Eco-Nationalism: Anti-Nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine

241 Pages·1996·15.92 MB·English

by  Jane I. Dawson

ECO-NATIONALISM

ECO-NATIONALISM
Anti-nuclear Activism and National
Identity in and Ukraine
Russia~ Lithuania~
JANE I. DAWSON
Duke University Press Durham and London I996
© 1996 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 00
Designed by Cherie H. Westmoreland
Typeset in Sabon with Eras display type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear
on the last printed page of this book.
For my parents

CONTENTS
Preface ix
Introduction: Anti-nuclear Activism in
Comparative Perspective I
I. Patterns of Social Mobilization in Late-and
Postcommunist Societies 10
2. Lithuania: The National Element 34
3. Ukraine: Civic or Ethnic Mobilization? 64
4. The Battle against Khmelnitsky AES:
A Close-up View of Mobilization in Ukraine 83
5. Russia: The Demand for Local
Self-Determination 99
6. The National Enclaves: Tatarstan and Crimea 124
Conclusions 162
Notes 179
Selected Bibliography 199
Index 209

PREFACE
This project spans a six year period, beginning in 1989 and continuing up
until the present. At the time I embarked on this study, public activism in
the Soviet Union was an entirely new and momentous phenomenon. After
years of repression, the strictures on public speech and independent asso
ciations were breaking down, and ordinary citizens were slowly creeping
out to test the waters of this newly tolerant system. After decades of
silence, Soviet society was finally awakening. People began speaking out
on controversial platforms and mobilizing to demand that the govern
ment open its ears to the concerns of its citizens. For those of us ac
customed to the grim monotony of the Brezhnev era, Gorbachev's opening
up of society was both welcome and exciting.
This project was undertaken in those heady days. With my own inter
ests in environmentalism spurring me along, I embarked on an investiga
tion of how people in the Soviet Union were utilizing these new oppor
tunities to mobilize on environmental platforms. I soon discovered that
the anti-nuclear cause was without contest the most potent mobilizing
issue in the environmental realm - and perhaps even all realms - and I
quickly dove into this issue as a way of looking at the novel phenomenon
of public activism in the USSR.
My investigation, however, led me in unexpected directions. Rather
than simply providing a window into the rebirth of civil society, my
research revealed an unanticipated linkage between anti-nuclear activ
ism and nationalism in many regions of the former USSR. I was startled
to learn that rather than reflecting strongly held environmental princi
ples, the movements against nuclear power were in fact often more in-