COLUMN ONE : A Lesson for Greens in Baltics : Environmental activists successfully sparked opposition to Moscow’s control. But now, after independence, many won’t sacrifice jobs and money for the environment.

It would not be far-fetched to say the movement for the independence of Lithuania began 70 miles from here, at the largest nuclear construction site in the world.

The Soviet-built power station at Ignalina already boasted twin reactors modeled after those at Chernobyl when Lithuanian environmentalists organized public demonstrations in 1986 to force Moscow to cancel an additional, larger reactor already under construction.

They were more successful than they could have dreamed. Faced with rallies, marches and the formation in 1988 of a “living ring around Ignalina,” a 15,000-person human blockade around the site, the Moscow regime agreed to shut down all new construction. The discovery that popular action could work against the Soviets was the root from which the rest of the independence movement sprang.

Next on the environmentalists’ agenda was the permanent closure of the two existing reactors, Ignalina 1 and 2. But today they still chug along, their shutdown off the national agenda. What came between the Lithuanian Green Movement and their most important goal was Lithuania’s independence.

“The Ignalina problem is still here,” says Janos Tamulis, a leader of the Greens who now serves as a deputy in the Lithuanian Parliament. “But it’s impossible to shut down now because the electricity it produces serves Latvia, Byelorussia and Kaliningrad. In 1988, that would have been Moscow’s problem. Now it’s a problem of the relationship between Lithuania and other countries.”

In the concise formulation of Vytautas Statulevicius, 62, a mathematician and physicist who is a founder and gray eminence of the Lithuanian Green Movement: “When Ignalina was in the Soviet Union, it was one thing. But now it belongs to us.”

That defines the dilemma facing the Baltic region’s Greens, who until recently made up the most politically successful environmental movements in Europe. For in Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, the very first manifestations of popular opposition to the Soviet regime in the late 1980s focused on the environment.

But with this summer’s events in Moscow having swept former Greens activists to leadership of independent governments more abruptly than they ever anticipated, the region’s environmental movements have suddenly and unexpectedly foundered. Committed environmentalists who cut their teeth on opposition to the Soviet Union find themselves still in opposition--this time to governments they helped come to power.

Says Tamulis, “The Green movement here is weaker than it was two years ago, that’s for sure.”

Politicians who as Greens rose to national prominence now support, even propose, programs and projects similar to what they were battling as recently as last spring. These include not only Ignalina but also Baltic oil transshipment ports, coastal developments and pulp and paper factories once regarded as Soviet projects whose profits and products were siphoned off by the vast Soviet empire.

Most telling, the simple process of evolving from outsiders to proprietors has given the former environmental activists a quick education in the benefits, as opposed to the costs, of ecologically unsound enterprises.

Says Dainis Ivans, who evolved from a firebrand journalist fighting Soviet pollution into vice chairman of the Latvian Parliament: “Two years ago we demanded the paper factories be closed, but now we understand that we need them, because we need paper. Two years ago we didn’t get any money from these factories, and it wasn’t in our interest to keep them operating.”

The post-independence tailspin of the Baltic economies has made ecology an also-ran on national agendas.

“When I was first elected to the Soviet Parliament, the people used to say, ‘We’d like to close Ignalina,’ ” said Statulevicius. “Now all they want is to know why they have to spend 40 rubles to get one dollar, instead of six rubles like they used to.”

What they earlier saw as symbols of foreign domination, Greens in government now regard as potential sources of desperately needed hard currency.

Consider the case of Ventspils, the main seaport of Latvia and the primary shipment point of most of the Soviet Union’s exported oil.

Four chemical manufacturing and transshipment installations are within 1.5 miles of the center of the city, and residents have long complained of heightened rates of birth defects and miscarriages along with respiratory and other ailments. The decrepitude of the rail lines around the port increases the chances of a catastrophic accident involving dangerous cargo.

