Frozen Ties

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If Siberia were a country, it would be Asia’s largest: 13.1 million square kilometers to China’s 9.6 million. The Russian Far East alone is larger than the continent of Australia [1].

But Siberia is not a country and the rest of the continent often seems of the geographically-challenged view that “Asia stops at the Amur River,” as I was once told by a Hong Kong investment banker.

Geography aside, however, there’s something to the argument that whatever Russia and Siberia are, they aren’t Asian. Demographically, the differences are stark. While Siberia makes up about three-quarters of Russia’s land area, there are only 40 or so million Siberians, nine-tenths of whom are of European descent and, on the whole, of European Russian language and culture.

This statistical divergence is reflected in innumerable everyday and, for the visitor, sometimes surreal experiences. Back in the early 1990s, I attended a conference reception outside Vladivostok: a tenor and soprano in evening dress were accompanied on a piano in a room with French doors opening out onto a long lawn ending in the taiga. I was the entire audience: everyone else was tucking into the king crab. It was a scene out of Turgenev or Tolstoy. Yet on the drive back to town, the car radio crackled in Chinese from across the border only a couple of dozen kilometers west (yes, west).

This Siberian dichotomy is in many ways true of Russia itself. The nation has never made up its mind how Asian it is or wishes to be. The two-headed Russian eagle has long been considered a symbol of Russia’s dual nature. “The Russian eagle has two heads, looking in two directions at once. It is just as important for Russia to look East to Asia, as West to Europe and the United States,” the late Arkady Volsky, leading Soviet and post-Soviet industrialist, told me in the late 1990s [2]. However, the eagle has been content to watch Asia rather than build much of a nest there.

The economic divergence between Siberia and its Asian neighbors is as stark as the demographic and cultural differences: Siberia’s economy is largely resource-based while its Asian neighbours have mostly built their economies on manufacturing and, increasingly, consumer consumption. But it is through this divergence—or perhaps synergy—that Siberia and Asia are linked. Asia, and in particular China, is an increasingly voracious consumer of the energy, metals and other natural resources from timber to fish that Siberia has in abundant surplus. The strategic reasons behind the now frequent Sino-Russian summits have more to do with energy than the previously-stated emphasis on developing a multi-polar world to counter the perceived end-of-history.

The resulting opportunities and perils are much on the mind of commentators. This comment from a recent article in Der Spiegel is typical:

The border between the fallen superpower Russia and the People’s Republic, which is gradually becoming a superpower, measures 3,645 kilometers, one of the longest borders in the world. And perhaps this border, where Europe’s last offshoots encounter 1.3 billion Chinese, and where Christianity collides with Buddhism and Confucianism, is also one of the most important in the power struggles of the new century.

Could an alliance develop in this region between two powerful countries that would finally put an end to American dominance of the world? One of the two has the raw materials that the other one needs so urgently. Or will the land of Vladimir Putin become a bulwark against an increasingly self-confident China, and thus become the natural partner of the West? Or will neither of these scenarios come to pass, when overpopulated China simply swallows up depopulated Siberia? [3]

Yet Siberia remains a cipher. In Russia’s Frozen Frontier, Alan Wood writes that for most people in the West,

Siberia—its location, its size, its global significance—is as much known about or understood as life in Tiruchirapalli, Tierra del Fuego or Timbuktu.

The state of knowledge among Siberia’s Asian neighbours is hardly much better. Siberia, Wood continues, “is also a land of literally immeasurable natural resources.” Asia’s lack of attention for its northern neighbor, while perhaps understandable, seems short-shortsighted.

* * *

An understanding of Siberia starts with Russia as a whole. Martin Sixsmith’s Russia: A 1,000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East was published to coincide with a BBC Radio 4 series marking the 20th anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As one must expect from any book that compresses 1,000 years into half as many pages, it is sweeping and generalised, but Sixsmith’s journalistic instincts, such as the use of first-person anecdote, have yielded a readable, clear and often stirring introduction to a complex country.

