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| ISBN-13: | 9789388161190 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | VIJ Books (India) Pty Ltd |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Eurasian integration and the development of Asiatic Russia
Russia's strategic objective of developing its Asiatic regions is tied to its serious intentions in Asia as a whole. After all, Russia can only connect to the political, economic, and cultural life of Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific through its own Asian regions. Moreover, leaders' claims that Russia belongs to both Europe and Asia will carry little weight with their Asiatic neighbours if Russia's own Asiatic regions remain underdeveloped and subject to shrinking populations.
In fact, Asiatic Russia is less developed because the country has focused for centuries on developing its European part while relegating the Asiatic to an auxiliary or supporting role. Only after Russia recently understood that its opportunities in the West had become severely limited did this situation begin to change.
1. Programs for developing Asiatic Russia
A checkered history Russia's political, economic, and cultural activity has focused on the Western part of the country for many long centuries – or at least dating from the time of Peter the Great. And, despite the fact that the greater part of its territory lay in Asia, Russia's Asian policy was seen as ancillary to its European policy. This explains why Asiatic Russia remains relatively underdeveloped economically and underpopulated.
Of course, leaders during the country's tsarist, Soviet, and modern periods have made efforts to accelerate the development of the Eastern regions. However, affairs in the Western part often consumed most of their attention, leaving little time or energy for the east.
During tsarist times, the largest and most successful programs for developing Siberia and the Far East were the construction in 1891–1916 of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which was initially called "The Great Siberian Railway," (along with the China Eastern Railway branch line through Northern Manchuria) linking Moscow with Vladivostok, and the resettlement policy of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin. Economic and political considerations played a significant role in both, including the desire to harness the wealth of Siberia and the Far East, to give the peasant population of European Russia land and an opportunity to cultivate it, and concerns that Russia might otherwise find it impossible to retain its Asiatic territories. Speaking of the Russian Far East in a speech to the State Duma in 1908, Stolypin said, "Our remote and harsh outlying regions are rich — rich in gold, rich in timber, rich in furs, rich in vast lands suitable for cultivation. And under such circumstances, gentlemen, with a densely populated neighboring state, these regions will not remain uninhabited. Foreigners will enter therein and this slow creep has already –if Russians do not get there first begun. If we sleep lethargically, those regions will become home to other peoples, and when we awaken, they might turn out to be Russian in name only." The Stolypin resettlement program offered numerous benefits to those willing to move to Siberia: government-paid travel expenses, a non-repayable loan of 100–200 rubles depending on the area of resettlement, and preliminary land surveys. The government also built schools, paramedic stations, and roads in those regions. As a result, more than 3 million men (no tally was taken of women and children) moved east of the Urals between 1906 and 1914, providing a major boost to the region's socio-economic development. During the initial period after the devastation caused by the civil war, the Soviet government placed its bets on attracting foreign capital to develop Asiatic Russia. Never before had those regions been linked to the world economy as they were in the first half of the 1920s. In 1923, for example, foreign capital held 57.9% of the industrial enterprises of the Far East, and those establishments produced 50% of the region's industrial output. The Soviet government began making concessions whereby it received the funds necessary to reinvigorate the economy and industry without having to make any additional investment. However, by the late 1920s, the new economic policy was halted and the concessions were cancelled.
After adopting the policy of accelerated industrialization based on domestic resources, there could be no talk of broad interaction with neighbouring states. The new policy was formulated in the resolutions of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union (CEC) and the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on the economic development of the Far East. It aimed to increase the rate of industrial development and create a domestic economic complex independent of outside factors that would be capable of provisioning the Soviet armed forces in the event of what was considered an inevitable armed conflict. As noted by Pavel Minakir and Olga Prokapalo – two economists specializing in the Russian Far East – from 1932 onward, "the Soviet Union began a massive redistribution of its resources toward the Far East, investing 7 billion rubles in its economy, or 6.8 times more than had been invested in the previous five years. That investment was focused not on export resource industries, but on entirely new ones – shipbuilding, chemicals, automotive repair, energy, oil refining, the fuel industry, and nonferrous metallurgy. The transport infrastructure grew especially quickly, with investment in this area increasing by 4700% in 1928–1932. As a result, industrial production increased by 335% and heavy industry by 430%. The Far East transformed from an agrarian into a super-industrial region in which industry accounted for more than 80% of gross output.
