Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 30 – Yesterday’s
meeting of the Russian State Council devoted to the Russian Far East and the
Trans-Baikal and chaired by President Vladimir Putin shows that those regions
remain “more dead than alive” and, in the words of two analysts, “nothing is
being done about this” in Moscow.
In an essay posted on “Expert Online”
today, Vasily Avchenko and Aleksandr Popov offer a devastating description of
the problems of these regions, the failure of Moscow up to now to address them
effectively, and the growing anger of both Putin and regional officials
concerning the situation (expert.ru/2012/11/30/nepod_emnyij-vostok/).
The
Russian president is “losing patience,” the two said because no decisions taken
“up to now have led to radical changes in the social-economic situation of
those territories” and there is not “the political will” to overcome what is
quite obviously become a serious “institutional crisis.”
Putin proposed creating a state
corporation for the development of the region, an idea that has been floated
for some time but that most had assumed had been dropped following the creation
of the Ministry for the Development of the East. Putin said he is now “ready to
return to this question.”
Vyacheslav Shtyrov, deputy chairman of the
Federation Council, said he backed the idea but added “of course not in the
form which Sergey Kuzhgetovich Shoygu proposed.” Shoygu’s idea “in fact” would represent
something like the recreation of the NKVD’s Dalstroy which existed in Stalinist
times
Whether a state corporation would be
more effective than the ministry is “an open question,” Avchenko and Popov say.
Mikhail Tersky, an economist from Vladivostok noted that the effectiveness of
either “depends on the people who will work in [them].” But judging from the
way Moscow is proceeding, he continued, “there aren’t any such in the Far East”
now.
Putin and various participants in the meeting proposed
special laws and tax policies to help promote the region, but “Kommersant”
journalist Andrey Kolesnikov, who attended the session, said that the
frustrations of those from the region are now so great that they in effect were
saying “Give us a Far Eastern Republic (www.kommersant.ru/doc/2078898).
That may overstate the level of
anger, but many in the enormous region of the Russian Federation east of Baikal
are clearly ready to strike out in new directions. One of the potentially most
interesting involves proposals to “rebrand” the region as “Russia on the
Pacific,” a shift that could lead to very different policies there and in
Moscow.
According to scholars at the Far
Eastern Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences, “the term ‘Far East’ has
outlived its usefulness and does not correspond to the present or even more the
future role of the eastern regions of Russia.” It should be dropped along with
the ideological baggage it carries (expert.ru/2012/11/30/rebrending-dalnego-vostoka/).
“In the very
name ‘Far East,’ Academician Petr Baklanov, who heads Vladivostok’s Pacific Ocean
Institute of Geography, says, “there is a certain relativity connected with
Eurocentrism” among people in Moscow, an attitude that gets in the way of the expanding
involvement of the region with the Pacific Ocean and the countries which live
on its shores.
But
of course, Yuri Avdeyev, a scholar there adds, “the issue is not just about the
name but about a change in the vector of Asian policy.” Until recently, he
notes, “the military presence of Russia dominated in the region,” but today
within a radius of 1000 kilometers of Vladivostok, there live 300 million
people, five times more than live within the same radius of Moscow.
And
the GDP of that region is currently “more than 6.6 trillion US dollars, three
times more than of all of Russia put together,” he notes. Russia on the Pacific
“must be constructed above administrative borders as it is something more than
the potential of a specific territory.” It needs specialists, institutions and
businesses so that Russia can cooperate with the Pacific Rim.
“Both
heads of the Russian eagle as before look to the West,” Viktor Larin, the
director of Vladivostok’s Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography,
says. Therefore, “rebranding” the region has “principled importance from the
psychological point of view” if the region and Russia as a whole are to
succeed.
None
of the scholars planned to raise this issue officially at least not yet because
there are many in Moscow would view such a proposal as raising a kind of
secessionist flag. But several of them do have specific ideas about what might
be done, and at least some of the latter are likely to become part of the conversation
in the near term.
Avdeyev
suggests that Vladivostok should be raised in status to become “the third
capital of Russia.” Khabarovsk is “really the capital of the Far Eastern
Federal District but Vladivistok is the center which links Russia, Europe and
Asia.” Unless something at least that serious is done, he argues, the situation
is likely to become dire indeed.
“The
population is fleeing, capital is leaving and foreign capital isn’t coming in,”
the scholar says. Unless that changes and changes very soon and radically “where
will it be, our Russia on the Pacific?”
