The Air

«What is a Soviet citizen breathes as he watched with a sense os superiority a TV program about the suffocating Los Angeles smog?» 

Boris Komarov

Back in the former Soviet Union, the government promoted the economic development at all possible costs. On the eve of collapse of USSR, the country produced the same volume of air pollution as United States, however, with 2 to 4 times lower economic output. Although the level of industrial pollution has decreased since 1990s, Russia’s air is still among the most polluted in the world. 

The Soviet environmental protection agency regarded air pollution as the biggest ecological threat to the country. Starting from 1980, the Soviet meteorological service began recording the volume of atmospheric emissions coming from the two main sources: stationary sources (industrial enterprises and power plants) and transport (cars). According to this data, the total amount of air pollution in 1989 was 94 million, with more than half of this volume coming from stationary sources.

In 1989, it was reported locally that no major city in USSR complied with standards* for suspended particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, ammonia, and phenol, while the concentrations of carbon disulfide, formaldehyde, and benzopyrene exceeded the norms by a factor of 2 to 4. 

The pollution has been uneven throughout the country and some of the regions experienced heavier pollution than others. 

The Russian Arctic region is the home of developing gas extracting industries, as well as the largest nickel and copper smelting plants and coal mines in the world. Tundra and northern taiga are occupied by enterprises that produce paper and pulp, aluminium plants, oil extracting and processing industries, industries extracting gold and diamonds. 

Among the cities in northern Russia, the leading source of pollutants is Norilsk, which accounts for over 2 million tons of different toxic emissions per year. The city was founded back in 1935 as a settlement for the Norilsk mining-metallurgic complex, today, the largest one in the world. According to the indicator of relative danger from release**, Norilsk takes the first place in Russia.

Norilsk is believed to be the «dirtiest» city in Russia, while the Blacksmith institute listed it as one of the ten most polluted places on Earth in 2007. 

The location of the plants around Norilsk means that residents always have to breath in the emissions coming from one or another side of the city. In this way, the northwestern part of the city especially suffers from copper plant releases when the wind blows from the west ; the south-eastern part is at risk when the wind blows from the south. The reason behind this odd construction plan lies back in 1930s, when the only people who lived in Norilsk were the prisoners from the GULAG labour camp and the government wasn’t worried about public enemies’ potential health problems. To make it even worse, such a thing as «ecology» simply didn't exist for Soviet government at that time. 

Sulphur dioxide and aerosols of heavy metals (nickel and copper) are the main components of atmospheric emissions from nickel smelters, which present a threat to forest ecosystems. For instance, sulphur dioxide emitted from the nickel mining combine is a cause of acid rains which killed all the vegetation within a 120 kilometer radius of Norilsk's facility. 

Vegetation Damage Around Norilsk Facility

The impact of air pollution around the city on humans is even worse. Norilsk is one of the 11 Russian cities with the highest rates of disease among children under 14 due to air pollution. 

The Russian government recently accepted an offer from an association of Swedish and Norwegian companies for upgrading the facilities of Pechenga Nickel, which would allow to cut sulphur dioxide emissions by 95%. However, there is no way to prevent the pollution of fragile subarctic ecosystem unless the management of the Norilsk facilities is willing to invest their revenues in the company instead of diverting them to their own pockets.

Footnotes:

*Standards for individual pollutants in the atmosphere were expressed in terms of maximum permissible concentrations (predel’no dopustimaya kontsentratsiya in Russian, or PDK) tolerated for human health. 

** The ratio of the released amount to the maximum allowable concentration (MAC) of the released chemical in the air