It is unfair to summarize a 500-plus page volume in just a few words, but Sixsmith’s main point for our purposes is that Russia’s present can be explained from its past. He is in particular far from sanguine about the possibility of true reform, to say nothing of democracy:

The Kremlin [under Putin] was as powerful, as distant and as corrupt as under the Romanovs, and, knowing no other form of rule, Russians in the twenty-first century bowed willingly to its command. George Bush’s suggestion at Christmas 1991 that Russia now be ‘like us’ seemed misguided at the time and seems so today.

Russia, as now often forgotten by everyone except the Russian themselves, was conquered and then ruled by Asians. Mongol Khans, the so-called Golden Horde dominated for two centuries in the late Middle Ages. The Western European Renaissance largely passed Russia by. Sixsmith, echoing long-standing conventional wisdom, blames Russia’s autocratic tendencies on this Asian-ruled interregnum:

In a strange version of the Stockholm Syndrome (where kidnap victims embrace the beliefs of their kidnappers), the Russian began to adopt features of the Mongol system for themselves. Forced to kowtow before the Khan, the princes began to demand the same thing from their own followers. The practice of chelobitie (literally beating one’s forehead on the ground) was adopted as part of Russian court etiquette and would remain in use for four centuries.... And, most significantly for Russia’s future development, a profound admiration for the Mongol model of an autocratic, militarised state began to enter the Russian psyche.

The period prior to the Mongol conquest, known as the Kievan Rus (Kiev, now the capital of the Ukraine, being the most powerful of the various principalities) was, says Sixsmith, relatively open politically and boasted “a well-developed judicial system with juries and mediation processes.”

The period of the Kievan Rus was a potential turning point, the first of several in Russian history, at which the country could have gone either way. If the Kievan model had been allowed to develop, if the forces of autocracy had not ultimately gained the upper hand, Russia today might be a very different place.

Sixsmith points out that the early eighteenth-century Tsar Peter the Great is still remembered as “the great modernizer who opened a window on the West and turned the country away from its old Asiatic leanings.” As European ideas of participatory politics penetrated Russia, especially in the nineteenth-century, a conservative movement—the Slavophiles—grew in response, holding views that would not seem out of place in the editorial pages of certain East Asian newspapers:

Alien western ideas, they believed, were the cause of the fatal estrangement between the monarch and the people; the old social model of an autocratic, Orthodox society in which everyone knew his or her place was a better recipe for social stability.

And this, says Sixsmith, was a direct result of the centuries under the foreign rule:

... the Slavophile-Westerner debate stemmed from a dichotomy that had haunted Russia from the earliest times: the values of Eastern depotism, the legacy of Mongol yoke, versus the Western model of participatory government and social guarantees.

But one might question this equating the Europe vs. Asia dichotomy that of democracy vs. autocracy. It is not only ethnocentric and potentially self-serving but also simplistic: several parts of Europe that spent centuries as part of the (Asian) Ottoman Empire now have thriving democracies, as do the Turks themselves. Japan has been democratic for two generations. Asia, especially in the twentieth century, has had no monopoly on autocracy, nor the West on democracy.

* * *

Perhaps because he doesn’t start his account until 1581, by which time the Tatars were in full retreat if not entirely defeated, Alan Wood sees the tide of autocracy going the other way: he advances the view that Siberia was been a ‘colony’ “ruthlessly and recklessly exploited for the benefit of the autocratic, tsarist government located in European Russia,” a situation which he argues has continued to the present day.

Wood’s Russia’s Frozen Frontier is far more academic in tone and treatment that Sixsmith’s book; while not for the casual reader, it very efficiently provides a great deal of background. Siberia’s role as a provider of natural resources for the enrichment of others dates back to its earliest days: the original “black gold” was sable among other furs, the value of which seems inconceivable today.

