideologues developed Lenin’s slogan by adding: ‘plus chemicalization of agriculture’ in an attempt to feed the population. The addition was made in 1963, the year after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (which was hidden in closed collections in Soviet libraries) created such uproar, and action, in the West. A recurring theme in the book is the waste of resources and human effort. One of the heroic projects was the railway from Baikal across eastern Siberia to the Amur river (BAM). Constructing ‘The Road into the 21^st Century!’ caused untold damage to fragile ecosystems and permafrost and, in reality, went to nowhere. One resource the Soviet Union had in abundance was timber. But, in floating it down rivers, ‘hundreds of thousands of cubic meters sank’ (160), lining river bottoms with logs and restricting navigation.

The epic of Soviet environmental history could have been more extreme. Soviet engineers thought they could overcome the imbalance in water resources (too much in the north, and too little in the south, where it was needed for irrigation) by diverting rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean to Central Asia. The plan provoked debate. Even the KGB, not normally considered a player in environmental politics, was concerned about the project’s ‘huge environmental costs’ (203). The scheme was cancelled by Gorbachev in 1988, averting an environmental catastrophe in the northern hemisphere, in the wake of growing opposition among scientists and an emerging environmental movement.

Was the Soviet Union so much worse than the West? A strength of this book is regular comparisons. The West too had its massive dams and giant technological projects. Soviet cities relied to a greater extent on public transport, which was less polluting, than the private cars that came to dominate Western cities. (The Ikarus buses, a common sight in Soviet cities in the 1970s and 80s, however, were manufactured in Hungary not Czechoslovakia [215].) Soviet district heating should have created less pollution than individual heating systems in the West, but was very inefficient. The West drew up and enforced environmental protection legislation more seriously sooner than the Soviet Union. A comparison the book does not make is between the world’s ‘first [peacetime] nuclear catastrophe’, at Kyshtym in the Urals (on 29 September 1957) and the fire at the Windscale nuclear reactor in northwest England 11 days later. The British government matched its Soviet counterpart in covering up the disaster.

A study of the Soviet Union’s environmental history (most of the book covers the Soviet period) is much needed, and the authors are to be acknowledged for producing this volume. They contribute different areas of expertise, a strength of the book, but the chapters are slightly uneven in balance between environmental issues and the wider political and economic contexts. The book is organized by time periods, mostly according to Soviet leaders. This allows discussion of the particular policies that drove environmental degradation and, largely, hindered protection; but, it does not allow sustained analysis of continuity and change, some of which is provided in the concise discussion at the beginning of the conclusion. The concluding chapter also offers a useful assessment of the Soviet environmental legacy and the challenges facing the former Soviet republics. Overshadowing much of the book is the Chernobyl disaster, which epitomized so much that was wrong with the Soviet system, and which the authors consider to be ‘one of the crucial factors’ in its collapse (258).