Module 4
Russia and the Near Abroad
a. Area and Population
With an area (including inland waters) of 8.5 million square miles (22.1
million sq km), the region of Russia and the Near Abroad is the largest world region
recognized in this text. A good indication of its staggering size is the fact that this
region (even Russia alone) spans 11 time zones; in comparison, the United States
from Maine to Hawaii spans seven. Russia is about 1.8 times the size of the United
States, including Alaska.
The eventful geopolitical history of Russia and the Near Abroad has given this
region land frontiers with 15 countries in Eurasia. Between the Black Sea and the
Pacifi c, the region borders Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, China, Mongolia, and North
Korea. Pakistan and India also lie close by. In the Pacific Ocean, narrow water
passages separate the Russian-held islands of Sakhalin and the Kurils from Japan. In
the west, the region has frontiers with Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland,
Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and Norway.
So much of this vast region is sparsely populated that its estimated population
of 278 million in 2007 ranked it seventh among the eight world regions. The average
population density of 32 per square mile (12/sq km) is less than half that of the United
States. Great stretches of economically unproductive terrain separate many populated
areas from one another. The mountainous frontiers in Asia have especially few
inhabitants. In contrast, on the frontier between the Black and Baltic Seas,
international boundaries pass through populous lowlands that have long been disputed
territory between Russia and other countries.
Russia has by far the largest population, about 142 million. The next largest
country is Ukraine, with about 46.5 million people. Uzbekistan is the most populous
central Asian nation, with about 26.5 million people. All the other countries in the
region trail far behind, with populations generally under 15 million apiece. Population
growth rates are highest, around 1.5 percent annually, among the predominantly
Muslim populations of the central Asian countries. At the other end of the spectrum,
Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus are losing population at a rate of up to 0.5 percent per
year. This trend is due to the plummeting quality of life that occurred after the
breakup in the Soviet Union in 1991. In an atmosphere of economic and political
uncertainty, couples chose to have fewer children, and there were more broken
marriages. More disturbingly, death rates soared due to declining health care;
increasing alcoholism, violence, and suicide; and more frequent flawed abortions.
b. Physical Geography and Human Adaptations
Stretching nearly halfway around the globe in northern Eurasia, the immense
region of Russia and the Near Abroad has problems associated with climate, terrain,
and distance. Most of the region is burdened economically by cold temperatures,
infertile soils, marshy terrain, aridity, and ruggedness. Natural conditions are more
similar to those of Canada than to those of the United States. Interaction with a
complex and demanding environment was a major theme in Russian and Soviet
expansion and development. Nature continues to provide large assets but also poses
great problems for the 12 countries.
The region of Russia and the Near Abroad has a harsh climatic setting. Severe
winter cold, short growing seasons, drought, and hot, crop-shriveling winds are major
disadvantages. But there are also advantages in the form of good soils, the world’s
largest forests, natural pastures for livestock, and diverse wild fauna. However, many
of these resources are hard to reach because of the logistical diffi culties posed by
harsh climates and vast distances.
Most parts of the region have continental climatic infl uences, with long, cold
winters; short, warm summers; and low to moderate precipitation. Severe winters, for
which Siberia (roughly the eastern two-thirds of Russia) is particularly infamous,
prevail because the region is generally at a high latitude and has few of the
moderating infl uences of oceans. Four-fi fths of the total area is farther north than
any point in the conterminous United States. The most extreme continental climate of
the world is here; the lowest offi cial temperature ever recorded in the Northern
Hemisphere (minus 90°F; minus 68°C) occurred in the Siberian settlement of
Verkhoyansk (located at 67°N, 135°E). Westerly winds from the Atlantic moderate
the winter temperatures in the west, but their effects become weaker toward the east,
where it is much colder.
The average frost-free season of 150 days or less in most areas (except the
extreme south and west) is too short for many crops to mature. Most places are
relatively warm during the brief summer, and the southern steppes and deserts are hot.
Partially offsetting the summer’s shortness are the length of the summer days, which
encourages plant growth. Summer is also a time of accelerated human activity
outdoors. Russians are passionate campers and sun worshipers, and they take every
opportunity to “get away from it all” to enjoy the fl eeting pleasures of summer.
Urban residents never lose the traditional Russian passion for nature, and many retreat
on weekends and longer holidays to rural cabins called dachas. Aridity and drought
also make problems for agriculture. The annual average precipitation is less than 20
inches (50 cm), nearly everywhere except in the extreme west, along the eastern coast
of the Black Sea and the Pacifi c coast north of Vladivostok, and in some of the higher
mountains.
There are fi ve main climatic belts in the region of Russia and the Near
Abroad: tundra, subarctic, humid continental, steppe, and desert. In this order, these
belts, each with its associated vegetation and soils, succeed the other from north to
south. There are also smaller scattered areas of subtropical, Mediterranean, and
undifferentiated highland climates.
Huge areas in the tundra and subarctic climatic zones are permanently frozen
to a depth of a few feet. The frozen ground, called permafrost, makes construction
diffi cult. Heat generated by buildings melts the upper layers of permafrost and causes
foundations and walls to sink and tilt. Most buildings are elevated on pilings to reduce
this risk. Pipelines carrying crude oil (which is hot when it comes from the ground)
would likewise melt the permafrost and sink, and so they are heavily insulated or built
on elevated supports.
A humid continental climate occupies a triangular area south of the subarctic
climate, narrowing eastward from the region’s western border to the vicinity of
Novosibirsk. This area has the short-summer (“cold”) subtype of humid continental
climate, comparable to that of the Great Lakes region and the northern Great Plains of
the United States and adjacent parts of Canada. Here evergreen trees occur in a
“mixed forest” with broadleaf deciduous trees such as oak, ash, maple, and elm. Both
climate and soil are more favorable for agriculture in the humid continental climate
than in the subarctic. Soils developed under broadleaf deciduous or mixed forest are
normally more fertile than spodosols, although less so than grassland soils.
The steppe climate characterizes the grassy plains south of the forest in Russia
and is the main climate of Ukraine, Moldova, and Kazakhstan. The average annual
precipitation is 10 to 20 inches (c. 25 to 50 cm), barely enough for unirrigated crops.
This is the setting of the black-earth belt, the most important area of crop and
livestock production in the region of Russia and the Near Abroad. The main soils of
this belt are known as chernozem, which is Russian for “black earth.” Among the best
soils to be found anywhere, these are thick, productive, and durable mollisols. A
similar belt of mollisols occupies the eastern portion of the Great Plains of North
America. Their great fertility is due to an abundance of humus in the topsoil. The
major natural threat to productive agriculture here is the occurrence of severe
droughts and hot, desiccating winds (sukhovey) that damage or destroy crops. The
steppe also includes extensive areas of chestnut or alfi sol soils in the zones of lighter
rainfall. These are lighter in color than chernozems and lack their superb fertility but
are among the world’s better soils.
