Chapter Eighteen—
Environmental Struggles in the Era of Stagnation

The last half of the Brezhnev regime and the terms of Chernenko and Andropov, Brezhnev's infirm successors, are known by the sobriquet "era of stagnation," not only because the growth rate of the Soviet economy dwindled to zero but also because the system's rulers seem to have been bereft of any positive vision of their society's possibilities for the future. In the ideological vacuum left by a decomposing Marxism, Russian and other nationalisms contended for the loyalties of the educated strata and the general population. One of the few organized forces that continued to uphold a multinational, cosmopolitan, and internationalist vision was the student environmental movement, the druzhiny .

Brezhnev wanted to be known as, among other things, the "environmental general secretary." Beginning with the Eighth Five-Year Plan in 1971 he ordered investments in water purification and supply, scrubbers, and other air pollution–control measures.^[1] The number and aggregate territory of zapovedniki observably grew, without any backsliding "liquidations" as under Brezhnev's two predecessors. International treaties were signed, and the USSR was well represented at Stockholm in 1972. Together with the now hopelessly bureaucratized VOOP, an army of agencies from the USSR Ministry of Agriculture's Glavpriroda to Iurii Izrael"s USSR State Committee on Hydrometeorology, not to mention the increasingly bureaucratized and tame Academy of Sciences, formed the phalanx of the Soviet green image machine. Sadly, naive foreign environmental activists regarded VOOP bureaucrats (see figure 28 ) as authentic comrades of the same cause, not realizing that their Soviet counterparts culturally had more in common with the Mafia than with themselves.

Newly available archival documents reveal the tight links between VOOP

Figure 28.
Sixth Congress of VOOP (1976).

and Soviet foreign policy strategists. As Soviet representatives prepared to attend the Fifteenth General Assembly and technical symposia of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Christchurch, New Zealand, in October 1981 they were instructed by the vice president (now president) of VOOP, Ivan Fedotovich Barishpol: "The prime task of the delegation of the [All-Russian] Society for the Protection of Nature is securing adoption at the meetings of the Fifteenth General Assembly . . . of positions and interests of the Soviet side."^[2] The delegates themselves were hardly representative of the rank and file: A. M. Borodin, the head of the USSR Ministry of Agriculture's Glavpriroda and vice president of IUCN; V. N. Vinogradov, an academician of VASKhNIL and VOOP's president; and F. Nyymsalu, first deputy minister of forestry of the Estonian SSR.^[3] Vinogradov's detailed report upon a similar delegation's return from Gland, Switzerland (IUCN's headquarters), complained about the "increasing influence of the American group, which factually decides all operational questions in the union."^[4] Similarly, in April 1981 Barishpol, together with longtime VOOP vice president G. G. Gan and the Presidium secretary met with a consul from the North Korean embassy at his request to coordinate strategy to deny South Korea membership in IUCN. Barishpol gave the North Korean plenipotentiary a generally encouraging answer and then promptly sent a report to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs Far Eastern Division, evidently seeking further instructions.^[5] With twenty-nine million members in the Russian VOOP alone (the Belorussian analog had 3,404,300 in 1984,

or 34.5 percent of the republic's total population), in the early 1980s VOOP was a significant player in the Soviet regime's game of image-making.^[6]

However, behind the display window the struggle between two visions of development continued. Stalin's signature projects were the Belomorstroi, the Volga-Don and Volga-Moskva River canal systems and the Stalin Plan for the Great Transformation of Nature; Khrushchëv's was the Virgin Lands project. Brezhnev's, which took a decade to unveil, were the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) Railroad and the great river diversion projects. Despite all the environmentalist rhetoric generated by the regime, orders apparently came down in 1975 placing huge categories of environmental data, not to mention criticism of the BAM, and later, the diversion projects, under strict censorship.^[7]

At the same times, alternative environmental and social visions persisted in the USSR. Had foreign activists wished to meet their real counterparts, they would have found them not among the officious Soviet representatives to international agencies but in the druzhiny and the meetings of the Section on Nature Protection of the Moscow Society of Naturalists and the Moscow branch of the Geographical Society. They would have also needed to seek out the growing literary and scholarly opposition to the regime's megalithic hydroprojects, a discrete movement.

The Further Evolution of the Druzhiny

Out of the variety of autonomous groups and initiatives that emerged during the Khrushchëv era, only the druzhiny and, to a lesser extent, the KSP (kluby samodeiatel'noi pesni , or, roughly, clubs for independent music) managed to preserve their independence and their original character, activist Evgenii Arkad'evich Shvarts noted in 1990. Of course, the druzhinniki represented the most self-sacrificing students and those "who had the very highest level of political and general culture," he added. But that answer, although generally true, was inadequate. It seemed to Shvarts that the decisive factor in the survival of the druzhiny was their ability to exploit those few outposts of a "law-based society" that were created during the 1950s and early 1960s and that survived the vagaries of Khrushchëv's rule and those of his successors. Foremost among these were the creation of "citizens' inspectorates" in the area of environmental quality.^[8]

Alone of all voluntary organizations, VOOP in the 1950s was given the right to organize "citizens' inspectorates," in which presumably duly trained members of the Society would be authorized to inspect for violations of air and water quality, to monitor or even detain poachers, and to write up official complaints to be processed in the courts or through state agencies. Although the officially sponsored "raids" conducted by VOOP were little more

than environmental theater, older activists such as V. G. Geptner as well as almost all druzhina members kept their official VOOP membership in good order so that they could acquire or retain "citizen inspector" status. Correspondingly, there were always sympathetic local units of VOOP that were willing to credential the students, even if that was not in the interests of the corrupt bureaucrats who now ran the Society. If all the members of a druzhina antipoaching unit were credentialed "inspectors," they had the right to detain suspected poachers and bring them up on charges, but the druzhina itself did not have the right to credential inspectors. Thus, the druzhiny could exist only so long as VOOP—nature protection's false friend and institutional object of the druzhinniki's contempt—existed. Another, more difficult way to become "deputized" as an inspector was through a government agency such as the Main Administration for Small Rivers or Glavokhota; for that reason, former members of student brigades strove to land jobs as inspectors in the various agencies that were the state's resource gatekeepers so that they could coordinate operations with the druzhiny and deputize students where necessary.

The druzhiny also confronted another problem. According to the law on voluntary societies of 1932 no unofficial organizations were permitted in the USSR; however much they proclaimed their factual independence, the student brigades needed official charters and sponsors. Those sponsors turned out to be the local universities' Komsomol organizations.

Attitudes toward the druzhiny on the part of the local and all-Union Komsomols defy simple characterization. Although there was some envy and suspicion of the nature brigades' freewheeling spirit, the Komsomol officials also wanted to see themselves as the kindly intercessors and protectors of these rebellious youths. Thus, in 1972 when Nina Aleksandrovna Gorodetskaia, the chair of the youth section of VOOP's Central Council, complained to the university's Party committee and tried to have the MGU druzhina disbanded, the Komsomol interceded and was decisive in saving it.^[9]

On the other hand, toward the end of the 1960s the Komsomol leadership decided that it would not abandon the environmental field to the growing druzhina movement and in 1968 created its own Council for Nature Protection under its Central Committee.^[10] Local Komsomol nature protection groups played constructive roles in a number of places; a notable example is that of the Perm' oblast 'Komsomol, whose efforts to protect the Chusovaia River in the Western Urals were particularly visible.^[11] In the early stages of the construction of BAM, local Komsomols, for example in Amur and Khabarovsk krais , were among the leading skeptics and critics of the huge project. Komsomol conferences in Irkutsk in 1975 and again in 1977 provided venues for voicing scientific reservations about BAM as well.^[12]

Competition, plus the formal responsibility that the Central Committee of the Komsomol felt it bore for the conduct of the druzhiny , however, led

to occasional tensions between the two organizations. In late 1976 Evgenii Grigor'evich Lysenko, head of the Komsomol's Council on Nature Protection as well as a deputy chair of the Presidium of VOOP, complained in a speech to VOOP that despite the student brigades' impressive organization of a summer nature-study practicum at Zvenigorod,^[13] there was insufficient oversight over these groups by the Komsomol, leading to their taking autonomous decisions and even subverting local Komsomol units. For instance, the Kirov Agricultural Institute, together with the Kirov municipal Komsomol committee, decided to conduct an all-Union seminar for the druzhiny without having consulted the Secretariat of the Komsomol Central Committee.^[14] Perhaps Lysenko's attention had been drawn to this as a result of the accusations leveled at the druzhina movement by Tomsk author N. Laptev, who had charged the brigades with "having broken with the Komsomol line" and with "apoliticism."^[15]

Although the Komsomol central bureaucrats' heavy-handedness showed in the literature on nature protection and environmental quality it published,^[16] the Komsomol Central Committee did sponsor Viktor Iaroshenko's "Living Water" expedition (described below) and awarded Iaroshenko and Chivilikhin its highest prize for their literary efforts on behalf of nature. Thus, like the Russian Republic, the Komsomol functioned both as patron and co-opter of nature protection activists, reflecting its own status as a core part of the system that nonetheless had pretensions to its own sphere of autonomy.

