Moscow—A grassroots environmental movement has sprouted in the Soviet Union. Bolstered by the spirit of glasnost and outraged over the increase in Soviet pollution problems, environmentalists in the USSR are mobilizing. The fledgling movement is gaining ground protesting air pollution, routine dumping of raw sewage into drinking water and pork-barrel water projects built without public debate.
While successful environmental protests by well-known Soviet scientists and writers date from the 1960s and include the celebrated battles over Lake Baikal and the Brezhnev-era scheme to reverse the flow of two Siberian rivers, only in the past two years have independent citizen-based environmental lobbies become both vocal and visible.
In the last two years, these independent citizen-based groups have become more assertive. Among the most active are a dozen small Leningrad-based groups associated with a coalition called Epicenter.
Names have not been revealed for the interviewees’ protection. This reporter reviewed three of the movement’s leaders…a geologist (GEO), a water inspection agent (WIA) and a wildlife filmmaker (WFM).
Q: What are your main environmental issues here in Leningrad?
GEO: Mainly water problems, especially the pollution of Lake Ladoga, a large freshwater lake east of Leningrad that supplies the city’s drinking water, and the new dam across the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland. The situations in these places are very, very serious. We are under an ecological siege. Lake Ladoga is now on the brink of demise—it is similar to the situation with your Great lakes in America.
Q: Is your main concern about how pollutants are affecting human health?
GEO: Yes, of course. The lake gives water to the second-largest city in the Soviet Union. Many products of industrial and agricultural activity cause mutations in microorganisms and make them virulent. So new forms of contagious diseases may appear.
Q: Do you have much hope that you can prevent the dam from being completed?
WFM: Very, very little, because the people who created the dam are still alive. But I think that sooner or later we will have to destroy the dam. Just a few years of it will create an ecological catastrophe. According to our scientists, the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland will turn into a huge swamp, infested with contagious and virulent bacteria. And so Leningrad will be under siege, with this part of the Gulf of Finland on one side and the heavily polluted Lake Ladoga on the other side.
GEO: Already beaches have been destroyed because of the dam.
Q: And what was the official reason for building the dam?
GEO: The official reason was to protect the city from floods. There was an alternative project that was very much cheaper, and much more effective. But its cheapness was the cause of its demise. We human beings think that we are the czars of nature.
Q: In what ways are you trying to have an influence on these issues?
GEO: We try to have an influence through publications, public actions and independent scientific research. It is now becoming possible to organize independent, formal scientific examinations to study these problems.
WIA: On the one hand, I feel that it’s almost futile. On the other hand, it doesn’t matter how pessimistic I feel. If I can help just a little bit, it’s worthwhile.
Q: Have you seen any results of your efforts so far?
GEO: Yes. For instance, a large group of specialists appealed to the Soviet Academy of Sciences to organize an independent commission to study how well the scientific justification for the dam was carried out.
Q: How did you get involved in this work?
GEO: I am a geologist, and I’ve traveled all over the country on expeditions. I saw everywhere that nature is being actively destroyed, and I concluded that if we don’t stop this process, this physical transformation of our Earth, there will no longer be human beings. I think that ecology if first of all a spiritual movement. If we politicize ecology, new demagogues of ecology will appear. And then we will pursue limited goals that will limit cooperation. Ecology to me is the contemporary religion. It’s the only on the basis of ecology that spiritual integration of the whole global community is possible.
Q: Do you see any signs of this happening?
GEO: These groups are appearing, but they must include the entire global population on the earth. No “ecological parity” can be the solution. Simple love for nature must enter into the consciousness of each living human being.
Q: Do you have much hope now that things will improve?
GEO: I live by this hope. We need a quantum leap of consciousness. And that quantum leap of consciousness may be in some way related to a new ecological Messiah.
Q: What do you mean by an “Ecological Messiah?” A particular person or…
GEO: I don’t know what form it will take. It may be a person, a group of people, a movement—it’s difficult to say. Now it’s impossible. But soon, such a person, or such a movement, must be born. We must come out for nature, and be against, at the same time, the destruction of nature continuing on an ever-increasing scale. We must feel our own personal responsibility.
Q: I understand that Epicenter tried to put you on the ballot for city council elections last spring. Do you agree that ecology and politics should not be mixed?
WIA: GEO and I have drastically different approaches, yet we are friends. The mistakes that ruin ecological balance are political mistakes, and we must mount forces to balance them. The workers at the Kirishi paper-making mill are opposed to closing the mill, even though they are ill and their children are all. This is their piece of bread, their ration, and they think that their clever uncles and aunts will technically solve the problem. But the officials and the party people think only about their only personal benefits. So we just have to come to the conclusion that nobody will take care of this except us. GEO says that if we are sincerely for saving nature, there mustn’t be politics in nature. I say that politics and nature are connected. On the surface level, there is a contradiction in what we are saying, but I believe that deep inside we are speaking about the same thing.
Q: Can you explain your personal approach in more detail?
WIA: It has to do with a way of life. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke. I don’t have a car, I don’t work in an industry that pollutes nature. And I write books, although they are not published. I have a nickname in this country, as a writer, that means “the little black one.” So I depict the black sides of our life. I use shock therapy to cause a reaction.
Q: Is being a writer your official work?
WIA: Officially, I work as a state inspector for water quality in the northeast region of the country, for the Northeastern Department of Water Inspection, which is part of the Ministry of Water and Reclamation.
Q: So environmental work is part of your job.
WIA: Yes. But I only began this work recently, and I can’t agree with the methods that my agency uses. I am a white crow (i.e. “a black sheep) in my agency. The people who work there are corrupted – they are just interested in getting their piece of bread. They are supposed to control pollutants, but the agency itself pollutes. So the thief tries to catch himself.
Q: Or as we say, “the fox watches the chicken coop.”
WFM: In this case, it is the fox hunting itself.
Q: Have your groups here in Leningrad been involved with issues in other parts of the country, for example with the river diversions in Siberia?
GEO: Yes, of course. The same agencies took part in building these projects. So if they are interconnected, we must be interconnected as well. If we win, it will be easier for our friends in Siberia to fight the same agencies.
WFM: Unfortunately, our ecological movement is so far not very united. We are considering only the most selective and local problems—like open space in Moscow—and no global problems. We are not experienced in inter-organization, we don’t have good means of communication, and it’s difficult for us to publish even the most primitive things.
Q: What can the people in the West do that would be helpful to you?
WFM: Of course, we are all interested in more cooperation. But it can be difficult. Our local Greenpeace acts under the auspices of the Peace Committee, and the Peace Committee does everything it can to isolate us from International Greenpeace.
WIA: The more publications about our problems that appear in the West the better. The more letters you can write to official Soviet organizations, the better, as well as copies to us, so we know that they were sent. We need joint exhibitions, mutual forums, exchanges of materials. The best help of all would be to send experts over who can participate in scientific studies and we need to come to know each other personally.
WFM: We don’t know what’s happening with the Swedes, the Finns, the people in other countries. There’s a lot of potential joint work.
WIA: We have only one planet. The Finnish industrialists dispose of their pollutants and they find their way to Lake Ladoga. And our authorities are satisfied with just the compensation for this. Finnish people are paying to have these pollutants disappear.
WFM: But the pollutants that find their way from Finland to Lake Ladoga will flow back to the Gulf of Finland and will poison it again. So we cheat each other.
WIA: And the dam in the Gulf of Finland violates the ecology of the whole Baltic Sea. So it’s not just our local problem.
GEO: Anything that affects the global community must be examined by the whole global community. We need solidarity and help. Not matter what country we are from, we ecologically-minded people form one family.