Map: Russian roulette

From black snow to dead seas to plagues of biblical proportions: the grim environmental legacy of the former Soviet Union

Ten years of life left

Pollution means that nearly 90 per cent of the Black Sea is now dead. The chief culprits are the vast industrial heartlands of the Ukraine that drain into the Dnieper river, as well as pollution from Krasnodar in Russia and Georgia's industrial ports, Batumi and Sukhumi. A huge deposit of dissolved sulphide is steadily consuming every last molecule of marine oxygen in the sea. Expert opinion gives it another decade of life at best.

Something in the wind

On 26 April 1986, Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine went into meltdown, releasing a vast plume of radioactive material. The heaviest deposits fell on the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Over a decade later, 200,000 people have been evacuated from a poisoned exclusion zone extending over 4,000sq km. Among the hundreds of thousands of clean- up and rescue workers, radioactive sickness has been common, while local childhood cancers have soared. What is left of the reactor core is entombed in a concrete sarcophagus.

Environmental nationalism

Soviet rule in the Baltic States brought with it environmentally catastrophic industrial development. In Ignalina in Lithuania, a bigger version of the Chernobyl reactor was designed to provide much of the region's electricity, under minimal regulations. Car bumper stickers read, "Today Chernobyl, tomorrow Ignalina." In Latvia, the proposed Daugavpils dam - ultimately not built - threatened forest ecosystems. Estonia's northern coast was turned into a moonscape of open-cast mining. Little wonder that the catalyst for a more nationalist politics in the region came from green groups.

The amazing shrinking sea

In the heart of Central Asia lies the shallow, saline Aral Sea, fed by the Syr and Amu Dar'ya rivers. In the last 30 years demand for irrigation water for growing cotton and other crops has soared in the region. The Aral Sea has become progressively smaller, shallower and saltier, leaving behind a saline and toxic desert where fishing villages once stood. Ironically, the land irrigated by its waters has proved unsuited for intensive agriculture.

Troubled waters

Lake Baikal is one of the largest and most ecologically diverse freshwater lakes in the world, with over a thousand indigenous freshwater species. This has not prevented both Soviet, and now Russian, industry from dumping oil, caustic chemicals and heavy metals into the lake in huge quantities. Despite a 30-year conservation campaign to limit the damage, air pollution, uncontrolled tourism and industrial shanty towns push the lake's ecosystem closer and closer to the point of no return.

Brighter than Northern Lights

In the Fifties and Sixties the Soviet military conducted extensive nuclear testing on the Chukotka Peninsula. The indigenous Chukchi were not informed. Nuclear isotopes accumulated in lichen, then reindeer and finally the Chukchi, who now have around 120 times the level of ingested radioactive caesium of non-reindeer eaters. Ninety per cent suffer from lung disease and almost 100 per cent from TB. Liver cancer is 10 times higher than in the rest of Russia, and viral and bacterial infections have decimated the population.

The land of black snow

Profligate industrial expansion has laid waste to the extraordinarily beautiful ecosystems of the former Soviet Arctic. The coastline is littered with machinery, lost shipping, oil barrels and other debris. Reindeer herds have declined as their feeding grounds have been poisoned by acid snow, oil spillage and radioactivity. Norilsk, the region's industrial centre, has the worst air pollution in any part of the former Soviet Union: snow turns black, the air is yellow with sulphur and over 60 per cent of the population have serious respiratory problems.

The wrong kind of soil

The Baikal-Amur railway was one of President Brezhnev's pet projects: 3,500km of railway line that would open up the Soviet Far East. Completed in 1984, two-thirds was constructed on permafrost, which alternately thaws and freezes. As a consequence, it is plagued by earth slides and subsidence. The new towns built on the route are almost all located on low-lying ground where air pollution caused by uncontrolled industrial development is trapped at levels eight times the legal norm.