Highlights of the History of the Druzhiny , 1965–1986

One year to the day from that great druzhina meeting where Professor Geptner held up the apparatchik M. M. Bochkarëv to public ridicule, the Biofak brigade held another conference, this time dedicated to Kedrograd. Over three hundred attended.^[17] As Bochkarëv had lost his VOOP presidency but had not yet been removed as chair of the RSFSR Main Forestry Administration, the conference represented not only support for the kedrogradtsy but also a continued public struggle against the bureaucrat. Along with a resolution calling for a restoration of the original Kedrograd experiment, which Bochkarëv had cut off, the brigades insisted on the restoration of the Altaiskii zapovednik to its previous boundaries—a cause closer to their hearts—and vigorously protested the use of DDT and other chemicals in the cedar forests, particularly around Lake Teletskoe.^[18]

The late sixties were golden years for the movement. There were sometimes two conferences in one year, as in 1967, when conferences on both tourism and Baikal were held. One participant recalled:

Whoever landed in our command in those days was amazed by the unity, of this modest collective and by the strength of the friendships that connected

each member with every other. What also struck newcomers was the attitude toward work as something personally important, done with a feeling of satisfaction. The feelings of pride in belonging to the druzhina astonished them as well. . . . We only had a few inspectors but they came almost every Sunday. The excursion was a holiday, it was that blast of a martial trumpet that awakened us from our everyday cares and called us to battle. And many excursions were held in this festive, tense, intrepid mood.^[19]

Tartu had boasted the very first such university organization, and Moscow had followed two years later. Brigades were established at Odessa University, the Ul'ianovsk Pedagogical Institute, and the Briansk Technological Institute in 1964–1965, and by 1972 there were thirty-four. With this exceptional growth the MGU Biofak brigade, arguably the social and intellectual center, began to concern itself with "foreign affairs." In late March 1968 a delegation led by former komandir Dmitrii Nikolaevich Kavtaradze traveled to Tartu for that group's tenth anniversary. Other bilateral contacts followed, and in September 1972 the various druzhiny finally came together in an official first "seminar," held in Moscow. This laid the basis for expanded collective action. By the spring of 1975 the number of brigades had expanded to around forty, with aggregate membership in excess of 2,500, and by the mid-1980s total membership of the 140 or so brigades was estimated at around 5,000.^[20]

Soon the brigades began to explore coordinating joint campaigns. The first to be adopted in common was "Vystrel" or Operation Shot, the antipoaching campaign, popularly called "BsB" or Bor'ba s brakonerstvom (Struggle with Poaching), adopted at the 1974 Kazan meeting. Under the leadership of Dmitrii Kavtaradze the program now took on a sociological cast, attempting to identify patterns among perpetrators.

Romanticism abounded in the program, and members learned selfdefense and practiced lifelike scenarios in their training: indeed, no fewer than six were killed participating in the antipoaching expeditions. On the whole, however, physical showdowns were discouraged; the philosophy was to educate and publicize. If a violator was caught, the druzhina sent letters to his workplace. "This was like tossing a pebble into the water; the pebble itself is not terribly big, but the waves it generates can travel a great distance," explained faculty advisor Tikhomirov. The Kazan conference was also noteworthy for stating in a resolution that "above all else it is essential to view the contemporary youth movement for nature protection as a school for citizenship."^[21]

Other programs focused on identifying nesting sites of rare and endangered species and other territories in need of protection (Operation Fauna), involving the organization of expeditions staffed by graduate students representing a variety of relevant disciplines. There were programs to design national parks, identify areas for zakazniki and zapovedniki , and study

the environmentally disruptive potential of mass tourism. The movement kept archives as well.

Whereas the student movement through the 1960s was preoccupied with the old agenda of protecting animate nature, by the 1970s it assumed a more assertive posture and began to tackle "sociopolitical problems," in the words of a prominent student leader. It sought the synergistic interaction of "cultural-historical, national, . . . ecological, . . . and socioeconomic issues."^[22] One example of this new social planning role was the druzhina program "Ecopolis," developed by Dr. Aron Brudnyi, a philosopher with the Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences, and by Kavtaradze, by then head of MGU's Laboratory of Ecology and Conservation (Biological Faculties). Using the town of Pushchino, the Academy of Sciences' Biological Research Center on the Oka River about seventy miles south of Moscow, as an experimental "subject," Brudnyi and Kavtaradze sought to design the new town's services, amenities, and physical features to achieve maximum environmental and aesthetic quality for its residents. Groves were left standing, ecologically sensitive paths wound through forests connecting the town with the accessible, undeveloped riverfront, and conservation educational materials were abundant. By surveying residents for their views the designers attempted to ensure that "Ecopolis" did not simply become two men's vision of an ecological utopia.^[23]

Also sponsored by the druzhiny was "Operation Cruelty," which began in 1969. A focus on the roots of cruel or sadistic behavior toward animals (again utilizing polling) led both to a broader discussion about "the phenomenon of cruelty" in general and to a widening of the debate beyond the walls of the brigade itself. Perhaps the most significant breakthrough was the convening of a roundtable discussion sponsored by the Conservation Section of MOIP on April 19, 1974, which was subsequently published in the Academy of Science's widely read monthly, Priroda . Professor Ksenia Semënova, a child psychiatrist specializing in the rehabilitation of children with cerebral palsy (though at the notorious Serbskii Psychiatric Institute), linked cruelty to animals and to fellow humans as a common failure on the part of many people to develop empathic responses to the pain of others. This, in turn, Semënova attributed to the cruel individual's inability to find any constructive avenues in society for self-affirmation. As a rule, she noted, low academic achievers were overrepresented in this group, which pointed to an implicit socioeconomic pattern; in the Soviet Union, as elsewhere, low academic achievement is highly correlated with poverty and low status.^[24]

Urban professionals were not exempt from this behavior, however. Semënova related the case of three young female medical students who were photographed laughing as ajust-dissected dog, entrails extruding, regained consciousness from anesthesia. Writing almost at the very moment that Peter

Singer published his controversial Animal Liberation , Semënova's piece was perhaps the first in the USSR to call attention to the ethical problems of vivisection and scientific experimentation upon animals.^[25] In other words, this outgrowth of the druzhina program began to explore the forbidden territory of common behaviors and cultural patterns in Soviet society that were not questioned elsewhere.

