By Irina Glushchenko
MOSCOW — When perestroika began, the environmental movement in the USSR grew strongly. But the movement has tended to die away as anger at the damage wrought by the old order was swamped by the difficulties of surviving under the new.
Now that privatisation is under way, the environment is suffering even more.
Aleksei Golub reported last year in Nezavisimaya Gazeta: "As a result of privatisation the state is losing its last possibilities of setting the ecological boundaries ... The state will be forced to relate to each enterprise as a sovereign economic unit, whose rights are defended by the law to a greater degree than are our general interests in the field of environmental conservation."
Golub suggested a single form of licensing for the emission of wastes, made binding through a document which would be part of the privatisation process. He also urged that the privatisation of ecologically dangerous plants be postponed. Nothing of the kind has been done.
Defenders of the environment can be thankful that the government's privatisation plan is not being fully implemented. The transfer of dangerous technologies into private hands is lagging far behind the authorities' schedule.
In 1992 the privatisation of natural resources was banned. But as a rule, control over natural resources has been given to local organs, which treat them as their own property. The resources are leased out, or become the local contribution to joint ventures.
The environmental movement during the perestroika years included an important antinuclear component. However, the antinuclear sentiments of the population were often exploited shamelessly.
A classic example was the nuclear power plant at Ignalina in Lithuania. When the opposition nationalist movement Sajudis was trying to win power in the republic, it demanded the halting of construction work on a third reactor at the plant. This reactor had been planned on the basis of the most modern and reliable technology then available in the USSR. If construction had gone ahead, it would have been possible to shut down at least one of the old Chernobyl-type reactors.
Once Sajudis came to power, and confronted severe power shortages, it dumped its antinuclear platform. But going ahead with the third reactor had already become impossible. Vytenis Andriukaitis, a Social Democratic deputy to the Lithuanian Sejm, explains: "After construction was halted, the population simply stole everything of value ... The antinuclear statements by Sajudis were pure speculation ... Now we've been left with two obsolete and dangerous reactors we can't shut down."
In Kazakhstan, where there have been appalling consequences of nuclear testing, secrecy provisions have been lifted from 13 of the 22 testing sites. Most are still in operation, even though the government has declared the state to be non-nuclear.
According to activists of the antinuclear Nevada-Semipalatinsk Movement quoted in January by Nezavisimaya Gazeta, "The test ranges are mainly unfenced and unguarded, and there are no stations for the decontamination of vehicles. Radioactive earth is carried off around the district on the wheels of cars and trucks."
Professor Bigaliev, one of the leaders of the movement, describes another alarming situation: "The region of the Azgir testing range is where ... rockets launched from the Kapustin Yar site return to earth. They include rockets with nuclear warheads. Every three or four kilometres there are pieces of these rockets." Local residents use unburnt fuel from the rockets for domestic purposes. When burnt, it gives off dioxin.
Unauthorised use of poisonous and radioactive wastes was a familiar problem in Soviet society. In Voronezh, where the first nuclear power plant in the USSR was built, cases are recorded of people stealing and drinking radioactive alcohol used for flushing out the cooling system. As a result of numerous radioactive spills, the soil in the vicinity is almost as contaminated as around Chernobyl, but Voronezh potatoes can still be bought at any market in Moscow.
Cases of explosions and accidents in military facilities have become frequent, including in those of the strategic forces. The most diverse kinds of military equipment are stolen and sold. Police throughout the world tremble at the mention of a new type of criminal enterprise — underground speculation in stolen radioactive fuel from the former USSR.