For context - not discussion in breach of the 20 year rule! - this question is inspired by the contemporary claim that to prevent climate change, we need to overthrow capitalism, as profit-seeking through exploitation of natural resources renders a solution under capitalism impossible. This recently got me wondering about what the environmental record of Eastern Bloc countries under socialism was actually like in practice. Were socialist governments better at protecting the environment than their capitalist counterparts?
Cold War-era Europe/North America seems the most straightforward framework through which to answer comparatively, but would be interested to hear about comparisons in Latin America/Africa/Asia if someone has the knowledge!
It was pretty atrocious.
One of the major examples of this is the fate of the Aral Sea. The Aral Sea is an endorheic salt water lake, not unlike the Caspian and Dead Seas. The Aral Sea's inflows, primarily the Syr and Amu Darya rivers (I personally prefer the romanticism of their Greek names, the Iaxartes and Oxus, myself, but to each his own) and their tributaries, nourished a glorious and ancient civilization of Turks, Iranians and Greeks on the vast cold deserts and high mountains of Turkestan, the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush. This area hosted at least fifteen of the cities Alexander the Great founded, and at least nine of the ones he named after himself, not to mention the Silk Road, which is, in some ways, the axis upon which the history of the world has turned. More prosaically, these rivers supported a fairly huge population in an otherwise very inhospitable place. For example, the modern Uzbekistan contains most of the course of the Amu Darya, and has a population of about 35 million, compared with only 18 million in its vast northern neighbor, Kazakhstan, the climate and geography of which (mostly steppe) is theoretically more hospitable. And most of Kazakhstan's population, including its capital Almaty, are nestled up against the southern border (where the Syr Darya flows through the country, and where it has access to some of what remains of the Aral Sea) and the southern mountains, which are the source of both rivers.
No more, though. The Aral Sea has shrunk to less than 10% of its true volume, and is no longer even a contiguous sea. It's now four or five shallow, broad lakes, and it has been completely disconnected from the Amu Darya. The death of the Aral Sea, and its ancient economy and history, are the result of the Soviet government's desire, in the 1960s (the time of the so-called "Red Plenty") to turn the deserts into cash crop plantations, especially cotton, and to a lesser extent, food crops. To do this, the Soviets massively diverted the flow of the Amu and Syr Darya rivers, and these efforts did actually bear fruit. There is, today, a large amount of farmland in the area, and Uzbekistan produces a significant amount of cotton (which, not coincidentally, is also one of the most water-intensive crops in the world). But the cost was obscenely high. Since irrigation attempts began in earnest in the 1940s, the construction has been of poor quality, allowing huge amounts of water to go to waste, while starving the Aral Sea of its only source of refreshment.
As a result, the Aral Sea contracted by 90% in about 50 years, and the salinity skyrocketed. This not only destroyed the fishing economy in the region, but also destroyed the ecology of the sea itself and the inflow river deltas. The remaining water is also heavily polluted, which is an ongoing health hazard for the people who live there, as it has entered the drinking water supply, which is inadequate in any case. The dry bed of the sea, now a desert the locals call Aralkum, is equally polluted, and makes dust storms in the region incredibly toxic. These hazards contribute to a myriad of public health catastrophes, including abnormally elevated levels of everything from infant morality, to cancer to tuberculosis to blindness. In addition to all these contaminants, which affect soil quality for agriculture in the immediate region, the leftover salt from the evaporating sea has had the effect of literally sowing fields with salt. The end of the sea's moderating influence has also affected the climate, which is hotter in the summer and colder in the winter by some 2 to 6 degrees Celsius in both directions.
Also interestingly, certain Soviet planners had a personal dislike for the Aral Sea, which they called 'nature's error,' and considered its end inevitable, and thus its intentional destruction acceptable.
Check out this completely non-depressing gif: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aral_Sea.gif
To expand on /u/BillyDeeWilliams1990's post on Soviet landscape transformation projects and the demise of the Aral Sea, I can provide some insights on the history of environmental protection in the socialist German Democratic Republic. In public, living memory at least, the late GDR had a pretty bad environmental record. At the very least one can say that pollution of the environment, specifically issues of air pollution by the GDR's increasingly outdated heavy industrial sector and land devastation by extensive lignite mining, had become so bad by the mid-1980s that environmental issues were high on the agenda of oppositional groups in East Germany. By this time, the GDR's environmental problems had become linked by critics to the failing of its state economy. That doesn't mean that this was always meant to happen and the narrative of "failing state economy"->"obsolete infrastructure"->"failure to protect the environment" was actually a relatively recent one. For most of her history, East Germany's environmental record was comparable to West Germany's, i. e. in an age where ecological awareness was only beginning to develop in earnest, it was equally bad. When it comes to legal protections granted to the environment and its resources both states were not so different.
German environmental protection in both German states built upon their common traditions of pre-war Naturschutz (nature protection) and Tierschutz (animal protection) that was of a more conservationist nature and focused on particular, confined landscapes or species that were identified as "endangered". Pre-war and post-war Naturschutz and Tierschutz policies led to the establishment of Germany's first nature and animal reserves. German Umweltschutz on the other hand is a later development. It is more holistic and concerned with comprehensive environmental issues that affect whole ecological systems and livelihood of humans and other species. Generally speaking, Umweltschutz movements in the West picked up steam in the late 1960s, were in part connected to the new left student and activist movements, and led to what resembles more our contemporary ecological awareness.
