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

They repeated endlessly that the border has been settled and that this is no longer an issue, but boil at what they view as the mistreatment of Chinese traders in Siberia. In a Chinese think-tank, instead of sitting together around a meeting room table, you recline in armchairs spaced apart and sip tea. This only makes the European in me less comfortable, as I listen to what the Chinese think about Russia. That the border is porous to migrants and influence, these experts do not bother to hide. ‘They have an army, customs, police and border guards. Our businessmen are no… angels . Are the Russians sleeping?’

But does China want this land back? When you confront Chinese experts with this question the usual refrain is: ‘this is impossible’. And it is not a priority like it is for Taiwan. But when you phrase the question differently: ‘But what if Russia collapsed again? If you could have your wish come true, what country would these territories be in?’ The answer suddenly changes. In the office of a leading Chinese Russia specialist in the sticky futurism of Shanghai, the professor refuses to answer the question and refers me to his assistant professor, who refuses to answer the question and refers me to the professor. They then argued in Chinese. Those higher up are more cautious. ‘If Russia collapses again China would never annex these territories… they would become independent,’ says one professor who advises the Politburo expert chamber. ‘China would not dare.’

Chinese history is an active volcano. The question of whether China is vengeful and hungry towards Russia struck me as unsettled and undecided, but also unimportant amongst its intellectual elites. It was unclear what their intentions would be when China had ‘risen’ and was not merely ‘rising’. But the same could be said for China’s views of the world.

As the Trans-Siberian approaches Birobidzhan it seems painfully clear in Russia today, where half of the country lives in the economic shadow of China while the elites of its European cities dream of the ‘civilized order’ of London and Berlin, that the tsarist reactionary, Konstantin Leonteyev, was accurate in his predictions of what menaced this state: ‘Russia’s death will come in either of two ways – from the East by the sword of the awakened Chinese, or through the voluntary merger with a pan-European republican federation.’

The dawn is the colour of stone and the landscape is different now. There is a mist and under it untouched marshes and bogs that roll towards low, rounded hills under forests and ever more mist. The railway is the only thing that is human. The gloom lingers into the morning. This emptiness is as raw and untouched as I imagine the savannah, but it is certainly more so. To those who live here, the Russianness of these lands is beyond dispute, but the plant life, the dense, busy thickets and the clouds clinging to the hilltops look little like Muscovy and everything like Manchuria. The rocking of the train, the damp chill that has entered the compartment, even on a July morning, reinforces the near absurdity of what I am looking at – that these are the lands Stalin designated as farmland for the Jews.

The train screeches to a halt for three minutes at the station. ‘Are you sure? Why is a foreigner coming to Birobidzhan?’ mutters the elderly ticket inspector. ‘Foreigners never come here!’ After three nights on the train, the platform had a ‘through the looking glass’ absurdity – the name ‘Birobidzhan’ written in big metal cursive Hebrew script over the red walls of this quintessentially Soviet station. A few steps outside and a column toped by a seven-branched candelabra, like the holy Menorah of the long destroyed Jewish temple, greets the traveller. Unlike in Israel, when as you step out of Ben Gurion Airport to be greeted by a small Menorah, at home and at peace with itself by the minibuses that climb the hills into Jerusalem, this one has the opposite effect of putting one at ease. It seems troubling. It is not just in the wrong place but seems duplicitous, sinister even.

A statue in bronze paint of a ‘Jew’ driving a cart that could have featured in an anti-Semitic pamphlet from the 1930s only exacerbates this feeling. No Jew would have ordered a statue with such a nose, to greet another at his station.

But I had not come to this incredibly remote region looking for Jews, but for signs of Chinese power. Birobidzhan is the capital of the ‘Jewish Autonomous Oblast’, a territory larger than Belgium with the population of little more than 170,000 people and falling. Its name is a legacy of one of Stalin’s projects to destroy Judaism. Like the Nazis, the Soviets believed that Jewish culture should perish in their territory – not physically, but as a religion. The Politburo dreamed of a day when no Russian-speaking Jew knew the meaning of Yom Kippur. Like Hitler, they almost succeeded.

In the utopian frenzy of the 1930s it was decided that to ‘normalize’ the Jews they should have a fixed territory like every other Soviet ethnos. Because the USSR was frightened of Japan severing the Trans-Siberian, unwanted and inhospitable land was selected for them on the Manchurian border. The Jews would farm the buffer zone. Birobidzhan is the dream that failed, inside the dream that failed. Its Jewish population never surpassed 12 per cent. This is because in the Potemkin Israel there was never a synagogue, the instruction of Hebrew was banned and the holy scrolls and manuscripts the Jews had brought with them were burned.

The longer you spend in Birobidzhan today you realize just how few Jews there really are here. But what is surprising is that for all the talk in Moscow about the ‘migrant invasion’, the Chinese are similarly invisible in the city. Everyone in Birobidzhan warned me that the Chinese ‘are everywhere’, but I couldn’t see a single one as I walked through the streets named after Yiddish writers. This is surprising because the facts about the Chinese presence in the region would indicate otherwise. The local authorities estimate that Chinese farmers are tilling 14 per cent of its arable land. 21This is the highest reported percentage for any region in Russia and a huge amount of territory. It is not being carried out by private individuals but by the state. In 2010 the authorities of the neighbouring Chinese province of Heilongjiang leased 4,266km sq. of Russia. 22The same year China rented another 3,450km sq. of agricultural land in the Far East. 23Altogether, an area somewhat smaller than the US state of New Jersey.

Yet this does not appear to have changed the city’s racial profile. The demographics of the town of Birobidzhan really do seem what the Russian 2010 census says – 90 per cent Russian. That is not to say there are no immigrants in the oblast. It is just not the immigrants one expected. There are Azeris, Armenians and Tajiks in every cafe, shop, building site or place that people gather. This is as it is anywhere else in Russia. Locals say there are next to no Chinese living in the city and that their numbers have dropped during Putin’s rule, even if more land is being leased.

I became friendly with one Muslim immigrant, Azer. ‘When my family moved to this place from the Caucasus,’ he remembered, ‘I was shocked and so homesick that I had to be hospitalized.’ Now in his twenties he is part of a local business clan of Azeris who migrated to Birobidzhan in the 1990s and have sewn up the city. It is they, not spectral Chinese, who as a clan dominate over the local taxis, minimarkets, furniture stores, meat-packaging business and even politics. He boasts that his cousin is even the local deputy prosecutor.

Intelligent enough to have become bored out of his mind in a small Siberian town, Azer took me for a drive in his father’s SUV. Even though it has the lowest HDI for a Slavic majority region in Russia, there is still development. The city is a muddy jumble of ramshackle estates, smattered with new low-lying housing projects, that even if new, look exactly like poor-quality Soviet buildings in Moscow. But many live in squalid wooden houses, the kind usually seen in villages. Azer sniffs: ‘Only the drinkers live there. But all Russians are drinkers. This nation is dying. It’s addicted to everything it can drink, swallow or inject and it’s rotten right through. There will be no Russians left here one day. Only Muslims and Chinese.’ He sighs. ‘If only Russians didn’t drink, like Muslims, they would be the strongest.’