Soviet oil pipelines in Siberia

At the same MIT World Economic Forum panel, the Russian environment minister (probably Viktor Danilov-Danilyan, identification uncertain) explains that interest in fixing oil-spilling Siberian pipelines collapsed after glasnost because by ~1991 Russians were just trying to eat. Same Maslow-hierarchy point as the Irani case.

I learned about doing things as cheaply as possible. MIT had the World Economic Forum here back in the early 90s, and I was running the session on the environment. I had the head of TATA Steel in India, and I had Danilov-Danilyan — his last name Romanov was the same, which is not uncommon in some parts of the Soviet Union. He was the minister for the environment. They were on this little panel and I was the chair. Someone said — this is the early 1990s — you've got oil pipelines in Siberia, they're just gushing out oil in the leaks, why don't you fix them? He said, well, in 1985, when we first had glasnost, people in the Soviet Union became very interested in the environment — but today, six or seven years later, they're really just interested in eating.