The most characteristic natural vegetation of the steppe is short grass.
Pastoralists, including the Scythians who in the fourth century b.c.e. produced
astonishing artwork of gold in the area that is now Ukraine, grazed their herds from an
early time on the treeless steppe grasslands, which stretched over a vast area between
the forest and the southern mountains and deserts. Today much of this area is
cultivated, with wheat as the main crop. The steppe is also a major producer of sugar
beets, sunfl owers grown for vegetable oil, various other crops, and all the major types
of livestock.
In the early history of Russia, rivers formed natural passageways for trade,
conquest, and colonization. They were especially crucial in the settlement of Siberia,
which is drained by some of the greatest rivers on earth: the Ob, Yenisey, Lena, and
Kolyma, all fl owing northward to the Arctic Ocean, and the Amur, fl owing eastward
to the Pacifi c. By following these rivers and their lateral tributaries, the Russians
advanced from the Urals to the Pacifi c in less than a century. The Moscow region lies
on a low upland from which a number of large rivers radiate like the spokes of a
wheel.
The longest ones lead southward: the Volga to the landlocked Caspian Sea, the
Dnieper (Dnepr) to the Black Sea, and the Don to the Sea of Azov, which connects
with the Black Sea through a narrow strait. Shorter rivers lead north and northwest to
the Arctic Ocean and Baltic Sea. These river systems are accessible to each other by
portages. A major link in the inland waterway system is the VolgaDon Canal, opened
in 1952 to tie together the two rivers where they approach each other in the vicinity of
Volgograd.
The completion of the canal meant that the White Sea and Baltic Sea in the
north were linked to the Black Sea and Caspian Sea in the south in a single water
transport system. The accomplishment was no small task. The Don River, which
empties into the Black Sea via the Sea of Azov, is about 150 feet (45 m) higher than
the Volga. The ground that separates these two rivers rises to almost 300 feet (90 m).
Engineers solved this discrepancy with 13 locks, each with a lift of about 30 feet (9
m), which carry water 145 feet (44 m) above the Don and drop it 290 feet (87 m) to
the Volga.
Most of the important rivers of Russia and the Near Abroad wind slowly for
hundreds or thousands of miles across large plains. Such plains, including low hills,
compose nearly all the terrain from the Yenisey River to the western border of the
region. The only mountains in this lowland are the Urals, a low and narrow range
(average elevation is less than 2,000 ft/600 m) that separates Europe from Asia and
European Russia from Siberia. The Urals trend almost due north and south but do not
occupy the full width of the lowland. A wide lowland gap between the southern end
of the mountains and the Caspian Sea permits uninterrupted east-west movement by
land. Cut by river valleys offering easy passageways, the Urals are not a serious
barrier to transportation.
Between the Urals and the Yenisey River, the West Siberian Plain is one of
the fl attest areas on earth. Immense wetlands, through which the Ob River and its
tributaries slowly wind their way, cover much of this vast fl atland. This waterlogged
country, underlain by permafrost that blocks downward of water, is a major barrier to
land transport and discourages settlement. Tremendous fl oods occur in the spring
when the breakup of ice in the upper basin of the Ob releases great quantities of water
while the river channels farther north are still frozen and act as natural dams. Russian
aircraft sometime bomb ice jams on the rivers to prevent worse fl ooding.
The area between the Yenisey and Lena Rivers is occupied by the hilly
Central Siberian Uplands, which rise 1,000 to 1,500 feet (c. 300 to 450 m) above sea
level. Mountains dominate the landscape east of the Lena River and Lake Baikal.
Extreme northeastern Siberia is an especially bleak and diffi cult country for human
settlement. High mountains rim the region of Russia and the Near Abroad on the
south from the Black Sea to Lake Baikal, and lower mountains rim the region from
Lake Baikal to the Pacifi c. Peaks rise to over 15,000 feet (c. 4,500 m) in the
Caucasus Mountains between the Black and Caspian Seas and in the Pamir, Tien
Shan, and Altai Mountains east of the Caspian Sea. From the feet of the lofty Pamir,
Tien Shan, and Altai ranges, and the lower ranges between the Pamirs and the
Caspian Sea, arid and semiarid plains and low uplands extend northward and
gradually merge with the West Siberian Plain and the broad plains and low hills west
of the Urals. “Rugged” and “challenging” thus describe great sections of this huge
world region, and the human pattern of the region is neither uniform nor easy.
c. Cultural and Historical Geographies
Russia and the Near Abroad form a complex cultural and linguistic mosaic.
The region’s peoples belong to about 30 major ethnic groups and speak more than 100
languages. In Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, the majority are Slavs who originated in
east central Europe as speakers of an ancestral Slavic language (a member of the
IndoEuropean language family) and who now speak Russian, Belarusian, and
Ukrainian, respectively. Along the upper Volga River, in the small regions of
Tatarstan, Chuvashiya, and Mariy-El, there are majority speakers of Finno-Ugric (a
subfamily of the Uralic languages) and Turkic (in the Altaic language family).
Another outpost of Turkic speakers is Yakutia (the Sakha Republic) in northeastern
Russia. In Moldova, the majority ethnic Moldovans speak Moldovan, which is the
same language as Romanian, a Romance (IndoEuropean) language.
The Caucasus is extremely diverse in its ethnicity and languages and has long
been a magnet for linguistic researchers. The Armenians have a unique language
within the Indo-European group. Their neighbors in the Caucasus— the Georgians
and Azerbaijanis—speak, respectively, a Kartvelian (South Caucasian) and a Turkic
language in the Altaic family. Most smaller ethnic groups in the Caucasus speak
languages unrelated to Georgian, belonging to the Abkhaz-Adyghean and Nakh-
Dagestanian families. The “stan” countries are less complex linguistically. Turkic
languages are spoken by most of the ethnic groups in the central Asian countries of
Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. In Tajikistan, however, the
dominant group of Tajiks speak an Iranian language in the Indo-European family. In
far northeastern Russia, there are speakers of the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages,
including Chukchi and Koryak, belonging to the Proto-Asiatic language family and
related to some of the languages that ancestors of Native Americans carried eastward
into the Americas.
Slavic peoples have inhabited European Russia since the early centuries of the
Christian era. During the Middle Ages, Slavic tribes living in the forested regions of
western Russia came under the infl uence of Viking adventurers from Scandinavia
known as Rus or Varangians. The newcomers carved out trade routes, planted
settlements, and organized principalities along rivers and portages connecting the
Baltic and Black Seas. In the 9th century, the principality of Kiev, ruled by a mixed
Scandinavian and Slavic nobility, achieved mastery over the others and became a
powerful state. The culture it developed was the foundation on which the Russian,
Ukrainian, and Belarusian cultures later arose.
