ABSTRACT
When President Vladimir Putin signed the decree to reorganize the Federal Forest Service and the State Committee for Nature Protection (Goskomekologya) on the 17th of May 2000, a major administrative change in environmental policy took place in Russia. The relatively autonomous status of both institutes was lost as they were integrated into the Ministry of Natural Resources. The Ministry's primary task has been resource mobilization, especially oil and gas production and mining, and now its responsibility has been expanded to include the fields of forestry and nature conservation (Yanitsky, 2001; Kuliasova and Kuliasov, 2002).
