Nature Protests: The End of Ecology in Slovakia

Introduction

on earth day, april 22, 1989, seven months before Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, the Bratislava City Branch of the Slovak Union of Nature and Landscape Protectors (Slovenský Zväz Ochrancov Prírody a Krajiny, szopk) issued to the public what was, at the time, a rather bold proclamation.1 “We are ill and must be cured,” the Union’s document charged. The group of volunteer conservationists warned that it was “necessary to reverse the present trends” and bravely called for a “change in values, full information and independent control of the condition and development of the environment” (szopk, mv 1989). The imperative tone of this Earth Day demand seemed to belie the repressive climate of Czechoslovakia’s communist regime, which even by late 1989 exhibited almost no signs of cracking. Other events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had by then suggested communism’s impending collapse . During that same April, roundtable talks between the Polish labor union, Solidarity, and the regime in Warsaw resulted in a historic agreement to hold free elections. Less than a year before, in May 1988, the Hungarian communists had initiated a national discussion of change. Even Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, allowed partially open elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies in March 1989. And despite the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, Czechoslovakia’s communists still clung to power. Only after mass demonstrations and strikes in late November of 1989 did the regime finally give in. Yet as early as 1987, beginning with the daring publication of Bratislava/ nahlas, an illegal and electrifying report detailing the environmental devastation of Slovakia’s capital city, Slovak greens began to rally dissident 3 Introduction 4 Introduction writers, religious activists, students, and ordinary citizens to the cause of nature. szopk’s Earth Day proclamation marked what appeared to be a burgeoning green revolution in socialist East Europe.2 By the late 1980s, from Leipzig to Budapest and from Krakow to Kiev, ecology gained prominence as a subject among various currents of regime opposition. But in Slovakia, more than in any other socialist society, environmentalism became a central and growing challenge to communist power. During the Velvet Revolution, Slovakia’s environmental movement numbered in the tens of thousands, and its key activists took the helm of the public demonstrations in Bratislava calling for change.3 After Czechoslovakia’s communist regime collapsed, however, Slovakia ’s green movement quickly shrank to only a handful of members. Activists who were once lauded as heroes of freedom and tolerance were portrayed by the post-socialist state as “enemies of the nation,” and the pollution they had fought to wipe out remained or even worsened. Why did Slovakia’s ecology movement, so strong under socialism, fall apart so rapidly? How did environmentalism develop in Eastern Europe as such an articulate challenge to totalitarianism and then suddenly dissolve into a muddled and marginalized collection of nongovernmental organizations (ngos)? Can environmentalism survive at all in a post-socialist world, or does the collapse of communism perhaps signal the end of ecology? We will see first how environmentalism became a message that stood in opposition to socialism. In part, it is a story of unlikely subversion, beginning with the fact that the regime allowed volunteer nature activism in Slovakia to develop a set of cultural dialogues about lifestyle, landscape , identity, and freedom. These dialogues first appeared in recreational efforts, under the rubric of nature protection, to preserve folk architecture as cultural monuments. Through this unassuming work, weekend and amateur conservationists began to articulate a larger arena of pollution , societal decay, and state neglect. Their efforts to expand ecological activism opened up a critical forum, attracting a wide range of anticommunist forces that utilized the versatility of nature protests as a surrogate to challenge Czechoslovakia’s totalitarian regime. More than in any other case of the fall of communism in East Europe, Slovak environmentalism played a decisive political and discursive role in consolidating the elements of civil society. Civil society is “the independent self-organization of [public life], voluntarily engaged in the pursuit of individual, group or national interests” (Weigle and Butterfield 1992:3).4 The emergence of this sector of society Introduction 5 and its influence on communism’s downfall is a story of significant variations in different East European states (Pollack and Wielgohs 2004; Ramet 1995). In Poland, for example, Solidarity and the Catholic Church were key...