The appeal of appearing green: Soviet-American ideological competition and Cold War environmental diplomacy

Abstract

This paper argues that the Cold War, for all its environmental costs, brought in its train a hidden benefit: the creation of an international ideological competition that made meaningful environmental agreements more likely. After reviewing the history of Soviet environmental initiatives, the paper discusses the rise of international environmental agreements and the abrupt decline after 1991.

Notes

¹ Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), xix.

² Ibid., 12. Italics in the original.

³ Although general histories of the Cold War tend to ignore the environment, the literature documenting the environmental damage wrought by the Cold War is burgeoning, focus thus far falling predominantly on nuclear energy and nuclear power. Significant recent works include John McNeill and Corinna Unger, eds., Environmental Histories of the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press USA, 2013); Dian Belanger, Deep Freeze: The United States, the International Geophysical Year, and the Origins of Antarctica's Age of Science (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press, 2006); Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press USA, 2013); Rebecca Priestley, Mad on Radium (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2012); Svetlana Alexeievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1997); Valerie Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West (New York: Routledge, 1998).

⁴ The accident took place in the town of Ozyorsk, a closed city whose name was unknown in the West until the fall of the Soviet Union. As a result, the accident is known outside Russia as the Kyshtym accident. The Mayak reactors are currently shut down, although not dismantled, and the facility disposes of nuclear waste for Bulgaria and Ukraine. For discussions of the Kyshtym incident, see Vladislav Larin, ‘Neizvestnyi radiatsionnye avarii na kombinate Maiak’, Energiia 1 (15 January 2000): 18–25; Zhores Medvedev, Nuclear Disaster in the Urals (New York: Vintage Books, 1980); Paul Josephson, Red Atom (New York: W. H. Freeman, 2000); Diane Soran and Danny B. Stillman, An Analysis of the Alleged Kyshtym Disaster (Los Alamos, NM: Los Alamos National Laboratory, 1982); Vladislav Larin, Russkie atomnye akuly: razmyshleniia s elementami sistemizatskii i analiza: istoriia, sozdaniia, katastrofy, utilizatsiia, perspektivy (Moscow: MKM, 2005); Michael R. Edelstein, Maria Tysiachniouk and Lyudmila V. Smirnova, Cultures of Contamination: Legacies of Pollution in Russia and the U.S. (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007); and A. M. Kellerer, ‘The Southern Urals radiation studies: A reappraisal of the current status’, Radiation and Environmental Biophysics 41, no. 4: 307–316. For information related to Hanford, see John M. Findlay and Bruce William Hevly, Atomic Frontier Days: Hanford and the American West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011); and Michele Gerber, On The Home Front: The Cold War Legacy of the Hanford Nuclear Site (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).

⁵ John McNeill and Corinna Unger cite sources indicating that ‘military goods accounted for 25–40 percent of all industrial production in the Soviet Union’, and presumably these industrial processes had an environmental impact. See McNeill and Unger, eds., Environmental Histories of the Cold War, 9.

⁶ Jacob Hamblin comes near to this argument, but only for the Nixon administration, when he writes in Arming Mother Nature that Nixon's embrace of environmentalism was due to ‘the looming threat that UN-wide environmental discussions would merely become vehicles for criticism of the Vietnam War’, and the ‘public relations contest with the Soviet Union’. Hamblin, 192.

