In recent years, journalists, human rights activists, and members of the opposition have not been the only targets of increasing government pressure: so have the organizations and individuals who working successfully for decades to protect the environment.
Some have been forced to stop their work and shutter their organizations, others to leave Russia. The activists who remain in the country are being harassed, assaulted, arrested, and prosecuted. Environmentalism today is a minefield: if you value your life, your health, and your freedom, you’d better watch your step.
We spoke with activists about the new reality and the future of environmentalism in Russia.
[Originally published by Kedr.]
The pressure on independent conservation organizations intensified significantly starting in February 2022. By September 2023, according to the Russian Social Ecological Union’s environmental activist support program, the Russian government had designated 38 environmental organizations “foreign agents,” and 25 of them had been forced to cease operations.
This was made possible in part by a new law on foreign influence that came into effect in December 2022, expanding the reach of the 2012 “foreign agent” law targeting NGOs “receiving support” from outside Russia. The 2022 law essentially meant that even an informal group with no foreign financing could be given the “foreign agent” designation. The law was also used against a number of influential regional organizations.
The Arkhangelsk Oblast environmental group Movement 42 announced its closure on January 10, 2023. (The group was named in honor of the Russian Constitution’s Article 42, which guarantees the right to a healthy environment.) The movement brought together like-minded individuals who had been educating Arkhangelsk Oblast residents on recycling and sustainable consumption for more than 20 years, as well as fighting the construction of multiple landfills, most famously one near the Shiyes railway station that had [1] been planned by investors as a destination for the capital city’s garbage.
For about five years, the activists had run an interregional summer climate school for youth. They also researched pollution on the White Sea coast and submitted hundreds of complaints about breaches of environmental legislation to regulatory authorities.
The same fate befell Sakhalin Environment Watch, which was created in the mid-1990s and was one of the oldest conservation organizations in the Far East. Over almost 30 years of operation, activists had saved an endangered population of grey whales that foraged on the Pacific island’s Northeast from threats posed by oil and gas exploration, freed more than a hundred orcas and belugas from “whale jail,” and stopped the destructive logging practices that were eroding slopes, causing landslides and the contamination and shallowing of rivers.
The nail in the coffin for most of these organizations, especially the smaller ones, was not just the discriminatory “foreign agent” designation, but the cumbersome accounting requirements and threats of fines of up to one million rubles for legal infractions, including simply failing to mention one’s “foreign agent” status when required.
Furthermore, in July 2023, President Vladimir Putin signed into effect a federal law that set fines of up to R300,000 for failure to comply with Ministry of Justice orders or warnings aimed at eliminating violations of the “foreign agent” legislation.
The 2015 “undesirable organization” law, which gives prosecutors broad powers against individuals and groups perceived as representing a threat to state security, has also been used to target environmental groups.
By September 2023, six NGOs involved in environmental protection had been added to the “undesirable organization” roster, five of them in just the previous four months. This designation represents a more serious threat. Anyone collaborating with “undesirable” organizations can face criminal penalties of up to six years of imprisonment.
This law primarily targets prominent international organizations. For example, in late June 2023, the Prosecutor General’s Office deemed the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), previously labeled a “foreign agent,” to be “undesirable.” Prosecutors declared that the fund, “under the pretext of protecting the environment, is performing activities aimed at interfering with implementation of the country’s policies when it comes to economic exploitation of the Arctic.”
The international WWF has indeed advocated for the creation of protected areas in the Arctic and a ban on mineral extraction, arguing that industrial development in the region threatens Arctic ecosystems and the ice sheet that plays an important role in the fight against climate change.
Another international organization deemed “undesirable” was Greenpeace. In its May 2023 ruling, the Prosecutor General’s Office claimed that the environmental organization “threatens the Russian Federation’s constitutional framework and security” and that its conservation activities “are accompanied by active promotion of a political viewpoint and attempts to interfere in internal affairs of the state and are intended to undermine its economic foundations.”
The Prosecutor General’s Office apparently considers efforts against weakening the law protecting Lake Baikal – including by allowing the removal of shoreline forest to build hotels, cafes, roads, and bathrooms – to be “threats to the security of the Russian Federation.” Here, there truly was a conflict between Greenpeace and the government: the bill in question was being advanced by State Duma member Alexander Yakubovsky, whose wife runs a construction business in Irkutsk Oblast, which borders the lake.
