Ben Judah - Fragile Empire - How Russia Fell in and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin

Yet people still talk about losing Siberia, even if the overall number of Chinese around them is not rising dramatically. This is because the source of their fear is not demographic trends, but the weakness of the Russian state. They know that any renewed breakdown could change the racial balance and the ownership of raw materials across the region overnight. Russians are like Israelis. The Jews will tell you – even as Israel is stronger in the Middle East than ever before – that they fear the new Holocaust. The Russians are also a historically shocked nation. If the Holocaust could happen once, it could happen again. If the Soviet Union collapsed, it means that the Russian Federation can collapse. The nation feels that Russia is a fragile thing.

In the train carriage, the conversation drifts to whether people in her town support Mr Putin: ‘At first people closed their eyes,’ she put her hands in a praying position and lifted her eyes, ‘and pretended not to see. They wanted to believe in Putin’s power. To see him as our “saviour”. But people had already stopped believing in him by 2008. Then we ended up in a war in Georgia, there was a crisis… things started getting harder for people again. Now nobody trusts and believes in his power.’

‘So who did you vote for?’

She gave a short, embarassed laugh: ‘I voted for Zhirinovsky. I think that he says what’s right and what’s wrong. He sees a problem and says it’s a problem. Most of my friends voted for the Communist Party. Yet in our town the results were over 50 per cent for Putin. I don’t believe this. In the villages around they say they all voted 100 per cent for Putin on the electoral returns. Am I supposed to believe this too?’

It is important not to think that Russians who vote for Zhirinovsky and Zyuganov are fools. They are not nostalgic for ‘empire’ or for the days that Russian tanks ruled in Prague. Those who vote for the Russian Communist Party are nostalgic for the welfare state. Those who vote for Zhirinovsky are frightened of being overwhelmed by millions of Muslims and Chinese. If you live in a tiny town on the Trans-Siberian both seem more immediate issues than liberal economic reform.

She lowered her voice: ‘We can’t buy the liberal newspapers like Kommersant in our town. People who go to Khabarovsk buy them and share them. People in our town are frightened of the FSB… unlike in Moscow. We are starting to get some more information. It’s seeping in through the Internet. Anybody who wants to know can learn – we know there is an opposition, we know there is this Navalny. But we know very little about it.’

The noise of slamming doors and the screeching of train wheels echoes down the corridor. Inside this carriage and in the minds of these two women, faith, trust and hope in the Putin state has gone, but the power of the Putin state remains. Outside, more oceans of trees on small hills. There is nothing, nothing here.

There is something unsettling looking at their children, playing on the floor of the compartment and toddling up and down past the compartments – these little people that do not know who Putin is – that if his foes continue to be as weak and ineffective as they have always been, that in the year 2024 they will be old enough to talk politics and to question how he ruled their entire lives. But in Russia with what people call ‘the Stalin time’, then ‘the Brezhnev time’, it is historically how things tend to play out.

Days go by, with more vague talks about the Chinese ‘threat’. It is clear that the Russians of Siberia do not feel themselves the ‘bear’ of European imagination, but a tiny nation on an enormous and weakly defended territory atop of the teeming masses of Asia. They feel more like a huge Mongolia, a sparsely populated and easily overrun territory inhabited by a backward tribe, towards the new China, than a small India, a fallen-behind peer competitor who smarts at being overtaken.

Part of the reason is historical. Slavs did not always inhabit these lands. In the beginning, the Russian empire was built by bandits and greed. The Cossacks, half-criminal horsemen living beyond the rule of the law, travelled ever further east from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries in search of furs and then more furs. On their way they trampled on the weak Khanates who ruled over what had been the core of Genghis Khan’s empire. This state system was so weak as it was not just Romanov Russia that was expanding, but to the south, the Chinese Qing dynasty was expanding into the north and west. It is a myth that China has never been expansionist. As Moscow conquered Siberia, the Qing emperors added Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia and their native Manchuria to its tributary imperium.

In the seventeenth century these alien empires met in the fertile valley of the Amur. Today, the Chinese nationalist narrative claims that these lands were under Chinese sovereignty. In fact the land was on each bank of the river under the sovereignty of the ethnically Manchu Qing dynasty, who made the Han Chinese wear pigtail queues on pain of death. The Qing separated this territory from areas inhabited by Han by one of the last ‘great walls’ built on the orders of the Forbidden City – the ‘willow palisade’.

This was a series of earthworks, moats and ditches begun in 1648 and lined with a wall of willow trees that marked an internal border between Manchu and Han areas. The Manchu, feeling themselves separate to the Han, did not want them flooding their ancestral lands. In 1668 the Kangxi Emperor even forbade Han from settling to the north of the willow palisade by imperial edict. This was not as if the Han were being amputated from their homeland. The ‘willow palisade’ was actually built along parts of the old ‘great wall’ built by the Ming dynasty that failed to defend China from barbarians such as the Manchus in the frozen north.

The construction of the ‘willow palisade’ was a historical error by Beijing of the first order. It meant that when the Cossacks arrived in the Amur they found not lands heavily populated by Han peasants but barren lands inhabited by a scattering of stone-age natives. The story of the rise and fall of the ‘willow palisade’ is the same as that of Russian annexation in the area. The year after Han were banned from the area in 1668, the Qing dynasty was forced to define its borders with the Tsar. Only when Russia tore up this treaty, to annex all of ‘outer Manchuria’ in 1858–60 did the Qing realize their world-historic mistake. Imperial officials began to encourage the migration of Han settlers to the north. A land-rush followed, as an estimated 8.7 million settlers arrived from the south in the late nineteenth century. 12Had they been permitted to migrate earlier there could never have been a Russian majority in the areas that are now the provinces around the cities of Birobidzhan, Khabarovsk and Vladivostok – whose name in Russian taunts them as ‘the lord of the east’.

Moscow’s Asian power peaked on the eve of the 1905 Russo-Japanese war. It was in this campaign that the last willows on the palisade were hacked down by Russian and Japanese troops as they fought for control of Manchuria. Yet losing the first modern war where Asians defeated whites may have been a piece of historical good luck. Had Moscow won the war it might have annexed Manchuria with its large Han population, which would have spread all over Siberia and the Russian Far East.

As a result of a Manchu error and a Russian defeat in the early twentieth century, the Chinese presence in these territories was only limited. There were perhaps fewer than 100,000 Asians in the whole region and an Asian majority in Vladivostok, who were overwhelmingly ethnic Koreans. Stalin corrected this by deporting them all to Central Asia, but he could do nothing to remove the geopolitical fault line that is the border between Christianity and China. Neither did shared communism close the huge distance between either country, across the short few kilometres over the Amur.