Sometimes, programs had indifferent success or even failed. In the early 1980s about thirty young biologists—graduates of Moscow, Gomel, Kazan, and Sverdlovsk schools—began work in five Turkmenian zapovedniki . As students they had participated in the summer druzhina program "Zapovedniki " and tried to continue their druzhina program at new places of work. Turkmenia was selected because of its extremely low population density and the biologists' belief that they could still save huge unbroken tracts and the plant and animal species that survived within them. Critics charged that they wanted to turn Turkmenia into a gigantic national park and fence off resources. The mutual incomprehension and lack of acceptance has persisted to the present.^[26]

But sometimes the druzhina programs had an effect. At the big 1966 conference on Kedrograd the student brigades insisted on the restoration of the Altai zapovednik . Was it merely coincidence that soon afterward the Altai zapovednik was the first of the reserves axed by Khrushchëv to be reestablished? Druzhinniki also took credit for a decree of the USSR State Committee on Forestry in 1967 enhancing protection of the "cedar" stone pine forests.^[27]

Ksenia Avilova has penned a personal memoir of her years in and around the druzhina movement and in it has compiled some interesting facts and figures. Over twenty-five years, the Moscow University druzhina conducted more than 1,300 antipoaching excursions, which resulted in the apprehension of about 4,500 violators; twenty-five expeditions to patrol for illegally cut and sold New Year's trees, which apprehended more than 3,000 violators; thirty conferences, workshops, and seminars; 1,500 lectures on nature protection; seven expeditions to study the effects of mass tourism on natural conditions; more than twenty expeditions to help create national parks; about fifteen expeditions to study the influences of industrial cities and agriculture on pollution; more than ten expeditions to identify habitat sites of rare plants in the Moscow area and to create zakazniki for them; more than twenty-five expeditions to identify habitat of rare fauna; six expeditions, in connection with the brigade-sponsored contest "Berkut" (Eagle), to identify nesting sites of rare birds in the Moscow region; and six expeditions to study the influence of poaching on the aquatic life of the Oka River as well as to study the poaching of animals from a sociological perspective. Moreover, the brigades over that time produced plans for more than fifty, zakazniki , thirty of which

were organized by the Moscow oblast' ; produced plans for ten national parks; and published more than 500 scholarly and popular scientific pieces on nature protection.^[28] As the movement celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary it was at the height of its social prestige. For decades, almost alone it had flown the colors of civic independence; to a great extent, whatever authentic political activism was available to youth during the long years of stagnation was through this movement.

At the stroke of noon on February 3, 1986 the auditorium "P-13" in the Second Humanities Building of Moscow State University was packed to overflowing. With more than 500 in attendance, including more than 100 standees, fire laws were doubtless broken that day. Looking back at twentyfive years of the druzhina movement, Professor Vadim Tikhomirov reemphasized the crowning social achievement of the movement, that "most importantly, the druzhiny based their activities on the principle of selfgovernment. They did not subordinate themselves to anyone. They pursued projects prompted by no one other than themselves." In other words, they successfully pursued and defended the subversive right to set their own agenda.

On the question of numbers, Tikhomirov came down on the side of quality over quantity. The movement did not want to become an impersonal bureaucratic outfit like the thirty-six-million-member VOOP, but should remain small and selective. This elitist "caste" mentality also expressed itself in Tikhomirov's understanding of the proper complex of problems with which the druzhiny should occupy themselves. As biologists, they should concern themselves for the most part with the protection of living nature, a legitimate concern, and not with "environmental quality," which was already presumably on the slippery slope of reconciliation with industrial civilization.

The All-Russian Convocation of Student Druzhiny concluded its last formal session on the morning of February 7, 1986. After lunch sixteen druzhina leaders set out for the center of town, where they had an appointment with leading officials of VOOP at the Society's Moscow municipal offices in an old mansion almost opposite the United States embassy on Chaikovskii Street. The druzhinniki already had copies of a proposed VOOP charter that would centralize their various organizations into a semi-autonomous, unified all-Russian movement affiliated with VOOP.^[29]

In an unamibiguous display of power, the five VOOP bigwigs, including vice president German Georgievich Gan, another middle-aged man who was an official in the Ministry of River Transport, an older man who also worked at the Main Administration for Small Rivers and Reservoirs, and two middle-aged women seated themselves at the front of a small auditorium on the raised dais. Seventeen much younger men and women ranged themselves in two rows in the pit.

Although the students were prepared to agree to the terms offered by

VOOP for affiliation in the charter, the meeting quickly went off track. German Georgievich Gan had opened the meeting with a promise that VOOP would indeed respect the students' autonomy. However, it soon became clear that the meaning of "autonomy" was radically different on either side of the dais. Gan had already prepared a list of names for members of the Scientific Council of the proposed united druzhina affiliate. It was heavily weighted toward Komsomol officials and ministerial types. Almost unanimously the students rejected the list as an attempt to co-opt their organization and to have bureaucrats dictate policy.

Gan responded that the list was formulated "to facilitate coordination" between the students and government agencies and that, in any case, voluntary organizations existed to assist the state in fulfilling the economic plan (and, implicitly, not to play at being a critical opposition). The students countered with the reasonable argument that coordination could just as well be facilitated by establishing a coordinating committee without including agency types into the policymaking body. Further, they feared a loss of control over their independent "inspectorates" as well as a trivialization of themes.

This fear was confirmed by an offhand remark by the department director of the Main Administration for Small Rivers. Students, he asserted, did not possess sufficient scientific knowledge to involve themselves competently in policy areas, especially in scientific investigations into water quality, land use, and other realms. The druzhina representatives displayed a poise and courage remarkable for their years. "And who do you think was responsible for drafting so many existing environmental strategies?" retorted one student, evidently reminding the official of the druzhiny' s twenty-five-year track record over a wide spectrum of environmental policies. For three and a half hours the two sides traded barbs. The meeting ended inconclusively, with the students refusing to sign the charter but agreeing to continue negotiations with Gan.

Skirmishing between the druzhiny and VOOP continued into the fall when three MGU druzhina members, V. Mokievskii, I. Chestin, and the most recent komandir , Evgenii Arkad'evich Shvarts, published a devastating exposé of VOOP in Komsomol'skaia pravda entitled "You Won't Fool Nature." The subtitle ("Is VOOP Really Interested in Protecting the Environment? It's Hard to Answer 'Yes' to That") cued the reader to the gist of the story. The authors noted sarcastically the odd fact that even as late as just after the Sixth Congress of the Union of Writers of the RSFSR (December 1985), when the entire intellectual community was discussing the river diversions, Baikal, and other environmental problems, "the nature protection society alone, until the last possible moment, had behaved as if the Pechora and the Northern Dvina flowed somewhere in Australia and that Lake Valdai and the hoary Ladoga were located somewhere in the vicinity of, say, Montevideo . . . As in

the past, the work of the approximately 5,000 (!) salaried staff workers in our view boils down to . . . fulfilling the financial plan for dues collection through the mass 'tithing' of workers, students, and pensioners."^[30]

To try to penetrate the mountain of self-promotion by VOOP, the druzhinniki in the spring of 1985 engaged in a little detective work of their own. In particular, the students sought to learn how effective VOOP's vaunted "raids" on polluters were. In 1985, they discovered, VOOP's several thousand citizen inspectors managed to file just three complaints.

This stagnation was caused by the fact that there were no checks on the leadership, particularly its highest-ranking paid staff, and that membership was fictive in the sense that anyone who paid the thirty-kopeck dues was considered a member. Moreover, many of the members of VOOP's executive organs were high officials in the very ministries and agencies over which the Society was supposed to exercise a kind of citizens' oversight. "Would we allow the winemaker ex officio simultaneously to serve as president of the Temperance Society?" the druzhina authors asked.^[31]

At the end of the year, in the stately Hall of Columns of the old House of the Nobility, where Bukharin was put on trial in 1938, VOOP held its scheduled national Congress, which now met only every five years. Courageously, druzhina member Tat'iana Olegovna Ianitskaia attempted to share some of the students' critical perceptions with the assembled delegates. At first, Ianitskaia summoned the utmost tact to counter the proposal of the Society's president, B. N. Vinogradov, to eliminate the citizens' inspectorates of VOOP and even merge them with the ministerial ones. These were the only officially sanctioned citizen watchdog units in the country, she argued, and they could be made to work more effectively. As an example she pointed to the raids and inspections conducted by the druzhiny —all members of which were formally credentialed as "VOOP citizen inspectors." The students were willing to help train other VOOP volunteer inspectors professionally as well. On the issue of protected territories, which had centrally preoccupied the Society for thirty years until its reorganization in 1955, Ianitskaia also asked, "Who else, if not we?"^[32]

Next, Ianitskaia tackled the Society's cult of numbers. She was gladdened to hear, for the first time, that the Society decided against any planned increase in membership. But she was disturbed to learn that it had decided to increase the number of student druzhiny from their current seventy-odd in the RSFSR to 390 by 1990; this was an approach that even the Komsomol had forsworn. It was not that Ianitskaia did not want to see the druzhiny expand, but that she objected to the treatment of free institutions as construction materials or as subjects for labor productivity measurements: "We don't know how many people are transformed into active fighters for nature protection by a series of lectures, seminars, and meetings that they have attended. Those data are not now available to science. And the student

druzhiny are active fighting units." In a particularly needling aside she also noted the paucity of young people at the Congress—only 7 percent of the delegates were under thirty although 67 percent of the membership were "youths"—and asked: "Can there really be such low activism among youths?"

