Rediscovering Russia in Asia

Siberia and the Russian Far East

Stephen Kotkin, David Wolff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317461296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This work presents a trans-Siberian expedition to rediscover the peoples, cultures and riches of Russia's eastern frontiers. It addresses such questions as: who are the people of the region?; have they a distinct culture?; and does the area have a future as part of the Pacific Rim?

Part IV

After Communism: Resources for Cooperation or Confrontation

Debate within the USSR on economic policies for Siberia and the Russian Far East revolved around two basic approaches: extract resources to supply and advance the European part of the country; or, try to bring about comprehensive development and make the eastern territories self-sufficient. During the Stalin period, the latter, more ambitious vision captured the imaginations of high officials and regional loyalists.¹ Following the dismantling of the gulag labor force after 1953, however, an inability to carry out even the first alternative led the Soviet authorities in the 1960s to invite the Japanese to supply capital and technology and the Chinese, as well as the North Koreans, to supply labor power.²

The 1965 Joint Soviet-Japanese Development Scheme produced what one scholar has called “very substantial results,” including construction of a port at Wrangel (Vostochnyi), progress in the joint development of Sakhalin oil and Yakut natural gas, and a brisk trade in fish, timber, wood chips, and coal.³ Although this activity was marred by periodic misunderstandings, by 1970 Japan had become the Soviet Union’s largest trade partner, and remained the second largest (after West Germany) for the rest of the decade.⁴ By the 1980s, though, economic cooperation between the USSR and Japan was faltering. Moreover, at no point did the USSR account for more than 2 percent of the total volume of Japan’s trade, a reflection of inherent geographic and economic difficulties and of a Japanese unwillingness either to strengthen Soviet military capabilities or to become dependent on imports from the USSR.⁵

At the same time, within Russia there has been a marked decline in investment in large-scale projects.⁶ Remaining cautious about the prospects for western Siberia, many scholars are fatalistic about developing eastern Siberia.⁷ The leading study asks whether the region should be seen as a bonanza or a quagmire, answering that it is neither, but reinforcing doubts simply by posing such a question.⁸ Development seems highly unlikely without substantial foreign participation. From such a vantage point, the economic future of Russia’s eastern territories looms as the transregional issue with the greatest potential for cooperation.⁹ Some notion about what is happening to the resources of Asian Russia during the transition away from Communism is provided by the five papers in this section.

* * *

Located under marshy wetlands, the Tiumen oil fields were discovered in the late 1950s. Exploration and development began in the 1960s. By the 1980s, West Siberian oil accounted for 80 percent of Soviet foreign currency earnings, underwriting the Brezhnev arms buildup and the war in Afghanistan. Today, the West Siberian basin remains the world’s largest known storehouse of hydrocarbons.¹⁰ Bruce Kellison, a young political scientist from Texas, investigates the rise of local economic and political structures that are challenging Moscow’s exclusive hold over the management of these resources—a set of developments fraught with international implications.

A complementary picture of hesitant but potentially fateful decentralization emerges in the story of West Siberian coal, as told by Paul T. Christensen, also a young political scientist. Christensen shows that what normally goes by the name of democratization more accurately could be called a property free-for-all involving local officials at all levels, as well as enterprise managers, but rarely worker collectives. Christensen’s window into the process of privatization in the coal industry reveals a world of aspirations turned into naked opportunism and a lingering dependency on central authorities.

* * *

Post-Communism has brought its share of surprises, not the least of which has been the near complete failure of private family farming to take root even when traditional obstacles have been reduced or removed. Cynthia J. Buckley, a young sociologist, examines the prospects for another key resource—land—that has been at the center of most of the decisive episodes in Russian history. Nowhere perhaps is the contrast between abundant land and persistent low agricultural output more evident than in western Siberia, where Buckley conducted fieldwork on a collective farm that undertook a sincere attempt to decollectivize.

Aided by outside experts, the members of the collective farm Zaria (Dawn) surged ahead of national reform efforts in 1990, implementing a well-thought-out program of de facto privatization through the distribution of specific assets to those who worked them. Under the new “cooperative system,” agricultural output rose and theft declined, but many old problems remained and new ones appeared, including inequities in access to tools or other formerly common resources and the near total decline of social welfare services. In 1992, disillusioned villagers assembled and voted to reinstitute the collective. Buckley examines this turn of events from the inside, emphasizing how in the area of agricultural reform, the case of West Siberia provides a marked contrast with the experience of Chinese neighbors across the southern border.

* * *

One of the most important and much-lamented facts about Siberia is that its numerous rivers all flow north, draining into the Arctic Sea, rather than south toward the densely populated but exceedingly dry regions of Central Asia. In such a context was born the scheme to reverse the flow of Siberian rivers. This project reflected not only the deeply held Soviet view that nature could be mastered, but also the intense lobbying within the centralized system by local interests and the resourcefulness of Siberian researchers in search of government funding. Much of the well-funded research for the river-diversion scheme was carried out at the Institute of Economics in Novosibirsk under Abel Aganbegian, the same institute that produced the heralded 1983 “Novosibirsk Report,” said to have been a catalyst to the onset of perestroika.

