This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Rediscovery of Politics, given by Geoffrey Hosking, was originally broadcast in 1988.

Last year, a turning point was reached in Soviet history.

The government passed a decree banning tree-felling around the Great Siberian freshwater lake Baikal,

and requiring the Baikal pulp and paper combine to phase out the production of cellulose.

Hardly the stuff of historic turning points, you might think.

But if you think about it for a moment, it actually contradicts the relentless drive towards

economic growth,

which Soviet Communists have always regarded as a paramount priority.

Lenin, after all, was fond of saying that communism equals Soviet power plus electrification

of the whole country. That meant accepting everything which electrification and accompanying forms of modernisation entailed.

So in a sense, last year, Soviet power was stopped in its tracks.

How did this come about?

In the formative years of the Soviet system, and especially during the 30s and 40s,

the primacy of economic growth

was so undisputed that no heed whatever was paid to environmental damage resulting from

industrial development. The predominant attitude to nature was that it was there to be conquered.

In any case, the cumulative effects of pollution were not readily apparent at first.

Blast furnaces, power stations and chemical plants were built at frenzied speed

and left to belch their fumes into the air and discharge their effluence into the rivers.

Lenin's electrification of the whole country was pursued at headlong pace.

Films were made and poems composed

...