Prosecutors were apparently unimpressed by the fact that Greenpeace had also been conducting extensive work restoring forests and conserving the most valuable forested land, implementing recycling programs across Russia, and trying to solve the country’s air pollution problems.
In October 2021, Eugene Simonov became the first environmentalist to be added to the “foreign agent” list.
Simonov is primarily known for his efforts to protect Lake Baikal and the Amur River from pollution. Involved in the global environmental movement for more than 30 years, he has helped create about 50 specially protected natural areas in Russia and has a master’s degree in environmental studies from the Yale School of the Environment.
“The ‘foreign agent’ designation restricted my interactions with the authorities and scientific organizations, impacting my ability to work on official projects,” he said.
The situation further deteriorated in February 2022.
“The beginning of military operations in Ukraine knocked my feet out from under me,” Simonov said. “Compared with that, being a ‘foreign agent’ no longer seemed so terrible. You might say, they simply reinforced each other. People – especially those connected with the government – started regarding ‘foreign agents’ with suspicion, even open hostility. We’ve been cast as a symbol of evil, and symbols of evil are in high demand.”
The environmentalist had left Russia in 2004 to work for the international organization Rivers Without Boundaries. His work had been closely associated with Russian environmental projects in the years following, and he often returned to his homeland.
“I left Russia so I could work more effectively on the problem of transnational rivers,” Simovov said. “It turned out that it made more sense to deal with the transnational Amur River from China, since that country has a greater impact on it. At the same time, the decision to leave Russia was based to a certain degree on political incompatibility. I started to understand where things were going, and I had to either ‘go to the barricades’ – that is, work in the political opposition – or devote my energies to conserving nature. I decided then that the latter was more important, and that it would be hard to combine the two.
“The atmosphere in Russia got worse and worse, and in that sense, even China was a more agreeable place to live.”
Russian-Armenian climate activist Arshak Makichyan is part of Fridays For Future, the international environmental movement founded by Greta Thunberg. Its members are fighting to prevent global warming and avert the climate crisis.
In 2019, Makichyan and his associates started staging one-person protests in Moscow every Friday, basically standing with a sign in some busy part of town, something that often led to police detention. Other activists joined the movement and started protesting in other large cities as well: Vladivostok, St. Petersburg, and Novosibirsk.
As Makichyan said, while the climate movement in Europe had existed for more than 10 years by that point, for Russia the phenomenon was new. Those taking action started calling climate change the “climate crisis” and explaining its connection with the massive wildfires and increasingly frequent natural disasters afflicting the country. Makichyan said he believes that the protests and rallies have had a strong influence on how climate is being discussed in Russia.
After the war in Ukraine began, Makichyan continued demonstrating in Moscow and urged European countries not to buy raw materials from Russia. In October 2022, Arshak, his brothers, and his father were stripped of their Russian citizenship. After that, the family was forced to leave Russia.
Makichyan sees the economy, including Russia’s reliance on revenues from natural resources, as one of the main reasons environmentalists are being persecuted.
“The government needs money, and it can easily earn it by destroying nature,” he said. “In other words, for the most part, the targeting of the environmental community has been motivated by economics, because the environmental movement in Russia has not been very politicized.”
He says that the climate movement in Russia is as active as ever, though protests under current circumstances are not viable, and people are trying to adapt to the new situation.
“We’re still planning to continue our work online, to better understand the conditions in Russia,” Makichyan said. “The climate crisis truly exists. It’s the melting of permafrost, it’s the destruction of infrastructure in the Arctic, and it’s desertification in the southern regions. More and more disasters of all kinds are going to take place in the country, like major wildfires and floods.”
Makichyan also predicted that, as countries gradually turn away from fossil fuels, Russia, which is strongly dependent on oil and gas extraction and is developing virtually no renewable energy sources, will lag behind the world’s leading economies.
Vitaly Servetnik is coordinator of the Russian Social Ecological Union, which supports environmental activists. He said that environmentalists’ first serious problems arose immediately after Vladimir Putin came to power. In April 2000, one of Putin’s first acts as president was to abolish the State Committee for Environmental Protection.
“That decree marks the beginning in Russia of what Academician [Alexei] Yablokov once called ‘de-environmentalization,’” Servetnik says.[1] “We’ve been noticing two parallel trends for a long time now. The first is a weakening of environmental legislation to accommodate the regime’s economic interests. The second is a clampdown on general freedoms and on activists, a shrinking of the space in which civil society can operate and its reduced ability to influence decision-making.”
