The Environmental Record of the Soviet Union

It is now clear that one of the legacies of the Soviet Union was a severely degraded environment. This seems to prove that communism offered no solution to the environmental destructiveness of a capitalist economy. However, what is also becoming clear is that within the Soviet Union there had been a strong environmental movement. This movement was the surviving remnant of something far greater. It was engendered by the Bolshevik revolution as part of the broader tradition of the left-wing Bolsheviks. These Bolsheviks had a much more radical agenda than the Stalinists who came to prevail; their project had been to create a new culture facilitating the democratic organization of the economy and a new relationship between society and nature. This radical tradition also provided a perspective from which the ultimate failure of the kind of command economy created by Stalin was anticipated. A command economy continues the domineering orientation to people and to nature of capitalism in a more extreme form. Ultimately, it was predicted, this would lead to a new form of serfdom and to stagnation. The failure of the Soviet Union, both politically and environmentally, thus vindicated the left-wing Bolsheviks. The environmental disasters of the Soviet Union illustrate the inevitable self-destructive tendencies and uncontrollable dynamics of any society that attempts to reduce people and nature to mere instruments of production. It shows that what is required to create an environmentally sustainable society is one in which the creativity of people and nature are fully acknowledged, a society in which the divisions between organizers and the organized, between managers and workers, has been overcome, and people are able to live as creative participants in a creative nature. Introduction