In 1623, two black fox skins were valued at 100 rubles. For this sum, the owner, ‘could have purchased more than fifty acres of land, erected a good cabin, bought five horses, ten head of cattle, twenty sheep, several dozen fowl, and have had almost half his capital left over’. [4]

Little has changed, except the nature of the assets from which the wealth is derived. The mineral assets of Rusal, the first Russian company to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, are based in Siberia, as are those underlying the extraordinary wealth of most if not all of Russia’s so-called oligarchs.

While most of China’s venom regarding late Qing-era “unequal treaties” has been, and is, directed at the Britain and the West in general, Russia—unlike the other European powers—has actually managed to hang on to its nineteenth-century territorial gains, which amounted “an area the size of France and Germany combined”. The 1858 Treaty of Aigun gave Russia “all the territories on the left (i.e. Northern) bank of the Amur”. There was, Wood continues, “some ambiguity in the wording of the text concerning ownership of the lands between the Ussuri and the coast of the Sea of Japan.”

Impatient of textological obscurities, [Governor-General Nikolai Nikolaevich] Muravëv brazenly—and typically—dispatched troops into the area (known as the Primorye), unceremoniously announced to the local natives that they were now subjects of the tsar...

Muravëv wasn’t one for subtlety. 1860 saw “the raising of the Russian flag over a scruffy coastal hamlet... with the new, triumphalist name of Vladivostok, ‘Lord of the East’”.

Siberia’s interaction with East Asia continued apace. The first Trans-Siberian railway line actually reached Vladivostok from Chita via Manchuria, passing through Harbin, a city which stills displays, at least architecturally, considerable Russian influence. Russia fought a disastrous war with Japan in 1904-05. The 1917 Revolution and ensuing Civil War further stirred Russians and Asians together. Mongolia, which had broken away from China, fell into the lap of the Soviet Union, although not without a bizarre and bloody period of rule by the messianistic Roman Fëderovich Ungern-Sternberg, who defeated the Chinese garrison in Urga and ushered in Mongolia’s independence. Wood writes: “Tracing his career or reading his biography is like delving into the deepest depths of human—or inhuman—wickedness.”

Japan intervened in the Russian Far East in 1918 and stayed until 1922, a curious and now obscure episode. Originally an Allied operation based on worries that, with Russia out of the First World War, German forces might push all the way to the Pacific. Japan, or at least parts of the Japanese establishment, saw an expansionist opportunity. The Japanese eventually deployed 70,000 troops, far exceeding the 7,000 soldiers originally envisaged by American President Woodrow Wilson. The Japanese played politics in supporting the “Whites” in the Civil War, but with no long-term result.

The territorial legacies of Russian expansion into Asia are now largely put to rest with the considerable exception of the dispute over the Kuriles, islands of which Russia is in possession but which are claimed by Japan.

* * *

Siberia is, and has always been, a place apart. It is vast, unimaginably so. I have experienced only the tiny 200-kilometer strip between Vladivostok and Nakhodka, two of the most developed cities, both ports in Primorsky Krai in Russia’s Far East [5]. Even in the most-densely populated parts of one of the most densely-populated regions, the emptiness outside the cities themselves is striking. This is a land where wild tigers—to say nothing of bears and bandits—still roam.

Histories and analytical texts struggle to give an impression of what the place is really like. Fortunately, Siberia’s remoteness—and the untamed nature of the place—is attractive to a certain breed of travel writer. One of these is the Polish journalist Jacek Hugo-Bader, who drove—alone—from Moscow to Vladivostok during the winter of 2007, an adventure he recorded in White Fever (originally in Polish, but now available in English translation).

The author’s first words set the tone: “My only prayers were not to break down in the taiga at night, and to run into any bandits.” And with good reason: “Every dozen metres there’s the wreck of a burned-out car. They must have broken down in the winter, at night too, and their desperate owners set them alight to keep warm. There’s little chance this would have helped them survive.”