⁷ There is a fairly well developed literature dedicated to questions of international environmental diplomacy, although for the most part the motivations of the various parties are left aside and questions about successes and failures of compliance take centre stage. Important works include Ulrich Beyerlin, Peter-Tobias Stoll and Rüdiger Wolfrum, Ensuring Compliance with Multilateral Environmental Agreements: A Dialogue Between Practitioners and Academia (Amsterdam: BRILL, 2006); Oran Young, The Effectiveness of Intl Environmental Regimes: Causal Connections and Behavioral Mechanisms (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999); Peter Sand, ‘A Century of Green Lessons: The Contribution of Nature Conservation Regimes to Global Governance’, International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law, and Economics 1 (2001): 33–72; Frank Biermann, Olwen Davies and Nicolien van der Grijp, ‘Environmental Policy Integration and the Architecture of Global Environmental Governance’, International Environmental Agreements 9 (2009): 351–369; Carlo Carraro, ed., International Environmental Agreements on Climate Change (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999); Scott Barrett, Environment & Statecraft: The Strategy of Environmental Treaty-Making (Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 2003); Nina Poussenkova, ‘Russia: A Country with an Unpredictable Past’, International Environmental Agreements 3 (2003): 243–267.

⁸ Robert Darst, Smokestack Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 3–4.

⁹ Ibid., 2

¹⁰ Marshall Goldman, The Spoils of Progress: Environmental Misuse in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 214; Philip Pryde, Conservation in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 163.

¹¹ Boris Komarov (pseudonym of Ze'ev Wolfson), The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union (White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1980); Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly Jr., Ecocide in the USSR (New York: Basic Books 1993); D.J. Peterson, Troubled Lands: The Legacy of Soviet Environmental Destruction (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993). Other works include David E. Powell, ‘The Social Costs of Modernization: Ecological Problems in the USSR’, World Politics 23, no. 4 (July 1971): 618–624; Keith Bush, ‘Environmental Problems in the USSR’, Problems of Communism, 21 (July-August 1972): 21–31; Ivan Volyges, Environmental Deterioration in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (New York: Praeger, 1974); Fred Singleton, ed., Environmental Misuse in the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger, 1976); John Massey-Stewart, ed., The Soviet Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Murray Feshbach, Ecological Disaster: Cleaning Up the Hidden Legacy of the Soviet Regime (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995); Brian Bonhomme, Forests, Peasants, and Revolutionaries: Forest Conservation and Organization in Soviet Russia, 1917–1929 (New York: East European Monographs, 2005); and Struan Stevenson, Stalin's Legacy (Edinburgh: Birlinn, Ltd., 2012). Works in the Russian language that similarly suggest an antipathy to untamed nature are Vladimir Boreiko, Belye piatna istorii prirodookhrany (Kiev: Kievskii ekologo-kul'turnyi tsenter, 1996), and Feliks Shtil'mark, Otchet o prozhitom: zapiski ekologo-okhotoveda (Moscow: ‘Logata,’ 2006).

¹² Feshbach and Friendly, Ecocide in the USSR, 29.

¹³ Douglas Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 444.

¹⁴ Paul Josephson, Nicolai Dronin, Ruben Mnatsakanian, Aleh Cherp, Dmitry Efremenko, and Vladislav Larin, An Environmental History of Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press USA, 2013), 5.

¹⁵ The conclusion that Josephson et al. reach regarding environmental diplomacy accords with their assertion about Soviet hostility to the environment: ‘Soviet environmental policy’, they write, ‘was geared to achieve diplomatic success rather than solve domestic or such international environmental problems as transborder pollution.’ Josephson et. al., An Environmental History of Russia, 192.

¹⁶ Slavenka Drakulic, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (New York: Harper Press, 1993), 181.

¹⁷ For a discussion of automobiles in the Soviet Union, although one lacking an explicit emphasis on environmental matters, see Lewis Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). The impact of Soviet urban planning and land use policy on the environment remains unstudied.

¹⁸ Zsuzsa Gille, From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana of University Press, 2007), 3.

¹⁹ Mayakovskii's brand of futurist poetry, which celebrated the impending replacement of human frailty with mechanical precision and contained lines such as ‘We'll destroy you, old romantic world! In place of faith in our soul we have electricity and steam’ left little space for an appreciation for untrammelled nature. Likewise, Gorkii's famous pronouncement issued in relation to the opening of the Belomor Canal ‘Man, in changing Nature, changes himself’, carried with it the certainty that the rejection of nature as it exists was an inseparable aspect of the effort to create a new socialist society.

