East Bloc Ecology

...The censor's blessing, however, was usually restricted to vague, general, and optimistic formulations...

...Because it has been a more feasible and reliable approach than "liberation," "detente," and "human rights," it has survived them all as the cornerstone of American foreign policy...

...In a country like Poland, a decision to raise the price of ham is fraught with political risk...

...after all, many of the world's most sophisticated weapons have been produced by the Soviet Union...

...which could eventually serve as the basis for a political opposition...

...The authorities complain of apathy and in-difference, especially among the young...

...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 Soviet press nearly ignored Three Mile Island...

...O We are told, again by a Czech, that "the solution for the ecological problem depends on the success of ideological work...

...it could be done elsewhere...

...In Eastern Europe, by contrast, money spent for defense is seen as money contributed (some would say extorted) for the support of an imperialist army of occupation...

...Some in-formation was permitted to seep through to the public...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 21...

...As we know in the United States, the making of a post-industrial economy is disruptive and often painful, involving high unemployment, the virtual death of smokestack cities, and downward mobility for millions of blue-collar workers...

...The Soviets, in fact, have gone to considerable lengths to refute the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth doctrine, something due less to compassion for impoverished Asians and Africans (the Soviets having contributed mightily to their poverty through the export of a failed economic model) than to nervousness over latent anti-growth and anti-urban sentiments among the Russian people...

...Growth is particularly crucial for the rulers in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, countries with historic links to the West, whose citizens equate Communism with a culturally inferior and imperialist foreign power, and compare living standards not with the Soviet Union but with Austria, West Germany, Sweden, and other prosperous nations of Europe...

...in Pravda, the party line still reigns supreme...

...If the ecological crisis originates in the capitalist world," Soviet philosopher I. T. Frolov posited, "then it is necessary to rebuild substantially the capitalist system in order to remove the ecological threat...

...Finally, no discussion of the East European environmental crisis is complete without reference to the psychological incapacitation brought on by decades of totalitarian rule...

...To meet these two goals, Gierek hit upon the idea of financing domestic economic expansion through trade and credits with capitalist nations, something never really tried by a Communist country...

...on the other hand, months after the event Pravda continued to denounce the "persecution" of the black radicals of MOVE who died in the Philadelphia incident...

...And from a theoretical standpoint, Communism, with its controls, centrally determined blueprints, and absence of entrepreneurial freedom, should be able to manage the environment with considerably more efficiency than a system which gives relatively free rein to the market...

...Communist planners were thus granted a decade or so grace period during which action could have been taken to avoid the troubles afflicting their ideological adversaries...

...the level of pollution in the Baltic Sea...

...Also worth-while are the research bulletins prepared by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty...

...The choices on such a planet are few...

...As Gierek saw things, Communism's future—not to mention his own—would rise or fall with the regime's ability to induce high rates of economic growth...

...More to the point, Marxism has always counter-posed the rationality and humaneness of a centrally planned economy to the sprawling, wasteful, and rapacious nature of capitalism...

...Not that journalists abandoned the struggle altogether...

...Today, such support does not exist among people who are constantly being told that a few more years of sacrifice will be necessary before the march towards full Communist affluence can begin again...

...Lately, and especially under Gorbachev, the braggadocio has been muted...

...Notably, Iheard no denunciation of aid to the contras in Nicaragua...

...Another diversionary approach is the much-heralded development of "smoke-resistant" trees, which are planted in forests killed off by coal-burning power facilities...

...pronouncements on ecological issues has taken place...

...Polish authorities have divided water quality into four categories, ranging from Class One—fit for human consumption—to Class Four—unfit even for industrial use...

...It is by now evident that rational Marxian planning is no better equipped than anarchic capitalism to cope with the complex array of environmental problems which inevitably follow in the wake of industrialization...

...The traditional Soviet position has been that Soviet might plus Marxian rationality can conquer any problem...

...For while Communism's public voice was boasting of socialism's built-in capacity to avoid environmental devastation, others—planners, economists, scientists—well recognized that Soviet-style economies were as susceptible as capitalism to pollution and the deterioration of nature's resources...

...An important side effect of the Solidarity era was the establishment of the Polish Ecological Club, an independent organization which remains in existence today...

...Thus the Soviet Union permits a more free-wheeling discussion of environmental controversies than the countries of Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia and possibly Hungary excepted...

