The Value Shift of the Russian Greens

Abstract

The Green movement in the USSR/Russia has existed for more than forty years. During this period, seven groups have been shaped and consolidated within the movement (the conservationists, the alternativists, the traditionalists, the civil initiatives, the ecopoliticians, the ecopatriots, and the ecotechnocrats). The aim of this article is to consider the value shift each group underwent during the decade 1992–2001 within the context of the broader changes in the Russian society. The article emphasizes key influences conditioning the transformations of values. These include changing of local and national contexts caused by the overall process of society's westernization and globalization, as well as by the changes in each group's positions vis-a-vis the state, market economy, science and local population.

Keywords:

• The Greens
• Environmental values
• Local population
• Science
• State
• Russia

Notes

1. The most glorious success of the SEU was the organization of nation-wide rallies in February 1989 against the northern rivers diversion project that involved about 1 million lay people in 100 cities of the USSR. The SEU was also able to collect more than 100, 000 signatures against the construction of the Volga-Chograi Canal, a part of the above project. As a result, the project was finally cancelled.

2. Nevertheless, it is rather significant that the Russian alternativists have chosen the small but ancient Russian town Kasimov (300 kilometres south from Moscow) with a rich history and cultural diversity as a place for the group's headquarters. More than that, establishing new local public organizations in the run of mass protest campaigns, the alternativists see themselves as exporters of the seeds of civil society (Fomichev, 1999).

3. Actually, the group is grounded on the idea of a ‘religious ecologist’. As one of the group's founding fathers put it, ‘a religious ecologist is rather a heathen or a pantheist than a Christian … He sees the God's image in every part of nature, he holds in reverence before it’ (Shtilmark, 2001, p. 11).

4. The public polemics between Vladimir Boreiko, the leader of the CIS deep ecologists group, and Svyatoslav Zabelin, the former leader of conservationists and the co-leader of the ISEU at present, is rather revealing. Boreiko accused Zabelin that in the run of the Ecological Doctrine of Russia drafting ‘you (i.e. conservationists) have transformed yourselves into adepts of business’. Zabelin responded that the Doctrine is only one tool among many others serving for the interpretation ‘of our ideas of nature protection into the language of bureaucrats and businessmen … We, humans, are still brutes’ … Therefore, ‘for saving nature and our souls we should return to the past, … to the lost Paradise’ (Gumanitarnyi Ekologicheskii Zhurnal, 2001, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 45–48). As one can see, the value gap between the conservationists and deep ecologists is not so wide.

5. According to my calculations, in modern Russia there are more than fifty types of social groups that identify themselves as groups at risk. These are refugees and forced migrants, drug addicts, invalids and homeless as well as the carriers of Afganistan, Kharabakh, Chechen and other syndromes, young women who search for work abroad, victims of crime and national conflicts, etc. In sum, they number nearly a quarter of population of Russia.

6. The Civil Forum initiated and carried out by the Russian government in 2001 aimed to demonstrate the union between the state and civil society in modern Russia. However, the Forum did not justify the hopes of its organizers. The Forum's participants quickly split into two parts: the pro-presidential majority and the minority that dared to criticize the environmental policy of the federal government. It is also significant that nearly a half of the ENGOs that attended the Forum had been established ad hoc and disappeared just after the end of the Forum sittings.

7. During the decade in question, this subgroup has done a lot for the transformation of the environmental movement of the former USSR into a loosely structured network of ENGOs and not into a Green party. At the end of 1980s the group's representatives openly came out in favor of the US model of environmental policy making.

8. Ostensibly, this group has a very limited experience with regard to such mobilization. In 2000 the group's leaders together with technocrats tried to launch a mass campaign in support of an all-Russian referendum against the decision of the federal parliament to import and deposit nuclear wastes in Russia. The campaign failed because only 1.8 million signatures were gathered instead of the minimum of 2.5 million stipulated by the Russian Constitution. In my view, the organizers of the campaign could have gathered much more than the 2.5 million signatures if they had been able to utilize the support of local civil initiatives.

9. In some cases such groups emerged on the basis of civil initiatives. For example, during the 1990s the Public Committee for Saving the Sukhona River was gradually transformed into the research and developments unit responsible for carrying out a number of projects aimed at environmental impact assessment by the order of particular industrial plants and the local administration.