ИСТИНА

Strict ideological control and censorship of Soviet media precluded any serious role for civil society in the environmental history of Russia in the twentieth century. With the exception of a few years during Gorbachev's “perestroika”, the Soviet population, moreover, was by and large characteristically indifferent to environmental issues. While the All-Union Society for the Conservation of Nature (VOOP) embraced 25 million people, the society had no noticeable impact on environmental protection. There were, however, several genuine green groups that had the capacity to influence Soviet authorities. Promoted by Soviet academicians during the early years of Khrushchev era, some laws on the protection of nature were issued in 1957-1960. Khrushchev himself, whose reign spanned the years 1953-1964, lacked any environmental instincts. He viewed nature reserves as “wasted” unproductive land and in 1961 shut down a number of them. The fraction of green academicians (mainly biologists) was small while the majority of Soviet scientists enthusiastically worked on giant “hero” projects. Soviet universities lacked any courses dealing with environmental protection. Individual Soviet writers, on the other hand, were more outspoken on the environment. In 1953 Leonid Leonov published Russian Forest, a novel in which he promoted the view that felling should never exceed annual forest growth. The novel reached a substantial readership and finally a quota system was introduced in Soviet forestry. In 1956 Nobel-prize winner Mikhail Sholokhov was the first to express concern about the project to construct the cellulose and pulp plant on the shores of Lake Baikal. Ten years later at the XXII Party Congress in 1966 he repeated his criticism. Still other writers managed to circumvent restrictions to publish views on Lake Baikal in the Soviet press. In 1976 Valentin Rasputin published the novel Farewell Matera describing the tragedy of a small Siberian village which was being destroyed in the course of preparing the construction of a large reservoir. In the years following the Gorbachev reforms, efforts by Soviet green writers became more intense. Following the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor on 26 April 1986 Soviet authorities restricted publication of any information about the disaster in Soviet media. This suppression of information in the Soviet press lasted until 1988. Surprisingly, in 1986, Vladimir Gubarev, a writer little known at the time, published Sarcophagus, a play about the Chernobyl disaster. The play was performed at Tambov-city theatre in the end of that year. In 1986-1987 five more novels about the Chernobyl disaster were published by different writers in the USSR. A large-scale environmental movement in the USSR appeared only in 1988, in wake of the adoption of the law allowing NGOs in the USSR. Thousands of protest actions under environmental slogans took place across the country. The first victim of the mass protests was the Soviet nuclear program: all projects of new nuclear plants were cancelled. Cancellation of many industrial projects followed. Powerful environmental NGOs concealed movements of national liberation in some Soviet republics: “Karabakh” in Armenia, “Rukh” in Ukraine, “Sąjūdis” in Lithuania. Mass protests reached their peak in 1990. After the breakup of the USSR, large-scale environmental movement vanished. The modern period is characterized by limited public interest in environmental issues. Interest is sustained largely by international NGOs such as WWF, Greenpeace, and UICN.