Chapter 9: ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY AND CIVIL SOCIETY Oleg Kobtzeff Complete text with footnotes and bibliography is published in Gardner, Hall, ed., Central and South-central Europe in Transition, Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000, pp. 219-296. Favorably reviewed in Marek Payerhin, "Transitions and Environment in Poland", An Annotated Bibliography for the Post-Secondary Curriculum Development Project prepared for the University of Michigan’s Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies (http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/crees/pdf/Payerhin1.pdf). On 4 April 1986, in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine, no more than fifty miles north of Kiev, reactor Number Four of a large nuclear plant exploded in the vicinity of Chernobyl. Its radioactive waste was detected in parts of Europe as remote as France, or Lapland, where entire populations of reindeer feeding on contaminated tundra had to be destroyed. Hundreds of deaths and thousands of cases of fallout-related disease struck the Ukrainian, Bielorussian, and Slovak populations. For the first time in recorded history, an exodus of nearly a quarter of a million “environmental refugees” proved that environmental politics could no longer be considered a marginal geopolitical issue. The progressive flow of uncensored data (eased by glasnost) revealed that Chernobyl was only the tip of the iceberg. For decision-makers, in the Soviet bloc or in the West, even those least concerned by ecology, the risks of geographic, economic, and political instability became too obvious to ignore as it coincided