In writing a paper last year on Soviet disasters and starting to collect sources for writing another paper on ecological disasters brought about through industrialization - the nuclear waste and heavy-metal pollution in the Kola Peninsula, the desalination of the Aral Sea in part due to over-irrigating for cotton, the decades of nuclear incidents at the Mayak facility, and not to mention Chernobyl - I was caught by how much these incidents were covered up by Soviet high command or deemed to be a necessary sacrifice to make way for industrialization. What was the overall responses in Soviet command to these incidents as they occurred/got worse? Is there any signs that these incidents altered Soviet (or Russian) law regarding environmental regulations, and if so, is there any sign these are actually being followed?
Also, tangential question/request: If people know of any other big Soviet ecological incidents, please feel free to name/cite them, even if they aren't relevant to your response. Soviet ecological disasters isn't a topic that seems to be widely taught or written on from what I've found, and adding in the general Soviet//Russian policy of sweep embarrassing incidents under the rug as much as able and...yea. Additional sources/directions to search would be appreciated.
Not an authoritative answer, just some references. What you should be searching for is the environmental history of the USSR. See e.g. the work of Stephen Brain:
"The Environmental History of the Soviet Union," in J. R. McNeill and Erin C. S. Mauldin, eds., A Companion to Global Environmental History (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 222-243.
"The Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature," Environmental History Vol 15, no. 4 (October 2010): 1-31.
And Paul Josephson has written some useful works on this:
There is a small-but-vigorous field that studies these things in the context of Soviet history, environmental history, and the history of science and technology.