Yet another cultural infl uence reached the Russians from the heart of Asia.
The steppe grasslands of southern Russia had long been the habitat of nomadic
horsemen of Asian origin. During the later days of the Roman Empire and in the
Middle Ages, these grassy plains, stretching far into Asia, provided the Huns,
Bulgars, and other nomads a passageway into Europe. In the 13th century, the Tatars
(also known as Tartars) of central Asia took this route. Many steppe and desert
peoples of Turkic origins were in their ranks, with the Mongols in the lead. In 1237,
Batu Khan (“Batu the Splendid”), the grandson of Genghis Khan, launched a
devastating invasion that brought all the Russian principalities except the northern one
of Novgorod under Tatar rule. The Tatars collected taxes and tributes from the
Russian principalities but generally allowed the rulers of these units to be
autonomous. Even the princes of Novgorod, who were not technically under Tatar
control, paid tribute to avoid trouble.
The Tatars established the khanates (governmental units) of Kazan (on the
upper Volga), Astrakhan (on the lower Volga), and Crimea (on the Black Sea).
Russians called the Kazan Tatars the “Golden Horde,” after the brightly colored tents
in which they lived. When Tatar power declined in the 15th century, the rulers of the
Moscow principality were able to begin a process of territorial expansion that resulted
in the formation of present-day Russia. Today, oilrich Tatarstan, with its capital at
Kazan, is one of Russia’s most important “autonomous” political units. Its distinct
ethnic Tatar population has proved remarkably resilient to centuries of Russian
supremacy.
The Russian monarchy reached outward from Muscovy, its original domain in
the Moscow region. From the 15th century until the 20th, the tsars created an
immense Russian empire by building onto this core. This imperialism by land, in the
era when the maritime powers of western Europe were expanding by sea, brought a
host of alien peoples under tsarist control. Russian motivations for expansion were
diverse. Quelling raids by troublesome neighbors, particularly nomadic Muslim
peoples in the southern steppes and deserts, was one objective. Many Russian cities,
such as Volgograd (originally named Tsaritsyn and then Stalingrad) on the Volga
River, were founded as fortifi ed outposts on the steppe frontier. In the wilderness of
Siberia, the search for valuable furs and minerals, especially gold, stimulated early
expansion, and the missionary impulse of Orthodox priests also played a role. Land
hunger and a desire to escape serfdom and taxation led to the fl ight of many peasants
into the fertile blackearth belt of southwestern Siberia, and many landlords also
moved there with their serfs.
The initial outward thrust from Muscovy under Ivan the Great (reigned 1462–
1505) was mainly northward. The rival principality of Novgorod, near present-day
Saint Petersburg, was annexed. This secured a domain that extended northward to the
Arctic Ocean and eastward to the Ural Mountains. Later tsars pushed the frontiers of
Russia westward toward Poland and southward toward the Black Sea. Peter the Great
(reigned 1682–1725) defeated the Swedes under Charles XII to gain a foothold on the
Baltic Sea, where he established Saint Petersburg as Russia’s capital and its “Window
on the West.” Catherine the Great (reigned 1762–1796) secured a frontage on the
Black Sea at the expense of Turkey.
A Cossack expedition reached the Pacifi c in 1639, but Russian expansion
toward the east did not stop at the Bering Strait. It continued down the west coast of
North America as far as northern California, where the Russian trading post of Fort
Ross was active between 1812 and 1841. In 1867, however, Russia sold Alaska to the
United States (for 2 cents per acre) and withdrew from North America. The relentless
quest of Russian fur traders for sable, sea otter, and other valuable pelts brought great
cultural changes to aboriginal peoples in Siberia and Pacifi c North America. These
effects became increasingly pronounced, especially in the last decades of the Russian
Empire, when millions of Russians moved into Siberia.
There was one stumbling block in Russia’s eastern expansion. In the Amur
River region near the Pacifi c, the Russians were not able to consolidate their hold for
nearly two centuries because of opposition by strong Manchu emperors who claimed
this territory for China. They were thus barred from the Siberian area best suited to
growing food for the fur-trading enterprise and best endowed with good harbors for
maritime expansion. This situation changed in 1858–1860 following the victory of
European sea powers over China in the Opium Wars.
Russia and the Soviet Union repeatedly triumphed over powerful invaders,
notably the Swedish forces led by King Charles XII in 1709, the French and their
allied European forces under Napoleon I in 1812, and the German and other European
forces sent by Hitler into the Soviet Union in World War II. In each case, the Russians
lost early battles and much territory but eventually infl icted a crushing and decisive
defeat on the invaders. The success of Old Russia and the Soviet Union in
withstanding invasions by such formidable armies was due in part to the
environmental rigors (particularly, the brutal Russian winter) that invaders faced, the
overwhelming distances of a huge country with poor roads, and the defenders’ love of
their homeland. It was also due to talented Russian military leadership and to the
willingness of good and poor generals alike to lose great numbers of soldiers in
combat. Finally, the successful defense used the scorched earth strategy to protect the
motherland; rather than leave Russian railways, crops, and other resources to fall into
the invaders’ hands, the defenders destroyed them.
The Russian Revolution of 1917, which set the stage for the formation of the
Soviet Union, was really two revolutions that occurred against the backdrop of World
War I. In 1914, when a Serb in Sarajevo (in modern Bosnia and Herzegovina)
assassinated the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, a complicated series of
alliances required Tsar Nicholas II to commit Russian troops to fi ght with Serbia,
France, and Britain against Austria-Hungary and Germany in World War I. The fi rst
revolution in Russia began early in 1917 as a general protest against the terrible sacrifi
ces of Russian forces on the Eastern Front during this war.
That revolt overthrew Nicholas II, the last of the Romanov tsars. The second
was the Bolshevik Revolution that came later that year. Led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
(1870–1924), the Bolshevik faction of the Communist Party seized control of the
government. The new regime made a separate peace with Germany and its allies and
survived a diffi cult period of civil war and foreign intervention between 1917 and
1921. Lenin presided over the establishment of Russia’s successor state, the Soviet
Union, in 1922.
World War II found the Russians again allied with France and Britain in a far
more ferocious war against Germany. The Soviet Union’s success in withstanding the
German onslaught that began as Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 surprised many
outside observers, who had predicted that the Soviets would prove too weak and
disunited to resist for more than a few weeks or months. The crucially important cities
of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and Moscow held out through brutal sieges. Late
in 1942, Soviet forces halted the German push eastward at the Volga River in the
huge Battle of Stalingrad. This engagement was the turning point in the war, when
Soviet and Allied forces began to reverse Nazi advances.
