Volume 40, Number 11 · June 10, 1993
The Politics of Catastrophe
By David Holloway
Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature Under Siege
by Murray Feshbach, by Alfred Friendly Jr.
Basic Books, 376 pp., $24.00
The Truth About Chernobyl
by Grigori Medvedev, translated by Evelyn Rossiter, foreword by Andrei Sakharov
Basic Books, 274 pp., $12.00 (paper)
No Breathing Room: The Aftermath of Chernobyl
by Grigori Medvedev, translated by Evelyn Rossiter, Introduction by David R. Marples
Basic Books, 213 pp., $20.00
Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl
by Piers Paul Read
Random House, 362 pp., $25.00
A case can be made that the Soviet Union collapsed because of the way it treated the environment. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which ruled one sixth of the earth's surface, squandered the resources of an immensely rich country and created an ecological catastrophe. As much as anything else, this undermined support for the regime by exposing as fraudulent its claim to have invented a new type of 'scientific' policy-making and by showing how little it cared for the well-being of its citizens. In the Gorbachev years, when public opinion became a political force, environmental issues provided a major source of popular protest and separatist sentiment.
Review, 3598 words
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