SUMMARY:

The article examines official and popular engagements with environmental questions in Soviet Armenia from the 1950s to the mid-1980s, in order to highlight how the environment shaped debates and decisions in the republic prior to glasnost. Furthermore, the article shows how the environmental movement in Soviet Armenia continued to influence the political agenda of both the Armenian National Movement and the Armenian Communist Party throughout 1988–1991. The environment was thus not a surrogate for nationalism, as Jane Dawson’s concept of “eco-nationalism” suggests, but an important idiom of social reality in its own right. It was also a source of legitimacy, both for the Soviet political elite and the rising national movement. The article is based on extensive archival material from Armenia and Moscow as well as the Soviet press and semistructured interviews with former and present Armenian environmentalists.