...But unlike the Stalinist era, when workers and farmers were made to work harder and consume less in the interest of industrial development, Gierek faced simultaneous challenges of expanding the industrial base and satisfying restive consumers with more food, cars, and televisions...

...The word "crisis" has even begun to creep into official language...

...not be readily soluble, were deleted...

...And we can safely assume that many articles that would have been routinely published in a free society were simply never written by journalists who, for career reasons or out of utter exasperation, succumbed to self-censorship...

...reports on the amount of DDT in Polish fish...

...By no means were these isolated incidents...

...In a perverse way, those who think capitalism responsible for the environmental catastrophe now confronting Eastern Europe are right...

...Containment is all that is left...

...The Gierek regime's censorship policies were not without logic...

...Absolutely no information on this subject should be permitted...

...More disturbing were the figures for Class Four—unfit for any use whatsoever...

...Where in the past' the public was assured that environmental catastrophe could be prevented by the timely and intelligent application of socialist principles, today expressions of extreme pessimism and impotence are often encountered...

...Arch Puddington EAST BLOC ECOLOGY Smoke gets in their skies...

...the Soviet people are being told things which more nearly resemble what the future actually holds in store...

...Typically, Soviet ideologists blamed "anarchy and uncontrolled development in the capitalist world, the pursuit of profit, the legacy of colonialism" as the overriding causes of ecological problems throughout the world...

...The adoption of strict anti-pollution standards has not been accompanied by anything approaching a serious enforcement effort...

...More significantly, a confidential report prepared by the Polish Academy of Social Sciences describes Poland as suffering the worst pollution in the world and concludes that one-third of the population lives "on the verge of ecological catastrophe...

...While it is conceded that mass ecology movements "could be an important positive factor in the class struggle and a significant antimonopoly force," such movements are also seen as uncertain allies, whose "concepts combine both progressive and reactionary positions and elements of antimonopoly protest with apolitical and even anti-Communist aims...

...since such an outcome is unlikely, the environment must be sacrificed at the altar of growth...

...The difficulty facing propagandists is to explain just why it is that the environmental situation is unlikely to improve for many years...

...Tivo of the more interesting studies are Joan DeBardeleben's The Environment and Marxism-Leninism (Westview, $32.50) and .Christine Zvosec's article "Environmental deterioration in Eastern Europe" (Survey, Winter 1984...

...For those entrusted with the formulation of the official line, environmental contamination poses a special dilemma...

...Despite his unconcealed contempt for the pastoral ethic (recall his sneering reference to the "idiocy of rural life"), we can well imagine the cannonades Marx would have aimed at the bourgeoisie had he written a Thesis on the Pollution Question...

...Until quite recently, official Communist dogma treated environmental deterioration as an exclusively capitalist phenomenon...

...If capitalism created pollution, then logically capitalism should assume the burden of pollution's elimination...

...Throughout Eastern Europe, and to a lesser degree in the Soviet Union, Communism has relied on economic growth and an undemanding workplace routine as the principal vehicles for the attainment of a measure of popular acceptance...

...Equally serious problems have been noted in East Germany and Czechoslovakia...

...It is thus hardly surprising that no Communist regime has seen fit to institute the kind of sweeping change which, while almost certainly beneficial in the long run for both the economy and the environment, would necessitate short-term dislocations in employment patterns...

...According to one study, rivers which met Class One standards declined from 22 to 10 percent between 1967 and 1977...

...Eisenhower and Dulles, after all, backed away from that game nearly thirty years ago...

...Some believed, however, that it should be possible to challenge Soviet imperialism in peripheral areas beyond any natural Russian sphere of influence...

...This fact by itself tells a great deal about the disruptive potential of ecological issues, at least as the Communist ruling elite sees things...

...If anything, environmental decay can be expected to worsen in the immediate future...

...It had been done in Grenada...

...Take the case of Poland...

...In practical terms, the capitalist example has meant that the economic structure of Communist societies cannot be built at a normal pace for fear of falling further and further behind the West...

...If Communist regimes were to publish ac-curate statistics for foul air and polluted water (most do not), they would discover that in this one area Marxism has caught up with and even surpassed the democratic world...

...In fact, the authorities regard Western environmentalists with considerable wariness...

...but they pose a dangerous threat to societies whose sole claim to legitimacy is economic security...

...A dominant impression was the spectacle of admiring acolytes more committed to containment than the Old Master himself and hardly as softskulled as many on the right believe...

