This volume was the product of a conference, and, like most such anthologies, has chapters of uneven quality and interest. In their Introduction, the editors argue that the Cold War and the rise of environmental social movements and environmental state policy were not simply “coincidental.” While this point is not fully illustrated in the volume, the chapters bear out other points made by the editors: that the Iron Curtain was porous respecting environmental matters, and that east and west broadly shared similar priorities concerning development. Environmental information also flowed in both directions (they could have added that environmental information was also suppressed by both east and west; the US government suppressed information about Soviet nuclear accidents, such as the one at Kyshtym, for fear of creating more concern about American nuclear operations). Finally, neither bloc was monolithic, and environmental policies and freedom of information varied.
If the Cold War itself may not have generated environmental initiatives, international venues designed to work on common environmental problems brought the two blocs together. In his fine chapter, Laurent Coumel shows how, through the person of river transport expert Vasilii Zvonkov, ideas and initiatives moved in both directions at once. His successors in the effort to create a genuinely sensitive multiuse management of surface waters in the USSR, including Petr Kapitsa, used not only unfavorable comparisons of Soviet practices and outcomes with those of the west, designed to shame the Soviet leadership into more enlightened policies, but what Coumel calls “proxy awareness,” in which western environmental problems are discussed in order to call attention to similar Soviet ones that could not be spoken of. Coumel in fact ends with an irony: the end of the Cold War and glasnost helped water quality activists far more than did the Cold War.
The interesting chapter by Anolda Cetkauskaite and Simo Laakkonen seems to contradict that of Coumel, arguing that Soviet Lithuania from the end of World War II actually had a very forward looking policy of water quality management, with a largely effective network of waste water treatment facilities built throughout the country. The authors explain this as a result of the importation of a general Soviet water protection model brought to Lithuania. What may surprise readers is that the USSR generally had already developed parameters for maximum permissible concentrations of chemical and biological impurities by the 1940s, which was comparable to standards of Nordic countries by the 1960s. These standards were applied much more rigorously in Lithuania than elsewhere, however, and so perhaps we also must look to the political culture in Soviet Lithuania and to the degrees of freedom enjoyed by local leaders in this policy area. As Philip Pryde reminds us in his Environmental Management in the Soviet Union (1991, 77), “most Soviet cities had no municipal waste water treatment plants” before World War II, and only fifty-one cities had sewage plants by 1960.
Other chapters take us outside Soviet territory, into eastern Europe. From Eagle Glassheim's chapter on Czechoslovakia we learn that even when environmental discourse was more permitted and there was genuine regime concern about extreme pollution, structural issues did not permit mitigation. Unable to afford to buy scrubbers from the west, and with reduced low-cost natural gas from the USSR owing to high energy prices on the world market and the USSR's need to market its gas, the Czechoslovak regime was forced to become more, not less, dependent on dirty lignite coal. Just as in the west, concludes Glassheim, the imperative for economic growth overrode everything else.
For environmental activists, the topography of freedom in eastern Europe was uneven. Poland in the 1980s, Julia Ault shows, was a relatively free space. As such Poles hosted meetings of activists from all over eastern Europe, actually inspiring visitors from the German Democratic Republic with the Poles’ sense of confidence in interacting with local authorities. It was a model of glasnost that the Germans desired to import to their own country. Indeed, because of the cramped opportunities for organizing in the GDR, it fell to the Protestant Evangelical Church to serve as a quiet umbrella for environmental advocacy. Here, Ault would have done well to point the reader to Anita Mallinckrodt's study, The Environmental Dialogue in the GDR: Literature, Church, Party and Interest Groups in their Socio-Political Context (1987). And speaking of the need of authors to be more diligent in citing antecedent literature, the chapter on Yugoslav environmental policy by Hrvoje Petrić should certainly have mentioned Barbara Jancar-Webster's Environmental Management in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia: Structure and Regulation in Federal Communist States (1987).
Finally, moving to the west, two interesting chapters caught this reader's eye. If many West Germans bought into the nationalist idea that only they knew how to maintain soil fertility, Scott Moranda tells us how American occupation authorities sold them on a more profitable way to run dairy farms, growing high-yield alfalfa to feed confined cows and then using liquid manure to fertilize the alfalfa fields. This replaced the more extensive pastures and barnyard manure the Germans loved. Americans sought to make Germany more prosperous to deflect the allure of communism—and to be able to buy our exports.
Jacob Hamblin tells an interesting story about the Water for Peace initiative. As America's answer to the Soviet-built Aswan High Dam, in 1964 LBJ committed to build a nuclear desalinization plant for Israel. Viewed as a technological fix not only for Israel but for the entire region, the plan imploded when the Israelis refused to accept IAEA safeguards and inspections—the Israelis looked to the plant as a source of plutonium for their nuclear weapons project at Dimona. Cold War competition on both sides led to risky stratagems, with environmental risks taking a back seat in favor of all sorts of other considerations.
As I perused this volume, it struck me that far fewer but intellectually deeper and more expansive chapters would have served readers better. Conferences should be held for discussion, and not obligatorily with the expectation of the production of an edited volume, let alone including all conference papers without exception.
