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A ‘Green' Referendum in Russia? Contribution to the Study of the Birth of a Civil Society
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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On 12 June 2000, the tenth anniversary of Boris Yeltsin's election as head of the reconstituted Russian state, 180 people who had formed an ‘initiative group for a pan-Russian referendum’ launched a campaign to collect the two million signatures required by Russian law to organize a popular initiative referendum which included these three questions:
- Are you opposed to the importing of radioactive material from other states to be stored, buried or reprocessed on Russian territory?
- Are you in favour of the existence of a federal environmental protection agency which would be independent of those bodies concerned with exploiting and managing natural resources?
- Are you in favour of the existence of a legally independent state service for forests in Russia?
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © ICPHS 2002
References
Notes
1. This study has been carried out from the written Russian press and Internet sites of the large Russian ecological organizations.
2. The State Committee for the Environment was itself a product of the reform of the ‘organization of the federal organs of executive power' (Decree of the President of the Russian Federation of 22.09.1998). As far as the ecological expertise which it was meant to implement was concerned, it had been defined by the federal law of 23.11.1995 (see Maureen Suchar, Le droit de l'écologie [Ecology law], a dissertation on DEJA supervised by Professor Yves Hamant, University of Paris X - Nanterre, 1999 [in Russian].
3. In Russia, the prescriptive texts date back to the 11th century. They regulate the proper use of a law or prohibit certain practices, and thus only affect one particular aspect of the question. The Commission for the Protection of Nature at the Academy of Sciences was created in 1955, the first scientific institution whose name leads us to think that it might have adopted a global approach to the problem, and at the end of 1972 the authorities, political this time, gave a ruling on this question (order of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of 20 September 1972 ‘Measures for subsequent improvement of the protection of nature and a rational utilization of its resources'; order of the Central Committee of the CPSU and of the Council of Ministers of the USSR of 29 December 1972 ‘Reinforcement of the protection of nature and the improve ment of the utilization of its resources’). But responsibility remained scattered between the numerous ministries which existed in the USSR. In 1988, a central body, the Committee of State of the USSR for the Protection of Nature and the Utilization of its Resources (Goskompriroda SSSR) was created, which shared responsibility in these matters with the Councils of Ministers of the Federal Republics. It was Federal Law No. 2060·1 of 19 December 1991 which laid the legal foundations in this field in Russia (see Maureen Suchar, op. cit.).
4. On 23 June 2000 A.F. Poriadin, the President of the Liquidation Commission of the State Committee for the Environment, gave the order that fines were no longer to be paid for the illegal discharge of pollution into rivers, lakes, seas, etc.
5. Session on 18 July 2000.
6. The most illuminating work on this subject is Jean-Robert Raviot's doctoral thesis, ‘Écologie et pouvoir en URSS' ['Ecology and power in the USSR'], supervised by Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, submitted at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris [Institute of Political Studies in Paris] in 1995.
7. The Federation Council is the upper chamber of the parliament of the Russian Federation.
8. [email protected]. The extent of the demographic crisis which Russia is going through was revealed publicly on 24 October 2000 at the reading of the annual report of the Minister of Health on the state of health of the country. According to the figures of the Minister of Labour, as well as a real fall in the birthrate, an increase in accidental mortality and a decrease in life expectancy, there will in addition only be 2.5 million young people doing military service in 2015 (Y. Pismennaya, The government launches a battle to save the nation, Vremia, 16.2.2001); speaking of the decrease in population by the year 2015, some press agencies have suggested figures up to 15 million, with a minimum estimated by the Committee for Stat istics of 2 to 3 million (V. Malyutina, Russia will become a country of immigration, Gazeta.ru, 15.2.2001).
9. Sections 24, 25, 26 and 34 of the Penal Code of the Russian Federation, which came into force on 01. 01. 1997, draw up a list of counts of indictment for ecological crime; article 42 of the Constitution declares the right to compensation for endangering the health or possessions of a person as a result of a crime against ecology, a right defined by articles 1064 and 1082 of the Civil Code, in force since 1 March 1996 (Maureen Suchar, op. cit.).
10. Interview with Sergei Tsyplyonkov, Director of Greenpeace Russia, 25.5.2000, www.greenpeace.ru
11. See Juli Fremin, ‘The Useless Committee', Itogui, No. 22, 25.5.2000.
12. The ‘green' referendum, an interview with Alexei Jablokov, Russkaya Mysl, 23.11.2000. Russkaya Mysl is a weekly Russian-language paper published in Paris; for the last ten years or so the majority of articles have been written by Russian journalists.
