ABSTRACT
During his first five years in power, Mikhail Gorbachev replaced his minister of health twice and organized a new agency for environmental protection, whose first chief was dismissed and replaced by a non-Party member. Gorbachev will have to address the policy implications of the changes for resource demands, the military and the nationality problem. New pronatalist policies, issued in April 1990, seek to instill a new impetus among the population to reproduce; these policies are directed especially at the Slavs, since the Muslims do not need the encouragement of any legislation to produce large families. In the fall of 1988, thousands of families living in Khmelnitsky were provided with gas masks because of the air pollution being generated at the local meat plant. Land pollution in the USSR is closely associated with two issues: the Chernobyl disaster and "nitrates" in food.
