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LENIN defined communism as ‘Soviet power plus electrification of the entire country’. Seventy years ago, when he launched the programme to electrify the whole of the Soviet Union, his government took pride in its ‘unlimited’ energy reserves and in its authority to exploit them fully. The reserves included the Caucasian oil fields between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea; the Ukrainian coal seams of the Donets Basin, or Donbass; and great rivers that could provide hydroelectric power, such as the Volga and Yenisey. What more could the rulers of the new proletarian state ask for?

As the years went by, the stockpile rose. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 brought in the Polish oilfields of Galicia and the Baltic shales of Estonia. In 1954, Soviet engineers began to operate the world’s first nuclear power station, a 5-megawatt plant at Obninsk, southwest of Moscow. Exploration in Siberia and the Soviet Arctic added more reserves of oil, coal and natural gas. For the first decades of the communist regime, its energy programme was regarded as one of the revolution’s greatest triumphs. For a brief period in the 1920s, girls were named ‘Elektrifikatsiya’; for boys, the name ‘Rem’ (‘Revolyutsiya, Elektrifikatsiya, Mekhanizatsiya’) endured much longer.

But the programme took its toll both in human lives and in human misery. Soviet planners dictated that electrification and its concomitant, the mechanisation of the economy, justified the forced collectivisation of agriculture – a policy that caused a dramatic fall in agricultural productivity and the deaths of several million people in consequent famines. And the planners of the great dams of the 1930s, on the lower Volga and in Ukraine for instance, took no account of regional history or archaeology. It was a Volga reservoir that submerged Ithil, the medieval capital of the Khazars – the only Gentile nation ever to adopt Judaism as its state religion. In Ukraine, the Dnepropetrousk dam caused the inundation of the Dnieper rapids and Khortytsya island, the latter being as much a loss to a Ukrainian as the drowning of Runnymede or Harpers Ferry would be to a Briton or an American.

Ultimately, the centrally planned energy programme evoked considerable resentment at a grass-roots level in the theoretically independent republics of the Soviet Union. Bureaucrats at the All-Union Ministry of Energy in Moscow frequently made decisions affecting territories many thousands of kilometres away, with very little knowledge of the areas concerned. Gorbachov had hardly launched his policy of glasnost when the complaints began. They came from Tadzhiks worried about a new high dam that would overshadow their capital, Dushanbe; from Estonians angered at the ethnic imbalance in their republic because of the influx of Russians to mine their shale; from Siberian Tatars opposed to the construction of a nuclear power station in a seismically active zone; and from Arctic Nentsi concerned that oil workers would damage their reindeer pastures. Seven Russian writers, known as the ‘villagers’ because they support a return to traditional cultural values, led a successful campaign against the proposal to divert the north-flowing rivers of Siberia southwards. The plan, which dates from the 1920s and was first reconsidered in the 1970s, aims to replenish the water resources of Soviet Central Asia, where dams built for hydroelectric power and irrigation have depleted supplies. Moscow shelved the scheme in August 1986.

Although opposition to Moscow’s energy policy is one of the few issues on which all activists agree, including the disparate strands of the country’s embryonic ‘green’ movement, concerted actions by different ethnic groups are rare. One notable exception was the case of the proposed Daugavpils dam, which was successfully blocked in 1988 by a joint campaign of Byelorussians and Latvians. For the most part, however, protests against power projects have been local reactions to what is seen as high-handedness in Moscow. This is partly a consequence of the rise in local, ethnic consciousness, and partly a desire not to risk ecological disaster in one’s own republic just for the sake of pumping power into the All-Union grid.

Broader criticisms of the energy programme are, for the most part, voiced by those ethnic Russians who wish to preserve the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union. At the end of last year, for example, the daily newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya, which tends to support the stance of the ‘villagers’ and the ethnic Russian patriots, carried a long interview attacking the ‘international round table’ staged by the USSR Nuclear Society in October.

