Abstract

On 12 June 2000, the tenth anniversary of Boris Yeltsin's election as head of the reconstituted Russian state, 180 people who had formed an ‘initiative group for a pan-Russian referendum’ launched a campaign to collect the two million signatures required by Russian law to organize a popular initiative referendum which included these three questions:-Are you opposed to the importing of radioactive material from other states to be stored, buried or reprocessed on Russian territory?-Are you in favour of the existence of a federal environmental protection agency which would be independent of those bodies concerned with exploiting and managing natural resources?-Are you in favour of the existence of a legally independent state service for forests in Russia?