Alongside the virtual prohibition in Russia on operating independent and international environmental organizations, more and more government-controlled environmental projects are appearing. Among the most highly publicized are the Russian Ecological Society and Compass, both of which are actively promoted by State Duma members and regional officials.
The practice by authorities of creating such organizations goes back to Soviet times. Since then, the abbreviation GONGO (Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organization) has come into common use to describe them. Sources said they believe that these state-controlled organizations have nothing at all to do with protecting the environment. They use government funding to create the impression that something is being done.
Vitaly Servetnik calls such organizations “simulacra of civil society.”
“The pro-Kremlin movement Nashi (Ours) also had these kinds of environmental groups,” Servetnik said. “Surkov’s idea of creating an alternative civil society in Russia is still alive and being used by authorities.[2]* Groups like this hold events to plant trees and pick up garbage in token schoolyards. That’s good, sure, but it has little to do with actually protecting the country’s environment. This is how they’re trying to replace the environmentalists and movements that the authorities are suppressing. It’s all in the spirit of a general depoliticization in Russia and a poor substitute for genuine discussion. And anyone who tries to criticize the government, environmental policy, and the laws being implemented, or to say that we need changes in the area of environmental protection, immediately becomes a ‘foreign agent’ and ‘undesirable.’”
“Even in the 1980s, various Komsomol efforts were being launched – although they didn’t last long – to undercut the conservation organizations that were only just starting up,” Eugene Simonov added. “The majority of today’s GONGOs will die off in the same way, because they don’t have their own purpose. Of course, some of them will find a niche business and earn some money. And a small portion might become more or less independent environmental organizations despite starting out completely government controlled. It’s the logic governing the existence of civil society.”
Eugene Simonov said Russia’s biggest environmental problem is management: a significant portion of the bureaucracy would be incapable of meaningful action in this area even if they had an appetite for it. The dismantling of professional management and structures that began in the early 2000s is to blame.
“There aren’t enough competent managers in the country who are capable of working on environmental problems,” he said. “And the specialists we do have aren’t able to do proper work. There is a sort of ‘negative selection’ in effect when it comes to appointments.”
Simonov said he believes that the country must completely replace its managerial apparatus so it can be restructured based on the principle of public accountability. In Vitaly Servetnik’s opinion, despite the suppression, environmental activism continues to exist in Russia, but in a new form – one that takes into account the prohibition on all large “green” organizations.
“We’re still supporting activists in Russia,” he said. “Thanks to the nature of such activism, environmental protest will not stop. It might be solo activists and grassroots groups taking action instead of the large organizations that have been banned.”
According to the Ecological Crisis Group, in the year ending September 2023, more than 50 environmental activists in Russia were assaulted, in some cases with weapons. Five had their homes set on fire and their tires slashed, and Andrei Garyayev, leader of an anti-landfill movement in the southern community of Poltavskaya, was effectively driven to suicide. His family believes one reason for that tragedy was the R32 million fine imposed on his company for not completing work erecting a sports complex in Abinsk. Garyayev insisted that the deadlines were missed due to circumstances beyond his control, which was later established by a court decision as well.
However, even under current circumstances, 31 activists have managed to defend their rights in Russian courts over the past two years. Environmental activists from Bashkortostan and Tambov Oblast had their assaults investigated and the guilty parties held criminally responsible. In the space of two years, two criminal and 12 civil cases against environmental activists were dismissed.
“There has always been suppression, and there always will be,” said Servetnik. “The problems aren’t going anywhere, so even in difficult times like these, people will still protest environmental problems. And I don’t think they’re going to stop.”
Even though they’ve left the country, those interviewed for this article, along with dozens of other activists, will continue to work to protect Russia’s natural environment. They are helping projects taking place in the country and waiting for the moment when they can return home without the threat of imprisonment, so that they can continue their efforts in person.
[1] Dr. Alexey Yablokov (1933-2017) was an advisor to Russian presidents Gorbachev and Yeltsin and a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In his final years, he was politically active member of the oppositionist Yabloko party.
[2] Vladislav Surkov is a former aide to the Russian president, and the founder of Nashi.
Shiyes Station is in Arkhangelsk Oblast—the plan had been to take Moscow trash there by train
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