The Soviet Government and the Ussr State Committee for the Protection of Nature

I agreed because I felt ashamed for our great country. —Nikolai Vorontsov on why he decided to accept the position as chief of the USSR State Committee for the Protection of Nature The Gorbachev administration went further than any of its predecessors in candidly acknowledging the extent of environmental damage in the Soviet Union and the need for new approaches to solving the problem. In addition to the official revelations of eco-glasnost outlined in the preceding chapters, two other significant developments in this reform process were the consolidation of environmental protection efforts within the State Committee for the Protection of Nature and the formation of the Committees on Ecology and Rational Use of Natural Resources in the parliament of the Union as well as those at the republican, regional, and local levels. The appearance of these two new institutions offered grounds for hope that the government would be better prepared to confront its enormous environmental problems. Though both institutions at the Union level were disbanded with the breakup of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, they served as the blueprint for their counterparts at the republic level. As a result, the experiences of environmental policymakers in the republics closely followed those in the Soviet government and parliament.