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

No Russian tills the land in ‘Experimental Fields’. The people who live here subsist only from picking berries or mushrooms and the little money they get from state pensions. The twenty or so wooden cottages that make up the village are uncared for but inhabited, yet nevertheless have an abandoned look. The centre of this settlement is no longer the ‘village club’, where Soviet dances and propaganda films would have been played when it was a collective farm, but what the villagers call the Chinese ‘base’. Protected by metal gates and barbed wire, the Chinese are living in a barracks between huge barns filled with what the Russians seem no longer to have: shiny machinery, trucks, tractors and jeeps. A sun-bleached red flag hangs limply at the entrance.

We push in. Ilya steps out of the car and starts to demand of the few huddled Chinese labourers in the barn, ‘Where’s your master? Where is a guy that speaks some Russian?’ Like any working-class person in Birobidzhan, Ilya knows some basic Chinese; the same words that in Europe Russians know in English from contact with Europeans. ‘Hello, yes, no, how much does it cost?’ Everything in the ‘base’ is splattered and pungent. Mud, more mud and piles of manure – but it was alive, unlike the Russian villages. The Chinese labourers claim the ‘captain’ is not here and only the ‘captain’ speaks Russian.

We go to speak to the Slavs of ‘Experimental Fields’. It is like entering into a scene from a Russian nationalist’s 3 a.m. nightmare. The ‘privatization’ of the collective farm effectively killed the village. Now the lands are ‘rented’ to the Chinese, but no one seems to know who collects the money. By the roadside we talk to some mushroom sellers. They look like they have the plague – in a sense they do – they are moonshine alcoholics.

‘The Russians are finished. They till nothing here. Nothing at all… All we do is pick mushrooms and sell them to passing cars,’ slurs the younger of the two, a cross-eyed woman with brown hair and crunched eyelids. She seems slightly deformed – as if she has never received anything like modern medical care her entire life. ‘All the land is farmed by the Chinese to the border. We work for the Chinese… we work in the fields for them. They are cruel masters.’

They are like survivors of an apocalypse. In a sense they are, as for this village that is what the death of the state was. The second mushroom seller has a face so riven by wrinkles it looks like cracked mud on the bottom of a dry lake; she shakes a gigantic mushroom she has picked in my general direction, shouting: ‘The Chinese have taken all the farm lands. We are just bums here.’

The hags say they are paid $2 a day by the Chinese to get on their knees and harvest the soya. Behind us some dirty teenage girls are wandering around aimlessly. It is a humiliating testament to the staggering incompetence of the Kremlin that despite being one of the world’s largest oil producers, people are living within its borders in conditions more squalid than anywhere in Africa, with the same trickle of new Asian landowners. ‘We hope more Chinese will come so there will be more work,’ squawk the mushroom sellers.

‘Are you worried that in the future the land will not be Russian and will be controlled by China? That there will be no more motherland here?’

‘Who gives a fuck about the motherland. There is no fucking motherland.’

They then waved the giant mushroom at me again, plaintively. I wanted to understand what the younger generation of ‘Experimental Fields’ felt about the motherland. So, I started to talk with three teenage girls sitting by the roadside. They were unwashed with crooked teeth, covered in a visible layer of dirt. All three had brilliant green eyes. According to them, every single Slav in the village of about 200 people was either an alcoholic, sick, dying or violent. Nobody was healthy. The Chinese they said lived ‘completely parallel in their base’, and had next to no contact with them. They laughed when I asked if the Russians tilled any fields in the border area: ‘No, only Chinese.’

Living like this, did they feel that they had a homeland, a country that cared for them, or a future? Nastya, aged sixteen, said: ‘What the fuck do I care? Who cares about the motherland? Who cares about the Chinese taking it all over? What the fuck should I care about that? The place is dying. It would be better if more Chinese came here so there would be more people here. What the fuck are you talking about a motherland?’

There is no future in ‘Experimental Fields’. There is no evidence of the 2000s economic boom, no evidence of Putin, no evidence of the state. Just sick survivors living in the wreckage of the ‘privatization’ of Soviet agriculture. It looks like a cartoon come to life of what one would expect an encounter between a rising and declining race to look like. Perhaps the thing that is the most dispiriting is that these old Cossack villages close to the border had been founded in the nineteenth century, by people fleeing in search of a better life.

In the remaining 50km to the border, the number of Chinese bases climbs dramatically. There is one in every village and most of the land by the roadside is electric soya green. In the larger village of Babtsovo the scene is equally bleak. The only building that has been renovated in the past two decades is the town council, where outside five or six cows chew the cud on the dirt track beside it. The ‘shop’ is just a door into the front room of a small house, which sells cigarettes and petrol. One elderly woman by the roadside echoes the story of social collapse I had heard earlier. ‘Not one Russian still farms. We only live off pensions. We drink. We pick berries and mushrooms. Sometimes people work for the Chinese.’

In the dirt tracks of this village I crossed paths with an impressive, clean white car being driven by a wealthy man. Out of it stepped a Chinese businessman in his thirties, leaving a pretty Chinese woman nervously looking out from the front seat. He is a thin, wiry young guy from Harbin region, who goes by the Russian name of Andrei, who explains in perfect Russian that he is the director of one of nineteen Chinese companies operating in this small border region of Leninsk in Birobidzhan.

‘I’m almost certain that the Chinese are now the majority in Leninsk, especially if you take into account there are next to no Russians of working age here,’ he says. In his opinion there are 1,000 Chinese in this region and just over 6,000 in the whole of Birobidzhan. However, that number has declined ‘quite a lot’ in recent years. ‘The local government wants to cut the quota for Leninsk region. They think there are too many Chinese here. They want it to be just 600. There’s nothing I can do about it… If they tell us to leave, they throw us out… then we’re gone, we’ve been thrown out.’

This isn’t his only problem regarding labour. The director explains that in recent years he has found it much harder to convince Chinese workers to come to Russia. ‘To be honest, life in China is better than it is in Russia these days. As Chinese wages rise I am going to start having serious problems getting people to come to Russia.’ Andrei also feels increasingly undercut by the arrival of large numbers of Central Asian and Caucasian immigrants. ‘The government is pleased they are coming as it means they need less people from China.’ But this hasn’t shaken his faith in business here: ‘There is so much empty land in Russia, so much of it is just great for vegetables.’ The Chinese director refuses to comment on any matter historical, political or geopolitical but groans suggestively: ‘And all the Russians are doing on this empty land is drinking moonshine and picking berries.’