The Fate of the Academy of Sciences Commission on Nature Protection

One aftershock that altered the administrative lineup of nature protection was a decree of the Central Committee and of the USSR Council of Ministers no. 299 of April 3, 1961, transferring the Commission on Nature Protection from the USSR Academy of Sciences to Gosplan USSR. The new president of the USSR Academy, M. V. Keldysh, agreed to the move.^[62] Although we do not yet have archival evidence to explain why this happened, one plausible hypothesis is that V. P. Zotov initiated the transfer in the hope of providing his personal support and patronage to the cause of nature protection in the wake of Khrushchëv's January outburst.

By February 1962 a new charter had been drafted as well as a new roster of members. While Dement'ev was still left as chairman and L. K. Shaposhnikov as scholarly secretary, a Gosplan functionary, A. D. Ponomarëv, deputy head of that agency's forestry division, was made deputy chairman (initially, botanist E. M. Lavrenko was asked). Compared with the previous membership, specialists in energy, public health, and air and water pollution were better represented on the Gosplan commission. On the other hand,

only a handful of the old elite of the movement—Sukachëv, Efron, Lavrenko, and Voronov—were left, isolated in a sea of sixty-four other "new" people.^[63] Nevertheless, the commission was impressive: eleven full or corresponding members of the Academy, sixteen doctors of science, and sixteen candidates of science.^[64]

Testament to the supportive circumstances that the commission encountered within the all-Union Gosplan is a letter from Shaposhnikov to botanist Evgenii Mikhailovich Lavrenko written on December 24, 1961. Shaposhnikov first alluded to the months and months of delay waiting for the official issuance of a new charter for the reorganized commission. This was no trifle, he explained,

for, without a charter it is impossible to bring to life the work of the Plenum and the Bureau of the Commission. Georgii Petrovich [Dement'ev] and I have invested a huge amount of sweat and time to speed up the time when this charter sees the "light of day. "Just recently we have had some important successes. Besides that, the current business of the Commission is going ahead full steam. As far as the functionaries at Gosplan are concerned, we are exclusively encountering attitudes of good will and great—I would even say generous—assistance as far as material and technical support of our work is concerned. The possibilities here are incomparably greater than within the Academy. Come visit us. We will all be happy to see you and to consult with you.^[65]

Lavrenko, though, was apparently less interested in continuing his central involvement, and in a note to Shaposhnikov of April 17, 1962 asked to be removed as deputy chairman of the commission and made an ordinary member "because I am otherwise occupied and owing to the condition of my health. "^[66]

The Gosplan commission was able to hold on through 1962, but by the late spring 1963 it, too, had attracted the suspicious eye of the increasingly arbitrary Khrushchëv. Rumors of a new "reorganization" began to flow. Although exhausted from the seemingly continuous defensive campaigns to save its modest scientific and civic world, scientific public opinion once again rallied to the cause. On May 25, 1963, three heavyweights, F. N. Petrov, Sukachëv, and the eminent chemist and defender of genetics N. N. Semënov, along with Dement'ev, wrote to USSR deputy premier K. N. Rudnëv asking for a final transformation of the beleaguered commission into the long sought-after State Committee for Nature Protection attached to the USSR Council of Ministers. They cited foreign examples. They cited the examples of Estonia, Lithuania, and Belorussia. They referred to the resolutions of the all-Union conferences of 1958 (Tbilisi), 1959 (Vil'nius), 1961 (Novosibirsk), and 1962 (Kishinëv). And they got nowhere.^[67]

Two weeks before the publication of the decree eliminating the Gosplan commission, which was signed by Khrushchêv on October 2, 1963, a new

wave of desperate letters began to flow to Kremlin addressees. One letter interesting for its emphasis on the image of the USSR abroad was from V. S. Pokrovskii, deputy secretary of the Commission and the head of its Laboratory for Nature Protection, to the Presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers with a copy to Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko.^[68] "From the moment of itconomic Assistance) countries in the area of environmental protection.^[69] With the aid of the ministry, the Commission had been able to obtain valuable information from Soviet embassies abroad on nature protection activities around the globe; already, the card file of the Commission contained the addresses of 350 organizations and scientists who regularly exchanged literature. The Commission, noted Pokrovskii, had recently submitted the findings of the National Academy of Sciences' report to President Kennedy to the Academy's Siberis creation in 1955 the Commission . . . has been making great efforts to enhance the influence of Soviet scientists in international [conservation] organizations," he began. Two Soviet initiatives on economic development and nature protection were adopted unanimously by the XVIII session of the General Assembly of the UN and by UNESCO. Further, the Commission, with the support of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, had been devising strategies of cooperation with the COMECON (Council of Mutual Ean division head, M. A. Lavrent'ev, to review what might be relevant in the USSR. Not only was the Commission a source of goodwill and a positive image of the USSR abroad, argued Pokrovskii, it was also a source of information about the outside world. For instance, its analysis of international legal norms in the area of resource conservation enabled the Soviet delegation to be more effective in the talks surrounding the study and use of Antarctica.

