Russia: A Changed Land
I
n 1971 and in 1989 I visited Leningrad, now St. Petersburg again. On both occasions I was awed by the beauty of the city. Stately government buildings and magnificent churches [used as museums during my visits) border the broad boulevards and canal-lined streets of this city that Catherine loved. Traveling by public transportation through the city and to the country palace at Pushkin, I could feel the people's relief that winter was over. Their warmth and friendliness toward two awkward Americans were comforting. On the second trip, I was struck by a feeling that all was not right in the city. The streets were pocked with huge holes, buildings were badly in need of paint, and we soon learned about the food lines. It was the end of April before the Berlin Wall fell, and little did we know the extent of decay within the Soviet Union. A whole nation was 001 3-936X/93/0927-577504.00/0 @ 1993 American Chemical Society
crumbling under the burden of a huge, inefficient bureaucracy and a massive debt caused by a cold war in which my country was the adversary. Change was in the air, however; we watched the first May Day parade in years that did not feature missiles and the military. In the years since, I and many others in the West have slowly realized that the Soviet Union had a dark side we did not imagine. A government with a compulsion for production officially sanctioned the ravaging of nature in cruelly efficient ways. Lakes were rendered sterile, forests were denuded, whole regions were contaminated beyond habitability: Even the oceans offshore were threatened. To work in some of the factories or even to live nearby was life threatening. In this issue we chronicle the tragic evolution of the neglect of the environment and public health in the former Soviet Union through writings of several Russian and foreign experts. We do so with compassion, however, because we realize that what was done to the environment there was different only in degree to what occurred in western countries before the environmental revolution. Indeed, the callousness of managers of the USSR's state-owned industries toward the natural environment and the apparent disrespect for individuals in the work place have analogues in the development of western Europe and its colonies. Perhaps we are shocked by the revelations of ecocide in the USSR because we thought that those days were past, that people and governments were too civilized to wantonly destroy nature and endanger their colleagues. The recent history of the Soviet Union reminds us, however, that our values can be easily distorted by political and economic pressures, and that the environmental movement is less about laws than it is about morals. As we proceed to perfect the systems of environmental and public health protection on the planet, let us not forget.
Environ. Sci. Technol.. VoI. 27. No. 4. 1993 577
