“When will ash stop being Cinderella?” utopian conservatism of late Soviet environmental regulation

The paper analyzes the features of the late Soviet environmental regulation using materials from the Department of Nature Protection of the State Planning Committee of the USSR. The author argues that despite the absence of a special environmental agency, environmental regulation in the Soviet Union was systemic, being integrated into national economic planning through the “economy of approvals” framework. The author distinguishes utopian conservatism as one of the key features of Soviet environmental regulation. On the one hand, the utopian horizon of Soviet environmental regulation was a radical restructuring of nature management that would turn all waste into resources for the economy. On the other hand, the implementation of the environmental program became part of Brezhnev’s conservative reforms, which did not imply a redistribution of power and resources between economic agents, but only “improved the mechanisms of planning and economic incentives” within the existing balance of power. The first part of the paper explores the institutionalization process of the Department of Nature Protection of the State Planning Commission and its operation principles. The author shows that while the did not set itself the task of detailing all environmental measure, it played a crucial role as a key node facilitating relationships among various agents within the “economy of approvals”. The second part of the paper presents a case study that reconstructs the interaction between the party elite, the Council of Ministers of the USSR, the State Planning Commission, and individual ministries on the issue of using waste from the petrochemical industry and power plants for vanadium production. The specialists from the Department of Nature Conservation of the State Planning Committee of the USSR sought to set up relations between individual ministries to convert waste of one ministry into resources for another one, but it required much deeper restructuring of Soviet environmental management.