Lethal legacy: Russia has been called the most polluted country on Earth.

Russia has a lot on its plate -- political turmoil, economic breakdown, organized crime, and civil rebellion. Environmentalists believe these troubles are small compared with the ghastly mess left behind by reckless Soviet industrial and military practices.

A top Russian public-health official has been quoted as saying: "The Soviet economy was run at the cost of public health." The German weekly, Die Zeit summarized the problem early in 1995: "Every third child in Russia, the authorities fear, may be ill because of environmental pollution. The death rate for people between 25 and 40 has risen considerably. Even if emergency measures were begun today, scientists warn, it would be 25 years before any improvements would be noticed." Those improvements are desperately needed.

* Kemerovo in southern Siberia is one of the most polluted places on Earth. Seven out of ten children born there come into the world sick.

* In 1989, 500,000 tonnes of spilled oil contaminated the southern Tyumen region of Siberia; four years later, 420,000 tonnes of oil were spilled into the Oka River. In the fall of 1994, a broken pipeline spewed out 200,000 tonnes in the Komi Republic.

* There are 15 nuclear reactors of the type that exploded at Chernobyl in operation in Russia. Writing in The Observer of London, England, reporter Robin McKie says Russia's nuclear industry "is teetering on the brink of an environmental cataclysm."

* Thirteen nuclear reactors from scrapped submarines were simply tossed into the Kara Sea along with at least 17,000 containers of liquid nuclear waste. More than 100 other naval nuclear reactors have been stored in barely guarded dumps.

* For 30 kilometres around a nickel smelter on the Kola Peninsula nothing grows, not even a blade of grass. Average life expectancy here and elsewhere in Arctic Russia has dropped from 62 in 1965, to 50 today.

* The West is making Russia's problems worse. There is growing evidence that companies are exploiting the near-collapse of government controls to sneak toxic wastes into the country for dumping. As well Western and Asian lumber companies are clear-cutting 40,000 [km.sup.2] of forest each year.

Ivan Blokov is a member of Russia's small Green Party. He says that Russia's problems extend beyond its frontiers. If a nuclear reactor explodes or the taiga forest disappears, he says, the whole world will suffer.

SUGGESTED ACTIVITY

The clean-up bill is high and quite beyond Russia's ability to pay. Cleaning up nuclear wastes in the Barents Sea could cost $128 billion; repairing defective nuclear power plants another $20 billion. Should we in the West be helping financially? Discuss.