Paul Goble
Staunton, Dec. 23 – At a Moscow conference on transportation routes east of the Urals, Academician Albert Tulokhonov argued that unless Moscow quicky changes its approach to this issue, “Russia will find itself without Siberia” and will suffer all the political, geopolitical and economic problems such a loss will entail.
The geography and former senator told a Higher School of Economics conference chaired by Sergey Karaganov who has long urged that Moscow refocus its attention from European portions of the country to areas east of the Urals that in recent years, what the center has done has “led to the degradation of the eastern regions” (business-gazeta.ru/article/690798).
“Over the last 30 years,” Tulokhonov continued, “our country has not created a single major enterprise in this regard equivalent in scope to those we built in the past.” The authorities in Moscow have limited themselves to coming up with ever new strategies but not mobilized the country to realize them.
And he said he was especially concerned by “the loss of technological and cadres sovereignty” that this approach had led to. In Soviet times, Moscow cooperated with other republics of the USSR and fraternal countries, but now “Russia remains without these competences and partners, and its own cadres have been shifted to other regions.”
In reporting this and other speeches to the HSE conference, Kazan’s Business-Gazeta portal says that it has a draft of the Paths and Roads of Siberia planning document that was prepared by Karaganov’s team of experts and that participants in the December 19 meeting were called upon to discuss.
Among the most important conclusions they reached was that unless Moscow develops the shore support capacity of the Northern Sea Route quickly, even that national project will be remain unfulfilled and even that “without railways” and river transport connected it to the rest of Russia, “the Northern Sea Route will remain isolated” and at risk of being taken over by others.
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