In the late Soviet period, environmental issues gained an unprecedented media resonance and dramatic socio-political importance. The "Ecological Revolution" took a tragic turn in the Soviet Union, against the background of high-impact industrial and natural disasters. After the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station (Ukraine, 1986) and in a context of increased free-speech, Soviet citizens seized on new and old, covered up or forgotten environmental issues and demanded that a hesitant government put them on the political agenda. In a mixture of media revelations, mass demonstrations, and intense voluntary-sector activity, environmental issues of local, national and global significance ranked high among the main preoccupations of the Soviet population. In this introduction to a special issue of SPSR on the environmental history of the late Soviet Union and postSoviet Russia, we explore new avenues of understanding the upsurge of ecological perestroika from the 1960s to the 2010s.

This article aims to identify a “Thaw” in Soviet environmental history. Focusing on the attempts from some actors, above all writers and scholars of the Academy of Sciences to promote an ambitious law at the all-Union level in the second half of the 1950s, it uses new evidences from the central Russian archives to show the existence of an offensive by activists and experts in this field, but also their failure to obtain the creation of a unified state committee of ministerial rank. If the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Nature (VOOP) was sidelined in this battle, the 1960 Law on Nature Protection was significant for its members. It cited the VOOP as the main organ of control in the environmental field, and created an opportunity for new “social organizations” to emerge in the country: the Brigades for Nature Protection (DOP), the first of which was created at Moscow State University.

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