Finally, she brought up the sorest point: "I believe, comrades, that you are all aware that the Society has become the object of criticism more than once in the press. A particularly serious example was the recent piece in Komsomolka [Komsomol'skaia pravda] . Serious accusations have been leveled at all of us. It is possible, of course, to try to dispute them, but let us instead find the courage to acknowledge that as a whole the criticism is justified. We have a host of opportunities to rectify the situation, and, in that context, . . . I propose that we evaluate the work of the Society and its Central Council over the past [five-year] period as unsatisfactory." Not surprisingly, Ianitskaia's call went down in defeat. As of September 1996 I. F. Barishpol was still president; the Society has never undergone perestroika .

If anything, the druzhiny —like their field naturalist forbears—show the utility of viewing even the most activist, democratic groups in Soviet society as continuing expressions of a quite old Russian understanding of social identity: soslovnost , or a corporativist-caste mentality. In a suggestive article I. I. Zhukova described the social milieu of the druzhiny as a kind of "our crowd" in nature.^[33] You only had to spot the distinctive druzhina emblem on a stranger's sweater "to feel confident in going up to that person, knowing that you had come across a like-minded individual, a comrade, someone with whom you could find a common language."^[34]

In fact, druzhina membership was a lifelong social identity because even though members graduated from the university they continued their ties with the movement as kuratory , consultants, mentors, and supporters. The "extremely high degree of support and mutual assistance," according to sociologist Oleg Nikolaevich Ianitskii, was crucial in getting these organizations through the difficult years of the "era of stagnation."^[35] It was an esprit de corps modeled after the students' field biologist mentors in the already established nature protection movement, but it especially resembled the old prerevolutionary studenchestvo . That six druzhinniki were murdered in the course of antipoaching campaigns forged bonds cemented by spilled blood, created a roster of martyrs, and conferred on these young men and women a feeling of significance that was hard to come by in the Soviet Union of those years.

That was not the only movement attribute borrowed from the older generation. The emphasis on the protection of living nature, habitats, rare species, and especially zapovedniki grew out of that legacy as well as the fact that the first druzhina was established in the Moscow University Biological and Soil Science Faculty (although this agenda would later broaden as the number of druzhiny expanded).^[36] No one has confirmed the intergenerational

link between the old nature protection activists and the brigadiers as well as Sergei Germanovich Mukhachëv, who explained to Ianitskii that although the newly formed druzhina at the Kazan Chemical and Technological Institute was formally part of the local branch of VOOP, his group used the formal bureaucratic structures to create an autonomous student organization. "In this way," he said, "we brought about the rebirth of the VOOP that we had in this country during the 1920s."^[37]

Another attribute of the movement was its elite quality. The druzhinniki were truly the best and the brightest, as Evgenii Shvarts has observed.^[38] The brigades' core of support was in the country's major universities, particularly those having biology or geography faculties. The largest, most cosmopolitan universities might have several druzhiny in different faculties. On the other hand, of the forty-nine economic higher educational institutions of the former USSR, only three had druzhiny . Engineering schools, polytechnical schools, veterinary institutes, and agricultural institutes had similarly low representation.^[39] The cleavage here is between a corporate (erudite and partially hereditary) natural science—based intelligentsia and the parvenus in technical schools.

This elite sensibility expressed itself in a number of additional policies, especially the campaigns against poaching and illegal sales of flowers, birds, and Christmas trees, and the student brigades' attempt to limit "ruinous" tourism to natural amenities.^[40] The targets of these citizens' "police actions" were mostly lower-class individuals; the white-collar or organized-crime figures who masterminded some of the larger operations and who fenced the ill-gotten state goods were never fingered. Druzhina raids often turned into morality plays in which the deficient ethics and poshlost ' (vulgarity) of the hoi polloi was exposed.^[41] The students were neither populists nor thoroughgoing democrats, nor courageous enough to take on the really powerful offenders at the heart of the economic machine. But then, how many in Soviet society were?

The Plan to Reroute the Northern Rivers

One struggle that did challenge a core element of the political economy of the neo-Stalinist state was that against the megalithic river diversions proposed in the 1970s. Perhaps the most far-reaching regime plans for transforming nature during the Brezhnev years were two projects to divert northward-flowing Russian rivers to the south. Robert G. Darst, Jr. discerned that the opposition to the river diversion projects, which were prematurely touted by its sponsors as, collectively, "the project of the century," embraced disparate social visions. Two geographically distinct projects were at issue, each generated by the excess of water use over supply in its respective region. The first

project sought to ease the shortage of water for irrigation in the southern portion of the European RSFSR and to stem the perceived fall in the level of the Caspian Sea. To do this, it was proposed to take water from northward-flowing rivers such as the Sukhona, Pechora, and Northern Dvina, as well as from Lakes Lacha, Vozhe, Kubena, and Onega, and pump them southward into the Volga basin.

Even more ambitious was the plan to reverse the flow of the Irtysh River and divert part of the Ob' to the gigantic Sibaral canal, which would stretch for 2,200 kilometers across the Turgai watershed. Here, cotton irrigation had led to withdrawal of almost all the water from the Amu-Dar'ia and SyrDar'ia Rivers before they could empty into the Aral Sea. Consequently, the Aral had lost almost half of its volume between 1950 and 1980. Salinity rose to unprecedented levels, and the exposed sands of the desiccated lake bed became a lethal source of pesticides and defoliants, which had precipitated to the lake bottom decades earlier. Winds now blew the toxic sands over fields of vegetables and pastures, spreading desertification, birth defects, and cancer.^[42] The water pumped southward was intended to stabilize, if not replenish, the Aral Sea, which had once been one of the most important inland fisheries of the Soviet Union, as well as to meet the growing need for water among Central Asia's fast-growing population.

Exactly when this gargantuan project was first imagined is still clouded in a historical fog. Driven by the fear of a drying-up of the Caspian Sea and after considering a number of proposals, an Academy of Sciences special conference in November 1933 approved a wide-ranging plan for the "reconstruction of the Volga and its basin" in which the following point was included: "To obtain additional flow into the Volga from neighboring river basins by means of a diversion to the Volga of a portion of the waters from the Pechora and Northern Dvina River basins and from Lakes Lacha, Vozhe, and Kubenskoe."^[43] Operational design work was assigned to Gidroproekt, S. Ia. Zhuk's hydraulic empire and accessory of the GULAG state-within-astate, and by the 1950s serious plans were being developed. Khrushchëv in his notorious January 1961 speech to the Central Committee "dug up a six-year-old memo by engineers . . . Zhuk and G. Russo on the feasibility of uniting the Caspian and the Aral to the Arctic Ocean through a series of canals and proposed the idea" to the plenum.^[44] As Darst recalls, by the late 1960s the project was already in the hands of design bureaus: "The research and design effort behind the undertaking was huge: over 120 agencies participated in the impact assessment study coordinated by the Institute of Water Problems of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and over a dozen major conferences were held on the subject."^[45] Besides making ridiculously low cost estimates (twelve billion rubles), the project's promoters promised that "harvests from newly irrigated lands in Central Asia and Kazakhstan alone would feed an additional 200 million people."^[46]

