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

In the Caucasus, the Chechens would dream of independence as there is no Turkish empire that could swallow them up. In Europe, the state system is so strong that even peasant Moldova can become independent without fearing German or Romanian armies. In Asia, the age of empires is not over. In Yakutsk, the coldest city in the world, I sat with some nationalistic ethnic Yakut officials in a beer hall where at one end was a bronze Russian figure, at the other a bronze Yakut. ‘You see… very tellingly they are sitting apart,’ snorted one. These men wanted as few Russians as possible in their region but were scared of independence. Even if Russia collapsed: ‘that would be a disaster. The Chinese would march in and help our “young democracy”. They would flood us with settlers.’ They dreamed of a Russia too weak to really control them, but one still strong enough to keep China out. In Tuva, even the local underground nationalists did not want independence. To quote one of their leaders: ‘It’s better to be part of a weak empire than a strong one. China would swallow in weeks what Russia could never digest.’

Across the paranoid continent you see very few actual Chinese, but they are already in people’s heads. In the third-class and second-class cabins of the Moscow–Khabarovsk, people talk about China when you ask them about politics. They tell you how much more efficient China is, how much healthier China is, how much more powerful China is. They are worried that one day it will be more than Chinese products that will come to Russia. The numbers make them worried: Chinese male life expectancy is seventy-one, but in Russia it is only sixty-four. 8China spent $143 billion on its military, but Russia mustered just $72 billion in 2011. 9

The second-class carriage is dark brown, this plasticated brown you find only in countries that were once socialist. It is half empty by now. In one compartment some men drink, sing and play cards. There is no shower. No one in this carriage had washed for days. In my own compartment sat two mothers and their three babies. For a few hours in the evening we talked about Putin, politics and the Chinese. One mother is young and attractive. Her name is Katya, she has a missing tooth and a working-class drawl. The other, Vera, has the short hair of a man and the clipped, universal accent of someone with a Soviet higher education, the kind of clear voice that all schoolteachers seem to have, with which the propagandists once read out ‘Moscow Calling, Moscow Calling’, to the third world.

Is it just me? Or are there more children in Russia these days? In 2006, when I had last journeyed on the Trans-Siberian, the jarring absence as you travelled of many children marked out Russia from the West. ‘There are more children because of Putin,’ this is the clipped voice of Vera, ‘you could say they are Putin’s children. He gave money for a second child that made it easier. The country stabilized. In the 1990s people didn’t want to have children. It was a terrible time in our country – they closed most of the kindergartens.’

I asked about politics. Katya, the younger one, giggled as if I had asked about UFOs. She was right to do this – asking provincial people in eastern Siberia their political opinions, when they have no political impact, is faintly ridiculous. ‘My husband is a soldier. So I didn’t protest. We have a baby.’ That baby is playing and jumping and chewing the wheels off a toy car. ‘There was an idea in Khabarovsk to start a “train army” to go to Moscow for the big protests. Can you imagine – a train army? Everyone rushed to buy tickets. Then they arrested the guy who was organizing it. That was the end of that. Things are good if you have a man in the army. It’s a state within a state with better benefits.’

‘The railways used to be like that,’ sighs Vera, ‘but not anymore.’

As we talked more about politics I could sense that Katya was ashamed to talk about such complicated things in front of Vera: she has a Soviet education, she is so much better educated, she knows so much more. In European Russia the younger generation has a better grasp on politics, here in Asian Russia the breakdown of the state schooling system in the 1990s shows. Today, only one-third of Russians feel their children or grandchildren will get a good education. Half do not.

Regardless, they both want to get across their annoyance at inefficiencies – all politics is local, as so are the problems of Putinism: ‘All the local officials and policemen are members of United Russia. We know that they steal and that this is the party of the state. About Moscow, what happens there, we are not so sure.’

The older woman tells me a little bit about her town, Oblyche. There had been nine kindergartens, the ‘young reformers’ had cut them to three, now they were filled ‘with Putin’s children’. In her town the young people were fleeing to work in Khabarovsk, while the old people were dying. There was no industry. It was a small town of over 1,000 people that lived off the railway. ‘The Chinese already feel at home. There are more and more of them every year. They come by boat over the Amur. In China they tell us they are hungry and there is no land and no work.’

But the Russians, she said, were also going to China, ‘It’s cheaper for us to get there than to get to the Urals, let alone anywhere on the Black Sea for a holiday.’ Russians, she said, were increasingly using ‘good natural’ Chinese medicines and holidaying in Chinese resorts. ‘All the technical stuff they produce is great,’ she added. ‘They are a very hard-working people, unlike us.’ They had never been to Moscow.

‘It’s becoming a Chinese state – eventually it will be one. We’ve always been a colony, you see. We always will be… just maybe belonging to someone else.’

This is a statement one hears repeated like a mantra in the Russian Far East. It contradicts what people say when you question them for ‘signs’ of this takeover. Everyone states that in their respective cities in Siberia (Irkutsk, Khabarovsk, Birobidzhan, Vladivostok) the amount of Chinese has gone down and the Russian birth rate has gone up. Immigrants are flooding in not from China but from Muslim ex-Soviet republics. Ownership of raw materials is firmly in control of Russian oligarchs and state corporations. Siberians say there are very few Chinese concerns where they come from other than vegetable farms and markets.

It is a statement without any link to the current demographic trends. There are less than 500,000 ethnic Chinese in Russia of which the majority are actually in Moscow. 10The number of yearly Chinese labour migrants into Russia has declined and both Russian and Chinese experts attest that the border guards have become more effective at keeping unwanted intruders out.

Nor are the numbers of Chinese migrants coming into Russia likely to grow. Siberia is deeply unattractive for Chinese labour migrants compared to the factories in the Pearl River Delta or any number of other countries in South East Asia or even the West. Furthermore, by 2020, as a result of the ‘one child’ policy China will begin to age as a society at phenomenal speed. By 2025 the country will no longer be meaningfully exporting labour but will be in short supply of workers itself. 11Unlike the West, China will struggle socially to accept mass migration. It will face a shortfall that there may not be enough migrants in the world to fill.

It seems that in the moment of Russian weakness in the 1990s neither was the Chinese state weak enough for large numbers of hungry settlers to cross the borders, nor strong enough to make Moscow give up control over major natural resources. Only if the massacre on Tiananmen Square had unleashed a collapse of Chinese communism with similar effects to what happened in Russia, might this mass-migration have taken place. The same goes if China had been as strong as it is now during the 1990s. It could have pushed for ownership over the resources it wanted. In Asia, Yeltsin’s Russia was not weak enough.