RED GOES GREEN

Is Mikhail Gorbachev a tinkerer or a reformer? And in either case, can he succeed against the bureaucracy and other odds? I am still watching, but one thing I do not doubt: he is a master pro-pagandist. In September, the Soviet Committee for the Defense of Peace grew a new tentacle: a Soviet Greenpeace Committee.

[The name was misreported as "Green World" by that part of the press that reported it at all. The single Russian word mir is a homonym for both world and peace. Russian also has no articles, so that when Gorbachev says Ya khochu mir, he says "I want peace," but he is also saying "I want the world."]

Present at the founding ceremony was David McTaggart, head of Greenpeace International, who is not bothered by Soviet har-poons in his "Save the Whales" campaign. Nor is he bothered about the amount of radioactivity dumped by Britain into the sea via coal ash; his thugs only disrupt the sea dumping of low-level nuclear waste with a smaller total radioactivity. (Both British procedures, the latter now discontinued after intimidation by Greenpeace, are sensible and innocuous.)

The purpose of the new propaganda body is "to organically unite the Soviet people's struggle for peace with the huge movement for the conservation of nature."

The simple fact, of course, is that there is no better conserver of a forest than Weyerhaeuser, and no worse manager than collective ownership, in which a forest belongs to everybody, and therefore to nobody. From the overgrazing of the Holy Land to the mismanage-ment of natural resources on Indian reservations, the environment has always been despoiled by one thing, and one thing only: the absence of clearly defined property rights. (See John Baden's report below on some US examples.)

Never has this old truth been better illustrated than by the devastation of the environment in the Soviet Empire. It took the Turks three centuries to ruin the Balkans (by harvesting forests without replanting); but "scientific" socialism can do it to far larger areas in a matter of decades. In parts of Czechoslovakia, mothers are officially advised not to give their babies tap water without boiling it first, and in Northern Bohemia (an industrial region which, like East Germany, burns low-grade lignite), life expectancy is by up to 10 years lower than in the rest of the country; in the "German" "Democratic" "Republic," drivers often have to switch on their lights downwind from Leipzig in the daytime to penetrate the emissions from chemical plants; and the horror story continues in Poland and Hungary (see references below). In the USSR itself, where public health has always been far behind that of Central Europe, the situation is at least as bad, though not yet officially admitted.

Of course, if the world's most aggressive and militaristic country can sponsor a Committee for the Defense of Peace, why should not the same country, the filthiest among industrialized nations, spon-sor a committee for conserving nature?

One thing master propagandist Gorbachev can rely on: if he sponsors a committee called "Cannibals for Vegetarianism," he can rely on Sen. Cranston and Rep. Schroeder going on TV to welcome this latest proof of Soviet good will and berating all who are reject-ing yet another opportunity for peaceful coexistence.

[More: J. Baden, Destroying the environment: Government mismanagement of our natural resources (Oct. 1986), $10, Natl. Ctr. f. Policy Analysis, 7701 N. Stem-mons/#717, Dallas, TX 75247; A. Puddington, "East Bloc Ecology," Amer. Spec-tator, March 1986; M. Kraus, "Czechoslovakia in the 1980s," Current History, Nov. 1985; "A Silent Spring in Eastern Europe," NY Times, 4/26/87; "Stoking an en- vironmental disaster," Insight, 7 Sept. 1987.]