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

The road is now straight to the Amur and the border, past forests and vast swamplands, Chinese bases and degenerated Russian villages. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a train track appears out of the wilderness and follows the road. A faded poster at the next turn-off of the main road announced where this leads. This sun-bleached placard of a Russian trooper punching the air with his rifle says this is a ‘Tankodrome’, a military base for armour. We pass some men in uniform, urinating by the roadside next to a parked camouflaged military truck.

Ahead is their large, run-down base on the hillside: rows of artillery, tanks, military trucks and listening towers stand to defend Russian land from the Chinese should the day ever come. It stares out onto the electric green farmlands of the settlers, then over the Amur onto a row of rounded hills.

They are covered in wind farms. We have reached China – civilization, progress and a roadblock of FSB border guards.

We stop the car to look and listen to the distant whirr of the white wind farms on the other side. The ignition is off and Ilya laughs a little sadly.

‘I guess the Chinese… built communism differently from us.’

They say that the last night of the Trans-Siberian always smells the worst. In Europe, when most travellers spend only a night or two in a carriage; it’s never been too long since they last washed. The third-class wagon carrying mostly Tajik and Uzbek migrants and poor Russian families into Vladivostok smells like no one has washed in a week. Pungent, acidic, somewhere between stale sweat, cigarettes butts and gone off meat.

The migrants are worried about the summer’s work in the port-city. They have heard that the construction boom on the back of Putin’s orders to rebuild it is already coming to an end. They are ready to work for next to nothing and on this last night of rest they are playing cards and smoking cigarettes in the rocking gloom of the carriage. Some drink, none pray. Everyone is excited – almost a week since it left Moscow behind, the train is coming into a station somewhere wealthy. As I fall asleep to the clattering of the tracks there is still chatter:

‘There are so many Uzbeks they say it’s an Uzbek town.’

‘I wonder what the bridges look like.’

‘But the police are bad there?’

Dawn in Vladivostok is misty and humid. This is the season of Asia’s monsoon. The pressure is heavy and the air is thick: the atmosphere of the Far East. The city comes as a shock. After weeks on Russia’s rotting periphery and along the post-Soviet rustbelt, it is a surprise to see so much development and prosperity. Vladivostok, to the chagrin of its Han and Korean neighbours, means ‘the lord of the east’ and has been redeveloped at huge cost into a Potemkin port-city to dissuade China of any false notions that Russia might be retreating from here.

Putin has sought out events to showcase Russia’s ‘resurgence’ to the world, the way China staged the Beijing Olympics. In 2006, he succeeded in gaining the right to host the 2012 summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Community (APEC). The site would be Vladivostok. The summit brought together the economic and political leadership of all Pacific nations. For Putin this was a chance to rebuild this city into an impressive showcase to dazzle the Japanese, American and Chinese leaderships all at once. He also hoped to rebuild an economically vulnerable region that simply could not afford to fall behind for strategic reasons – being so close to China, South Korea and Japan.

As a result, day and night, thousands of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Kyrgyz were drilling, spinning cement mixers and hammering the final nails of the rebuilding programme. It is cheaper and less geopolitically risky to ship semi-illiterate Russian speaking migrants from ex-Soviet Central Asia than to employ Chinese from across the border. It is perhaps ironic then that the city they are rebuilding is excessively, ostentatiously in the image of nineteenth-century Europe – to the point of being un-Russian. The pavements are made with paving stones not concrete like most in Moscow or anywhere else in the country, there are neat fresh flowerbeds, freshly tarmacked roads and restored nineteenth-century tsarist facades.

You can see that this city enjoyed the 2000s as boom years, by losing count of how many supermarkets, car dealerships, designer clothes stores, $100-a-head seafood restaurants or hoardings for flights to Hainan and Thailand there are. New high-rise apartments are perched around the Golden Horn Bay, the city’s perfect natural harbour that tsarist officers named after the straits in Constantinople, Istanbul – or Tsargrad, which they imagined as the most wonderful bay in the world.

The new Vladivostok surprises by what it does not have. There are hardly any Chinese restaurants, Chinese shops or large amounts of Chinese workers, travellers or tourists. In complete contrast to the border cities of more open countries, on the US–Mexican border, or Marseille in southern France, the city is far ‘whiter’ than any of the major urban areas of Britain, France or the United States. You have to look closely to realize this city is actually on the Sea of Japan. Most of the food on sale is imported from China, practically every car has its wheel on the right and is imported from Japan and dacha-construction companies advertise they can build you something ‘To Korean Quality’. It may be dysfunctional – but Moscow appears nowhere near losing control.

Yet by turning Vladivostok into a showcase of what he could build – Putin’s own St Petersburg – he had turned it into a showcase for incompetence, corruption and inefficiency. Huge funds went into the city’s redevelopment for arrival of the Pacific elites for the APEC Summit. Estimates are that over $20 billion has been spent – more than the London Olympics the same year. 25

These funds are over sixty times higher than Vladivostok’s usual annual budget. It has been ‘spent’ on a general infrastructure overhaul, including a new opera house and a new university. It would be more accurate to say that the funds have been ‘wasted’. It is unclear why a region of 1.9 million people needs a 4 million capacity airport. 26Its centrepiece is none other than two bridges to nowhere: one crosses the Golden Horn Bay and the other, the largest cable-stayed bridge in the world, stretches over the sea to reach Russky Island off the coast, a place with less than 2,000 inhabitants. The illogical economics of hosting the summit on a disconnected island that needed a 3km bridge built to it, when cities such as Birobidzhan have no functioning airport, was impossible to miss.

It is apparent to everyone in Vladivostok that though big improvements have been made thanks to this investment in the city’s roadworks – there is also excitement about a new university and locals find the new bridges pretty – it is clear to everyone that this does not have a price tag greater than the London Olympics. ‘The thing is the more money they put in, the more people could see how much money was being stolen,’ says the local politics specialist Andrei Kalachinsky. ‘Politics here works like it does in all Russian regions. The local governor gets the funds and distributes them to the companies of his loyalists and then the companies of those who Moscow says are its own Kremlin loyalists.’

The ‘vertical of corruption’ has swallowed up its own dreams. On no projects was this more evident than on Putin’s bridges to nowhere. First, the contract was awarded to a Russian company that had never before built a bridge like this. Second, they cost over 2.6 times more than had they been built in the United States and 5.5 more than had they been built in China. 27