Why This Place Is in a Mess

Now that winter's here, I sometimes wander down along the river below the dacha to inspect what's left of summer -- not memories, but garbage. All along one of the most beautiful stretches of the Moscow River is a midden of beer cans, bottles, old newspapers, cartons, cigarette packs, plastic bags and a rotting mess of whatever was left over after August's picnics.


Now, I wouldn't say I'm particularly ecology-minded. But I have to admit I'm both irked and mystified by the way Russians lackadaisically dump their trash wherever and whenever they feel like it. My hackles rise when, on the Garden Ring, I see drivers rolling down their windows and tossing out into the traffic soda cans, candy wrappers, banana peel, or whatever else they have in hand.


I even at one time started making a mad list of all the things littered across the city, abandoned in courtyards and alleys and on what in the West would be called common land: "Planks, rods, laths, blocks, bricks, wheels, crates, pipes, scaffolding, iron, wood, broken glass; old bathtubs, broken radios, heaps of filthy sand and gravel; mats, paper, crazed springs, oozing vegetables, smashed fencing, sharded stone ..."


Well, you see what I mean. You all have seen what I mean.


The question is: Why? A fancy Western editorial I read a while ago said it had to do with the sheer size of the country: In other words, it didn't matter what you did with the land, since there was always plenty more where it came from. But that doesn't explain why Russians don't seem to mind despoiling their own city backyards.


In the end, I think, this has to do with the nature of the communist polity, now tainted -- if you can call it that -- by the West.


Under communism, all real estate, the whole of the outside world, belonged to the state: that is to say, to everyone -- or to no one. All that really mattered happened inside, in the private fastnesses of people's homes.


Beyond the door -- well, who cared? That was the state's business; ordinary people had no stake in it. So there was never any sense of what we might call commonwealth, or common wealth -- not even a sense of neighborhood, let alone courtyard pride. How many Russians do you know who live in meticulous apartments, with Pushkin and Dostoevsky proudly on glass-front display, whose responsibility for where they live stops immediately outside their front door? You have to make your way to them via rank courtyards, squalid staircases and elevators stinking of urine. It never seems to occur to them that they have any collective responsibility for their own immediate environment. It's as if "out there" doesn't exist -- except, perhaps, as a major inconvenience.


When you translate this attitude to the countryside, and combine it with the communist notion that man (and especially the perfectibility of his ideological outlook) is the measure of all things, then you have the sort of landscape you'd expect: a disaster area filled with everything you can think of except individual or collective responsibility.


Forget the pylons riveted carelessly into farmland; forget the graveyard of machinery on every collective farm. What about the nickel plant close to the Norwegian border that produces more sulphur pollution than the whole of Scandinavia?Or the dam at Sillimae, in Estonia, with its 4 million tons of uranium waste about to spill into the Gulf of Finland? Or the recent pipeline oil spill 1,500 kilometers north of Moscow, which has left a ruination, according to a Western company in the area, eight times worse than that of the Exxon Valdez? I can't help thinking they all come from the same mind-set, in the end, as the garbage scattered below me along the Moscow River.


And yet I said "tainted by the West." What I mean, I think, is that the cities of Britain are also smothered in garbage, because Britain has lost its sense of a collective societal responsibility. American cities, ditto, because they're locked into an omnivorous present: The sense of the future has been lost. So the new freedoms in Russia, which imitate those of these countries, have simply compounded (rather than solved) the problem of the environment here. The clean-up brigades -- the old subbotniki -- are gone. But there's no new consciousness to replace them. All there is is the freedom to throw what you want where you want, and the hell with the hindmost. Meanwhile, of course, Western companies can sidestep here -- to their considerable profit -- environmental legislation at home.