Soviet Environmental Policies

[Zor]

One thing i was wondering about, but found comparitively little on beyond the Devistation of the Aral Sea.

With the effects of the Soviet cotton industry on the that paticular body of water being a notable exaple, from what i read, the Soviets (and the Russian Fed. afterwards) had a bunch of really bad enviromental policies and i was wondering, how bad were they?

Zor

[K. A. Pital]

Well, the Aral sea could've dried up totally if some measures weren't taken in the recent years, so yeah it was pretty bad from an environmental point. However, cotton production went massively up. Large industrial projects tend to have massive environmental effects.

In some places the reverse was observed. The Sayano-Shushensk dam when constructed led to a 250 km long unfreezing zone on the river, and the massive body of water above combined with the un-freezing flow below resulted in a greatly mildened climate. Many thousands of square kilometers impacted by this climate change attracted wildlife and led to a great diversity of plants and animals. The place is now a wildlife reserve.

[TC Pilot]

Not sure how accurate it is, but there's a map of the Soviet Union titled "Soviet and post-Soviet ecocide" in the back of Stephen Kotkin's Armageddon Averted that has huge swathes of territory being affected by "Multiple Pollutant Danger," "Characteristic Pollutants," "Soil Erosion," "Deforestation," "Acid Rain," and "Water Pollution," with dozens of specific points of "Air Pollution," "Groundwater Depletion or Contamination," "Pollution of Seas," "Depletion of Fish Resources," "Soil Salination, Depletion, or Contaminatinon [sic]," "Disruption of Permafrost Soil Conditions," and "Disruption of Land or Depletion of Subsoil."

[Stormbringer]

With the effects of the Soviet cotton industry on the that paticular body of water being a notable exaple, from what i read, the Soviets (and the Russian Fed. afterwards) had a bunch of really bad enviromental policies and i was wondering, how bad were they?

The August 1994 National Geographic had a pretty good expose about that. It's neither political nor going for the "gasps of horor" style either. Pick it up if you can.

Judging from that, the policies were pretty horrific. There were a lot of cases where things were just plain frightening. Massive industrial pollution, widespread environmental damage, and way too many innocent people caught up in incidents of the same. The policies were not really malovelent, it was just a case of environmental protection not being an issue or impossible to address because of the lack of funds. It's pretty bad and the report suggested there was a lot more yet to be fully understood.

In short, pretty damn bad even for the pace of industrialization. Of course, it sounds like China is on a pace to be even worse.

[wautd]

Based on an article I once read about Mayak and the massive amounts of nuclear pollution.... not good