Soon after Leonid Brezhnev and his allies in the party deposed Nikita Khrushchev in 1964, they claimed that the country had entered the stage of “developed socialism.” Khrushchev had embarrassed them by promising in 1961 to achieve Communism by 1980, clearly a difficult goal given the poverty in the countryside, the shortages of consumer goods in the cities, the growing costs of waging the Cold War, and increasing awareness of extensive environmental problems. In their claim of “developed socialism,” they sought to convey the message that socialist society had transformed into something qualitatively more advanced than in the Stalin and Khrushchev eras and rivaled the capitalist West. Developed socialism became a frame of reference throughout Brezhnev's days in power against both the nation's own and Western achievements in a variety of areas. Economic growth, progress in culture and science, and advances in the areas of environmental protection and rational use of resources – all of these things indicated such achievements. Yet, environmental problems grew worse in the Brezhnev era, the pronouncements of the Soviet leaders notwithstanding. Erosion, deforestation, and pollution accelerated. The priority of economic development left the land disfigured, the water poisoned, the air polluted. Whether agriculture and its excessive use of chemical biocides, forestry and its indiscriminate clear cutting and waste, or industry and its mortal contamination, the Soviet system may have been “developed,” but it was also increasingly polluted “socialism.” The citizen – the ostensible beneficiary of the leadership's enlightened rule – lived in an increasingly dangerous environment.