ABSTRACT
This chapter studies the communication of environmental problems in the Soviet Union in the period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, that is, before perestroika and the Chernobyl catastrophe. The first part looks at how the environment, ecology and nature protection appeared in the official Russian language Soviet press, which topics received specific coverage and from which angle. The second part focuses on the question of climate change and the communication of climate science as it happened on the pages of Soviet newspapers. However, the official sources did not capture the entire media landscape of late socialism. Dissidents in the USSR had developed an alternative channel of communicating the uncensored information known as samizdat. The last part of the chapter studies how important environmental problems were for the Soviet samizdat media and how different the underground narratives were from the discussion in the state-controlled forums.