Backers of the projects represented a wide array of bureaucratic interests. Although convict labor had largely been replaced on water projects by free labor during the Khrushchëv years, Zhuk's agency was formally renamed only in October 1965, when it was reincarnated as Minvodkhoz—the USSR Ministry of Land Reclamation and Water Resources. Although eclipsed by the ascending nuclear power industry, Minvodkhoz, with its nearly 70,000 employees, was still a heavy hitter. Its leaders, while never surrendering the monumentalist engineering visions of their past, were able to adapt to new times, learn new rhetorics, and forge new alliances. We have seen how Minvodkhoz posed as a friend of Lake Baikal against the polluting pulp and paper interests. Even more impressively, by the late 1960s under its head E. E. Alekseevskii, the ministry positioned itself as the preeminent champion of a thoroughgoing cleanup of European Russia's waterways and under Brezhnev received significant funding to improve water quality.^[47] Between 1966 and 1984 the agency's budget was more than 115 billion rubles. A work force of two million labored on its projects, building more than 700 million kilometers of canals and ditches and draining as well as irrigating vast expanses of land.^[48]

Allied with Minvodkhoz were the local Party and government apparatuses of the Central Asian republics, especially Uzbekistan and Turkmenia, which stood to gain most by the diversions. Doubtless tacit support was also provided by the ministries concerned with atomic energy and heavy equipment, both of which would be essential for excavating the enormous canal.^[49]

As long as the project seemed to remain in the realm of fantasy, criticism was rare. There were more pressing issues to be concerned about, such as Kedrograd, Baikal, and the fate of the zapovedniki . Sergei Pavlovich Zalygin was one of the few to see the potential for huge damage in a system that placed such a premium on monumentality. In a 1961 essay on the literary treatment of Siberia, Zalygin appealed for an end to the ideology of the conquest of nature. "For some reason," he wrote, "our active literary hero, if he comes in contact with nature, does so exclusively according to the principle 'I came, I saw, I conquered.' Otherwise, such a hero is 'not active.'" Meanwhile, there were limits to our ability to change the physical world. "In Siberia the problems of transforming nature are grandiose," he noted, "but the errors made may be equally grandiose. And when people start talking about reversing the waters of the Enisei and the Ob' and diverting them to the Aral Sea, we still have too inadequate an understanding of the consequences of such a transformation. We understand them too poorly, and yet how many dithyrambs have already been sung by our literary brother about that project! And all in the service of grandiosity."^[50]

In 1963 one Leningrad professor of the Academy's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute "pointed to the unforeseeable effects on arctic climate of reducing the flow of fresh water to the Arctic ice pack."^[51] In the same year

Zalygin, in one of the more memorable victories of the nature protection movement, organized the defeat of a hydropower dam on the lower reaches of the Ob' River with a memorable series of broadsides he published in Literaturnaia gazeta .^[52] For the most part, though, public opinion was dormant until 1978, when a propaganda campaign began to promote the project and word leaked out that a thirty-five-meter dam had been erected in Kargopol' and housing built for construction workers, despite an absence of official approval for the project.^[53]

Parallel with the development of Minvodkhoz's plans, a group of young scientists, scholars, and journalists had come together as early as 1974 with an interest in examining independently the water resource problems of the country and Minvodkhoz's proposed solutions. Sponsored by the Oleg Poptsov'sjournal Sel'skaia molodëzh ' (Rural Youth) and formally credentialed and financed as "The Permanent Ecological Expedition of the Central Committee of the Komsomol Zhivaia voda [Living Water]" the group was led byjournalist Viktor Afanas'evich Iaroshenko, who set up an energetic program that eventually encompassed thirteen major field expeditions, much in the spirit of the druzhiny po okhrane prirody . These included field trips to the Volga, the Caspian, the Russian North, the Pechora, the Sukhona, Lakes Kubena and Onega, the Dnepr, the Pripiat', the Danube, the Amu-Dar'ia, the Aral Sea, the Ob', the Irtysh, Kamchatka, and the Russian Far East.^[54] From 1975 the expedition began systematically to investigate the proposed dam sites, canal routes, and other facilities of the river diversion project, and, importantly, to conduct interviews with local residents, scientists, and planners (who, for objectivity's sake, were included in the expedition).^[55]

The river diversion scheme was also playing out against another backdrop, the announcement in March 1974 of a massive new campaign to reinvigorate the decaying northern non–Black Earth regions of European Russia. Even within bureaucratic circles this was viewed as throwing good money after bad; an "unseen, quiet bureaucratic war of ranking and positioning [vedomstvenno-mestnicheskaia voina ] between the North and the South" ensued. The South, with its greater population, soil fertility, and passable roads held a heavy advantage, particularly since northern fields became even less productive after drainage.^[56] Soon the non–Black Earth program died on the vine. Hoping to influence the course of events through the Party's high command, the "Living Water" group after its 1976 expedition sent a memorandum to Central Committee secretary for agriculture F. Kulakov warning the Party of the possible negative consequences of river diversions in the North. At the center of their concern was the fate of the unique Kirillo-Belozerskii Monastery, whose walls, murals, and frescoes would be imperiled by a dam and hydropower installation on Siverskii Lake. Kulakov was unimpressed and sent the memo to the USSR State Committee for Science and Technology. "Do you want to mislead the leadership of the country?" the

leaders of the expedition were asked. "How can you not understand that the productivity of southern lands is incomparably higher than in the North?!"^[57]

The new direction was unmistakable. After the Twenty-fifth Congress of the CPSU in late February 1976, both river diversion projects were written into the "Main Directions for Economic Development for 1976–1980." This was followed by a decree of December 21, 1978 (No. 1048), signed by Brezhnev and Kosygin, which called for the theoretical and economic justifications for the Volga basin diversions to be completed by 1979 and those for Central Asia and Siberia by 1980. Minvodkhoz and its institutes would prepare the reports, while the Academy of Sciences' Institute of Water Problems under Grigorii Vasil'evich Voropaev would provide "scientific justification."^[58]

In a newly built high-rise the "All-Union E. Alekseevskii Red Banner of Labor Main Planning, Expeditionary, and Scientific Research Institute on the Problem of the Diversion and Distribution of Northern Waters and of Siberian Rivers" opened in Moscow in 1978, a valedictory accomplishment by Alekseevskii as he retired. Here, battalions of engineers and scribes were at work generating the "scientific" justification for these immense public works. "A full one hundred forty volumes of Technical-Economic Justifications [TEO or tekhicheski-economicheskiie obosnovaniia] supported one conclusion: the country would perish if the project were not undertaken," wrote activist Vera Grigor'evna Briusova. Accordingly, censorship was imposed on public statements critical of the diversions. Articles for Pravda and even the sympathetic Nash sovremennik were suppressed because of objections and real censorship on the part of the USSR State Committee on Hydrometeorology, which was supposedly the lead Soviet agency for environmental monitoring. The committee's head, Iurii A. Izrael', prohibited publication on this theme. For this, plus services at Chernobyl and with regard to legitimizing atomic testing in the Soviet Arctic, Izrael' won a seat on the prestigious Revkom (Auditing Committee) of the Party's Central Committee.^[59]

Despite this pall of censorship, the "Living Water" expedition managed to smuggle into print in mid-1979 in Chelovek i priroda a report on the damage the Volga project would inflict on the Pechora basin, which the expedition visited in 1977, both to nature and to the economy.^[60] From Iaroshenko's report of the group's attempt to interview the chief engineer of the Pechora project in the new Gidroproekt office building we may see an important change in the group's sense of its own mission. Defending the right of "public opinion" to be a part of the decision-making process was now as much the issue as evaluating the merits of the project itself.^[61]

In 1978 the expedition studied the "Sibaral" variant, traveling to the AmuDar'ia from its sources in the high Pamirs to the Aral Sea, and again publishing its findings in Chelovek i priroda 7 (1980). Again, the group argued against the diversions, concluding that Central Asian irrigation was already overwatering and thus salinizing the soil. The following year, 1979, the ex-

pedition proceeded from the source of the Ob' in Lake Teletskoe in the Altai range down to the great river's delta, again publishing in Chelovek i priroda , perhaps the only periodical that escaped the regime of censorship, but one with a national circulation of 100,000.