Latvian Greens thought they had won an important battle last year to ban the importation of ammonia into the port. But the new Latvian government is set to resume the shipments--it says Latvian farmers are desperate for ammonia-based fertilizer--and is openly hostile to all other attempts to curtail shipping in the port.

“Ventspils is a big problem,” acknowledged Ivans, “but for us the seaport is like oil is to Kuwait. Since 90% of Soviet exported oil goes through Ventspils, we decided to save it.”

Of course, even the crestfallen Greens prefer to be dickering for ecological standards with their own governments rather than with the Soviets.

“Certainly we still have very many people who want to solve economic problems at the expense of the environment,” said Olegs Batarevskis, a prominent Latvian activist. “But we need individual statehood to solve our ecological problems. Under the occupation regime, no one cared for the welfare of Latvia.”

Still, many Greens justifiably feel betrayed, given their role in the Baltic independence movements.

Estonian politicians date the rebirth of that country’s independence drive to a series of rallies sparked in 1986 by a Soviet plan to expand mining of the mineral phosphorite, which is used for fertilizer, in the country’s northeast. The scheme would have strip-mined Estonia’s heavily forested national park and contaminated local water supplies with mine tailings.

Similar protests that year forced the Soviets to back off from plans to drill for oil on the Baltic shelf off the Lithuanian coast and to build a hydroelectric plant that would disrupt the flow of Latvia’s Daugava River.

This took place against a backdrop of genuine environmental crisis. The Baltic Sea is one of the world’s most polluted waterways, in large part because the Soviet Union took advantage of its control over Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to line the shore with industrial plants equipped with rudimentary pollution controls, if any at all.

To exploit the region’s abundant forests, the Soviets erected pulp and paper factories in every republic and in the Russian outpost of Kaliningrad, pouring untreated waste water into the Daugava, Neris and Pregol rivers, which empty into the Baltic. In northeast Estonia and elsewhere, mineral-rich land has been crudely strip-mined. Urban sewage is almost entirely untreated, so the same rivers used as sources of drinking water are fouled by effluent.

With Baltic ports such as Ventspils among the very few in the empire not closed by ice in the deep winter, the Soviets used them for the import and export of their most hazardous cargoes, including ammonia, petroleum and nuclear material.

Many environmental activists believe they were able to press their protests because the political significance of environmentalism was at first entirely lost on the Soviets.

“The environment looked like an innocuous issue,” said Tamulis. “We were in some ways testing what was allowed.”

As it happens, Soviet industrial projects may have been particularly vulnerable to popular opposition because they were only lightly integrated into the Baltic economies. Ethnic Balts could afford to be unconcerned about unemployment resulting from industrial shutdowns, because those plants were almost entirely staffed and worked by migrant workers--mostly Russians--housed in segregated new towns such as Snieckus, the enclave of 30,000 Ignalina workers.

In truth, public concern with environmental issues may always have focused less on ecological factors than ethnic ones. The size and nature of the migrant labor force has long been a sensitive issue in the Baltics, where all three native peoples were convinced that the Soviets were trying to dilute, if not destroy, their cultures.

“ ‘Ignalina’ and ‘Snieckus’ became code words for the nationality problem in Lithuania,” Alfred Erich Senn, a chronicler of the Lithuanian independence movement, has written.

Asked at an appearance before the Environmental Law Institute in Washington last January whether the number of non-Latvian workers was a factor in deciding which projects to fight, Latvian activist Valdis Abols replied, “Definitely.”

But even this rationale for plant shutdowns has diminished, as the new governments also find themselves the heirs of the social and economic problems that would result from large-scale evictions of the migrant work forces.

“It’s a social bombshell,” said Tamulis. “To get the residents of Snieckus to leave, you’d have to give them something, and we have nothing to give.”

His remarks reflect the discovery of Greens all over the Baltic region that environmentalism bears short-term costs that may be beyond the ability of small, strapped countries to shoulder.

“This is a risk too big for Lithuania,” he said. “Things that would be acceptable for a big country are not acceptable for us.”