ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the environmental situation in what is the world’s largest country, Russia. Like the old Soviet Union that preceded it, the Russian Federation is a complex association of numerous ethnic groups, linguistic stocks, and national territories. Russians, of course, dominate, while the largest ethnic minority group is the Tatars, of whom over five million reside in the Russian Republic. An agreement was signed on March 31, 1992, by eighteen of the twenty main ethnic groups to respect and preserve the existing form and territorial integrity of the Russian Federation. In 1993 the situation became even more complex as some non-ethnic areas within the Russian Federation also suggested that they wished to have a certain degree of “autonomy.” The Soviet-era mandate of industrialization at virtually any cost has left a mosaic of environmental deterioration across the Russian Federation. The most important of the new laws is the 1991 Russian Law on Environmental Protection.
