Where Are We Headed? reflects the ideas of Perestroika. It shows the increasing concern among the grassroots movements over the environmental issues. The film was created at the amateur “Kadr” film studio in Mariupol, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It addresses the most pressing environmental problems in Mariupol (in 1984-1989 called Zhdanov, after the Soviet revolutionary, politician, and accomplice in the Great Purge of 1937-1938, Andrei Zhdanov).

The filmmakers employed various narrative methods: voice-over narration; shots of city scenes and landscapes; filming near industrial enterprises; landscapes and close-ups of rivers and coastal areas; overlaying visuals with a list of harmful chemicals; and excerpts from expert commentary (including the chairwoman of the City Women’s Council, unnamed commentators with a microphone, and one of the city’s leaders).

The film reflects the distance from the previous era—known as Stagnation following Gorbachev’s speech at a Party Congress in 1986—through a critical engagement with the main concepts of the Soviet propaganda discourse. “Blast furnace produced the first cast iron,” “giant factories,” “world record broken,” “we will overtake the steel production”—all these are semantic remnants of the past era and its critique during Perestroika. The phenomenon of industrialization, the race for progress and quantitative growth, and the emphasis on heavy industry as the sole foundation of the economy are now recognized as having caused significant harm to both people and nature. However, the film still uses a very scientific and expert-driven approach to highlight this damage. The voiceover provides quantitative data and statistics on emissions and disease rates clarifying the origins of this information or how it is obtained. In this new context, “competition”, “racing” and the allocation of jobs now take place in the realm of environmental damage and diseases cause by it.

Glasnost was one of the key concepts during Perestroika. Mikhail Gorbachev, who served as the general secretary of the CPSU from 1985 till 1991, introduced it as a means to renew Soviet politics. Glasnost allowed the Soviet people to express themselves in ways that even Gorbachev and his most liberal allies could not have anticipated or controlled. In practice, it turned into a right that was fought for, resembling the concept of freedom of speech and the press. The Soviet leader hoped that Glasnost would speed up Perestroika, but society was quickly flooded with reports of rising crime and the exposure of past wrongdoings  (the so-called “retrospective glasnost”), which undermined confidence in the state’s ability to achieve the long-claimed prosperity or even stabilize the crisis.

Perestroika coincided with another pivotal event of the 1980s: an environmental catastrophe. On April 26, 1986, an explosion occurred at the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine, resulting in the largest nuclear disaster in modern history. Radioactive particles were released into the atmosphere and carried by the winds to neighboring countries. Although Soviet authorities initially kept silent about the disaster, monitoring stations in Sweden recorded abnormally high levels of radiation. Amid rumors and panic, the Soviet Ukraine authorities evacuated about 40,000 residents of Prypiat. The explosion killed 38 people, and it is estimated that up to 100,000 people were injured or died from radiation exposure. When Gorbachev addressed the nation only three weeks after the accident, his credibility was severely undermined. The economic consequences of the disaster were also devastating: the efforts to mitigate the damage, relocate people, build a new city of Slavutych, and help evacuees cost billions of rubles, further destabilizing the already fragile Soviet economy. The Chornobyl disaster marked a turning point in the USSR’s democratization during Perestroika. Until then, the process had been mostly declarative. The Soviet government not only sought international aid for the victims but also created new opportunities for the Soviet media, which started investigating environmental issues and accidents across the Union.

Environmental issues reflected broader social discontent and the desire for reform. By the early 1980s, the environmental damage from decades of unchecked industrialization, resource extraction, and pollution had become impossible to ignore. This led to a growing environmental concern among activists, scientists, intellectuals, and even some politicians. Following the nuclear plant accident, environmental discussions turned into a widespread movement, a space for criticism that resonated with the broader goals of Glasnost and Perestroika under Gorbachev. In addition, environmental issues were often intertwined with national movements in the Baltic states, Ukraine, and other republics, where environmental problems were linked to the central Soviet government’s colonial policies.