Russian Far East Arose as ‘a Zomia’ -- a Society without a State, Blyakher Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 31 – In 2002, Dutch scholar Willem van Schendel introduced the term “Zomia” to describe portions of Southeast Asia where societies have been vital but governments largely ineffective or absent. Now a Russian investigator, Leonid Blyakher, argues that term applies to origins of the situation in what is now the Russian Far East.

            But while most of the characteristics of “Zomia” have disappeared from that Russian region since that time, many remain and continue to define how people in the region view state and society and how outsiders view them to this day, setting it off from the rest of the country, the Russian analyst suggests (liberal.ru/priamurye/7653).

            The Zomia in the Far East was “not a customary pre-modern (traditional) society but a society outside of the modern world,” Blyakher says. That difference is one of principle, in that the first consists of communities that haven’t evolved to current arrangements, whereas the second, the Zomia, “knows about the modern but rejects it.”

            “Its values,” he continues, “are fundamentally different, not technical development, not victory over space and time, not unification and competition but the value of a customary way of life, a maximum of egalitarianism, and of localism.” 

            Between the time the central Russian government made claim to the Russian Far East and the early 20^th century, local society there existed largely independently of the state which lacked both the interest and the resources to extend its tentacles of control over the local population in a systematic way.

            The government’s “lack of forces and the impossibility of providing security forced the authorities to look through their fingers at the presence among the peasants of a significant quantity of weapons, including fire arms.” The latter formed “self-defense detachments” in almost each settlement and provided what security there was.

            “The lack of police was compensated” by the peasants themselves who elected people to run their affairs, then replaced them regularly so that those in power knew that they had to be responsive to the population because they would soon return to the population which would put forward new leaders.

            According to Blyakher, “the resident of Zomia (including in its Amur embodiment) strives not for maximization of profit but for the minimization of risks and uncertainty. The state’s concern creates risk and therefore they seek to distance themselves from it.” Inequality was minimal.

            “And so,” he writes, “Zomia on the Amur arose under conditions of weak imperial (state) control and the lack of instruments of compulsion,” creating sets of expectations that have continued even when the reality has changed as it did in the early 20^th century and especially after the Bolshevik coming to power in the 1920s.

            Until then, however, the Zomia in the Amur continued to avoid the state when it could. Draft evasion was high during World War I, and the state’s reach did not extend much beyond the limits of cities. 

            Then came the era of the Far Eastern Republic, “which in fact was also the republic of the victorious Zomiya,” Blyakher says. Yes it was a buffer state but it was not a failed one. The principles which had animated the peasants before the Russian state could impose order on them continued to operate and inform the entire FER.

            The commentator suggests that this may have been one of the reasons why the Soviets moved so quickly to destroy that institution, fearful that it could serve as a model for peasants elsewhere in the USSR. “But the liquidation of the Far Eastern Republic was hardly the death of Zomiya. Rather, it was the last act of a tragedy.”

            Its peasants stood aside from NEP, and when the state sought to impose tighter control, they revolted in 1925. But they lacked the forces to stand up to the Soviet onslaught, although some distant places resisted well into the beginning of the 1930s. Part of the population retreated into the taiga in hopes of saving something of what was being destroyed.

            “But,” according to Blyakher, “Zomiya has not disappeared without a trace. New people in new conditions have begun to revive former practices. In ‘the shadows,’” sometimes, “real life remained untouched and unpublic.”

            And that is “the secret of Zomiya.” “It doesn’t disappear but only withdraws from view. It contributed to the protest voting there in 2018 pushing the population into meetings in 2020. Today it is mute and attempting to use the language of others. But it is again living and possibly it will save the Amur Region during the new wild years ahead.”