At this point, the theoretical and economic justifications had to be approved by expert commissions in both Gosplan of the RSFSR and of the USSR. Voropaev was chair of the Gosplan USSR commission. The Twenty-sixth Congress of the CPSU had directed preparatory construction work on the project to commence during the next Five-Year Plan (1981–1985). Everything looked like a sure deal. And then came the bureaucrat's nightmare: a revolt of the experts. The Gosplan USSR expert commission's subgroup on economic planning dismissed the proposal almost out of hand. Courageously, the eight men and women asserted that, owing to its narrow agency-oriented profile of interests, Minvodkhoz was incapable of developing alternative scenarios for improving agriculture in the targeted regions. In the words of Iaroshenko, "This was a reversal—not of rivers but of the situation regarding the public's participation."^[62]

Emboldened, a dozen scientists led by geologist and MOIP vice president A. L. Ianshin sent a letter to the country's leaders, "On the Catastrophic Consequences of the Reversal of Part of the Flow of Northern Rivers and the Complex of Measures for Attaining the Food Program of the USSR," in which they demanded the creation of an independent special commission to review the projects.^[63] And when a letter by noted "Village Prose" novelist Vasilii Ivanovich Belov, "Will Lakes Vozhe and Lacha Save the Caspian?," calling for a scientific debate on the river diversions, was rejected for publication owing to censorship, he sent it to Paris, where it was published in the tamizdat (unapproved foreign publication by Soviet authors).^[64] Soon it became well known within the Soviet Union. From Vologda, Belov came to Moscow to pursue the matter, approaching the nationalist historian of the pre-Kievan and Kievan periods, academician B. A. Rybakov, who promised to raise the issue at his well-known Wednesday discussion group on the Volkhonka. When the guests arrived, however, there was a notice that the Wednesday discussion had been canceled, so the group went to Russian art historian V. G. Briusova's apartment nearby. Her home became a clearinghouse for the campaign for the next five years.^[65]

"We needed to have the opportunity to discuss these problems among a broad public," wrote Briusova. In December 1981 the antidiversion forces rallied their troops, holding their first real public meeting in the main auditorium of the Union of Artists of the USSR. Chairing the meeting was the president of the Union's Commission for the Preservation of Monuments of Culture and History (VOOPIiK), Dementii Alekseevich Shmarinov, who acted "not because of the office he held but out of a deep, burning conviction, as a true Russian patriot of Russian culture and the Russian land."

Later meetings took place at the House of Artists at 11 Kuznetskii most, in the Central House of Artists on Krymskaia Square, and in a variety of "houses of culture" throughout the city.^[66]

At the first expanded session of the preservation of monuments commission, Fotei Iakovlevich Shipunov (of Kedrograd fame), now an avowed Russian nationalist and no longer going by the name Sergei, was among the speakers, who also included Professor S. N. Chernyshev, a geologist, and the economist S. G. Zhukov. Briusova spoke about the threat to the wooden architecture of the north. The meeting, which included writers, artists, and architects, adopted a resolution that the commission prepare a substantive independent assessment of the river diversion project. VOOPIiK obtained for the commission a copy of the official technical-economic justifications. After five months of work the report was readied, and all endangered sites were identified. Like the Belov letter, it was published in Russkaia mysl' (Paris) and then republished in Moscow. Altogether the report, which was sent to the Politburo, identified more than 490 threatened historical and architectural sites. In its 120 pages ecological and economic arguments, although not as close to the hearts of the compilers as the cultural ones, were also included to reach the utilitarian minds of the nation's leadership.^[67]

This "revolt of the experts" in turn provoked an echo from broader and broader segments of the population. Locals from the threatened city of Kirillov had written to the Central Committee on July 28, 1982 that "Party and civic conscience does not permit us to remain indifferent to the possible destruction of the most magnificent cultural values which, to a significant degree, help to engender a feeling for one's own Motherland."^[68] Iurii Efremov and A. A. Kuznetsov, who headed the nature protection section of the Moscow writer's organization, gathered eighty signatures—forty from Party members—on a letter to then RSFSR premier Mikhail S. Solomentsev. When the Moscow writers' leadership protested that eighty was too many, Efremov facetiously suggested perhaps eight to ten, to which the thickheaded leadership, which perhaps had failed to grasp Efremov's sardonic humor, assented. Thus was a letter signed by Zalygin, Belov, Rasputin, Soloukhin, Volkov, Krupin, and others sent to the Russian Republic leadership.^[69] The growing piles of letters to all layers of authority, when added to the report of the academicians, created an air of disquiet in the Central Committee. Something had gotten out of hand.

To contain the situation, the Central Committee Agricultural Department convened a special conference. Although the face-off between the academic authors and signatories of the report, on the one hand, and the project planners and their political patrons, on the other, failed to win converts on either side, "the taboo had been broken," in the words of Briusova.

In retrospect, the reluctance of the Central Committee to forcibly silence the critics of the project opened the floodgates for a mass mobilization of

the patriotic-minded intelligentsia. While field biologists were conspicuous for their absence in this defense of Russian culture and homeland, in this Party of "memory" were reunited Fotei Shipunov and Vladimir Chivilikhin, joined by the other leading "Village Prose" and patriotic writers: Valentin G. Rasputin, Vasilii I. Belov, Viktor P. Astaf'ev, P. L. Proskurin, and Oleg V. Volkov. Repentant hydrologists included Evgenii Makar'evich Podol'skii and Sergei Pavlovich Zalygin. There were geologists (N. A. Lebedeva, E. M. Pashkin), artists (N. I. Rozov, A. P. Gorskii), economists (Mikhail Iakovlevich Lemeshev, Natalia Petrovna Iurina, L. F. Zelinkina), and the geographer and historical preservationist Iurii Konstantinovich Efremov.^[70] The great historian of medieval Russian culture Dmitrii Likhachëv continued to spearhead opposition to the project on the Gosplan USSR Expert Commission.^[71] With the help of Iaroshenko and his "Living Water" crew, Sergei Shatalin, working in the All-Union Institute of Systems Analysis, authored two important assessments of the European and Asiatic diversion schemes.^[72]

As the bureaucrats lost control, the debate spread to almost every major relevant scientific institution. Brezhnev had died and was succeeded by the infirm Andropov in December 1982. By late 1983 Andropov was mortally ill, and on his death in February 1984 Chernenko assumed the leadership of the Party. The atmosphere of drift lent greater urgency, but it also contributed to a feeling of greater freedom; the old men in the Kremlin no longer seemed capable of enforcing discipline.

