Broad indictment of the environmental practices and policies of the Soviet Union.

The dramatic revelations of environmental catastrophe in the Soviet Union made during the late 1980s and early 1990s were a driving force behind reform in, and later the demise of the communist party-state. But while the Union no longer exists, the independent republics confront the same dilemmas that plagued the Soviet state: Will the goal of econ

Boris Komarov is the name under which Ze'ev Wolfson published his 1979 The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union in the west after he could not get it published in Moscow. He based his criticisms on his observations as an employee of the Soviet Department of Nature Preserves. Here he focuses on how aridization, the loss of natural soil, destruction of fresh water resources, and other ecological problems move across the landscape without regard to national boundaries. His examples are the migrating environmental degradations spawned by oil and gas production in Siberia and cotton production in the Aral basin. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In 1989 a Soviet environmental expert writer under the pseudonym Boris Komarov startled the world. His book "The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union", was both a chilling description of the environmental devastation in the Soviet Union and an indictment of the official policy and public apathy that allows it to be perpetuated. Today Boris Komarov writes freely under his own name - Ze'ev Wolfson. But the ecological crisis he documents has only become more severe, more widespread, more deadly. In "The Geography of Survival" Wolfson speaks out in unmistakable terms about the world's choice to embrace the cause of our collective survival or to let desertisation, pollution, disaster, famine, epidemic, and war work their own solution.

This in-depth exploration of five industries in the Kola Peninsula examines Soviet power and its interaction with the natural world.

Is there a link between the collapse of the Soviet Union, the radical reforms in China and Vietnam, and the current crisis in East Asia? David Lockwood argues that the common factor in each is the crisis of state-controlled economies, besieged by the developing forces of globalization. This book examines the collapse of the Soviet Union not as the 'end of history', or the beginning of a 'new world order', but as an illustration of processes that are taking place the world over. The author concludes that it was globalization that brought down the communist system. Globalization continues to threaten state-controlled economies - from the remaining 'socialist' state to the NICs of East Asia.