When Gray Looks Green.(Cover Story: Who Is the Greenest of Them All?; SPECIAL REPORT)(Russia)

Byline: Owen Matthews

Rather than tackle its ecological problems, Moscow is cracking down on its ecologists.

Russia ranks 28th on the green index, but it's too good to be true.

The Russian government takes environmental violations seriously--sometimes. Just ask Oleg Mitvol, deputy head of Russia's Federal Environmental Monitoring Service. Last year Mitvol compiled a dossier on alleged environmental violations by an oil- and gas-drilling consortium led by Royal Dutch Shell on the Pacific island of Sakhalin. An indignant Kremlin promptly suspended Shell's operations. As soon as Shell and its partners agreed to sell a controlling stake in Sakhalin to state-owned Gazprom last year, Moscow lost interest. By contrast, Mitvol's report stating that the Kirovo-Chepetsky Chemical Plant had spilled radioactive waste into Prosnoye Lake in Kirov was ignored. "When I am needed to come down hard on Shell's ecological crimes, then I can be active," says Mitvol. "But if I try to talk about Krasny Bor outside of St. Petersburg, the biggest chemical dump in Eastern Europe, or about lakes of spilled oil all over Siberia, the ministry shuts me up."

Mitvol is experiencing the growing cult of secrecy around environmental data, particularly when it embarrasses the Kremlin. "Ecology in Russia has become a state secret; it's almost impossible to access information on radiation dumps, nuclear power stations and retired nuclear submarines," says former Naval Capt. Aleksandr Nikitin, a researcher for the Norwegian-funded ecological group Bellona.

It's no wonder that Russia scores implausibly well on Yale and Columbia's Environmental Performance Index. On many criteria, from air particles to industrial pollution and water quality, data provided by Russia suggest almost Scandinavian levels of purity. For instance, the country scores a 99 on ground-level ozone, a gas produced by coal plants and other heavy industry, and 96 on a measure of air pollution--to the disbelief of anyone who's ever opened a window in any city in the former Soviet Union. One reason for the disconnect is the very vastness of Russia, which includes pristine wilderness that dilutes the effect of heavy industry. Russia, alone among big nations, may also be cooking the numbers. Indeed, officialdom now seems to ...