| City | Mean annual concentration | Peak observed concentration | Max. permissible concentration * |
| Donetsk, Ukraine | .11 | .76 | .04 |
| Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan | .07 | .70 | .04 |
| Bratsk, Russia | .07 | 1.83 | .04 |
| Tolyatti, Russia | .05 | 1.63 | .04 |
However, factories are not the only air polluters. Transportation is responsible for more than half the pollution in many large cities. “Vehicles in the NIS [Newly Independent States] reportedly generated 68% as much air pollution as their counterparts in the United States.” And the “NIS has barely 10% as many cars and its trucks haul less than half the amount of freight.” One reason the levels are so high is that the nation has not switched to unleaded gasoline (Green, E. 592).
This massive pollution of the air has devastated health in the areas of the surrounding factories, as well as thousands of miles away. An example is the Lenin Steel Works which pollutes an area twice the size of Delaware. Less than 1% of the children that reside in the surrounding area are healthy- less than 1%! Occasionally the pollutants become so heavy in the air that residents can taste the sulfur on their tongues (Staglin 47). In Nizhni Tagil, the air pollution is so thick on some days that children walking home from school get skin rashes (Pope 51). Imagine what it feels like to breathe deeply on those days. Think how it would hurt to play tag, feeling a burning sensation with every leap or bound; and being very careful what puddles are splashed in.
The Aral, which was once the world’s fourth largest sea, has lost 40 ft. of water (Pope 50) and is now the sixth largest.
This has caused local temperatures to increase by 3 degrees Fahrenheit (Stanglin 42). The two rivers that were feeding it,
the Amu Dar’ya and Syr Dar’ya, were diverted for irrigation. The sea’s life support had been severed. The starvation
was slow but extreme. “Since 1960, the Aral sea’s surface area has been cut in half and it’s volume has decreased by
73%...In the deltas 75-80% of all animal species have become extinct...Since 1960, 30,000 square kilometers of former
sea bottom have turned to desert” (Eustis, Micklin 15). Can there be worse?
Yes. The Volga river provided much of the caviar that the Russians are famous for. The catch of sturgeon has decreased by 60% in the last ten years (Pope 49). This is due to the massive amount of pollutants that it absorbs (“30% of the nation’s toxic effluents” (Dyukov 25).) and the fact that the water was slowed and disrupted by hydroelectric dams (Pryde 40). The Caspian, the sea which receives the Volga river, absorbs 17 cubic km of effluents and sewage yearly (Dyukov 25).
Lake Baikal, however, seems to top them all. It holds one-fourth of the world’s fresh water (Preserving Lake Baikal 85), or 80% of the country’s fresh water. Three-fourths of the 2,500 fish and plant species are unique to this lake. It also is home to a factory that produces 200,000 tons of cellulose fibers a year and its fumes have killed approximately 86,000 nearby fir trees while polluting an area 23 miles wide (Pope 50).
The Dnepropetrovsk-Donets Basin and Kuznets Basin have extremely polluted waters due to the coal mining and steel production. Near Kyshtym, the water was contaminated by three radiation accidents in the 1950s and 1960s (Pryde 39). The facts continue; a phenol spill at a herbicide plant leaked into Ufa’s drinking water
in 1990 (Green, E. 593) and petroleum products in the Ob river have been found at a concentration ten factors higher
than local legal levels (Green, E. 593). Still today the water is astoundingly unhealthy. In 1990, only 30% of the water
was treated to Soviet standards 3(Green, E. 593) “which is why half of all tap water is unfit to drink, and a third of the
underground reservoirs are too contaminated for drinking use” (Engelman 34). The people themselves are slowly dying
along with the fish, wildlife, and vegetation. Russia’s water is in danger. If it goes, the people go.
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Water Pollution
Some bodies of water contain enough chemicals that they do not ripple or freeze. They may be yellow, red, or black from hydrocarbons, oil, sulfur, and iron oxides (Pope 49). “Pink foam lines the beach. Greenish-brown sewage hugs the shore before it merges into a ribbon of reddish water, then into the dull
slate-blue of the deeper sea” (Green 47). The Baltic Sea once was a beautiful, shimmering body of blue water. What has
happened to it? The sediment now contains 1,000 times the natural occurring levels of lead and cadmium (Green 47).
Deforestation
Siberian deforestation is also a considerable threat to the environment, more so than the deforestation of the Brazilian rain forests. Russia contains almost 60% of the world’s boreal forests (The Forests of St. Petersburg 85), and 5 million acres are cut
per year in Siberia (Stanglin 41). Endangered species are being affected because of this. For example, the habitat of the
Siberian tiger is shrinking as Hyundai moves in to clear cut, an eastern logging operation in the Bikin River Basin that was
made possible by a thirty year concession by regional Russian authorities (Scott 15). Why has it not been stopped? One
reason the Russians aren’t moving quickly to prevent this massacre is money. The wood is valuable and brings in large
amounts of capital, capital that is scarce and badly needed.
Soil Erosion and Contamination
Soil erosion and contamination is the essence of yet another predicament. Tons of pesticides used by farmers have left residues on food and have contaminated the air, water, and soil. Pesticides were found in 42% of dairy products and residues were found in mothers’ milk (Pope 51). Moldova, the Kalmyk republic, the Fergana Valley shared by Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and
Tajikstan suffer from soil erosion, chemical contamination, and industrial pollution (Pryde 40). Soil filled with pesticides
are often washed away with acres of eroding topsoil, filling rivers with contaminated silt, and altering delta ecosystems.
Oil accompanies the stew of chemicals; in fact, “920,000 barrels of oil are spilled a day. This is equivalent to an Exxon
Valdez spill every 6 hours” (Stanglin 41). In Noyabrsk, some oil spills have covered 400 hectacres within the last decade
(Pearce 4). Also, in most homes and offices, utilities are not metered which leads to increased waste. Basically, “More
than 20% of Russia’s 450 million acres of arable land is unusable because of chemical contamination, overirrigation, or
erosion” (Engelman 34).
How Did This Happen?
Where did it all come from? How can there be so much pollution? How did this happen? It resulted simply from “neglect, inefficiency, and lack of technology” (Pope 50). Included in the neglect was the abscense of zoning laws to in any way separate the polluters from the innocent (Belenkova). The Bolsheviks
essentially gave more priority to economic growth than social welfare (Feshbach, Friendly 27), and their objectives were
achievable because the government controlled the market completely. The image of the factories was not a concern;
competition between companies was non-existent, the workers had no job selection, and they certainly would not voice a
negative opinion. Environmental 4considerations were, therefore, put aside in pursuit of productivity. However, when the
USSR opened to the West and communism crumbled, capitalism stalked in. Factories now have to respond to consumer
pressures, clean up their image, and become efficient; demeanor they neither had the money nor knowledge to do.
Consumers now have to play an active role in society, an entirely new function after years of silence.
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