The failure of powerful Germany to conquer the Soviet Union was a clear
indication that the strength of the Soviet Union had been underrated and that the
country’s power would henceforth be a major feature of world affairs. But the war’s
impact on the USSR would linger. The German invasion took an estimated 20 million
or more Soviet lives and caused the relocation of millions of people. It did enormous
damage to settlements, factories, and livestock. As a strategic precaution during the
war, Lenin’s successor, Josef Stalin, directed major Soviet industries to relocate
eastward away from the front, a move that has had a lasting imprint on the region’s
economic geography.
d. Economic Geography
The Soviet Union’s Communist economic system was an attempt to put into
practice the economic and social ideas of the 19th-century German philosopher Karl
Marx. According to Marx, the central theme of modern history is a struggle between
the capitalist class (“the bourgeoisie”) and the industrial working class (“the
proletariat”). He forecast that exploitation of workers by greedy capitalists would lead
the workers to revolt, overthrow the capitalists, and turn over ownership and
management of the means of production to new workers’ states. In the classless
societies of these states, there would be social harmony and justice, with little need for
formal government. Marx’s utopian vision did not materialize anywhere, but it did
provide guidelines for antigovernment revolts and Communist political systems in
many countries.
The ideas of Marx and of Lenin (who died in 1924), as Lenin’s successor
Josef Stalin interpreted and implemented them, provided the philosophical basis for
the Soviet Union’s centrally planned command economy. Beginning in 1928, a series
of fi ve-year economic plans demanded the fulfi llment of quotas for the nation: types
and quantities of minerals, manufactured goods, and agricultural commodities to be
produced; factories, transportation links, and dams to be constructed or improved; and
residential areas to be built for industrial workers. The goals were to abolish the old
aristocratic and capitalist institutions of tsarist Russia and to develop a strong socialist
state equal in stature to the major industrial nations of the West.
Although cumbersome, this system succeeded in propelling the Soviet Union
to superpower status, improved the overall standard of living, prompted rapid
urbanization and industrialization, and altered the landscape profoundly. The principal
goal of Soviet national planning after 1928 was a large increase in industrial output,
with emphasis on heavy machinery and other capital goods, minerals, electric power,
better transportation, and military hardware. Masses of peasants were converted into
factory workers. New industrial centers were founded, and old ones were enlarged.
There were huge investments in defense, and the country grew strong enough to
survive Germany’s onslaught in World War II. After the war, the Soviets maintained
large armed forces and accumulated a massive arsenal of conventional and nuclear
weapons in the arms race against the world’s only other superpower, the United
States. By the height of the Cold War in the early 1980s, 15 to 20 percent of the
country’s GDP was dedicated to the military (in contrast to less than 10 percent in the
United States), representing an enormous diversion of investment away from the
country’s overall economic development.
Farmers and farming had troubled careers under the Soviet system of
collectivized agriculture. Between 1929 and 1933, about two-thirds of all peasant
households in the Soviet Union were collectivized. In this process, their landholdings
were confi scated and reorganized into two types of large farm units: the collective
farm (kolkhoz) and the factory-type state farm (sovkhoz). The consolidation of
individual farmsteads and villages into fewer but larger communities on the collective
farms was supposed to permit the government to administer, monitor, and indoctrinate
the rural population and provide services, including education, health care, and
electricity, more cheaply and efficiently.
Internal freedoms and prosperity did not accompany superpower status for
Soviet citizens. The fl ow of goods and services ebbed to a trickle in the 1980s when
large demonstrations and strikes underscored public anger at a political and economic
system that was sliding rapidly downhill. The Communist system came under open
challenge on the grounds that it stifl ed democracy, failed to provide a good living for
most people, and blocked the ambitions of the country’s many ethnic groups for a
greater voice in running their own affairs. The outpouring of dissent was
unprecedented in Soviet history. Worsening economic conditions led to offi cial calls
for reform in the mid-1980s.
At the center of the crumbling empire, having failed to reverse the downward
slide of the economy, Gorbachev faced growing sentiment to scrap the command
system and move as rapidly as possible to a market-oriented economy. The reformers’
cause was championed by Boris Yeltsin, a leading advocate of rapid movement
toward a marketoriented economy and greater control by individual republics over
their own resources, taxation, and affairs. Yeltsin’s political stature grew when in
June 1991 the citizens of Russia chose him president of the giant Russian Soviet
Socialist Republic in the Soviet Union’s fi rst open democratic election. Gorbachev,
himself elected president of the USSR (but by the Congress of People’s Deputies
rather than by the people as a whole), opposed Yeltsin’s proposals for radical reform.
He advocated more gradual movement toward a free-market orientation within the
state-controlled planned economy and insisted on the need for unity and continued
political centralization within the Soviet state.
Matters came to a head in August 1991, when an attempted coup by hardliners
failed. Yeltsin gained enhanced stature from his defi ant opposition to the coup.
Gorbachev resigned his position as head of the Communist Party and began to work
with Yeltsin to reconstruct the political and economic order. But his efforts to
preserve the Soviet Union and a modifi ed form of the Communist economic system
could not stand against the growing tide of change. During the autumn of 1991, the
Communist Party was disbanded, and the individual republics seized its property. On
December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned the presidency, and the national parliament
formally voted the Soviet Union out of existence the following day. A powerful
empire had quickly and quietly faded away, to be replaced by 15 independent
countries, in what was dubbed the Second Russian Revolution.
The unprecedented experiment to transform a colossal Communist state into
separate bastions of free-market democracy produced strange and often unfortunate
results, particularly in the vast Russian Federation. Some observers classifi ed Russia
not as a less developed or more developed country but as a “misdeveloped country.”
The disturbing demographic trend of a plummeting population due to rising death
rates—the Russian cross described earlier—was the strongest indicator of Russia’s
backward momentum in the years following independence. The roots of this trend
were mainly economic.
Russia’s new private entrepreneurs came to include a large criminal “mafi a”
that preyed on government, business, and individuals. Organized crime and corruption
became pervasive and made “free enterprise” far from free. A company wanting to
build a factory, for example, would have to pay off offi cials at every stage of
construction; without the payouts, organized crime would terminate the project.
Russia became a kleptocracy, an economic and political system based on crime.
Corruption is still so rampant that Russians begrudgingly accept it as part of everyday
life. Rather than endure hours to pay or contest a traffi c violation, for example, most
Russians will discreetly hand the equivalent of $15 over to the traffi c policeman, and
the matter is resolved. On its corruption index from 1 to 163, with Haiti the most
corrupt at 163, Russia ranked 121 in 2007.