The newspaper interviewed Boris Aleksandrovich Kirkin, a senior lecturer at the Higher Legal Correspondence Course School of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. Kirkin accused leading figures of the Soviet nuclear industry of publishing disinformation; in particular he cited the Chernobyl casualty roll, which lists just 31 fatalities from the accident. He claimed that the industry forces its workers to sign a pledge of secrecy, and he attacked the Soviet policy of selling nuclear power stations abroad, because the sales agreements stipulate that the Soviet Union will dispose of the resulting nuclear waste. Kirkin added that the industry’s ‘explosion of glasnost’, launched by the new Centre for Public Information of Nuclear Energy, is no more than a propaganda campaign that misuses public funds, including scarce reserves of hard currency. ‘Soon we shall be able to read pamphlets about the ecological purity of nuclear energy printed on Finnish paper, which we receive simultaneously with the radioactive waste from the Loviisa nuclear power station in Finland, and for which we pay in energy from the Leningrad nuclear power station, whose waste we naturally keep,’ Kirkin grumbled.

Chernobyl lies at the heart of the nuclear power issue. The West saw the aftermath of Chernobyl as a triumph for the new policy of glasnost; after years of official silence and denials, a Soviet admission of an accident was a major breakthrough. For Soviet citizens, however, Chernobyl became an exemplar of how little they can trust official assurances of safety. Eleven days passed before the Soviet media indicated the real scale of the accident, and almost three years passed before they released maps of the contaminated zones. In many cases, official cleanup campaigns have failed to materialise. In January, workers in Naroula, Byelorussia, called a strike to protest against delays in the promised programme to decontaminate the area.

The Soviet Union has 15 nuclear power stations, which together provide nearly 34 000 megawatts of electrical power. This meets just 12 per cent of the country’s primary energy demand but, before the Chernobyl accident, Moscow saw nuclear power playing a much greater role. In the early 1980s, Soviet planners wanted to build another 30 nuclear power stations by 1995; since the accident, protesters have blocked plans to increase the country’s nuclear power capacity by 30 000 megawatts. According to Viktor Sidorenko, a senior nuclear safety official and a corresponding (non-voting) member of the All-Union Academy of Sciences, the country’s nuclear power capacity must double over the next 20 years. He says he cannot see that happening.

Criticism of energy policy is not confined to the nuclear industry, however. Since the mid-1980s, surveys of the effects of the great dams built during the Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras have tarnished the image of clean, renewable hydroelectric power. According to members of academies of sciences in affected republics, the studies indicate that the schemes raise water tables and damage the surrounding environment. The academy scientists say that engineers have designed many of the schemes without studying the site for the dam thoroughly enough. In Tadzhikistan in the 1960s, for example, engineers planned to build a cascade of seven dams on the Vakhsh river, including the great Nurek and Rogun high dams. Though the area is mountainous and seismically active, they adopted the safety criteria for the design of a single dam in lowland terrain that is not seismically active. Long before the reservoir behind the Nurek dam was full, the number and magnitude of earth tremors in the region began to increase. This forced the engineers to build a special seismic monitoring station; the Rogun dam is still not finished and its reservoir may never be filled completely.

Oil and natural gas are plentiful in the Soviet Union, but the main focus of production has now shifted from the gentle climate of the Caucasus to the harsh environment of Siberia and the far north, where the logistics of extraction and local protests make exploitation difficult. Moreover, the collapse of the old communist idealism means that there are now very few young people who are willing to work in the country’s wildest regions to help ‘to build socialism’. Those who do go demand extremely high wages, the most modern housing and generous social benefits – well beyond the levels they could otherwise expect. A shift system, with workers living away from the site among their families and flying to and from their job every fortnight, has never received serious consideration: Moscow prefers to install settlements of people in what it sees as the wild territories of the Union. Finding enough people to service and to safeguard the pipelines is a headache too; and, as glasnost has revealed, pipelines can rupture and destroy packed tourist trains and turn rivers into infernos.