During the public debate over the proposed diversion, references to “Siberian” water became commonplace. Regional interests came to the fore as various groups sought to influence central policy—the subject of the next paper in this section, written by yet another young political scientist, Michael L. Bressler. Bressler uses the Siberian river project to gain access to the policy-making process under Brezhnev, determine the effects of glasnost on that process, and identify the significance of its legacy for today’s post-Communist planners.

A key role in the struggle for control over resources has been played by environmental concerns, which became a vehicle for nongovernmental political activity among scientists in Siberia seeking to defend Lake Baikal and among protonationalists in Kazakhstan opposed to the use of Semipalatinsk for nuclear testing.¹¹ Since the collapse of Communism, efforts to protect the environment in eastern Russia have become entangled with export get-rich-quick schemes, center–periphery relations, and the larger problem of Russian federalism. Elizabeth Wishnick, a consultant in Washington, D.C., and the author of a forthcoming study of Moscow’s China policy since the 1969 border clashes, examines these issues by focusing on forestry policy in the Maritime province.¹²

As Wishnick shows, struggles for control over the resources of Asian Russia have intensified, exacerbating an already sobering legacy of environmental degradation. Privatization and chaotic decentralization have further weakened the effect of feeble safeguards. Only newly activist native peoples seem to be exerting a counterpressure. Wishnick concludes with a report on a joint venture between the provincial timber trust and the Korean multinational Hyundai Corporation, focusing on the conflicting goals pursued by a host of actors, from federal and local officials to Russian managers, native Siberian tribes, and foreign investors. Asian Russia’s forests, no less than its water, land, coal, and oil, will continue to attract attention at home and throughout the wider Northeast Asian region.

Notes

1. Jonathan Schiffer, Soviet Regional Economic Policy: East-West Debate on Pacific-Siberian Development (Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1989); Michael Bradshaw, “Trade and High Technology,” in Rodger Swearingen, ed., Siberia and the Soviet Far East: Strategic Dimensions in Multinational Perspective (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1987); Theodore Shabad, “Economic Resources,” in Alan Wood, ed., Siberia: Problems and Prospects for Regional Development (New York: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 62–95. A brief overview of some of the literature is provided by Peter de Souza, “Siberian Futures? Economic Perspectives,” Siberica, 1 (3), 1990, pp. 170–83.

2. Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), pp. 248–50; Paul Dibb, Siberia and the Pacific: A Study of Economic Development and Trade Prospects (New York: Praeger, 1972), p. 122.

3. Stuart Kirby, “Siberia and Its Far Eastern Neighbors,” in Wood, Siberia: Problems and Prospects, pp. 193–212; Allen Whiting, Siberian Development and East Asia: Threat or Promise? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981).

4. Kazuo Ogawa, “Economic Relations with Japan,” in Swearingen, Siberia and the Soviet Far East, pp. 158–78; Richard Louis Edmonds, “Siberian Resource Development and the Japanese Economy: The Japanese Perspective,” in Robert Jensen et al., eds., Soviet Natural Resources in the World Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 214–31.

5. Raymond Mathieson, Japan’s Role in Soviet Economic Growth: Transfer of Technology Since 1965 (New York: Praeger, 1979); Kiichi Saeki, “Towards Japanese Cooperation in Siberian Development,” Problems of Communism, 21 (3), May–June 1972, pp. 1–11.

6. Theodore Shabad, “The Gorbachev Economic Policy: Is the USSR Turning Away from Siberian Development?” in Alan Wood and L.A. French, eds., The Development of Siberia: People and Resources (Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 256–60.

7. Leslie Dienes, “A Comment on the New Development Program for the Far Eastern Economic Region,” Soviet Geography, 19 (4), 1988, p. 495; and idem, Soviet Asia: Economic Development and National Policy Choices (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987). See also Boris Rumer, “Current Problems in the Industrialization of Siberia,” Berichte des Bundesinstituts für Ostwissenschaftliche und Internationale Studien, no. 48 (Cologne, 1984); and “Panel on Siberia: Economic and Territorial Issues,” Soviet Geography, 32 (6), 1991, pp. 363–432.

8. Whiting, Siberian Development and East Asia, ch. 2.

9. John Stephan, “Siberia and the World Economy: Incentives and Constraints to Involvement,” in Wood, Siberia: Problems and Prospects, pp. 213–30.

10. David Wilson, “The Siberian Oil and Gas Industry,” in Wood, Siberia: Problems and Prospects, pp. 96–129. East Siberia may contain equally vast riches, but runaway military spending has eclipsed investment in adequate exploration, let alone development. John Hardt, “Soviet Siberia: A Power to Be?” in Swearingen, Siberia and the Soviet Far East, pp. xxi–xxx.

11. Boris Komarov [pseudonym], The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union (White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1980), Russian-langu...