²⁰ See Stephen Brain, Song of the Forest (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).

²¹ Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii (RGAE) f. 17, op. 163, d. 790, l. 58

²² RGAE f. 9466, op. 5, d. 207, ll. 25–35.

²³ See Peter Blandon, Soviet Forest Industries (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983).

²⁴ Pryde, Conservation in the Soviet Union, 51.

²⁵ The Ministry of Forest Management issued a report in 1950 in which they claimed that they ‘conducted a study, in the interests of oversight, of the quality of forest management in the state zapovedniki on an area of 961,100 hectares… Measures for forest regeneration were applied on an extremely insignificant scale, and forest protection was organised weakly. Current fire protection measures do not safeguard the forests… and patrols from the air, the best defense against fires, are either not carried out at all or only in a limited amount.’ The report also contended that older forests served as breeding grounds for insects and forest diseases. See RGAE f. 9466, op. 5, d. 273, l. 11.

²⁶ Douglas Weiner, Models of Nature (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988).

²⁷ Kai-Ching Cha, ‘Can the Convention on Biological Diversity Save the Siberian Tiger?’ Environs 24, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 6.

²⁸ A. Cetkauskaite and A. Jakstaite, ‘Waste Water Treatment in Lithuania from 1950 to 1990’, European Water Management 2, no. 4 (August 1999): 40–50. See also Anolda Cetkauskaite, Dimitry Zharkov and Liutauras Stoskus, ‘Water-Quality Control, Monitoring and Wastewater Treatment in Lithuania, 1950–1999’, Ambio 30, no. 4–5 (August 2001): 297–305. Cetkauskaite and Jakstaite show that as of 1989, Denmark had 1039 wastewater treatment plants for its population of 5.16 million people, while Lithuania had 900 plants for 3.7 million people. In addition, Lithuanian pollution loads were much lower than Danish levels: Denmark produced 20,900 tons of nitrogen and 4,900 tons of phosphorus, while Lithuania produced 10,600 tons of nitrogen and 1,438 tons of phosphorus.

²⁹ Cetkauskaite, Zharkov and Stoskus, ‘Water Quality Control’, 305.

³⁰ Although the Red Book has been mentioned in passing by many historians of Soviet environmental history, no author has analysed its origins, development, or consequences in any depth.

³¹ V.M. Thomas and A.O. Orlova, ‘Soviet and Post-Soviet Environmental Management: Lessons from a Case Study on Lead Pollution’, Ambio 30, no. 2 (March 2001): 104.

³² Thomas and Orlova refer to Yuri Alekseev's 1983 biography Evgenii Chudakov to suggest that Stalin helped influence the ban on lead, but given that both Chudakov and Stalin died in 1953, while the ban came into effect in 1956, this seems unlikely.

³³ A Swiss and Russian team of scientists studied air bubbles trapped in ice cores and found that lead concentrations reached a peak level of 2250 ng/l in the year 1970, and by 1980 had fallen approximately by half. See A. Eichler, L. Tobler, S. Eyrich, G. Gramlich, N. Malygina, T. Papina, and M. Schwikowski, ‘Three Centuries of Eastern European and Altai Lead Emissions Recorded in a Belukha Ice Core’, Environmental Science and Technology 46, no. 8 (2012): 4232–4330.

³⁴ Zigurds L. Zile, ‘Lenin's Contribution to Law: The Case of Protection and Preservation of the Natural Environment’, in Lenin and Leninism, B. Eissenstat, ed. (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1971), 83. Perhaps the first work linking Lenin to environmentalism was Shaposhnikov and Borisov, ‘Pervye meropriiatiia sovetskogo gosudarstva po okhrane prirody,’ Okhrana prirody i zapovednoe delo v SSSR No. 3 (1958).

³⁵ Quoted in Bonhomme, Forests, Peasants, and Revolutionaries, 201.

³⁶ Joan DeBardeleben discusses the environmental attitudes inherent in Marxism in The Environment and Marxism-Leninism: The Soviet and East German Experience (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985).

