Green Movement Flexes Muscle in Soviet Union : Environment: A country once notorious for its rape of nature is now being pressed to protect it.

Last spring, the Soviet government announced plans to build a coal-fired, 800-megawatt electricity generating station in this Siberian industrial city. The plant would have been so huge that designers were planning a smokestack 500 feet high to get rid of all the smoke.

In years past, the project might have caused little stir under a system whose main slogan was “communism equals Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country.”

But Communist Party influence is on the wane, and the people of Irkutsk, a city on the edge of a vast, starkly beautiful wilderness, now worry instead about air pollution and acid rain.

Tens of thousands of names were gathered on petitions against the power plant and sent to Moscow. Even schoolchildren marched with placards saying “Stop the Power Station.” And, according to Mefyordi Grudinin, a geologist who sits on Irkutsk’s newly formed city environmental commission, the popular opposition stopped the project in its tracks.

“Soviet society has become so different,” Grudinin said. “Only 15 years ago, we were thinking to build more and more factories. Now we want to close them all down.”

As the power plant episode indicates, an environmentally conscious “green” movement is finally flexing its political muscle across the Soviet Union, a country once notorious for its rape of nature.

From residents near a vitamin factory in St. Petersburg to those concerned about the disappearing Aral Sea in Central Asia, there have been demands for radical changes in the country’s economic agenda to give priority to protection of the environment.

Closely identifying themselves with democratic forces, the green movements are seeing their representatives in regional governments and Moscow rise to new prominence after August’s failed coup by Communist Party hard-liners.

There are few places where ecological concern is more dramatically illustrated than in Irkutsk, which lies near Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake.

Accounting for more than one-fifth of the world’s fresh water and known as the Pearl of Siberia, Baikal has been increasingly threatened by industrial pollution.

An immense paper products complex stands on Baikal’s southern shore, employing 36,000 people and dumping its waste into the lake--even in the winter, when the surface is covered by three feet of ice.

More than 360 rivers flow into Baikal, and many of them carry pollution from factories upstream.

Only the Angara River flows out of Baikal, and the government has chosen the waterway as the site of dozens of heavy industrial plants ranging from aluminum smelters to chemical works. Air pollution from these factories is getting intense, environmentalists say, causing acid rain just 10 miles from Baikal and fluoride pollution of the water.

The lake’s fish population is beginning to die out, including many species unique to Baikal. Animals such as the Baikal seal, which feeds on the lake’s fish, are also threatened.

The environmental movement in the region came to life in 1988 when the Baikal Paper Complex proposed to build a huge pipeline to carry its waste products.

The Baikal Fund, a small environmental group with members in three cities, stunned everyone by collecting 107,000 signatures against the project and sent the petitions to the Communist Party Central Committee in Moscow. The project was shelved.

“It was the first time the government changed its decision for environmental reasons,” said Aiyur Badmayev, a university lecturer and deputy director of the group. “The democratic movement in Irkutsk really began as an environmental movement.”

The Baikal Fund, which now has more than 100,000 members, is campaigning to shut factories that are heavy polluters near the lake and to clean up those factories deemed worth saving.

Vera M. Shlyonova, first deputy chairman of the Russian Society for the Protection of Nature, said that opposition from environmentalists has forced the Soviet Ministry of Paper to agree to phase out operations of its Baikal factory by 1993, a major breakthrough for the environmentalists.

But with the Soviet economy on the verge of bankruptcy, Shlyonova said it is doubtful that the ministry can meet the target.

“There is a lot of concern that the factory won’t close on schedule,” she said. “After all, people are more worried about bread than about the air and water.”

Environmentalists such as Grudinin and Svetlana Shevchenko, who also serves on Irkutsk’s City Council, have had some success in getting laws passed to limit pollution in the area.

A local law provides for continuing penalties for companies that pollute the air or water with a sliding scale of fines depending on the size of the factory. Proceeds from the fines go to the Nature Protection Society and to a special fund to help factories clean up their own environment.

“We’ve only started dealing with ecological problems in the last few years,” Shevchenko said. “It’s only been possible since the democratization of society began. We’re starting to have an impact.”

The Russian Federation government is debating adoption of a special Baikal law, the first time legislation has been considered for the protection of a single wilderness area.

Arnold Kharitonov, a local journalist, expresses outrage over the wholesale destruction of forests to feed the region’s huge paper and cardboard industry. “There’s a euphoric attitude that there is a lot of everything in Siberia, but it’s all disappearing. There’s a danger that it will be permanently destroyed.”