It is clear that the proposal, advanced recently, to eliminate the Commission may negatively affect the position attained through such hard work of the USSR among the progressive international movement for the rational use of natural resources of the earth, and could lead to the weakening of ties between Soviet scientific specialists in nature protection and their foreign colleagues. There is the danger that such a step would be greeted with incomprehension in the IUPN and among scientific public opinion of foreign countries.^[70]

Another letter, one of F. N. Petrov's last (he retired as head of MOIP's Section on Nature Protection in 1964), was addressed to the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Party. Despite his age, Petrov showed that he was still following public affairs. Raising the argument that both socialist and capitalist countries alike had seen the need for authoritative agencies for the protection of nature, Petrov chose a highly unusual example to make his case: "Particularly great attention to developing the scientific bases for the protection of nature is being paid in the United States of America where,

for example, on the request of President J. Kennedy to the Congress, the National Academy of Sciences began special studies by the most eminent scientists in America on the condition of natural resources in the U.S."^[71] With the contemplated dismantling of the Gosplan commission, warned Petrov, the contrast with the Soviet Union's archrival would be striking and not to the USSR's advantage. At the end of his life, Petrov decided that he could afford to dispense with niceties:

In the Soviet Union as a result of the liquidation of the Commission for the Protection of Nature of Gosplan USSR and the transfer of its Laboratory, the development of scientific bases for the rational exploitation of natural resources will be brought to an end. The Soviet Union will lose official representation and will be deprived of any links in the international arena in the area of nature protection. Active state oversight over the rational use and reproduction of the entire complex of resources of the USSR will be liquidated. On the basis of the above I ask you to reexamine the draft decision of the USSR Council of Ministers prepared by the State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research of the USSR.^[72]

The letter ends with no attempt at cordiality or propitiation. It was Petrov's last big campaign, although he lived for nearly another decade. As for the liquidation, it went ahead on schedule, and the Commission's Laboratory of Nature Protection Research was transferred to the USSR Ministry of Agriculture's Glavpriroda, Malinovskii's old outfit.^[73] The Party chose not to heed one of its last links to Lenin.

Beaten down just when they had allowed themselves to regain hope, the older activists now perceived the extents of their social weakness and isolation. No longer in their prime of life, and unable to influence social events to their satisfaction, they clung to one of their few tangible achievements: the preservation of MOIP as the independent institutional locus of their social group.

A poignant series of letters from Boris Evgen'evich Raikov, longtime member of MOIP, to Vera Aleksandrovna Varsonof'eva, the society's vice president, a conservation activist, and Raikov's close friend, suggest that at least some members of the pre-perestroika nature protection movement were aware of its importance as a hidden site of opposition to the dominant official social and economic vision. Written on July 17 and November 18, 1903, the letters from the eighty-one-year-old historian of science reveal Raikov's fear that Varsonof'eva's care for her ailing sister could fatally interrupt her scientific and, especially, her civic work. "Your last letter devastated me," wrote Raikov.

It is positively tragic. That your relative has died is, of course, sad; but we all die sooner or later. But the situation with your sister is worse than anyone could have imagined. Worse for you, because she scarcely is aware of her own con-

dition, and remembers still less. But for you to spend time with her several times a week . . . is to doom yourself. I beg you straight out to stop this. . . . You do not have the right to sacrifice yourself in the name of a relative. . . . I am in complete sympathy with your views and feelings about the desecration of the Volga. But I do not have merely a feeling of sadness about these "refashionings" [peredelki ] of nature, but a sharp feeling of anger [negodovanie ]. Anyway, there is no sense writing about that! [emphasis in the original]^[74]

In his next letter, Raikov renewed his admonitions:

You have surrounded yourself with several sick charges . . . but surely there are others who could and even, perhaps, must take on part of your load. I have not even come to the question of MOIP, which is doing work of enormous importance, because this is the only scientific institution that has maintained its civic dignity not only in Moscow, but in the entire [Soviet] Union, and which by some kind of miracle has so far retained its integrity amid all the other statedominated ones. And you are so needed there, even indispensable, precisely as a guarantor of scientific public opinion.^[75]

Ask any of the veteran members of MOIP about its golden age in the 1950s and 1960s, and they will tell you the same thing: politically insulated by its loose subordination to Moscow State University and by its physical location within the Moscow University Zoological Museum—the citadel of old guard nature protection activism—MOIP remained virtually the only "voluntary society" in the land that could claim scientific, intellectual, and even political autonomy. This was because MOIP, like the elite conservation movement as a whole, existed at the distant margins of Soviet life. Perhaps the high hopes engendered by Khrushchëv himself set the stage for the feelings of disillusionment and extreme social isolation experienced by this lonely outpost of the scientific intelligentsia. However, the double bind of serving the ideal of "science" as the activists defined it and trying to be loyal and patriotic state servitors remained; the scientists were not ready to join the still invisible, sparse ranks of dissenters from the system.