13. Born in October 1952, Vladimir Gusinski is one of the Russian ‘oligarchs', that is, one of those businessmen who has been endowed with a great deal of influence over politicians thanks to a considerable fortune amassed during perestroika, although he has never held any political post, strictly speaking. By turns a theatre director, a businessman and a banker, he became one of the main press, radio and television barons. Accused of fraud on 13 July 2000, he was quickly tried, then left for Spain where he was arrested shortly afterwards, then released on substantial bail. He negotiated the conditions for the transfer of shares which he held in the NTV channel with Ted Turner, director of CNN. Accused of money-laundering, a new international arrest warrant was issued against him in 2001.
14. Formerly the KGB.
15. Boris Jukov, ‘Aristarkh, come to an agreement with public opinion!', Itogui, 7.7.2000.
16. A weekly distributed and read in Russia, but basically aimed at a foreign audience and considered to express the official point of view on the subjects it addresses.
17. It will be noted that Boris Jatskevich, totally engrossed in ideological arguments, made no allusion to the actual reason for reviewing a system in which a real confusion of genres has been established. The Forest Service's task was to maintain and supervise the safeguarding of forests, to distribute the plots to managers, to control their activity, and to collect taxes and possible fines. The exploitation itself has been entrusted to industrialists who are represented by the Union of Forest Managers and Timber exporters, the Association of Cellulose and Paper Manufacturers and the Pan-Russian Union of Manufacturers and Contractors. Maintenance work by the Forest Service has very quickly provided them with an enormous quantity of cut timber available for sale, which the State, which did not have the means to finance the Service, authorized them to sell, seeing in this a way for the Service to finance itself. Very quickly, commercial functions overtook maintenance functions and the Committee became the biggest producer in the world, with 14 million cubic metres of timber cut per year! It sold the timber all the more easily because it was exempt from exploitation taxes (which it was responsible for collecting from its rivals). So the representatives bodies of the managers sent Vladimir Putin a letter in which they asked, not that the initial distribution of work should be adhered to, but that they themselves should be made a part of the committee (Juli Fremin, ‘A stubborn suitor', Itogui, 28.4.2000). This surprising reaction - Western industrialists would probably have asked for the opposite in their place, that is to say the disbanding of a Service which was unacceptable because it was a competitor and also enjoyed privileges which were inadmissible in a market economy - seems to me to show well how much less clear the idea of the regulatory role of the State is in the new Russia, and doubtless also the idea of the simple separation of economic and political powers.
18. Russkaya Mysl, 23.11.2000, interview with A. Jablokov.
19. Nezavissimaya Gazeta, 7.7.2000, article by I. Chestin.
20. Itogui, 27.6.2000. The law allows ordinary citizens the right to organize a national referendum. Some of them have decided to exercise this right.
21. Nezavissimaya Gazeta, 7.7.2000.
22. Groups of volunteers, during the Soviet era, who carried out surveillance. Here, they were concerned with fighting poachers.
23. Boris Jukov, ‘Chestin's Way', Itogui, 4.8.2000.
24. In the USSR factories were classed by their strategic importance. Each of the levels of this economic hierarchy came under the jurisdiction of the corresponding State administrative and political apparatus.
25. ‘The initiators of the current referendum do not deny that a “variant of Moscow” would be most welcome', Itogui, 27.6.2000.
26. Itogui, 4.8.2000. To return to a distinction which is now widely accepted, the members and staff of the WWF are environmentalists rather than ecologists, scientists rather than politicians. On the relationship between science and power (let us not forget that Communism wanted to be a science) and more particularly ecology and power, as well as the role of ecology today, see J.-M. Drouin, L'écologie et son histoire [Ecology and its history], Paris, Flammarion, Coll. Champs 1993, ch. 7.
27. Itogui, 4.8.2000.
28. ‘The authors of this document [The ecological doctrine of Russia] believe that a wide-scale debate on the ecological doctrine of Russia is one of the principal elements which will allow constructive collaboration between society, the world of business and the authorities; the development of a civil society; the implementa tion of the constitutional right of Russian citizens to take part in the running of the State' (http://www.seu.ru/documents/doctrine/join.htm).
29. ‘Civil society is a community in which citizens exist, sometimes identified with and sometimes opposed to the political society or the State.
The recent history of the expression “civil society” mixes scholarly and political use. In the 1970s, critics of Communist regimes characterized totalitarianism by the fusion of the State and civil society, then those in opposition, above all in Poland, identified the struggle for civil rights with the civil society's fight against the totalitarian State. At the same time, in the West, sociological analyses of the State took the strength or weakness of the civil societies to be variable. The recovery of “the civil society” was also linked to the attempt to produce a doctrine of co-operative management in France: the expression became a symbol for the second left, but also for the liberalism of the 1980s. It refers to social life organized accord ing to its own, notably community, logic, which would assure economic, cultural and political dynamics. The expression also served to implicate “political society” or “political class” sometimes presented as ineffective or corrupt. But, continuing on its way more spectacularly in the East, civil society seemed to triumph in the collapse of the communist regimes (…)' O. Duhamel, Y. Mény, Dictionnaire constitutionnel, Paris, PUF 1992, pp. 984-985.
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