...Furthermore, now, just when the Soviet Union has achieved a remark-able economic transformation, a new threat stands in the way of full Communist prosperity and environmental health: World imperialism, under American instigation, has launched an unprecedented arms build-up, necessitating.the diversion of resources from consumer goods and the environment to bombs and missiles...

...Under the centralized arrangement adopted, at least at the beginning, by all Communist regimes, such crucial questions as where to locate factories, whether to emphasize heavy or light industry or agriculture, whether to use coal, oil, or nuclear energy, even the question of where people are allowed to live—all were to be determined by the state, in the presumed interest of the people...

...Although Marxist propaganda boasts that under socialism nothing is impossible, those who live in existing socialist systems understand that in practice very little is possible beyond the necessities of life...

...The most radical solution was instituted in Poland by the Gierek leader-ship during the 1970s...

...The notion that ecological progress is dependent on dismantling the Euromissiles and jettisoning SDI may carry a certain credibility in the Soviet Union, where military power and foreign conquest are carefully promoted as the surrogate of economic success...

...From the very outset of postwar Communist rule, a time when economies all across Europe lay in ruins, the example of capitalist success has been a destabilizing force, an ever-present reminder of Communism's inability to compete economically...

...With the authorities there unable to appeal to citizens' patriotic instincts, and with the old alibi about capitalism as the source of Communist failure gone stale, new explanations and new approaches have been devised...

...Having witnessed movements for change or liberation rise and fall—twice in Poland, once each in East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—the people of the satellites regard with cynicism the prospects of changing the system "from within...

...Classes have been suspended in that school...

...Instead, an interesting shift in official "It is only fair to note that official Polish attitudes toward the environment have improved since the Gierek era...

...There is something ironic about the Communist world's plight...

...In the United States, environmental achievements have resulted not simply because of stricter regulatory enforcement, but also because of the transformation of the economy brought about by its openness to technological innovation...

...Occasionally, individual sloth is blamed, as in a Czech ideologist's assertion that "lack of discipline and indifference" are at the heart of the trouble...

...Ultimately, the major obstacle to environmental improvement in the Communist world is the stalemate of the Soviet economic model...

...80 in Gdansk...

...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 presumably as a way of warning the public that improvements cannot be expected for years to come...

...As censorship guidelines (smuggled out of Poland in 1977 and later published in the West) reveal, the regime placed a high priority on smothering the burgeoning environmental debate.' For example, censors were instructed that No materials should be permitted which provide information about the current level of pollution or the increasing pollution of the Polish sections of rivers flowing from Czechoslovakia that results from industrial activities in this country...

...The Soviets, however, have thus far rejected the ecology versus growth trade-off argument as an admission of weakness unworthy of the Leninist heritage...

...As is their usual practice in dealing with troublesome social causes, Communist regimes attempt to control and manage citizen concern over the environment instead of overtly suppressing it...

...Party-sponsored environmental entities have been formed in most Communist countries, and the party takes care to channel their energies into such non-threatening projects as tree-planting and municipal clean-up expeditions...

...If one considers the alternatives, it has been a success, not a "brilliant success" perhaps, but about the best that could be expected given the history of the last forty years...

...The key enforcement instrument—impoiing fines on offending industries—is one of the least effective means of fighting pollution...

...In some parts of Czechoslovakia, bottled water is obligatory, much as in the Third World, and some Czechoslovaks reportedly insist on using bottled water for brushing teeth...

...No one is permitted to endorse, even obliquely, the limits-to'Nevertheless, when in 1983 a dam burst in the Ukraine, spilling thousands of tons of contaminant$ into a major river, news of this ecological disaster was withheld from the Soviet public for six weeks...

...Here again, the problem is less technological than political...

...Crash industrialization did have its costs, of course, environmental degradation being one of the most promi...

...these registered an astonishing increase from 32 to 48 per-cent from 1977 to 1980...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 19 is responsible for socialist pollution...

...references to specific events, or suggestions that a problem might 'See The Black Book of Polish Censorship, edited and translated by Jane Leftwich Curry (Vintage, $8.95...

...Unfortunately for the people of the Arch Puddington is on the staff of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in New York...

...As a man of the nineteenth century, Marx can-not be blamed for his failure to anticipate the price which industrialization would exact from the air, rivers, and forests...

...The most obvious, and not unjustified, excuse would be that truly effective environmental enforcement would hamper economic growth...