White Fever is a story about a journey and the breakdowns, roads that are little more than tracks, the close escapes. It is even more a story of the people he meets along the way: drug addicts, HIV sufferers, shamans, scavengers of metal wire from nuclear test sites, alcoholic natives and a living Christ. It sounds grim, and in many ways Hugo-Bader makes Siberia (and the Kazakh steppe to the south) sound like it is populated exclusively with hobos, charlatans and derelicts. Siberia is not for the faint-hearted.

But Hugo-Bader is, on the whole, non-judgemental, telling his tales in a tone of wry bemusement. He describes his visit to the leading shamaness of Kyzyl, the capital of Tuva:.

Finally she filled her mouth with as much milk as she could fit in there. She stuck the bowl in my hands so it wouldn’t be in her way, gave her head a good shake, almost took a run-up and spat the whole lot straight in my face

Instantly I felt better. And once I had wiped my eyes, I saw a very real invoice, including VAT, for 800 rubles (£16) for a ‘purification ritual’.

When I finally made the claim for business trip at the newspaper office, I put it down as a ‘health-care expense’.

Or his encounter with Sergei Anatolievich Torop, known to his followers as “Vissarion”, which means “Life Giving”:

The first time, Christ ride on a donkey, drank wine and lived in chastity. Now he prefers a Yamaha snow scooter, he’s a vegetarian and teetotaller, and his wife is pregnant again. His second wife. He divorced the first one, so she went off to the city and started studying clinical psychology.

The white fever of the title is what the native people call the after-effects of alcohol, to which they have a particularly low tolerance and, apparently particularly terrifying after-effects: hallucinations and black-outs often resulting death, sometime self-inflicted, sometimes through exposure to the elements. Hugo-Bader introduces a particular sad chapter by noting:

the words ‘die’, ‘kill’ and ‘death’ appear more than fifty times. The word ‘rifle’ comes up eleven times, ‘vodka’ twelve times, and only once does the word ‘love’ appear, but in an unhappy context.

Wood describes how the native Siberians—Buryats, Tungus, Ainu, Yakuts, Chukchi—suffered greatly in their four centuries of shared Russian history. For Americans (and perhaps Australians; I cannot speak from experience), these heartbreaking accounts are like seeing the sorry treatment of our own native peoples through a Slavic mirror.

* * *

None of these books deals directly with the issue of why Asia and Russia are taking so long to integrate economically. The Kurile Islands of course get in the way of full Russo-Japanese normalization, but China and Russia no longer have such impediments.

The difficulties are not hard to discern. China’s interest is not so much in Russia as in its Siberian resources. Russia’s long ambivalence regarding Siberia—a combination of exploitation and neglect and the socio-economic consequences therefrom—are all too evident. Frazier’s accounts of the Siberian ways of doing things suffice to explain why Sino-Russian trade and investment has not yet reached the levels that logic indicates it should.

China is for Russia both an opportunity as well as a strategic and demographic threat; yet even if Russia could make up its mind what it wanted to do in Asia, Hugo-Bader’s White Fever indicates that such human capital as exists in Siberia is more a function of the people themselves than state investment in their well-being, and proves difficult for central authority to leverage.

But maybe it’s best that things aren’t too easy. Difficulties give one precious time to reflect. Siberia has a surfeit of both.

Related reviews:

Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier

Japan’s Siberian Intervention, 1918-1922 by Paul E. Dunscomb

The Future of China-Russian Relations by James Bellacqua (ed.)

The Bear Watches the Dragon: Russia’s Perceptions of China and the Evolution of Russian-Chinese Relations Since the Eighteenth Century by Alexander Lukin

The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia by Anna Reid

The Bloody White Baron by James Palmer

Where Empires Collided by Michael Share

Through Siberia By Accident by Dervla Murphy

Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia by Andrei Znamenski

Secrets and Spies: The Harbin Files by Mara Moustafine