A growth in population was achieved through forced resettlement, primarily of prisoners. During Stalin's years in power, prison labor contributed significantly to the development of Asiatic Russia, which itself was used primarily as a storehouse of mineral wealth that was mined for the needs of industries located primarily in European Russia – and as a means for covering miscellaneous budget expenses. In 1934, the State Trust for Road and Industrial Construction in the upper Kolyma (Dalstroy) – established three years earlier by decision of the Council of Labor and Defense of the Soviet Union – was handed over to the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). Despite its modest moniker, Dalstroy was set up as a comprehensive organization responsible for all aspects of life in the Far East, from industry to culture. At its disposal were approximately 100 labor camps with thousands of prisoners, most of them had been convicted for political crimes according to Article 58 of the Russian Federation Penal Code. Enjoying no rights, they constituted an enormous pool of free labor that was pressed into service to construct roads, mine gold and other minerals, and build cities and enterprises. Entire cities such as Taishet, Magadan, Nakhodka, and Igarka arose and developed as administrative and holding centers for the system of labor camps. Similar organizations answered for other parts of Asiatic Russia: Siblag (Western Siberia), Bamlag (responsible for construction of the Baikal-Amur Railway), and so on. The exploitation of unjustly convicted prisoners with the ostensible goal of helping the regions and developing their economies led to countless deaths from starvation and freezing for the sake of abstract goals and prompted predatory individuals with power to plunder those areas' riches.
During the Second World War, industries in European Russia were evacuated eastward, contributing to the industrial development of that region. After the war's end, the fishing industry became a high priority. In 1948, the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union adopted a resolution "On the development of the fishing industry in the Far East" that provided for increased investment in the industry, the modernization of its technical foundations, the development of active marine fisheries, and the means for staffing those efforts. By 1965, the Far East alone provided 40% of the Soviet Union's total catch, and 90% of those fish were caught in the open seas and oceans. A major fishing fleet was also built.
After succeeding Stalin, Khrushchev dismantled the system of labor camps, and the new government put its hopes into science and education. A major Siberian branch of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, established in 1957 with its center in Novosibirsk and institutions in different Siberian cities, began tackling the most advanced goals, primarily in the natural sciences, and creating new technologies. In addition, the Far East branch of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union that had existed since 1932 was placed under the auspices of the Siberian branch. Dissolved in 1930, the Far Eastern State University was re-established in 1956 and became one of the country's leading institutions of higher learning. Major university centers arose in each of Siberia's largest cities: Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Tomsk, Omsk, Chita, and Ulan-Ude.
Measures were also put into place to attract settlers and consolidate the population. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued a decree in 1960 "On the regulation of benefits for those working in the Far North and in areas equivalent to the Far North" according to which workers in a large part of Siberia and the Far East were entitled to earn more, for the same work, than residents of other regions. The wage premium ranged from 10% to 80%, depending on the region and the amount of work experience. In 1967, a similar set of benefits was also extended to the more southern parts of Siberia and the Far East. The size of the premiums subsequently underwent some changes, but the overall approach remained the same.
The arms race with the United States and worsening relations with China prompted a military buildup in the Far East and along the Soviet–Chinese border. By the early 1970s, the Soviet Union had built a new fleet of nuclear missile equipped ships in the Pacific that provided strategic deterrence of the U.S. By the mid-1980s, the Pacific Fleet constituted 32% of the Soviet Navy. With 800 ships and 150,000 service personnel, its theater of operations stretched from the Pacific to the Indian Oceans. The number of troops on the border with China grew from 10,300 in 1965 to 51,300 in 1970. The number of ground troops increased from 15 divisions in the mid-1960s to more than 60 divisions in the early 1980s. All of this required corresponding infrastructure. The arms race compelled military factories in the region to step up production. All of this, in turn, naturally led to an influx of people settling in Asiatic Russia.