The biggest benefi ciaries of the new economic system were the so-called
oligarchs, Russia’s leading businesspeople (oligarchy is literally the “rule of the
few”). In the 1990s, they acquired massive stakes in former state enterprises through a
series of rigged auctions called “loans for shares,” fi nally controlling an estimated 70
percent of Russia’s economy. They wielded enormous political power and helped
usher Vladimir Putin, a former KGB (state security) offi cer of the Soviet Union, into
Russia’s highest offi ce, the presidency, in 2000. Once in offi ce, Putin vowed to
crack down on the oligarchs. He purged the largest, especially those in the energy
sector, while strengthening the economic and political clout of fellow former
servicemen in the Soviet Union’s security agency, the KGB. Putin’s increasingly
authoritarian style proved to be popular with voters, who awarded him a second term
in offi ce.
He has since grown to have very broad popular support among Russians, with
a spectacular approval rating of over 80 percent in 2007. His consolidation of power
with little public opposition seemed to reaffi rm what Stalin often said: “The Russians
need a tsar.” Russia’s economic decline following independence raised public fears
and prompted some people to call for a return to the relative stability and security of
the Soviet state. Others emigrated, including 380,000 from the former Soviet Union to
the United States in the 1990s. But most stayed, struggling in creative and often
brilliant ways with limited resources to make ends meet and, ideally, help build the
middle class and the normal way of life that communism’s collapse was supposed to
bring. Recent developments have reversed Russia’s decline and have ushered in a new
period of self-assurance and economic renewal.
Russia’s economy and Russians’ personal incomes grew steadily in the early
2000s. Between 2000 and 2007, average incomes grew at a rate of about 10 percent
each year. Twelve percent of Russia’s population still lived in poverty in 2007, but
poverty and unemployment had fallen signifi cantly since the start of the decade.
Ironically, the improvement resulted partly from the severe economic crisis Russia
experienced in 1998. When Russia’s currency was devalued that year, sales of
imported goods plummeted, and Russian entrepreneurs boosted production of textiles,
clothing, and automobiles. A surge in oil prices after 1999 was the main stimulus to
the economy. Russia has enormous energy reserves; its proven oil reserves represent 6
percent of the world total, and its natural gas, 27 percent of proven global reserves,
the largest in any single country.
After years of belt tightening due to low world market prices, Russia fi nally
began to realize energy revenues. Oil production grew by 50 percent between 1999
and 2007. Energy exports in 2007, when Russia was the world’s second-largest oil
producer (after Saudi Arabia) and its largest producer of natural gas, accounted for
about 64 percent of Russia’s export earnings. There was also considerable growth in
exports of aluminum and other metals and minerals; by 2006, Russia was tied with
Japan as the world’s largest steel exporter, for example. The Russian companies
selling these resources and products used their growing profi ts to purchase co-
ownership in automobile and other industries and in agricultural companies, helping
spark a revival in some sectors of the Russian economy. But as oil revenues continued
to rise, investment in other industrial sectors began to lag again.
e. Geopolitical Issues
Russian President Putin, in a 2005 speech, called the collapse of the Soviet
Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”2 Today there are three
concentric spheres of major geopolitical concern in the former Soviet realm: the unity
of Russia itself, Russia’s relationships with its Near Abroad, and the relations between
this region and the rest of the world. There are perhaps more critical geopolitical
issues in this world region than in any other, and getting to know them is worth the
effort.
Internally, Russia is struggling to maintain a cohesive whole that is fashioned
from diverse and sometimes volatile ethnic units. As mentioned earlier, the Soviet
Union included a number of “autonomous” units based on ethnicity. When Russia
emerged from the Soviet Union, it kept those designations within its borders. The
Russian Federation today includes 83 “subjects” divided into six categories: 48
oblasts (regions), 7 krais (territories), 21 republics (which have varying levels of
autonomy), 4 autonomous okrugs (ethnic subdivisions of oblasts or krais), 2 federal
cities, and 1 autonomous oblast. The 26 autonomies (nationality-based republics and
lesser units) in total occupy more than 40 percent of Russia’s total area and contain
about 20 percent of the country’s population.
What gives some of these units particular geopolitical signifi cance is the
presence of major mineral resources: oil and gas in the Volga-Urals fi elds in
Tatarstan and Bashkhortostan, high-grade coal deposits at Vorkuta in the Komi
Republic, and a quarter of all diamonds produced in the world in Sakha. After the
breakup of the USSR, many of the former Soviet ASSRs, recalling Moscow’s
longstanding promises of self-rule for them, issued declarations of sovereignty
asserting their right to greater self-direction of their internal affairs and greater control
over their own resources. Eighteen of Russia’s 21 republics signed the 1992
Federation Treaty, which granted them considerable autonomy. The treaty called for
the devolution of power centralized in Moscow and for more cooperation between
regional and federal governments. Each republic of the Russian Federation was
legally entitled to have its own offi cial language, constitution, president, budget, tax
laws and other legislation, and foreign and domestic economic partnerships. But many
soon complained that Moscow did not honor the treaty, and they began looking for
regional solutions to their economic and other problems.
Moscow relented to some of these demands. The Sakha (formerly Yakut)
Republic, for example, won the right to keep 45 percent of hard-currency earnings
from foreign sales of Sakha diamonds, compared with only a small fraction during the
Soviet era. In turn, Sakha must now pay for the government subsidies that Moscow
previously gave to local industries. Without credits from Moscow, Sakha no longer
pays taxes to Moscow. Salaries and other indexes of living standards in the Sakha
Republic have risen since this agreement was implemented. The majority-Muslim,
oil-rich Tatarstan, which did not sign the Federation Treaty in 1992, now has “limited
sovereignty” with its own constitution, parliament, fl ag, and offi cial language and
has since signed the treaty. The autonomous republic of Chechnya—of particular
geopolitical importance because of its crossroads location for oil pipelines—never did
sign the treaty, and its future is critical to the Russian Federation.
A second sphere of geopolitical concerns involves Russia’s relations with the
other successor states of the USSR. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
Russian Federation took over the property of the former government within the
federation’s borders, including Moscow’s Kremlin. Russia also took custody of the
international functions of the USSR, including its seat at the United Nations. In late
1991, the new countries of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (formerly Byelorussia)
formed a loose political and economic organization, the Commonwealth of
Independent States (CIS), headquartered in Minsk, Belarus. Except for Estonia,
Latvia, and Lithuania, the other former Soviet republics eventually joined the CIS, in
which Russia took a strong leadership role. To date, the CIS has been concerned
mainly with establishing common policies on economic concerns. Russia’s President
Putin has proposed that its members unite on other issues, particularly security, with
the formation of an antiterrorism alliance.
