Foul Air, Contaminated Water : Soviet Union Wakes Up to the Ravages of Pollution

“A cap of smog hung over the city. Each hour it grew thicker. By lunchtime, the cars were passing the Nizhni Tagil Metallurgical Plant with their lights on. By evening, the city was covered with a heavy, suffocating blanket.”

Thus began the dramatic account of a recent air pollution crisis in the Ural Mountains city of Nizhni Tagil that appeared April 6 in the Communist youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.

The article noted that the air was so foul that children broke out in rashes on the way to school. It noted that 54 unexplained stillbirths had been reported in the town last year and suggested strongly that bad air was to blame.

The air pollution became so bad that the residents of Nizni Tagil finally rebelled, staging a demonstration involving 10,000 people. In response, one of the coke furnaces at the metallurgical plant was shut down.

The story of this year’s Nizhni Tagil crisis, exposed and debated in painful detail in the national press, reflects a sea change in official Soviet thinking toward the environment. The Kremlin is suddenly environment-conscious.

Only a decade ago, the Soviet Union flatly denied that it had pollution of any sort. Indeed, the belching chimneys and crisscrossed power lines that appeared in photographs were emblems of Soviet achievements.

The country was slanted so far in the direction of big industry that the national motto was “Communism is Soviet power and the electrification of the entire state.”

In recent weeks, the Communist Party Central Committee has responded to this period of long neglect by establishing a National Environmental Protection agency to oversee all aspects of pollution control in the country. The new agency was given broad powers to set standards and authority to close industrial violators.

Pollution control has long been regarded with horror by Communist Party officials. Whereas in the West the costs can be passed along to the consumer, here they must be borne by the state. In addition, controls frequently result in less output--anathema in a country driven by long-range economic plans.

Press Exposes Problems

In addition to establishing the new agency, the government has allowed the official press new freedom in exposing and reporting on a plethora of environmental disasters.

A huge sewage basin near Alma Ata in Kazahkstan ruptured in February, sending a tidal wave of industrial waste through a populated area, killing 10 people and poisoning the local reservoir. Three similar sewage basins are in the same condition in the area, according to a report in the Communist Party newspaper Pravda.

Last month, Komsomolskaya Pravda said that the town of Kirishi, southeast of Leningrad, was about to “explode” with popular protests because of the harmful effects of a chemical plant whose pollution has caused allergies, disease and uncounted deaths.

A river southeast of Moscow overflowed its banks in the city of Uvarovo in February, flooding basements and garages. The river was said to be so polluted that “mice hopped out of the basements and died instantly. . . .”

Yuri Izrael, the former head of environmental protection in the country, said in a newspaper interview last year that the Soviet Union now has 100 cities where air pollution was more than 10 times the acceptable level for several days.

He said that about 105 million tons of harmful substances--including 40 million tons from cars--are emitted into the atmosphere each year, a figure that he described as “enormous” but still less than the 150 million tons per year reported in the United States.

Severe Acid Rain

Izrael said sulfur dioxide emissions, primarily from power stations using coal, have risen to more than 20 million tons a year. He described acid rain as so severe that it is damaging forests, farms and even historical monuments and buildings.

He said that while the government ordered so-called scrubbers installed on power plant chimneys as far back as 1972, the devices have still not been installed.

Izrael was quoted as saying that over the last few years, “dramatic events have occurred--the taking of natural resources has grown at a headlong pace, chemistry has intruded into nature on a broad scale, ecological events approaching crises have occurred and their scale has grown sharply from a local to a global level. . . . “

In 1986, he said, inspectors issued 1,559 orders to various industries to suspend various production operations. Another 300 cases were turned over to the prosecutor’s office.

Another aspect of environmental damage being aired in the Soviet press these days is the overuse of natural resources.

Irrigation Project Harms Sea

The Aral Sea in Uzbekistan has become virtually lifeless because of an increase in salt and a decrease in water level connected with irrigation projects for nearby cotton farms.

“Today, we must admit that, despite all the undoubted achievements (mainly of a quantitative nature), the billions of rubles in capital investments put primarily into increasing cotton production have not brought this land prosperity,” said the Literary Gazette. “Instead, the money aggravated the land’s problems in the extreme.”

Even nuclear power stations are now subjected to the kinds of concerns found in California, unthinkable in the past. In January, construction of an atomic power plant at Krasnodar was stopped because of fears of possible earthquakes in the area.

The decision was not without controversy, however. Writing in Komsomolskaya Pravda, one author blamed “instinctive fear” that had blossomed in the wake of the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine in April, 1986.

The environmental movement began in earnest in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, when protests were raised about the construction of a paper-processing plant on Lake Baikal in Siberia, the largest lake in the country and then a pristine gem.

A protest was mounted by five prominent writers, but the effort was initially a failure. Although the government ordered pollution safeguards, the paper mill was constructed--and badly polluted the lake.

Recently, the government has indicated its displeasure with the initial decision. The paper plant has been ordered closed, and the official of the Paper and Lumber Ministry who was involved was publicly dismissed.

Gorbachev Canceled Canal

After coming to power, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev gained early support by ordering the cancellation of another major environmental threat--the proposed construction of a 1,200-mile-long canal designed to carry water from Siberia to Central Asia.

Despite the recent progress, there is still opposition to some efforts to protect the environment.

One Moscow newspaper, for example, was rebuffed when it asked permission to publish precise statistics on air pollution in the capital, where a thick cloud of smog is almost a daily occurrence.

When residents of Moscow expressed apprehension about their foul-tasting tap water, a government official explained that several thousand tons of fuel oil had leaked into the Moscow River. The water smells intolerable, the government said, but it is safe to drink.

The Soviets also claim to have a unique form of pollution along their Arctic coast. There have been so many expeditions to the frozen wasteland that the coast has become lined with millions of empty oil drums that no one wants or can collect.

It is called the Soviet Union’s “coastline paved with steel.”