Moscow’s Failures to Consider All Sides of Issues Mean Arctic Likely to Become Another Khabarovsk, Stanulevich Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 8 – “The Arctic region may ‘unexpectedly’ repeat the events” in Khabarovsk, Vladimir Stanulevich says, because just as Moscow failed to take into consideration all sides in reforming the Far East, the center is repeating that mistake in its promotion of Murmansk at the expense of the rest of the North.

            Two weeks ago, Yury Trutnyev, a deputy prime minister and plenipotentiary representative of the president announced the creation of a Foundation for the Development of the Arctic that will be funded by 50 percent of tax revenues from government-supported Arctic projects (regnum.ru/news/polit/3031919.html).

            So far, so good, the Regnum commentator says. But there are several “buts.”  First of all, Trutnyev wants all the money to go to the development of Murmansk as an ice-free port and give nothing at all to the entire rest of this enormous region. His Murmansk plans are “fantastic” but won’t happen.

What will happen is a tide of anger elsewhere in the North, Stanulevich argues; and Khabarovsk shows what can happen when residents of a region think they are being ignored or worse not shown respect. There are many places in the North who will draw the same conclusions the people of Khabarovsk have and likely take similar actions.

But what Trutnyev is doing is even worse. He is creating “a state within a state,” one that will take resources from a large region and give them to only one city. On the one hand, this raises the specter that he plans to create an Arctic Federal District or Northern Kray. And on the other, he undermines the tax system of the Russian Federation as a whole.

No one questions that developing the Arctic is important for Russia, but Trutnyev’s slogan, “Murmansk is the capital of the Arctic,” opens the way to another disaster neither Trutnyev nor others in Moscow appear to have thought through. Murmansk in the past and even recently has close ties to Scandinavia and thus is being pulled away from Moscow.

 There are people in Moscow who understand all these dangers, but they haven’t come together to correct things. As a result, tensions are growing in the Arctic “similar to those which led to ‘the unexpected developments’ in the Far East,” because once again individual officials are taking actions without thinking things through.

What makes this commentary significant is not so much that it points to problems in the North – many have commented on them – but rather that an analyst who is on almost all things a defender of Moscow against the regions is now blaming the center for causing problems beyond the ring road – and doing so by suggesting officials at the center aren’t thinking things through.