But the critical factor is the Russian hand on the tap of energy supplies to its
neighboring countries. In an energyhungry world, Russia is using fossil fuels to
achieve maximum political clout. Under Vladimir Putin, the Russian government
began in 2004 to increase its control of the energy sector, a process of
renationalization that reversed the trend toward privatization that had been under way.
With its state powers in this critical sector, Russia has repeatedly wielded fossil fuel
as a political weapon. Loyal former Soviet countries get the “carrot” of large
subsidies, while disloyal ones get the “stick”; until 2006, for example, Russia charged
Belarus just one-third of what it charged Latvia and Estonia.
It rankles Russia when Western clout grows in Russia’s giant backyard,
particularly in critical nations like Ukraine, and Russia answers by playing its energy
cards. With independence, Ukraine became a nuclear weapon–free nation, and the
United States rewarded that move with an increased foreign-aid package. Ukraine’s
orientation toward the West grew with its membership in NATO’s Partnership for
Peace program and in its application to become a member of the European Union.
Russia’s favored candidate then lost Ukraine’s 2005 presidential election. Following
an eventful campaign in which the opposition attempted to poison him with dioxin,
Ukraine’s new president, Victor Yushchenko, turned even more solidly westward. In
what was widely seen as retaliation for the so-called Orange Revolution that brought
Yushchenko to power, Russia’s mostly state-owned Gazprom company briefl y cut
natural gas supplies through the so-called Friendship Pipeline to Ukraine in 2006.
Ethnic issues are also important in this geopolitical realm.
About 25 million ethnic Russians lived in the 14 smaller states at the time of
independence. Although some have migrated to Russia since 1991, most stayed, and
many have had diffi culties fi nding housing and employment. In certain areas,
notably eastern Ukraine and Crimea, many ethnic Russians are causing political
instability because they want to secede and form their own state or join Russia. While
Russians in the 14 non-Russian nations complain that governments and peoples
discriminate against them, the Russian government has said that it has a right and a
duty to protect these Russian minorities. Russia also encourages these Russian
minorities to maintain and strengthen their ethnic identities, creating prospects for
future political secession from host countries. In political geography terms, such a
movement by an ethnic group in one country to revive or reinforce kindred ethnicity
in another country—often in an effort to promote secession there—is known as
irredentism.
For many years, a critical issue between Georgia and Russia was the fate of
Batumi, the Black Sea oil-shipping port. It lies in the rebellious province of Ajaria
(Adzharia), home to another Russian military base and to a population bitterly
opposed to the rule of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, who ousted former
President Eduard Shevardnadze in the peaceful Rose Revolution of 2003. Saakashvili
vowed to reassert fi rm Georgian control over all of the separatist regions within
Georgia, thereby risking a direct military confrontation with Russia. His forces
secured Batumi and the rest of Ajaria in 2004, and his attention turned to the even
more dangerous South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia supports the aspirations of the
primarily Muslim South Ossetians, who would like to free themselves from Georgian
control and establish an Ossetian nation (almost 100 percent of the population voted
to do so in a 2006 referendum).
The mostly Christian North Ossetians, whom they wish to join, live adjacent
to them in Russia in a region the North Ossetians call Alania. South Ossetia now
exists as a Russian puppet state within Georgia’s borders. Since a ceasefi re broke
down in 2004, the region has been plagued by a violent anti-Georgian insurgency.
South Ossetia was also the setting of the horrifi c civilian deaths at Beslan in 2004
after Islamists from nearby Ingushetia seized hostages at a school.
Finally, there are outstanding geopolitical issues in relations between Russia
and the Near Abroad and the rest of the world. In the years following the breakup of
the USSR, most of these involved the development of a new model of relations
between East and West and a peaceful succession to the Cold War. During those
years, important plans were also made about how to ship central Asia’s critical oil
supplies westward. After 9/11, these issues were complemented by others related to
the “war on terrorism,” as perceived by both the United States and Russia. After 2004,
a popular and confi dent Vladimir Putin, emboldened especially by Russia’s soaring
energy revenues, put more distance between Russia and the West and consistently
reminded Russians of their greatness.
Russia and the other successors of the Soviet Union have nevertheless
generally enjoyed improving relations with the West since the USSR dissolved.
Russia has since 1997 been a member of what is known as the Group of Eight (G-8),
the world’s eight most economically powerful and politically infl uential countries
(along with Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the
United States). Russia is a member of the UN Security Council and along with its
other permanent members (China, France, the United Kingdom, and the United
States) has the enormous veto power that position offers; Russia can therefore have a
huge impact on world affairs. Russia has ramped up oil production and advertised
itself to the United States and other major industrial powers as a more stable source of
energy than the volatile Persian Gulf (Arabian Gulf) countries— only to threaten that
status by renationalizing oil and manipulating fuel supplies and prices in its Near
Abroad. Countries of the Far Abroad are asking profound questions about how
reliable a business partner Russia is and how far it might go in fl exing its muscle in
the countries of the former Soviet Union. Western Europe frets because of its growing
dependence on gas from Russia via a cat’s cradle of pipelines; Germany, already the
largest foreign consumer of Russian gas, is the most worried because it has been
building a new undersea gas pipeline to Russia. On track to start receiving oil from
Russia’s Sakhalin and Arctic fi elds in 2010, the United States is also concerned.
The potential of an Islamist threat to central Asian stability is uncertain.
Russia has expressed great concern about an Islamist wave spreading into central Asia
and Russia itself. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have allowed Russia to deploy thousands
of Russian troops in their countries, in part to stave off such a threat. Some observers
believe Russia is using the Islamist threat in places like Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge as a
pretense to maintain infl uence in the region or even to counter the growing U.S.
military presence there since 9/11. Others believe the Islamist danger is real. The
outlawed Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir hopes to establish a pan-Islamic caliphate
throughout central Asia and is suspected of being responsible for uprisings in
Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Tajikistan is home to a group called the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan
(IMU), which aims to overthrow the Uzbek government of President Islam Karimov
and establish an Islamic state in the Fergana Valley. Following a 1999 attempted
assassination blamed on the rebels, Karimov cracked down hard on suspected
Islamists and even began to restrict symbols of Islamist sympathies, such as beards on
men and headscarves on women. Islamist suicide bombings of government targets
carried into the middle of the following decade. Anxious to repress any external
support for Islamist insurgency within its borders and to curry political and economic
favor with Washington, Uzbekistan initially welcomed the U.S. military to use its
land and air space in attacks against al-Qa’ida and the Taliban in 2001 and 2002.
Uzbekistan shut down this access in 2005 after the United States and its European
partners, citing human rights abuses, slashed economic assistance to the country. The
United States, like Russia, continues to use military bases in nearby Kyrgyzstan and
Tajikistan.
