Book review: Stalin’s Legacy: The Soviet War On Nature, by Struan Stevenson

A GLASS jar in the museum of Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, holds the body of a boy born to a Soviet pilot and his wife. With a single eye in the centre of his forehead – a perfect ­Cyclops – he was born alive and suffered for a few hours before, no doubt, being suffocated by the nurses.

Stalin’s Legacy: The 
Soviet War On Nature

Struan Stevenson

Birlinn, £20

This is just one of the gruesome consequences of the Soviet nuclear programme which Conservative MEP Struan Stevenson includes in a litany of “crimes” against the environment.

Begun by Stalin in 1949, and only terminated after public protests in 1990, the atomic bomb tests carried out in “the Polygon” mean that, in this part of Kazakhstan, cancers run at five times the national average. The nomadic tribesmen of the area suffer from leukaemia, anaemia, terrible birth defects and mental illness: they are not attributable to “evil spirits” of lore, but to massive doses of radiation.

To this Stevenson adds an atomic lake, an imploded mountain and a disappearing sea, the Aral, drained to irrigate cotton-fields. Indeed, the author points out that the struggle for water in Central Asia is as much a geopolitical issue today as the war on terror. This book is meant to be a searing indictment of the Soviet system, and, in particular, of Joseph Stalin who, the author claims, “declared war” on nature as well as “the kind, considerate and hospitable people” of the region. But as the MEP travels around the radioactive ruins of the former Soviet Union, interviewing scientists, veterans and civilians, the picture becomes unintentionally nuanced: Stalin ordered a nuclear programme to counter the threat from Nazi Germany then the United States; the considerable achievements of Soviet scientists, notably the future dissident Andrei Sakharov, rightly continue to be celebrated; the “war” on the environment was anticipated by Tsar Peter the Great, accelerated after the death of the Soviet dictator, and, as Stevenson himself points out, continues apace ­today, but now without a rudimentary but free health service to help the victims.

Although this book contains much that is informative and compelling, Struan Stevenson’s constituents might wonder why he is spending so much time as a “disaster tourist” with a conscience. The narrative is studded with accounts of endless vodka-drenched banquets offered by corrupt potentates and fame-struck ­villagers, reaching a literally nauseating climax when he is entertained by the Uzbek foreign minister: “I can honestly say that sitting at the top of a raging waterfall high in the Pamir Mountains, eating wild white brambles with honey and chapattis and sipping Chateau Margaux 1990 must be one of the finest culinary experiences I have ever had”. One wonders why it is only a primary school “in one of the poorer parts of Glasgow” which raises a noble but ultimately derisory £233 for ­Kazakh radiation victims, while two leukaemia survivors invited over by Stevenson’s far-right grouping of MEPs are perhaps not the only ones for whom “staying for three nights in a five-star hotel and being shown around Brussels and the European Parliament was an eye-opener”.

Why, while he’s at it, does Stevenson not campaign for the rights of those Commonwealth troops used as guinea pigs in British nuclear tests, or those millions of Vietnamese whose lives have been blighted by the Americans’ use of Agent Orange?

In his preface, the former Nato secretary-general, Lord George Robertson, condemns the “crimes of a ruthless regime”, but is deafeningly silent on the deadly legacy of depleted uranium used in the Kosovo campaign. Stevenson’s text concludes with a bizarre rant about wind farms, vanishing bee syndrome and the possibility of greening the desert. In some ways he is inadvertently showing us that the war on nature is a universal and dangerous feature of human civilisation that did not disappear with the Berlin Wall. Ideologically driven, egotistical and strewn with contradictions and half-truths, this book is another monstrous legacy of the Cold War. «