Examples of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s approach to human health and the environment

While working to turn my still-unfinished blog series, published under the general heading Stalinism and Alcoholism in the Soviet Union, into a small booklet, I added to Chapter Six of the draft a boxed section giving examples of some of the grave crimes committed by the Stalinist regime against human health and the natural environment. I would like to share the text of that section here as well.

Before presenting the text, it is worth adding that the devastation inflicted by capitalist restoration on the environment and workers’ health in today’s Russia and the other former Soviet republics is likewise extremely severe. What the two periods have in common is the complete exclusion of the working class from democratic participation in production and investment decisions and from any democratic control over those decisions. The real solution lies in placing the means of production under the democratic control of the international working class and subjecting production, not to the profit motive, but to democratic and rational planning based on human needs and ecological imperatives, while also taking account of humanity’s relationship with nature.

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For decades, under conditions in which the working class had no democratic control over the means of production, the Stalinist bureaucracy pursued an inefficient, wasteful and predatory policy of industrialisation, with no regard for the grave human and environmental costs it caused. The list of crimes committed by the Stalinist bureaucracy against human health and the natural environment is a long one. Here, however, we shall confine ourselves to just a few examples, in order to help the reader visualise the concrete consequences of this approach.

The large-scale discharge of radioactive waste from the Mayak facilities into the Techa River system between 1949 and 1952, and the 1957 Kyshtym nuclear disaster, are among the early and striking examples. Soviet officials did not submit an official report on the Kyshtym disaster to the IAEA until 28 July 1989. IAEA sources confirm that large quantities of liquid radioactive waste were discharged from Mayak into the Techa River.

Map of the East Urals Radioactive Trace (EURT), showing the area contaminated by the Kyshtym disaster.

The same instrumental attitude towards the natural environment also had grave consequences in Central Asia. The large-scale diversion of water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya for irrigation in order to expand cotton production played a decisive role in the drying up of the Aral Sea. According to a study prepared for the World Bank, the expansion of cotton irrigation accounted for roughly 90 per cent of the decline in river inflow to the lake.

At the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in Kazakhstan, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests between 1949 and 1989; radioactive fallout, particularly from atmospheric tests, exposed people living in the surrounding areas to radiation.

The Chernobyl disaster

The Chernobyl disaster became one of the most striking examples of this mode of governance, in which serious flaws in the design of the RBMK reactor and weaknesses in safety culture running through the system—from plant personnel to designers and engineers, and from ministries to regulatory bodies—reinforced one another. The IAEA’s INSAG-7 report demonstrates that the accident cannot be attributed solely to operator error, and that serious flaws in the reactor design and weaknesses in safety culture extending throughout the Soviet nuclear system’s design, operating and regulatory organisations were decisive factors. A United Nations report prepared in the aftermath of Chernobyl likewise notes that the exchange of information and the expression of differing views were restricted within the Soviet system, and that a great deal of radiation-related data was kept secret.

Another striking piece of evidence showing that this pattern was not confined to the nuclear industry can be found in Chernyaev’s diary. Chernyaev records that, at a Politburo meeting held on 11 April 1985, shortly after his election as General Secretary, Gorbachev presented various data on the agricultural and food system. According to Gorbachev, 1,300 milk, cheese and butter plants, 200 meat-processing and packaging plants, 103 canning factories and 60 starch and glucose-syrup factories had been built without waste-treatment systems; as a result, these facilities were causing severe damage to the environment.

The situation in the field of occupational health and safety was no different. In his article “Moscow, 1990: When Trotskyist Travellers Met Soviet Reality”, Simon Pirani quotes David Hopper, General Secretary of the Durham miners’ union, as saying after visiting the Pavlograd mines in eastern Ukraine in 1990: “We were deeply shocked! The safety arrangements were appalling. These were the conditions our grandfathers told us about.”

Sources:

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Scenario T: Radioactive Contamination of the Techa River, South Urals, Russia, IAEA, Vienna, 2011. Available online: https://www-ns.iaea.org/downloads/rw/projects/emras/emras-aquatic-techa.pdf. Accessed 14 June 2026.

B. V. Nikipelov, G. N. Romanov, L. A. Buldakov, M. S. Babaev, Yu. B. Kholina and E. I. Mikerin, “Accident in the Southern Urals on 29 September 1957”, Report on a Radiological Accident in the Southern Urals on 29 September 1957, INFCIRC/368, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 28 July 1989. Available online: https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/infcirc368.pdf. Accessed 12 August 2026.

David Tarr and Eskender Trushin, “Did the Desire for Cotton Self-Sufficiency Lead to the Aral Sea Environmental Disaster? A Case Study on Trade and the Environment”, World Bank, 2004. Available online: https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/433771484052748191. Accessed 16 June 2026.

International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), “SEMI-NUC: Prospective Cohort Study of Residents Near the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site”. Available online: https://semi-nuc.iarc.who.int. Accessed 17 June 2026.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), The Chernobyl Accident: Updating of INSAG-1, Safety Series No. 75-INSAG-7, Vienna, 1992. Available online: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub913e_web.pdf. Accessed 22 June 2026.

UNDP and UNICEF, The Human Consequences of the Chernobyl Nuclear Accident: A Strategy for Recovery, report prepared with the support of UN-OCHA and WHO, 25 January 2002. Available online: https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/documents/publications/the-human-consequences-of-the-chernobyl-nuclear-accident53712189-b688-45ef-8164-ac2273508ec9.pdf. Accessed 27 June 2026.

Anatoly S. Chernyaev, The Diary of Anatoly S. Chernyaev, 1985, trans. Anna Melyakova, ed. Svetlana Savranskaya, Washington, DC: National Security Archive, p. 43. Available online: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB192/Chernyaev_Diary_translation_1985.pdf. Accessed 19 July 2025.

Simon Pirani, “Durham and Ukraine Miners: Historic Links of Friendship”, Anticapitalist Resistance, 6 July 2022. Available online: https://anticapitalistresistance.org/durham-and-ukraine-miners-historic-links-of-friendship. Accessed 12 August 2026.

See also:

Before Chernobyl

“They’re keeping the Tashkent earthquake from the public”

Two bitter examples of the Stalinist culture of secrecy

The misery of Soviet agriculture and bureaucratic waste

Soviet Stalinism and secrecy: Gorbachev's revelations