News Archive

Russia TV’s “Vesti Nedeli” Sunday feature on 8 June highlighted the plight of an area in Russia’s northwestern region of Karelia, the site of a major aluminium producer, whose residents have “lived in dreadful environmental conditions for decades”. Children and adults alike suffer from fluorosis. The concentration of cancerous substances is massive. One man has […]

[Presenter] Now back to domestic news. Irkutsk ecologists have carried out more research work in the area of the Bratsk Aluminium Plant. They have proven that poisonous substances discharged by the plant’s smokestacks for many years are extremely dangerous for local residents. Local authorities have been impressed by the collected data. Officials say that they […]

Condensed text: The whole world knows about the tragedy of the Aral Sea, the unhealing wound of Uzbekistan. . . . This disaster has now been joined by a new one, this time in the southern part of the republic. Years ago the Tajik Aluminum Plant (TAZ) was built near Tajikistan’s border with Uzbekistan. . […]

ONE hundred and twenty-five miles south of the Arctic circle the first snow falls in early September and can stay until June. The temperature often plummets to -40C. Seven months into the bleak 10-month winter there is little to smile about in Nadvortsy. But the weather is not the reason for the town’s grim expression. […]

Excerpt: A cloud of dark metallic smoke filled the summer sky as Andrei Kozlovich talked to a compressor operator in an aluminium factory in Nadvoitsy, near the Finnish border. “To sue the factory we need a complainant,” Kozlovich shouted to Lyudmila Kuzina over the din of the machinery. “I want that person to be you.” […]

NADVOITSY, Russia – The children of this town learn early not to smile. When they do, they show a ghastly array of blackened, splintered, rotting stumps where milk-white teeth might have been. An environmental plague has struck this northern land of lakes, no longer pristine, and thinning pine forests. The children of Nadvoitsy are its […]

The first thing that anyone coming to the settlement of Nadvoitsy (Karelia) encounters … is a strong, throat-burning odor of nitrogen sulfide on the street. But the odor penetrates railroad cars about 20 minutes before Nadvoitsy, when the train passes by the Segezha Pulp and Paper Combine. Most residents of Nadvoitsy consider this “aroma” to […]