Environment

Abstract

Environmental policy has never been central to Russian politics and power. Indeed, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the implicit and explicit operating principle of Russian governance was “economy first, then environment”—a posture largely supported by the population, for which the most important problems were income, employment and the general need to increase the standard of living. (Of course, as Fyodor Lukyanov observes in Chap. 12, if in Russia the economy is prior to the environment, then politics is prior to the economy.)