Most recently, China has sought to build security relationships with the central
Asian countries, especially to blunt any aspirations by Muslim insurgents in China’s
far western region. Not surprisingly, given its geographic proximity and surging
wealth, China has growing economic interests in the region, too. Chinese exports to
central Asia are surging. To build on this trend, China is upgrading its roads leading
into Kyrgyzstan and cooperating with Kazakhstan to build a railway across
Kazakhstan that will ultimately link producers and markets in China and Europe. In
an apparent effort to counterbalance NATO, China and Russia are urging their central
Asian partners (all the central Asian countries except Turkmenistan) in the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO) to form a military confederacy.
f. Peoples and Nations of the Fertile Triangle
Although closely related to the Russians in language and culture, Ukrainians
—the second largest ethnic group in the Slavic Core—are a distinct national group.
The name Ukraine translates as “at the border” or “borderland,” and this region has
long served as a buffer between Russia and neighboring lands. Here armies of the
Russian tsars fought for centuries against nomadic steppe peoples, Poles, Lithuanians,
and Turks, until the 18th century, when the Russian Empire fi nally absorbed Ukraine.
For three centuries, Ukrainians were subordinate to Moscow, fi rst as part of the
Russian Empire and then as a Soviet republic. Ukraine’s industrial and agricultural
assets were always vital to the Soviet Union; the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin,
once declared, “If we lose the Ukraine, we lose our head.” Slightly smaller than
Texas, Ukraine (population 46.5 million) lies partly in the forest zone and partly in the
steppe. On the border between these biomes, and on the banks of the Dnieper River, is
the historic city of Kiev, Ukraine’s political capital and a major industrial and
transportation center. Although its agricultural output has plummeted since the
USSR’s demise, Ukraine was traditionally a great “breadbasket” of wheat, barley,
livestock, sunfl ower oil, beet sugar, and many other products, grown mainly in the
black-earth soils of the steppe region south of Kiev.
The Kansas-sized country of Belarus (formerly called Byelorussia or White
Russia; population 9.7 million) is on Ukraine’s northern border. Minsk (population
1.7 million) is the political capital and main industrial city. Belarus developed slowly
in the past, mainly because of a lack of fuels other than peat. Recently, however, oil
and gas pipelines from Siberia and other areas have provided raw material for oil-refi
ning and petrochemical industries. There is some oil production in Belarus itself.
Under Soviet rule, Belarus became an industrial powerhouse, shipping televisions,
farming equipment, automobiles, textiles, and machinery to both Moscow and its
eastern European satellites.
Belarus’s foreign trade is now almost exclusively with Russia, much of it in
the form of barter; for example, Belarus has sometimes paid off debts to Russia’s
natural gas monopoly by supplying it with refrigerators, tractors, and other hard
goods. Unlike Russian industries, most manufacturing enterprises in Belarus are still
state-run, under what the country’s leaders call “market socialism.” Industrial output
is low, but Belarus did not suffer the extensive economic disruption typical of Russia
and most of the other Soviet successor countries. Belarusian farms raise potatoes
(particularly for the production of vodka), small grains, hay, fl ax, and livestock.
Southern Belarus contains the greater part of the Pripyat (Pripet) Marshes, large
sections of which were drained for agriculture in Soviet times. Agricultural
productivity declined after 1986, when much ground was contaminated by the nuclear
accident in nearby Chernobyl. To compensate for these losses, Belarus stepped up
production of agricultural machinery for export.
Maryland-sized Moldova (known formerly as Moldavia and, in the 19th and
early 20th centuries, as Bessarabia; population 4 million), made up largely of territory
that the Soviet Union took from Romania in 1940, adjoins Ukraine at the southwest.
The indigenous Moldovan majority (about two-thirds of the country’s population) is
ethnically and linguistically Romanian, not Slavic. Some Moldovans desire to have
their country reunited with Romania, though this sentiment has declined in recent
years. There are serious problems of ethnic antagonism, irredentism, and political
separatism involving Moldova. In the eastern part of the country, in a sliver of
territory along the Dniestr River known as Transdniestria, ethnic Russians and
Ukrainians have been agitating, sometimes violently, to form a separate state. Their
self-proclaimed TransDniester Republic is effectively beyond control of the
government and has become a haven for smuggling and money laundering. Despite
protests from the European Union and other international organizations, Russia
maintains troops there, ostensibly to protect the ethnic Russians. The presence of
Russian troops gives Moscow enormous infl uence in Transdneistria. In a 2006
referendum, a reported 97 percent of this territory’s inhabitants voted for
independence from Moldova and free association, and possible reunifi - cation, with
Russia. Although Russia recognized the vote, most other countries (including
Moldova itself) have not.
Kaliningrad is the odd piece of Russia stranded between Lithuania and Poland.
As the northern half of the former German East Prussia, this territory—then known as
Königsberg—was transferred to the USSR at the end of World War II to become the
Kaliningrad Oblast. Soviet authorities expelled nearly all of Kaliningrad’s Germans to
Germany, and Russians now make up more than three-fourths of the population of 1
million. Kaliningrad remains a massive military and naval establishment, with defense
workers and their dependents and retired military families making up most of the
population. Moscow would like Kaliningrad to continue to be principally a military
state, but many in Kaliningrad have other ideas about how to capitalize on their
strategic geographic location. Regarding themselves as Euro-Russians, they want
Kaliningrad to become a more vibrant European economy. Some dream of making
Kaliningrad one of the world’s great free-trade zones, a sort of “Hong Kong on the
Baltic.”
g. Agriculture and Industry in the Russian Core
Most of the Fertile Triangle is within Russia, which still faces huge problems
in transforming state-run into freemarket farming. Throughout the second half of the
20th century, the Fertile Triangle was a global-scale producer of farm commodities
such as wheat, barley, oats, rye, potatoes, sugar beets, fl ax, sunfl ower seeds, cotton,
milk, butter, and mutton. The overall high output, however, did not refl ect high
agricultural productivity per unit of land and labor. There were many ineffi ciencies in
the state-operated and collective farms that dominated the agricultural sector. On the
state-operated farms, workers received cash wages in the same manner as industrial
workers. Bonuses for extra performance were paid.
Workers on collective farms received shares of the income after obligations of
the collective had been met. As on the state farms, there were bonuses for superior
output. These methods, however, failed to provide enough incentives for highly
productive agriculture. Farm machinery stood idle because of improper maintenance;
since no individual owned the machine, the incentive to repair it was diminished.
There were also shortages of spare parts. Poor storage, transportation, and distribution
facilities, plus wholesale pilfering, caused alarming losses after the harvest. Young
people were deserting the farms for urban work, often living with the family in the
countryside but commuting to their city jobs. With the shortage of younger male
workers, the elderly, women, and children did a large share of the farmwork.