³⁷ Aryeh L. Unger, Constitutional Development in the USSR: A Guide to the Soviet Constitution (New York: Pica Press, 1981).

³⁸ For a highly representative and seemingly reliable example of the misleading environmental claims that Soviet propagandists often made, see N.F. Izmerov, Control of Air Pollution in the USSR (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1973), in which it is piously claimed, after noting the air pollution problems in London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington and New York, that the USSR was ‘the first country in the world to lay down maximum permissible concentrations for atmospheric pollutants, ‘and that the ‘approaches adopted in the USSR… to solve the air-pollution problem may also prove acceptable and useful governments.’ http://whqlibdoc.who.int/php/WHO_PHP_54.pdf. Accessed 22 November 2013.

The appeal of Marxism in remedying capitalist environmental excess is given voice in Arran Gare, ‘Soviet Environmentalism: The Path Not Taken’, in The Greening of Marxism, ed. Ted Benton (New York: The Guilford Press, 1996).

³⁹ G. I. Red'ko and N. G. Red'ko, Istoriia lesnogo khoziaistva Rossii (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Moskovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta lesa, 2002), 314

⁴⁰ For one example of an attempt to portray the Great Stalin Plan as a proxy fight in the developing Cold War, see P. V. Vasil'ev, ‘Razval teorii i praktiki burzhuaznogo lesnogo khoziaistva v kapitalisticheskikh stranakh,’ Lesnoe khoziaistvo 2 (December 1949): 11–17.

⁴¹ Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arhkiv Ekonomiki (RGAE) f. 9466, op. 1, d. 140, l. 5.

⁴² In a recently defended dissertation, Andy Bruno investigated Soviet industrial development from an environmental point of view, and found evidence that the Soviet economic planners indeed ‘were concerned with creating harmony with nature even in the throes of Stalinism’, and that they sincerely believed that planned economies could utilise resources so efficiently that industrialisation and environmental integrity need not come into conflict. See Andy Bruno, Making Nature Modern: Economic Transformation and the Environment in the Soviet North (Urbana-Champaign, IL: Unpublished Dissertation, 2011), 280.

⁴³ The improvement rendered even by the incomplete Stalin Plan plantings was measureable. One study conducted in Novocherkassk, near Rostov-on-Don, showed that yields near forests brought 33.5 centners per hectare, while fields with no forests brought only 25.7 centners. RGAE f. 538, op. 1, d. 11, l. 109. A centner is equal to fifty kilograms.

⁴⁴ On 30 June 1957, Eisenhower addressed the American public via television and radio, and announced that the ‘most important result of the International Geophysical Year is that demonstration of the abilities of all nations to work together harmoniously for the common good.’ Eisenhower's Records as President, Official File, Box 624, OF 146-E IGY, 1. For discussions of the peaceful potential of the International Geophysical Year, see Walter Sullivan, Assault on the Unknown: The International Geophysical Year (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961); and Harold Bullis, The Political Legacy of the International Geophysical Year (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959).

⁴⁵ Y.V. Ivashchenko, P.J. Clapham, and R.L. Brownell, ‘Scientific Reports of Soviet Whaling Expeditions in the North Pacific, 1977 – 1978’ (NOAA Technical Memorandum NMFS-AFSC-175: Washington, DC, 2007).

⁴⁶ Alfred A. Berzin, ‘The Truth about Soviet Whaling’, Marine Fisheries Review 70, no. 2 (2008): 4–55.

⁴⁷ ‘Carter Reaffirms Support for 10-year Halt to Whaling’, Vancouver Sun, 20 June 1977, 14.

⁴⁸ Kurkpatrick Dorsey, Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas (Seattle: University of Washington Press), 2013.

⁴⁹ ‘Carter's plea to delegates: “Eyes of the World on You”’, Canberra Evening Herald, 21 June 1977, 10.