...There was a broad consensus among the academics that in a nuclear world it would be simply too dangerous to challenge the core area of Soviet dominance, Eastern Europe...

...Eastern Europe is becoming more reliant on brown coal as the Soviet Union increases the price of oil...

...Another disadvantage for Communist economies is their resistance to change...

...Yet the The difficulty facing propagandists is to ex-plain just why it is that the environmental situation is unlikely to improve for many years...

...But it has yet to take hold in societies under Communist rule...

...One ordinarily would expect the Kremlin to suppqrt unconditionally those in the capitalist world who are in rebellion against capitalism and the alleged lack of humane and spiritual values in the West...

...As for the in-escapable existence of pollution in the Soviet bloc: "In a society with public ownership of the means of production, environmental disruption will in-variably be accidental...

...It thus imposed strict and wide-ranging censorship...

...To be sure, there exist in every Communist country dedicated conservationists, and even a few ecology radicals of the anti-growth variety...

...Originally formulated to save Western Europe, containment has enjoyed at best mixed success in the non-European world...

...Northern Bohemia experiences periodic air-pollution alerts during which children are kept indoors and doctors told to be prepared for emergency treatment of those over-come by the pervasive smog...

...Withdrawal would be dangerous folly, condominium—call it detente or what you will—unrealistic...

...growth thesis, which is dismissed as a plot hatched by the capitalist haves to undermine the development of the have-nots of the Third World...

...The Kremlin has also been cautious in bestowing praise on West Germany's Greens, despite their manifest neutralist sympathies...

...even in the Soviet Union, increases in the price of food and changes in production norms have triggered riots...

...At the same time, the regime has taken precautionary measures to prevent workers from abandoning the region, since the industries and mining operations there are considered crucial to the national economy...

...Or, as a Czechoslovakian commentator once blurted out, ecological decay would be nonexistent were it not for "non-socialist individuals still surviving in the country...

...For example, the male life expectancy in north-ern Bohemia is ten years lower than the national average, while infant mortality rates are 15 percent higher...

...As an alternative, the Kremlin has concocted a strange line of reasoning: Capitalism Prague, historically one of the most culturally advanced cities of Europe, doesn't bother to treat two-thirds of the sewage dumped into the Vltava River...

...Nevertheless, the most troubling question about containment is whether, as actually practiced, it implies acceptance of any Soviet gain...

...Even so, it is not unusual for the daily press to report on the poisoning of a river, the impending demise of an endangered species, or the devastation of a forest, and the coverage may include sharp criticism of an offending factory or.of bureaucratic inertia.' In the Soviet Union, of course, there is a limit to freedom of debate on environmental matters, as on every other question...

...That the necessary measures were not adopted was not due to the stupidities of official ideology...

...Nor is there good reason to accept challenges in areas where this country has no compelling geopolitical interests...

...The regime had reached the conclusion that open discussion of the environmental problem—or any other domestic issue for that matter—posed a serious threat to the nation's fragile political equilibrium...

...Communist countries are, not, of course, incapable of economic modernization...

...There was also excessive optimism and two-dimensional thinking, intently focused on political and economic matters, heedless of military matters...

...Yet the degree of state interference summoned by the environmental impact statement pales before the constraints imposed by Communist regimes to prevent the reemergence of a capitalist class...

...Of course, if Communism were to be forced on the en-tire world, there would no longer be a need for Communist regimes to engage in an inherently unequal race with capitalism...

...Gierek rose to the pinnacle of power because of the previous leadership's botched economic policies and a series of regime-shaking worker riots...

...Especially in heavily industrialized countries like Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, the official media have been striking an uncharacteristically despondent theme of looming catastrophe, ' The problem of environmental decay in the Communist world has recently elicited the attention of Western journalists and scholars...

...In most democratic societies, and certainly in the United States, the environmental ethic has become ingrained in the public consciousness...

...What, finally, were one observer's conclusions after two days of exposure to the academic foreign policy establishment...

...The drastic upsurge in pollution is also blamed for the emergence of serious health problems in Eastern Europe's industrial pockets...

...Unfortunately, these free commentaries are restricted to limited-circulation, specialized journals...

...Water pollution has also reached crisis proportions: Prague, historically one of the most culturally advanced cities of Europe, doesn't bother to treat two-thirds of the sewage dumped into the Vltava River while Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, treats none of its waste...

...George Kennan had once hoped that containment would lead to the break-up of the Soviet empire...

