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The Emergence of Soviet Environmental Studies

Throughout the 1970s, a considerable body of popular and scholarly literature has emerged concerning environmental protection efforts in the Soviet Union.2 This work has ranged from airline in-flight magazine articles concerning the rebirth of sturgeon fisheries along the Volga to comprehensive monographs analyzing the complete range of Soviet legislative, bureaucratic, and social initiatives in the area. Despite all these publications little attention has been given to the emerging institutional support system for Soviet academic environmental research. To a considerable degree, this hiatus is due to the way environmental studies is practiced in the Soviet Union. It has yet to attain the character of a formal academic discipline. Rather, it remains a loosely integrated collection of subdisciplines drawn from such disparate fields as philosophy, zoology, legal studies, and limnology. These research areas are tied together by a shared focus upon the relationship of man to his environment, resource utilization, and nature conservation. This fragmentation his deep historical roots. Soviet authors justifiably point to centuries of Russian and Soviet efforts to protect and study the environment.3 For example, the second Romanov tsar, Aleksei Mikhailovich, issued some sixty-five decrees regulating hunting; Peter I set aside parcels of land to be protected from economic development; and Catherine II promulgated the first set of Russian fishing regulations. Nevertheless, few of these attempts to regulate the environment were sustained. None were reflected in Russian scientific research of the day. As in Western Europe, any systematic approach to the environment, its study, and its preservation, remains a phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries rather than of the seventeenth and eighteenth. In 1828, the Russian government first became involved in the establishment of state nature preserves when it opened the Askaniia-Nova State Preserve in the Ukraine. By mid-century, changes in the general European attitude towards the environment gained wide currency in Russia. Instead of a national wealth to be preserved for future exploitation by man, natural resources came to be viewed as having intrinsic value independent of economic considerations. By the 1870s, various natural science societies flourished in the Ural and Baltic regions. These groups frequently placed considerable emphasis upon conservations efforts. 2