Although military and strategic necessity prompted the Soviet leadership to develop southern Siberia and the Far East, officially they explained it as stemming from the desire to develop the national economy and improve the living standards of the population. These measures were formulated in two resolutions of the CPSU Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers. The first, No. 638 "On measures for the further development of the productive power of the Far East economic region and the Chita region," was adopted on July 8, 1967. The second, No. 368 "On measures for the further comprehensive development of the productive power of the Far Eastern and Eastern Siberian economic regions," was adopted on May 25, 1972. Even the name of the measure made it clear: the Chita region was grouped with the Far East for the obvious reason that it also bordered China. These documents "were intended to facilitate the development of productive power, the inflow and retention of manpower due to the commissioning of new production facilities, and the construction of buildings for residential, cultural, and community uses." However, not one of those objectives was fulfilled completely.
The continued construction of the Baikal-Amur Railway (BAM) in the 1970s was probably due primarily to military concerns about the security of the Trans-Siberian Railway that ran too close to the border with China – which at that time was hostile to Russia. Although that undertaking, widely billed as the "construction project of the century," was prompted by the need for economic development, it seemed to have very little broader economic significance. Perhaps it would have taken on such significance in the context of more systematic plans for developing the transport infrastructure of the region in the direction of, for example, Kamchatka. However, even those economic plans that did exist in connection with the BAM could not be implemented due to the crisis in, and later the collapse of, the Soviet Union. In any case, significant resources went into its construction. The rail line stretching 3145 km from Ust-Kut in the west to Komsomolsk-on-Amur in the east required the construction of 3700 culverts, 142 major bridges, and 24 km of tunnels. This time, however, it was not prison laborers who performed the work, but Komsomol members and military personnel recruited for this purpose.
Siberia continued to be seen largely as a storehouse of raw minerals that are increasingly used for export. For many years, the proceeds from that activity kept the sinking Soviet economy afloat and helped mitigate the deficits of a wide variety of goods. Oil and gas regions were established in the mid-1960s and gradually developed to the point where they were providing 70% of the country's oil and more than 90% of its gas. A system of oil and, later, gas pipelines for delivering those products to Europe was also built. In Eastern Siberia, the mining of coal, diamonds, iron ore, gold, and other minerals was expanded.
Thus, the region developed in this rather lopsided way during the Soviet era. Largely owing to outside pressures, the systematic plans for the region's socio-economic development became a lower priority than developing the military and military-industrial complex and the mining of minerals. Only a few non-military industries were developed, making it impossible to create the full-fledged social and economic infrastructure needed to attract people to the region. Despite the higher salaries, living conditions in most of Siberia and the Far East were difficult. Nevertheless, people did not move away and the population grew. From 1959 to 1989, the population of the Far East increased from 4.8 million to almost 8 million, and in Siberia it grew from 18 million to more than 24 million. However, the overall population ratio remained unchanged, with the majority continuing to live in the European part of the country.
In a speech in 1986 in Vladivostok, new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev linked, for perhaps the first time since the 1920s, plans for developing Asiatic Russia with expanded international cooperation. Toward this end, he proposed a number of initiatives for improving relations with Russia's neighbors, and especially China and Japan. Proclaiming "the Soviet Union is also an Asiatic and Pacific Ocean country," the Soviet leader announced not only the military, but also through – the economic return of the Soviet Union to the Asia-Pacific the development of the economy of the Far East.
However, this plan faced serious problems. Acknowledging that the economic development of the Far East lagged behind the rest of the country, Gorbachev proposed transforming the region into a highly advanced economic complex not only by using its geographic position, natural resources, fuel and energy complexes, and manufacturing infrastructure, but also by boosting its economy with expanded exports and the revitalization of its coastal and border trade, and adopting "progressive forms" of economic ties with foreign countries – including cooperative production, joint ventures, and so on. This essentially meant a partial return to the experience of the 1920s: the development of Siberia and the Far East using local resources and expanded foreign economic relations.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Russia: A Thorny Transition From Communism"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Alexander Lukin.
Excerpted by permission of Vij Books India Pvt Ltd.
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