...In truth, not even the United States can create a world in which every Soviet-encouraged movement can be contained every time...

...It goes without saying that nothing resembling independent environmental movements is allowed to function in Communist societies...

...The official response to the mounting calamity varies from country to country, Generally, it has been the most politically secure regimes which have permitted the most candid debate and implemented the most aggressive enforcement measures...

...This trade-off poses special problems for the Communist world, with its reliance on technologically archaic industries and one of the most environmentally destructive sources of energy, brown coal...

...If, as seems probable, the USSR re-mains much the same, the world willcontinue to be a troubled, dangerous place throughout our lifetimes, and the Soviets likely will keep busy doing what they can to make it more troubled...

...These are serious problems for any political system...

...Soviet Union and its 'Communist neighbors, the "accidents" have been fast accumulating over the years...

...Air and water pollution, food contamination, the implications of widespread use of pesticides, and similar agricultural controversies—these and many other questions practically ceased to exist in the Polish press...

...Nevertheless, the official environmental committees are permitted more latitude than the bogus peace councils or the hierarchies of certain subverted church bodies...

...Nor have the relatively - high rates of growth registered during the sixties and seven-ties resolved the dilemma, since growth predictably whetted East European consumer appetites and since, in any event, the exhaustion of the Soviet model has produced a stagnant or even declining standard-of-living over the past five years...

...The capitalist ruling stratum, it is argued, purposely maintained pre-revolutionary Russia as a feudal backwater, thus compelling the new Bolshevik government to telescope into a few decades an industrialization process which had evolved in the capitalist world over several centuries...

...But environmental reform re-quires that the ideas propounded by the activist elite enjoy the support of the public...

...And the psychological element in Gierek's strategy was crucial: Dubbed the "propaganda of success," this amounted to an endless stream of articles touting the achievements of the new course, coupled with the suppression of anything that might raise doubts in the minds of Poles or foreign investors—like the suggestion that pollution and industrial activity were intertwined...

...Another example, involving a specific incident: It was discovered that harmful substances were being emitted from a material being used to seal the windows in School No...

...A somewhat different course has been followed by the East Germans, who have attempted to divert public attention from the industrial sources of pollution by attributing the deterioration of the country's forests to various subsidiary causes: heavy snowfalls, storms, poor forestry management, even predatory insects...

...Thus many scientific warnings went unheard: about the inadvisability of locating an industry in an area suffering a water shortage...

...article after article was censored or totally suppressed—this in a country whose media have enjoyed a reputation as the Soviet bloc's most liberal...

...It has developed dubious formulas for dealing with Soviet military action by proxy, "wars of liberation," and limited, brushfire conflicts...

...Although the quotations above were gleaned from fairly recent articles in the Soviet bloc press, they are not (or, to be precise, are no longer) representative of Communist writings on environmental matters...

...The environmental debate, moreover, emerged initially in the West...

...Yet the warning signals emanating from the West were ignored...

...factories find it less expensive to pay the relatively mild fines than to install scrubbers or similar devices,' and it is common practice for an enterprise to include in its budget a special fund for payment of environmental fines...

...In that region's most seriously affected areas, workers are paid a special indemnity after ten years on the job as compensation for the presumed damage to their health caused by constant exposure to fumes from coal-burning power plants...

...The label, "environmental crisis," overused and depreciated in the United States, is an appropriate description of current conditions in the more economically developed countries of Eastern Europe and parts of the Soviet Union...

...As we have learned in the United States, effective environmental protection often demands far-reaching, permanent government intervention in previously unregulated areas of business decision-making...

...No other Soviet bloc regime has felt it necessary to impose a virtual press blackout on environmental subjects...

...In fact, the most severe damage to Soviet and East European environments was occurring during the 1970s and '80s, a time whenwidespread, vocal concern over the environment was forcing Western governments to implement thoroughgoing (and expensive) clean-up programs and, in countries like West Germany, provoking dramatic changes in the political culture...

...references to the devastation of forests by air pollution...

...even recommendations of specific ways to bolster environmental enforcement...

...The success of the Greens has apparently sent a cautionary message to the East, and the authorities have decided that a limited quota of protest must be tolerated to head off spontaneous movements...

...Yet these are the attitudes which Com=munism inculcates in those ordinary citizens whose destinies are not directly tied to the Communist party...

...Or, alternatively, we are told, again by a Czech, that "the solution for the ecological problems depends on the success of ideological work...