Russian state official stands with Greenpeace against garbage burning plans

The Green Alternative, an ecological organization officially established last week, made its debut in public affairs Saturday at a protest in Moscow against city plans to build garbage burning plants. Several Russian pop stars and members of Greenpeace Russia and the Russian Green Cross took part in the action. Green Alternative founder and leader Oleg Mitvol was present as well.

Mitvol’s day job is deputy director of the Russian Natural Resources Management Supervisory Service. He is one of Russia’s most visible public servants and a tireless fighter against corruption and abuse of the environment.

Mitvol is campaigning to “ecologize” local government. One of the goals of the new organization will be to advance candidates in local elections, Mitvol told Kommersant newspaper earlier this year. A Green Alternative member was elected to local office in the Moscow suburbs last month, beating the candidate from the ruling United Russia party by a hefty margin. That was the first election victory in Russia of a candidate running on an ecological platform.

Mitvol flirted with the Yabloko Party late last year, but decided in the end to remain without party affiliation. He told Kommersant that “certain party leaders” there were resisting reforms he had proposed. “I don’t know what they have to lose,” he commented about the perpetually unelectable ultraliberal party.

The 42-year-old Mitvol has a colorful biography. In Soviet times, he worked in the space industry. During perestroika, he set up an aircraft parts business, then he founded a bank. In 1997, he became the chairman of the Novye Izvestia publishing company, which publishes a newspaper of the same name (“New News” in Russian). According to press accounts compiled by Lenta.ru news service, he was the owner of 76 percent of the stock in the company, and Boris Berezovsky, the magnate who would later flee from Russia into infamy, was his partner. Mitvol was active in business for several years.

He also found the time to earn a doctorate in history.

In 2004, Mitvol was appointed to his current government post. The agency might not have known what it was letting itself in for. Mitvol launched an anticorruption campaign in his own agency and then went after the dachas built by the wealthy in public forests. After that, he became a fixture in the media as he set about fulfilling his duties with a gusto that is rarely seen in government.

Mitvol is clearly not an easy person to work with. A conflict between him and Ministry of Natural Resources Yury Trutnev spilled over into the press two years ago. The appointment of former Leningrad Region governor Vladimir Kirillov as Mitvol’s boss last year led Mitvol to resign. His resignation was not accepted, but he was nonetheless later laid off, after legislative machination to eliminate his position. (The four deputy’s posts were reduced to three.) A court ruled at the end of the year that Mitvol should remain in his post. Last month, a different deputy director of the Russian Natural Resources Management Supervisory Service was dismissed.

The protest action this weekend was attended by 200-600 people, depending on accounts. It had received a permit from the city government. On Friday, Yabloko members in the Moscow city council introduced a law to ban the burning or burying of Moscow household and industrial garbage. They want it sorted for recycling at a rate of 15 percent next year and 50 percent by 2017. Currently there is no recycling of garbage in Moscow, which has a population of over 10 million. The city’s garbage is being buried in its suburbs, but city officials point out that towns are beginning to refuse to accept the city’s garbage, leaving the officials with few options for its disposal. Recycling bins were set up in downtown Moscow several years ago. The attempt to introduce ecological practices was ignored by the public and the bins were later removed.