The extraction of traditional fossil fuels, coal and lignite, is now vulnerable to strikes, to criticism from environmentalists and to hard questions about fatal accident rates from the new People’s Deputies and from investigative journalists. The great coal and iron fields of the Donbass, where in 1870 the Welshman John Hughes set up the first modern steel works of the Russian Empire, lie within Ukraine. These energy reserves should help the republic to achieve the economic autonomy it seeks.

Some political commentators suggest that if Ukraine secedes from the Soviet Union altogether, which is its constitutional right like all republics, Moscow would find some way to preserve an interest in the Donbass. Others disagree. The Russian republic, which includes Siberia and the Soviet Arctic, might be better off if it did not have to supply the other republics with energy. If the political union did disintegrate, the main loss to Moscow, as far as energy is concerned, would probably be know-how. For instance, although Baku in Azerbaijan now supplies only 3 per cent of the oil that the Soviet Union needs, it is the home of many of the industry’s marketing and administrative concerns.

For the foreseeable future, the Soviet Union’s main energy problem will not be a lack of resources, but the cost of exploiting the reserves in increasingly remote areas of the country, and public hostility to environmentally polluting forms of fuel. During the Brezhnev era from 1964 to 1982, Soviet planners devised grandiose energy schemes, ranging from a proposal to provide nuclear-powered central heating for major cities to one that bypassed fission power altogether. Eighteen years ago on a visit to Britain, Vladimir Kirillin, then the energy minister, said that the only nuclear energy research that the Soviet Union should engage in should be into fusion power. He suggested that until the technology of nuclear power was proven, the country should rely on its cheap and plentiful reserves of lignite – one of the most highly polluting fossil fuels. Fusion research is still going on in the Soviet Union but it is a long way from yielding a prototype power station. Since Kirillin’s time, Soviet planners have gone on the defensive: in the face of mounting public pro tests, they now advocate alternative energy sources and energy conservation.

Apart from the development of geothermal power in the Soviet Far East, however, research into alternative sources of energy is at only an experimental stage. Soviet engineers are investigating the use of solar cells, but mainly in exotic contexts, such as for a TV relay station in the Tien Shan mountains of the Kirgiz republic. Soviet Central Asia pro vides an ideal climate for solar heating of domestic water supplies, but there has been little research. During the past few months, Soviet engineers have proposed the use of portable windmills for the herdsmen of Kazakhstan, following the example of neighbouring Mongolia. But these are peripheral developments.

Energy conservation, which includes using existing supplies more efficiently, may be a better way of developing the country’s power base. Staggering the peak demands for power across the country is one method. To some extent, this is built into the Soviet energy economy. The Union spans 11 time zones and, since the beginning of 1989 when the Baltic republics and the Kaliningrad Oblast reverted from Moscow time to ‘natural’ time, all of them are used. Although most of the industry lies west of the Urals, this still spans several time zones: Soviet planners want to exploit this natural asset more. And at least for the ethnic Russian patriots, energy saving has a respectable tradition. A 16th-century compendium of household management, the Domostroi, said that baking and the laundry should be done on the same day to save wood.

Modern Soviet citizens have little incentive to save energy. Domestic energy supplies are highly subsidised, with the price often hidden in the nominal rent of an apartment. Local shortages of matches can mean that gas stoves are left burning all day. Crude official attempts to save energy fail miserably. During the past few winters, power supplies were cut. But as soon as the current was restored, chilly citizens simply switched on everything they could to warm up again.

In industry, production lines are obsolescent and energy-guzzling. Decades of emphasis on meeting centrally imposed targets has left managers with neither the time nor the motive to modernise. Occasional energy-saving drives have often meant that factories turned off antipollution devices, such as electrostatic precipitators.

If power in the Soviet Union is to be used more rationally, energy prices will have to be raised to a realistic level. And in the current state of social and ethnic tension, such a move could be political suicide.