⁵⁰ ‘Soviet Dispels Hope It Will End Whaling’, New York Times, 22 January 1981. http://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/22/world/soviet-dispels-hope-it-will-end-whaling.html. Accessed 20 October 2013.

⁵¹ R. Stephen Berry, ‘What Happened at Stockholm’, Science and Public Affairs 28, no. 7 (September 1972): 16–58; Brooks Flippen, Nixon and the Environment (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 173.

⁵² Despite the theatrical aspect of the ENMOD treaty, Hamblin observes that the treaty had the effect of ‘reinforc[ing] the impression that global catastrophic environmental change was quite possible, and that ‘these were not warnings coming from the margins of society… but from the heads of state of the United States and the Soviet Union.’ Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature, 216.

⁵³ See D. Favre, International Trade in Endangered Species (Boston: Dordrecht Press, 1989); Kevin Hill, ‘The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species: Fifteen Years Later’, Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review 13, no. 2 (December 1990): 231–278.

⁵⁴ See Richard Benedick, Ozone Diplomacy: New Directions in Safeguarding the Planet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 65–6; and Pasi Räsänen and Simo Laakkonen, ‘Cold War and the Environment: The Role of Finland in International Environmental Politics in the Baltic Sea Region’, Ambio 36, nos. 2–3 (April 2007): 229–236.

⁵⁵ Kofi Annan, We The Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21^stCentury (New York: United Nations Department of Public Information, 2000), 56. Scientific assessments reinforce Annan's conclusions, and show CFC concentrations levelling off or declining after the ratification of the treaty. See J. A. Mäder, J. Staehelin, T. Peter, D. Brunner, H. E. Rieder, and W. A. Stahel, ‘Evidence for the Effectivness of the Montreal Protocol to Protect the Ozone Layer’, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 10 no. 24 (December 2010): 12161–12171.

⁵⁶XXV s'ezd Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovestskogo Soiuza (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1976), 77.

⁵⁷ Ibid, 81; 305.

⁵⁸XXIV s'eazd Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza,(Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1971), 54, 417.

⁵⁹ Ibid, 501.

⁶⁰ Don Munton, Marvin Soroos, Elena Nikitina and Marc A. Levy, ‘Acid Rain in Europe and North America,’ in The Effectiveness of International Environmental Regimes: Causal Connections, ed. Oran Young (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 160.

⁶¹ Josef Füllenbach, European Environmental Policy (London: Butterworths, 1981), 168–171.

⁶² Leonid Brezhnev, Vital Speeches of the Day, Vol. 42 Issue 6, 164.

⁶³ William C. Clark, Learning to Manage Global Environmental Risks, Volume 1 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 143.

⁶⁴ This data is drawn from the Air Pollutant Emission Viewer (LRTAP Convention). http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/data-viewers/air-emissions-viewer-lrtap. Accessed 31 October 2013.

⁶⁵ Protokol k Konventsii 1979 go

⁶⁶ See Weiner, A Little Corner, Chapter 28. It should be noted that the Soviet effort to redirect rivers for economic advantage had direct American analogues. See Stephen Brain, ‘The Environmental History of the Soviet Union’, in A Companion to Global Environmental History, ed. J. R. McNeill and Erin Mauldin (Chichester, West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2012), 234.

⁶⁷ ‘Stasi Note on Meeting between Minister Mielke and KGB Chairman Andropov, 11 July 1981.’ Wilson Center Digital Archive (http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/115717). Accessed 31 October 2013.

⁶⁸ A.S. Chernyaev, ‘Record of Conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush at Malta Summit.’ Wilson Center Digital Archive (http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/117223). Accessed October 31, 2013.

⁶⁹ Gareth Porter, Janet Welsh Brown, and Pamela S. Chasek, Global Environmental Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 120.

⁷⁰ ‘What Next, Then?’ The Economist (26 July 2001), 77.

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Stephen Brain

Stephen Brain is professor of history at Mississippi State University. Email: [email protected]