When the Gosplan RSFSR Expert Commission formally approved the projects on February 3, 1983, another group of experts sent a memorandum rejecting the commission's conclusions.^[73] A month later Briusova daringly sent a letter to Andropov.^[74] Two months later, on May 18, 1983, the Presidium of VASKhNIL discussed the economic and agricultural implications of the Asiatic portion of the scheme. Voropaev and the leaders of Minvodkhoz, who were present, were astonished by the "hail" of hostile questions. Even the representative of Kazakhstan, corresponding member S. Mukhamedzhanov, defected. With the exception of Voropaev's Institute of Water Problems, the world of Soviet science was inexorably congealing in a united front against the bureaucrats. Eventually, fifty academicians, twenty-five corresponding members, and five divisions of the Academy of Sciences came around to opposing the project.^[75]

The Party and ministerial bureaucrats had the power to legislate the diversion schemes, fund them, and order them constructed. Scientists and experts had no such access to the direct levers of power. However, in James Scott's term, they did possess some "weapons of the weak." One of them was science's residual corporate ability to credential its members, and here they were able to exploit a chink in the bureaucrats' armor. Just as the civil degradation of M. M. Bochkarëv entered the folklore of the scientific intelligentsia as an important moral victory, so the tempestuous and ill-fated

doctoral dissertation defense of A. S. Berezner, chief planner of the European portion of the diversion project, became a symbol of social resistance to the Party bureaucracy. As chief planner, Berezner's status as a mere "candidate" (rather than "doctor") of science seemed incommensurate. Using a monograph based on the project's theoretical-economic justification as the scholarly opus to be defended, Berezner prepared to uphold his ideas before the Scholarly Council of the Academy's Institute of Geography, located on the quaint and winding Staromonetnyi pereulok in the old Zamoskvorech'e district. The defense was set for December 4, 1984.^[76]

In the Russian and Soviet traditions defenses of scholarly degrees are open to the public, and interested individuals are permitted to submit written evaluations and critiques based on a précis (avtoreferat ) of the dissertation materials distributed beforehand. Berezner's provoked no fewer than ten negative reviews, an augury of the defense itself. Although Ianshin's evaluation was sharply critical, he tactfully withheld a final judgment as to whether a degree should be conferred. Other evaluations were not as diplomatic. His official opponent, corresponding member of the Academy O. F. Vasil'ev, who had submitted a highly positive appraisal of Berezner's work, was effectively disqualified when, on examination, it became clear that Vasil'ev did not understand the issues involved and probably had not read the work through. The mathematical ecological modeler lu. M. Svirezhev exposed the deep flaws in Berezner's calculations. As Berezner sank deeper and deeper, the defense had to be extended an unprecedented additional day. Ultimately, the Scholarly Council, though it had sought to avoid trouble, was forced by the weight of academic argument to reject the doctoral defense.^[77]

At about this time the unofficial society Pamiat' (Memory) started up its activities. Central among them was agitation against the diversion project. Briusova nostalgically recalled the early days of Pamiat': "At the time," she wrote, "the Chivilikhin-style traditions of healthy patriotism were still alive. Later, it broke into several diverse, frequently mutually hostile groups, whose activities at times took on an extremist cast." In any event, Pamiat"s increasing network of activists helped to arrange meetings in clubs, Houses of Culture, and institutes around the country, including in Moscow, Obninsk, Tula, Novosibirsk, and Irkutsk. Sometimes, as following Briusova's visit and speech in Irkutsk, there was an uproar. In many instances meetings generated a flood of letters to the authorities.^[78]

Unprecedented in scale, expense, and general temerity, the river diversion scheme propelled many opponents toward a more vocal extremism. Chivilikhin's own two-volume Pamiat , after all, was based on a belief in the unceasing war between the principles of the "Slavic taiga" and the "Asiatic steppe." Those who would destroy the taiga to water the steppe were

traitors to Russian Slavdom. For Rasputin, the diversion scheme was a "conscious act" against the Russian countryside, which he likened in its destructiveness to collectivization.^[79] In a letter to Vitalii Vorotnikov, the new RSFSR premier, the writer even threatened to immolate himself on Red Square should the diversion be implemented.

In a letter of April 15, 1985 to Grigorii Vasil'evich Voropaev, Vasilii Belov (then a member of the Vologodskii obkom KPSS) denounced the "orientation on the south" and the preference for irrigated agriculture as "antiscientific and against the [Russian] nation [antinarodnoe ]."^[80]

There were repercussions. People were fired, lights went out at meetings, and microphones mysteriously failed. Certain institutions removed themselves from the fray, such as the Ministries of Culture of the USSR and the RSFSR, Moscow State University, the Academy of Artists of the USSR, and even the Central House of Artists on Krymskaia Square, which imposed a ban on evenings with Russian national themes. Briusova was removed from the Academy of Artists' Commission on the Protection of Monuments of History and Culture.^[81] The October 1984 Plenum of the Central Committee endorsed USSR premier Nikolai Tikhonov's call for the "completion in the near future of the plans for the diversion of a portion of the flow of Siberian rivers."^[82]

Emphysema carried First Secretary Chernenko to his death after barely a year in the Soviet Union's top job, and in March 1985 Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachëv was formally elevated from acting to de jure general secretary of the Party. At first it was unclear whether Gorbachëv was going to take the country in a truly new direction; his initial campaigns, which featured slogans as such uskorenie (intensification) and relied heavily on moral exhortation and punitive measures (e.g., the antialcoholism campaign), seemed to cast him as a younger version of the disciplinarian Andropov. Unenthusiastic, both the liberal intelligentsia, including its scientific-environmental wing, and the Russophile intelligentsia and supporters waited skeptically for some sign that Gorbachëv would be different.

In this uncertain atmosphere two highly visible attacks on the diversion project were published. Sergei Zalygin's open letter to Nikolai Fëdorovich Vasil'ev, USSR minister of land reclamation and water resources, which appeared in Literaturnaia gazeta on October 2, 1985, was actually a fundamental attack on the vulgarized "Marxist" economics that guided water—indeed, all resource—use in the Soviet Union since the Revolution. Zalygin ridiculed the idea that water had no "cost," for it was this false assumption, he argued, that had led to the squander of such vast quantities of water in Central Asia to begin with. Consequently, the solution did not reside in a monstrously scaled technical scheme but in strict cost accounting and a responsible stewardship and husbanding of existing resources.^[83]

Just one month before, Zalygin had succeeded in publishing another important technically argued critique of the diversion plan in the Party's ideological monthly, Kommunist .^[84] But the article's most memorable point was that scientific public opinion as well as political representatives had a rightful place at the decision-making table:

Public opinion under our circumstances is an enlightened opinion. It encompasses scientists, engineers, and people who are "abreast of the times," who have passed through the school of civic upbringing and civic activity. And they really do not want terribly much. They want problems to be decided in the open and on a high scientific level, and not just from their technical side. The experience of public opinion in the problems of Baikal and the Lower Ob' Hydropower Station back this up.^[85]

As Zalygin repeated in his memorable speech to the Congress of the Union of Writers of the RSFSR in early December 1985, "Technology in its pure form, introduced without taking into account public opinion, is a terrible thing."^[86]

Even more striking, as much for where it was published—in Pravda —as for its assertion that the project "was from beginning to end in its economic and ecological aspects without justification," was an intrepid piece by two members of the Komsomol's Council of Young Scientists and Scholars that appeared on December 30. The water authorities even demanded an apology from the Council and a disavowal of the article, but the Council did not immediately respond.^[87]

Behind the scenes beginning in early 1985 an informal group of scientists, led by Ianshin and including hydrobiologist B. Laskorin and agronomist A. Tikhonov, began work on a letter to Gorbachëv. By July Ianshin had collected twenty signatures from full academicians, and Academy president A. P. Aleksandrov promised to deliver it to the Central Committee, of which he was a member. Strangely, however, the letter was never delivered.^[88]

As efforts at the various diversion sites proceeded apace, and with no sign that the new Party boss had shifted from the October 1984 decision, opponents grew more desperate. On August 3, 1985, in a clear breach of protocol, Ianshin and his confederates decided to bypass the Academy president and submitted a new letter, signed as well by V. A. Kovda, Laskorin, Tikhonov, and Ianshin himself, directly to the offices of the Politburo. By late August the "letter of the four" had found its way to the agenda of that body, and Gorbachëv for the first time called for a policy review. Entrusted with that task was Ziia Nuriev, then a deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers. Losing no time, Nuriev called a conference for September 1 after hurried meetings with the authors of the letter.^[89]

At his conference Nuriev established nine separate working groups, each of which was to thoroughly study a particular aspect of the European and

Asiatic portions of the project and present their findings. In his choice of chairpersons for these groups, however, Nuriev hewed to the practice of appointing specialists in or around Minvodkhoz. Having already broken the rules, the scientist opponents of the project returned to the Academy of Sciences, where they broke some more by forming their own parallel working groups. Having readied their materials by early January 1986, the scientists' parallel groups delivered them to USSR premier Nikolai Ryzhkov, RSFSR chief Vorotnikov, V. Murakhovskii of Gosagroprom, the new Soviet superministry of agriculture, and A. Nikonov, another Kremlin functionary. Sufficiently troubled by this unprecedented unofficial politicking, Ryzhkov decided to tackle the issue at a special session of the USSR Council of Ministers to be held later.^[90]

One of the more piquant moments of the struggle also played a role in reinforcing the praxis of glasnost , which had only recently been elevated to a level with uskorenie . A live television broadcast on the river diversions was being aired from Ostankino. All of the speakers had been proponents. To all appearances, at least, it seemed as though the project continued to enjoy official support. But in the closing moments of the show, the script suddenly went awry. A thin, tall, white-haired man—Academy of Sciences vice president A. L. Ianshin—managed to get to the microphone to denounce the river diversions. Nothing like that had ever happened on Soviet television. "It was a real act of daring," wrote geologist Pavel Florenskii and coauthor T. A. Shutova four years later.^[91] Of course Ianshin, as a leader of scientific public opinion, had several decades of courageous civic activism under his belt to prepare him for that fateful moment. By spring 1986 the censorship regime of Minvodkhoz and the Hydrometeorology Service was tottering, but the political situation was still unclear and, to a certain extent, unstable.