Just as the Federal Republic, the GDR inherited the legacy of National Socialist "environmentalism," which was very much mired in the trappings of völkisch and racial "blood and soil" thought. The Nazis are credited with the introduction of Germany's first real environmental protection law, the Reichsnaturschutzgesetz (RNG, the Reich nature protection law) of 1935. The history and environmental record of the Nazis and the RNG is complicated, the magnificient /u/kieslowskifan has a great post on that topic, suffice to say that it wasn't that great and when push came to shove industrial and agricultural policies and war imperatives always trumped environmental concerns.
The RNG was inherited by both Germanies, although the GDR was quicker in replacing it with her own Naturschutzgesetz in 1954. (In the FRG, the RNG stayed in place until 1976.) It improved upon the RNG, making way to a more scientific and observational approach to environmental protection to replace the earlier conservationist rural romanticism. The new law recognized the already established nature reserves and tried to accurately assess their worth and where necessary to improve and expand them. However, as part of the expansion of the one-party system and the consolidation of socialist rule after 1949, the independent club and association infrastructure of civil environmentalism was either abolished or integrated into party structures in the East. The 1954 law was in theory ambitious and progressive for its time, especially compared to the complacency about the topic in West Germany where environmentalism was still a small-time affair for volunteer clubs. In practice however, the guidelines laid out by the five-year plans of the state economy overruled other concerns. Especially the collectivization of agriculture and the great agricultural expansion and intensification plans decreed by the party conventions in 1963 and 1967 began to subject the rural landscapes of East Germany to an alarming transformation.
In 1968, the new East German constitution recognized the protection of the environment as a state objective, and in 1970 the Volkskammer adopted the new Landeskulturgesetz to replace the law of 1954. The new law envisioned a "socialist Landeskultur" ("rural culture/countryside culture") which would preserve ecological habitats while simultaneously providing the socialist agriculture with everything it needed. The Landeskulturgesetz was a very ambitious step in the direction of Umweltschutz ecological thought, acknowledging the preservation and replenishment of resources and human and animal living conditions as objectives equal to economic growth in theory at least. However, like the preceding law, socialist Landeskultur was very much subject to the same imperatives of the GDR state economy that since the 1960s was increasingly focused on the expansion of its consumer goods industries and on the stated goal of "overtaking without catching up" to the West.
The oil crisis of 1973 and the skyrocketing oil prices (which quintupled between 1973 and 1974) hit hard the chronically cash-strapped GDR economy that was dependent on importing almost all of its oil. The rising oil prices also led to higher prices on other commodities and goods as well that East Germany imported. The experiences of the 1970s led the East German economic planners to heavily intensify the extraction of domestic resources, mainly the lignite reserves in Lusatia. (The GDR was not alone in this, lignite saw a big comeback generally in that time due to the rising oil prices.) Lignite mining was extensive in the GDR already because after the war East Germany had neither access to the West German Ruhr Area coal mines nor the Silesian ones. However, lignite surface mining is a huge environmental hazard (and to this day a very contentious issue) that transforms whole landscapes into moonscapes and power plants running on lignite are among the worst air polluters.
The increased air and water pollution by the expanded lignite mining and burning and the fallout from often short-sighted agricultural policies had by the early 1980s piled up to the extent that environmental protection became a controversial issue. Faced with criticism by local activist groups, the state authorities in 1982 decided to keep environmental data gathered by its agencies secret from there on. East German secret police, the infamous Staatssicherheit, always wary of activism and associations independent from party structures, began to monitor environmentalists. Environmentalism became an oppositional movement in the GDR – a state which had enshrined environmental protection in accordance with human needs in her constitution long before the FRG did (in 1994). Environmentalist, "green" groups had connections to the secular and the Christian civil rights movement that emerged in 1980s in the GDR and that was partly responsible for the Wende, the peaceful revolution in East Germany in 1989 and 1990 and her subsequent reunification witht the West. (The civil rights movement, especially groups like Bündnis 90, actually had very diverse views on reunification and all that but that's a different story.)
Against the backdrop of the incipient Wende and the free communal elections in early 1989, East German state authorities responded on May 18, 1989, to the increased demand for improved environmental protection by adding the new Naturschutzverordnung ("protection decree") to the 1970 law. The decree took up the progressive ecological thought of 1970 and expanded on it, calling for state capacities to be committed to re-building East German nature and replenishment of her resources. January 1990 saw the establishment of the Ministerium für Naturschutz, Umweltschutz und Wasserwirtschaft ("water economy"/"hydrology") that immeditaly began to enact an ambitious "national park program" that expanded existing nature reserves and founded new ones. Amidst the unravelling GDR state, the ministry's officers succeeded eventually in putting large swathes of East Germany under legal protection. The late "state environmentalism" also belatedly vindicated the suppressed environmentalist activism of the last decade as the new law explicity called upon civil society and volunteers to act in concert with state authorities in that regard. While the GDR phased herself out in the unification treaty of 1990, her environmental legacy is perhaps better than her earlier record as she brought extensive nature reserves into the new union of both Germanies.
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/edit: Typos, wording, formatting
