Planet Of The Year: The Greening of the U.S.S.R.

The Soviet Union is anenvironmentalist's nightmare. The industrial city of Nizhni Tagil, some 700 miles east of Moscow, is sometimes wrapped in clouds of gaseous wastes so thick and toxic that drivers must turn on their headlights at noon and children walking home from school get skin rashes. Every year 700,000 tons of toxic substances are spewed into the city's air. Not only Nizhni Tagil but more than 100 other major cities, including Moscow, also have air-pollution levels ten times as high as the acceptable standards set by the Soviets.

The land and water are not in any better shape. The riverbed of the Neva, which meanders beside the magnificent Hermitage in Leningrad, is covered with a thick layer of oil. Ill-advised dam construction and inappropriate irrigation projects have caused the level of the Aral Sea to drop 40 ft. It is possible that this body of water, the world's sixth largest sea, will not exist in 20 years. Siberia, once pristine, is laced with wastes from steel, chemical and coal industries. Worrisome numbers of dead sturgeon are floating atop the polluted Volga River, threatening the Soviets' prestigious caviar supply. Resorts along the Black Sea have banned swimming after the government's warning that the waters are contaminated with dysentery and typhoid germs.

For decades the Soviet people accepted the situation in silence. But glasnost has made them less afraid to speak out. Citizens worried about the environment are demonstrating by the thousands and contributing to political unrest in the Baltic States. Elsewhere, budding environmental groups have even sponsored candidates for city elections.

Amid the turmoil the Soviet government has finally begun to move. The Kremlin has reorganized a number of departments into the new State Committee for the Protection of the Environment, Goskompriroda, and given it an impressive range of powers. "In this restructuring," said Nicholas Robinson, a Pace University professor and an expert on the Soviet environment, "the Communist Party Central Committee has decided that, after disarmament, environmental protection is the No. 1 world issue." An aggressive cleanup program has already begun. Projects are being re-evaluated in light of their environmental impact. Fines have been levied on some polluters, and criminal proceedings have been started against others.

Internationally, the Soviets are pushing for stronger accords to protect the environment and are seeking ways to integrate their atmospheric-research efforts with those under way elsewhere. For the first time since World War II, the Soviet Union and the U.S. may have found a common enemy: global climate change. Said President Mikhail Gorbachev in his speech this month to the U.N. General Assembly: "International economic security is inconceivable unless related not only to disarmament but also to the elimination of the threat to the world's environment."