Window on Eurasia

Russian Far East Would like to Be Known as ‘Russia on the Pacific’

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 28, 2006 – The central government in Moscow might pay more attention to the Russian Far East if it were known as “Russia on the Pacific,” scholars in that distant area say, because the adjective “far” has connotations of “distant, unachievable, and even unnecessary.”

Such a change in name, scholars at the Institute of Regional Projects
of the Pacific Ocean Center argue, would bring the name of their region
into line with that of “the South of Russia” and could help reverse
declines over the last 15 years in official and popular interest in the
Far Eastern portions of the country.

Indeed, they insist that unless Moscow starts paying greater attention
to the region, it will lose what they call “the quiet war on the
Pacific ocean” to increasingly autonomous local elites, rapidly
expanding transnational criminal groups and neighboring countries
[http://stoletie.ru/geopolitic/060727152238.html].

At present, officials and scholars in what is still known as the
Russian Far East point out, the population of the region is declining 3.9 times
faster than the fall in the population for the Russian Federation as a
whole. That means that ten years from now the number of residents there
will be from 7.6 to 12 percent lower than today.

That demographic collapse, academic specialists suggest, reflects among
other things a decline in the attention the region has received since
the end of Soviet times. Prior to 1985, Moscow invested heavily in the
region for geopolitical as well as economic reasons. But since 1991, it
has ended most of those programs.

This lack of attention, regional officials continue, has been exploited
by regional elites who pursue their own autonomous goals, organized
criminal groups both domestic and international who prey on the
increasingly defenseless population, and neighboring states that have
both economic and political interests in the region.

In the 1990s, the Stoletie.ru writer says, “there existed a real
threat of the complete loss of ties between the East and the Center of
Russia,” something people in the region noticed but that few
officials in Moscow or Russians in other parts of the country paid any attention
to.

Since the coming to power of President Vladimir Putin, the situation
has changed somewhat, the journalist continues, but not nearly as much as
the occasional government statements and media articles about a region
eight to ten time zones away from the Russian capital suggest.

Putin has reined in most of the regional elites, but transnational
organized crime from China, the Koreas, and Japan continues to grow.
And Chinese interest in the area has expanded as well. Sometimes,
Stoletie.ru suggests, people view reports of this last threat as
overblown and thus are inclined to ignore it.

But, the site continues, “for establishing control over the wealthy
lands of Eastern Siberia and the Far East China does not have to annex
Russian terrirotires by political or military means. It can do this by
having the Chinese economy assume a dominant position in regional
markets.”

That is already happening, scholars in the Rsusian Far East say. One,
at the Vladivostok Institute of International Relations, point to the fact
that Chinese investments in Russian areas as so structured that they
benefit cities on the Chinese side of the border far more than they do
cities on the Russian side.

Indeed, while the cities of Dunin, Suifenhye, and Heihe have grown and
prospered, this scholar notes, “neighboring Russian cities and
settlements” have suffered impoverishment because Chinese businessmen
who make money in Russia repatriate their profits to their homeland.

Over the last several years, Stoletie.ru reports, Russian officials
have begun to talk more about these problems, proposing such solutions as
attracting ethnic Russians from the so-called “near abroad” to live
in the region and developing tourism around Lake Baikal.

But despite all the talk, “these intentions remain only intentions,
and little has been done.” And consequently, people in Russia’s
most distant regions are beginning to discuss how they might attract more
attention from the center and hence more money to their region

A major problem, they have concluded, is that most Russians know little
about the area and thus remain largely “indifferent” to its fate.
Indeed, at the present time, many of them do not even associate in
their own minds “Siberia and the Far East with [the rest of] Russia.”

On the one hand, that means “residents of Eastern Siberia and the Far
East frequently feel themselves forgotten by the Center.” And on the
other, people “in the European part of Russia” are seldom
adequately informed aabout the history of Russians in this region.

As part of a broader effort to rectify this situation, scholars in the
Far East say, the region should rename itself “Russia on the
Pacific,” a title that will make it seem closer to the rest of the
country, and ask that the Russian authorities adopt as a federal
holiday one or another date significant in the region’s history.

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