Meanwhile, the country was on the eve of earthshaking events. The country awoke on the morning of April 27, 1986 to the worst nuclear accident in history. Perhaps things could have played out politically in a completely different way, but as Zhores A. Medvedev argues in his Legacy of Chernobyl , true glasnost' , in a macabre way, was born in the wreckage of reactor block no. 4.

Only in light of Chernobyl can we understand the incredible candor and independence of the speeches at the Eighth Congress of the USSR Union of Writers in late June 1986, an outpouring of criticism of the planners and the bureaucrats for their despoliation of Russia. Iurii Bondarev's speech embodied the anguish and frustration of the literary environmentalist Russian nationalists:

If we do not stop the destruction of architectural monuments, if we do not stop the violence to the earth and rivers, if there does not take place a moral explosion in science and criticism, then one fine morning, which will be our last . . . , we, with our inexhaustible optimism, will wake up and realize that

the national culture of great Russia—its spirit, its love for the paternal land, its beauty, its great literature, painting, and philosophy—has been effaced, has disappeared forever, murdered, and we, naked and impoverished, will sit on the ashes, trying to remember the native alphabet . . . and we won't be able to remember, for thought, and feeling, and happiness, and historical memory will have disappeared.^[92]

In this atmosphere of upheaval and crisis the Presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers met on July 19. As protocol dictated, minister of land reclamation and water resources Vasil'ev led off with a defense of the entire project. Now, however, Minvodkhoz's opponents were given the opportunity to have their say, if not on a completely equal footing. Ianshin offered the first and crucial rebuttal. An earth scientist, he noted that meteorologists were predicting a period of rising precipitation for northern Russia, thus obviating the need to divert water; besides, the level of the Caspian Sea had been rising for two decades, which many opponents had pointed out previously. As if nature itself sought to buttress Ianshin's case, a violent summer rainstorm began, visible and audible through the windows of the meeting room. Voropaev followed with a complete endorsement of the project, and was followed in turn by Academy president Aleksandrov and by Gurii Marchuk, chair of the USSR State Committee on Science and Technology, both of whom supported the plan with reservations. Gosplan USSR chair N. K. Baibakov also was among the backers. Significantly, though, weighing in against the plan was one of Gorbachëv's most trusted economic advisers, Abel Aganbegian, who questioned the unbelievably low cost estimates in Vasil'ev's presentation. An indication that the planners were in trouble was the conclusion of Vitalii Vorotnikov, who had studied the opponents' critique in detail. "We want to create new seas within the country," he asked, "but where then will we sow our wheat?"^[93]

Prime Minister Ryzhkov, now revealing his own opinion on the matter, turned to Gosagroprom minister V. Murakhovskii and asked whether his ministry could find the ninety billion rubles to finance the plan. Of course the minister answered in the negative. To this Ryzhkov responded that the USSR Council of Ministers itself did not have that kind of money either, especially in light of the expenses incurred by the accident at Chernobyl. For that reason, he concluded, the Siberian part of the project needed to be postponed to some time in the next millennium, while the European portion needed to be ended outright, as the scientists had recommended. Ryzhkov even went farther, accusing Aleksandrov and Vasil'ev of disinformation. Neither Vasil'ev nor any of his allies dared to mount a rebuttal to the prime minister, and the decision now went to the Politburo for a final hearing. Gorbachëv supported his prime minister. On August 14, 1986, a joint decree of the Party's Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers stopped the further progress of the projects, citing both the objections

of "broad circles of public opinion" as well as "the goal of concentrating financial and material resources to enhance the efficiency of water resource use and that of existing reclaimed lands."^[94]

For many groups within the Soviet population, even those that did not take active part in the struggle against the diversions, August 14 now stood as a landmark date. Although parts of the project survived—particularly the Volga-Don-2 and Volga-Chograi Cat time, a "project of the century" was derailed, thanks in good measure to citizen activism. Anals—another fact far outweighed the defects of the decree. For the first time, the highest Party and state leadership had sided with "public opinion" against the almost united front of bureaucratic empires. For the firsnd for the first time, the Soviet intelligentsia and others began to take the regime's commitment to glasnost' seriously. This reassessment had the most dramatic consequences for the tenure of Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachëv.

Three organizations stood out by their official silence on the river diversions. The USSR Academy of Sciences, the Geographical Society of the USSR, and VOOP, all of which—the Geographical Society most recently—had been transformed into the domesticated fiefdoms of Party bureaucrats. Iurii Efremov, who attended both the Geographical Society's congress in Kiev in 1985 and VOOP's in the Hall of Columns of the former Moscow House of the Nobility a year later, noted that "even in hindsight at their congresses [both societies] managed to avoid saying even one word in their official reports about the antidiversion activism of their members." There was "not a single word of approval or encouragement" at the VOOP meeting, despite the fact that some local branches, notably those of Vologda, Leningrad, and the Komi ASSR, figured centrally in the struggle.^[95] Traditions of resistance survived, but ironically not in some of the institutions that early nurtured them.

If for field biologists and the druzhinniki the Party and state bureaucrats were first and foremost antiscience and anti-intellectual, to many of the activists against the river diversions they were anti-Russian, anti-Volk. For some it was easy to focus on the role of the Jews Iurii Izrael' or Berezner or of the Tadzhik P. A. Polad-Zade; their ethnic identities confirmed the anti-Russian, cosmopolitan rootlessness of these homeland-destroyers. On the other hand, many defenders of Russian culture acted out of their general commitment to culture. Sergei Zalygin and Dmitrii Likhachëv are Russian patriots, but they are also citizens of the world, and they opposed the Party bureaucrats as much for their effect on science and intellectual life as owing to the bureaucrats' threat to Russian culture and Russian rural folk.^[96]

In the case of Zalygin various narratives joined to make new combinations. Viewing nature through the eyes of a trained hydrological engineer, he saw the technical problems contingent on the vast nature-transforming schemes. As a sensitive writer who had witnessed (and then written about) the

human pain associated with the collectivization of the Siberian peasantry, Zalygin shared the "Village Prose" writers' sensibility that the transformation of nature was an instrument of violence against rural people. As a self-made intellectual who, to a great extent, had absorbed many of the values of the scientific intelligentsia, Zalygin was offended by the Party bosses' rejection of the claims to policy-making roles of credentialed experts and scientists. Yet, he remained a unique voice. Unlike the other "Village Prose" writers, Zalygin never totally embraced a nativist—let alone exclusivist—Russian nationalism. And, unlike the field naturalists, Zalygin was fully aware of the false nature of the dualism "humans and nature" and therefore never fetishized "pristine" nature or considered people to be disruptive and polluting aliens in the otherwise harmonious Eden of aboriginal nature. That is why, for his own reasons, Zalygin could be counted among the supporters of Baikal, zapovedniki , and the campaign against the river diversions and was almost alone as an honest broker to whom all factions of Soviet environmentalists could turn.