As Russia turns east, it turns on itself
The Kremlin claims to have cut ties with the West and turned east, but the facts say otherwise. Putin's Russia has renewed with its old 19th century imperial image, captured by the mid-century Crimean War when Russia was at odds with everyone in the Old World. As Moscow neglects its Eurasian expanses, Beijing is stepping in to fill the gap.
As the story was told in the old Soviet era, two students are sent to summer exercises but end up in the wrong place; instead of going to the south of the White Sea, they found themselves in the north of the Black Sea. Russia’s size comes with multiple, sometimes confusing directions.
Today Russia is holding eastern Ukraine, in an all-out war against the Western world, but it is completely losing sight of eastern Siberia and the Far East, concentrating its resources against the hated Europe and the West.
This reflects the typical logic of empires, according to which territorial expansion is more important than tending the occupied lands, as was the case at the time of the Hellenistic "Ecumene" of Alexander the Great, role model for successive Roman emperors, who died in modern-day Afghanistan without giving a definitive shape to his conquests.
Rome tried to apply more effective and lasting forms, only to break up under barbarian pressure. The "Third Rome", Russia, has decided to skip a phase and go directly to the self-destructive phase, without heeding its maternal Byzantium, the "Second Rome", which converted to European Christianity the ancient Rhos (Rus) to avoid their invasion.
For decades, mineral-rich Yakutia has failed to build a bridge over the Lena River, which meanders across eastern Siberia for more than 4,400 kilometres. Such a structure would provide a link to many a land in every direction.
Money Moscow earmarked for this project was eventually diverted to build another iconic bridge, the one over the Kerch Strait between Russia and Crimea, now under constant Ukrainian attacks, still standing but for how long?
The Kremlin says that it has broken away from the West, turning eastward, but the facts belie this claim. Instead, all that Putin did was to revive Russia’s 19th-century imperial image, embodied by the Crimean War (1853-1856), when it was in conflict with the countries of the Old World.
At that time, poets and writers like Fyodor Tyutchev and Fyodor Dostoevsky dreamed of "erecting the cross again on Saint Sophia Basilica in Constantinople”, uniting perhaps all Slavic peoples (Pan-Slavism) and bring the whole of Europe under the "true faith".
Nineteenth-century Russia was so caught up in its endless Eurasian expanses that it even occupied Alaska and part of California, the Far West, which it then hastily discarded for some US dollars.
In 1860 Russia founded the new city of Vladivostok (Lord or Ruler of the East), calling the gulf in front of the port the "Bosphorus" after the one in Constantinople, but the city never sparked great passion among Russians, who are so close to China and among Chinese that they always feel like "Westerners".
The Russian mindset remains Eurocentric even in its angriest variety, and despite occupying the largest part of the Far East, this part of Russia feels like the "edge of the world".
To conquer these lands, the Russians sent Ukrainians, like the mythical Cossack Ataman Yermak Timofeyevich at the time of Ivan the Terrible and the colonisers of Primorye (Primorsky Krai). On the Pacific coast, one is more likely to hear Ukrainian accents than Russian or Chinese, so much so that the settlers set up the autonomous republic of Zelenyj Klin (literally green wedge), a "Green Ukraine” in the East.
The Far East has never fascinated the Russians, unlike the Far West for the Americans, even though there is more gold in Siberia than in California, but harder to get to under the frozen ground.
The great writer Anton Chekhov visited Sakhalin Island in 1890, impressed not by its extraordinary natural beauty or the wealth of resources, but by its use as a prison, a tsar-ruled Hades.
In general, Siberia is the chosen land for internment and exile, as much under the tsar as under Stalin. Dostoevsky said as much in The House of the Dead, after spending a terrible decade in its embrace, emulated by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago.
In Between Two Millstones (1974), the great Soviet dissident wrote that "history has given us the uncontaminated dream of the great house of Russia’s northeast; instead of trying to put order between the oceans and disturb the neighbours with a ruling hand, we could learn to live freely in our infinite space, focusing our efforts on making it habitable and welcoming for everyone.”
Putin has always claimed that he admired Solzhenitsyn, and perhaps his "turn to the East" is an attempt to fulfil the (very Soviet) dream of finally civilising Siberia.
The writer, after exile in America, returned to Russia in 1994, where he delivered a memorable speech before the Duma on “Rebuilding Russia”.
Rejecting the Soviet variant of empire, Solzhenitsyn warned against the “subjugation of Ukraine, Belarus and northern Kazakhstan", citing Novorossiya (New Russia), the name used for the disputed western lands that were to be “re-admitted” into Russia but without violence.
Unfortunately, the words of the great dissident have been used to justify the invasion of Ukraine. And today the Kremlin is urging the regions of the Russian Federation to adopt an annexed piece of Ukraine to help rebuild the same infrastructure destroyed by Russian forces.
Kamchatka Governor Vladimir Solodov has heeded the call and put his administration to work to rebuild the Donbass, even though his region, a peninsula in Russia’s Far East on the border between East and West, does not even have a railway to serve residents, which he anyway believes is a pipedream.
Solodov is a typical "young technocrat", one of the many parachuted by the presidential administration to rule over Russia’s vast territories, especially in the east.
Born in Moscow, after the "Kremlin school" he was sent to Irkutsk and then Kamchatka, and thanks to people like him the eastern regions will always lag behind European Russia.
He often talks about "technological innovations" in the Far East, forgetting that this was part of many a plan worked out with European and US organisations, but now all but ended because of the war and sanctions, which includes him as well for the “deportation of Ukrainian children”.
On the other hand, the "eastern tigers" are increasingly active in the region, starting with the Chinese, who don’t need to invade to swallow up the entire Russian Far East.
Siberia is already an economic colony of Beijing, especially when it comes to natural resources, thanks to all sorts of permits issued by Moscow in exchange for "geopolitical friendship"; for example, one third of all of Russia's fish catch comes from Kamchatka, but most of it ends up on Chinese plates.
The largest natural gas field is in Kovykta (Irkutsk Oblast), but almost all of the gas goes to China, while locals keep warm with mazut (a low-quality heavy fuel oil) or wood.
Timber too is now largely in Chinese hands, with decades-long leases given to Chinese companies with rights to thousands of hectares of Siberian and Far Eastern forests; all the cut wood is sent to China, while not a single pulp mill is operating in the Russian East, despite its huge resources.
Producing paper is quite expensive, while unprocessed timber is very useful to China as a cheap raw material.
In the eastern Russian lands, an attempt was made to build some manufacturing capacity, but only of the most dangerous kind, as befits a colony.
In 2021, a Chinese company wanted to build the world’s largest chemical plant for the production of methanol in Ayano-Maysky District (Khabarovsk Krai), but a district referendum sunk the project by 97 per cent. Still, the issue is bound to come up again.
The Kremlin has not been interested for a while in infrastructural development in the East. The mythical Trans-Siberian built in the late 19th century, once a top technical marvel, is now a shadow of itself, while Kamchatka, Yakutsk and Magadan are left to fend for themselves, at least until a route to Beijing is built.
The Chinese have even envisaged a bridge, or a tunnel, between Chukotka, Russia’s easternmost territory, and Alaska, a fantastic plan to link East and West, a reminder that everyone lives in a round planet (although not everyone believes it), not a flat and empty earth of opposing worlds.
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23/03/2022 14:55
06/09/2021 09:18
