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

He points out that many people still live in the cheapest, simplest barracks-like, two-storey blocks of flats dating back decades. They are made of sodden, worn wood. Built by the USSR as a temporary solution for the first colonists but never replaced due to lack of funds. ‘How can they not afford to build a decent block of flats, when the country produces more oil than any other? They do not care about Russia… the government are all thieves. They are robbing Russia and buying villas in the south of France.’

But what does he think of Putin himself? The car bumps on potholes and swerves out of the way of a bleeding alcoholic stumbling across the road, but Azer is suddenly worried that he has given the wrong impression of Birobidzhan. For the past hour he has been ranting about alcoholism, inevitable migrant invasions, drug abuse and the death of the nation. ‘Don’t get me wrong. It’s so much better than in the 1990s. I want to show you that good things are happening here too. We may not be China but things are getting better.’

The car speeds back towards the centre down empty roads. We have arrived at a glistening new supermarket, packed. It opened last year. ‘You see,’ smiles Azer as we walk inside. ‘This is why people voted for Putin, even if they know that the party are crooks in this town. Because now you can buy whatever you want.’ In the aisles we stop and count: over ninety kinds of beer, over eighty kinds of shampoo, over thirty kinds of frozen prawns, a similar number of frozen pizzas. We lost count trying to work out how many variants of yoghurt. Never, before the opening of this supermarket had there been anything approaching a modern shopping centre here. ‘Before Putin you could not go shopping like this,’ says Azer. ‘So I think he has not been all bad.’

Travelling through Russia is like travelling in a time machine. In Moscow, St Petersburg and Ekaterinburg the ‘wild 1990s’ have faded from memory and with it the problems that ‘the Russian Pinochet’ was supposed to solve. Supermarkets have been present for over ten years. After a decade, consumerism alone no longer legitimizes the regime. Here in Russia’s least developed region a single supermarket is such a huge sign of progress that Putin’s inefficiencies, corruption and dysfunctions – the very things that can cause the poor public services that Azer was ranting about – are excusable. When did the people of a region that was home to forced labour camps and impoverished Stalinist collective farms, fighting off the buzzing of mosquitoes in the Taiga, ever before have the chance to taste thirty kinds of frozen pizza?

‘The Chinese want this empty land,’ expounds Azer. ‘They are everywhere.’ But where? In the miserable marketplace where peasants in dirty T-shirts and camouflage pants sell bric-a-brac and vegetables, there are only a handful of Chinese. ‘The Chinese own the stalls and the Russians sell for them,’ said one macho Kyrgyz crockery vendor. ‘They are very clever you see. They don’t work for nothing like us.’ There are half a dozen Kyrgyz and Tajik market hands. Here, like everywhere else in Russia the fabled mass migration of Chinese is hard to see, but the mass migration of Caucasian and Central Asians is self-evident.

The locals say that Chinese peddlers have been ‘dying out’ during Putin’s rule. First, because the 2000s economic boom has brought a supermarket even to Birobidzhan, meaning there is less need for Chinese peddlers on street corners. Second, the local police and interior ministry forces were instructed to chuck out more Chinese illegals. The smaller a town is in Russia, the more likely it is to have Soviet-style policing. Birobidzhan is no exception. Locals say ‘one call to the FSB’, for suspicious behaviour snuffs out opposition before it begins. ‘People are frightened,’ says Azer. ‘Corrupt police can come and extort your business and try and take it away if they find illegal workers.’

So it is incredibly hard to operate as a foreigner, especially for the Chinese, without getting harassed by the local police. During my stay in the ‘oblast’, I was detained and under a clock with Putin’s face in it, interrogated about my ‘activities’ in the region. The questions ranged from the sinister, which I refused to answer – ‘name every single person you met’, to the absurd–’how did you learn of the existence of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast?’ Their responsibilities, they explained, included catching illegal immigrants. This gave me a chance to interview the front line in Russia’s anti-migrant guard about the Chinese.

‘We catch illegal Chinese almost every other day,’ explained the officer interrogating me. His face had scars and his hair was in a crew cut. ‘In all, we estimate there are about 2,000 Chinese here in the region. We are constantly catching them.’

This number is not particularly high and hardly a ‘sovereignty threatening’ amount. It is a testament that for all the problems of Putinism, the border police have not broken down under the pressure of corruption and weight of numbers. Indeed if the figure of 2,000 from the migration police was anywhere near accurate, it would mean there are less ‘ethnic Asians’ in Birobidzhan than there were in the 1930s when a 4,500-strong Korean ethnic minority lived here. 24

The longer I spent in Birobidzhan the more I realized that my expectations – that business and job opportunities would be blending Russia and China across the Amur, the way the USA and Mexico have melded together across the Rio Grande – were misplaced. In fact, the city might even need more Chinese to take advantage economically of its trading position.

According to the migration police the Chinese were almost all farmers in the countryside. To find them I drove out to the former collective farm of Waldheim, the USSR’s failed ‘kibbutz’. The drop in development is sharp and instant the moment you leave behind the outskirts of Birobidzhan. In the villages there are no paved roads and only official buildings are not made from wood. With the closing of the collective farms these small societies have tumbled into subsistence farming, alcoholism and a degradation of a darker kind than I had seen elsewhere in Russia. People, often visibly sick, stood by the roadside trying to sell berries and mushrooms they had picked – this, they told me, is the only way of making ends meet in the summer.

A car mechanic drove me to the Chinese border, almost 100km to the south, to finally see the ‘takeover’. The man in question is Ilya. He has a sandy unshaven look, and does a bit of everything: trading, driving, smuggling, odds and ends. ‘You know what makes a man from Birobidzhan? Cannabis, it’s all about the cannabis.’ The road to the south has not a single piece of farmland by its sides, only pristine, empty fields. ‘But everyone knows the dealers are in big business growing huge fields of cannabis in the Taiga and everyone here is an expert smoker.’ According to Ilya and local rumour, the SUVs in this city all come from men making their money in narcotics. ‘What else do you think it is? Oil? We have none of that.’

About 50km from China, we come to a fork in the road. There is a derelict piece of Soviet roadside sculpture, an exuberant, futurist and cracked hammer and sickle. The forests cast their shadows as they do in Disney movies and come close to the road. ‘Which way are the Chinks?’, shouts Ilya at a passer-by. A young woman of indeterminate age, sweating alcohol is circling round and round the crossroads on a bicycle. ‘That way.’

The jagged trees fall away and for the first time in Birobidzhan we see industrial, efficient, farmland. This crop is low-lying, electric green and clings to the earth like a moss. ‘Soya,’ breathes in Ilya. ‘That’s how you know the Chinese are farming the land. Only Chinese farm soya.’ We drive past kilometres of electric green agriculture until we reach the village of ‘Experimental Fields’, in the ‘Leninsk District’. A rusty sign says that it has been inhabited since 1848 by Cossack horsemen. This era of settlement seems to be coming to an end.