The industrialized area surrounding Moscow is known as the Central
Industrial Region, Old Industrial Region, or Moscow-Tula-Nizhniy Novgorod
Region. This region has a central location physically within the populous western
plains and is clearly the country’s economic core, with about 70 percent of Russia’s fi
nancial wealth located there. It lies at the center of rail and air networks reaching
Transcaucasia, central Asia, and the Pacifi c and is connected by river and canal to the
Baltic, White, Azov, Black, and Caspian Seas (Moscow is known as the Port of Five
Seas). The Moscow region’s favorable geographic connections help compensate for
its lack of mineral resources. The area’s well-developed railway connections, partly a
product of political centralization, provide good facilities for an infl ow of minerals,
materials, and foods and for a return outfl ow of fi nished products to all parts of
Russia and the Near Abroad. Moscow, capital of Russia before 1713, of the Soviet
Union from 1918 to 1991, and of the Russian Federation today, is the most important
manufacturing city, transportation hub, and cultural, educational, and scientifi c center
in the region.
This region ranks with Ukraine as one of the two most important industrial
areas in the nations of the former Soviet Union. South of Moscow lies the
metallurgical and machine-building center of Tula, and to the east is the diversifi ed
industrial center of Nizhniy Novgorod (formerly Gorkiy) on the Volga. Textile
milling, mainly using imported U.S. cotton and Russian fl ax, was the earliest form of
large-scale manufacturing developed in the Moscow region. The area still has the
main concentration of textile plants (cottons, woolens, linens, and synthetics) in the
region of Russia and the Near Abroad, with Moscow and Ivanovo the leading centers.
The Soviet Union’s collapse did much damage to this textile industry. The
price of central Asian cotton quadrupled with independence, forcing mills to close and
consumers to turn to cheap clothing imports—like the rest of the world, mainly from
China. The economy of Ivanovo, which had produced 70 percent of the Soviet
Union’s textiles, went into a deep depression. Now, however, life is stirring again as
the mills in Ivanovo and nearby cities seek to exploit global niches in linen products.
New technologies allow fl ax to be worked into linen that is nearly as versatile as
cotton. The region’s fi ne linens for kitchens and bedrooms are already selling in
Europe and the United States.
Other industrial cities are strung along the Volga River from Kazan
southward, in the region Russians know as the Povolzhye. The largest are Samara
(formerly Kuybyshev); Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad); Saratov, heart of the Volga
German Autonomous Republic until World War II; and Kazan. These four cities in
the middle of the Volga industrial region grew up around diversifi ed machinery,
chemical, and food-processing plants. Under the Soviets, Samara was one of the
military-industrial “closed cities” (closed to foreigners because of security concerns)
whose industries Stalin commanded to be hastily built as a defensive measure against
German attack in World War II. Like Nizhniy Novgorod upriver on the Volga, the
city is undergoing a process known offi cially as conversion—the retooling of military
enterprises for civilian-oriented manufacturing. Even while it converts, Russia hopes
to reestablish dominance in weapons exporting. Although more than 90 percent of its
1,700 Soviet-era military factories shut down after the USSR broke up, Russia is the
world’s second- largest arms exporter.
From Omsk, the Trans-Siberian Railroad leads eastward to the Kuznetsk
industrial region, the most important concentration of manufacturing east of the Urals.
The principal reason for industrial location here is an enormous reserve of coal. The
manufacture of iron and steel is also a major industrial activity of the Kuznetsk
region, whose main center is Novokuznetsk. The industry draws its iron ore from
various sources in Siberia and Russia’s central Asian neighbors. The largest urban
center of the Kuznetsk region is Novosibirsk, a diversifi ed industrial, trading, and
transportation center located on the Ob River at the junction of the Trans-Siberian and
Turkestan-Siberian (Turk-Sib) Railroads. Sometimes called the “Chicago of Siberia,”
Novosibirsk has grown from a town with a few thousand residents at the turn of the
20th century to a city of more than a million inhabitants today. In Soviet times,
hundreds of factories produced mining, powergenerating, and agricultural machinery,
tractors, machine tools, and a wide range of other products.
h. The Russian far East
The Far East is Russia’s mountainous Pacifi c edge. Most of it is a thinly
populated wilderness in which the only settlements are fi shing ports, lumber and
mining camps, and the villages and camps of aboriginal peoples. Port functions, fi
sheries, and forest industries provide the main support for most Far Eastern
communities, and until now, the output of coal, oil, and a few other minerals has been
small. Most of the Russians and Ukrainians who make up the majority of its people
live in a narrow strip of lowland behind the coastal mountains in the southern part of
the region. This lowland, drained by the Amur River and its tributary, the Ussuri, is
the region’s main axis of industry, agriculture, transportation, and urban development.
Several small to medium-sized cities form a north-south line along two
important arteries of transportation: the Trans-Siberian Railroad and the lower Amur
River. At the south on the Sea of Japan is the port of Vladivostok, which is kept open
throughout the winter by icebreakers. About 50 miles (80 km) east of the city, the
main commercial seaport area of the Far East has developed at Nakhodka and nearby
Vostochnyy (East Port). Both ports are nearly icefree and well positioned for trade in
goods manufactured in Korea, China, and Japan. Seaborne shipments of cargo
containers from northeast Asia to Scandinavia require 40 days, but the cargo can
make the 6,000-mile (9,600-km) journey from Vostochnyy to Finland by rail in only
12 days. Business in Vostochnyy is picking up. A new oil terminal is being built at
nearby Krylova Cape to support exports of oil, to be brought in initially on the Trans-
Siberian Railroad, to Japan and elsewhere.
North of Vladivostok lies a small district that is the most important center of
the Far East’s meager agriculture, producing cereals, soybeans, sugar beets, and milk
for Far Eastern consumption. The Far East is far from self-suffi cient in food and
consumer goods; large shipments from the Russian Core and from overseas
supplement local production.
The diversifi ed industrial and transportation center of Khabarovsk is located
at the confl uence of the Amur and Ussuri Rivers, where the main line of the Trans-
Siberian Railroad turns south to Vladivostok and Nakhodka and the Amur River turns
north toward the Sea of Okhotsk. Before World War II, the Soviet Union and Japan
held the northern and southern halves, respectively, of the large island of Sakhalin.
The island has much pristine wilderness with some forest, fi shing, and coal mining
but is particularly important for its offshore petroleum and natural gas. Russian
energy offi cials are describing it as a “Second Kuwait,” with about 1 percent of
global oil reserves and enough natural gas to supply the U.S. import market for about
25 years. Some of the liquefi ed natural gas will make its way to the United States
from a terminal in northern Mexico, but most of the gas will be exported to China,
Japan, and South Korea.
The Kurils are small volcanic islands that screen the Sea of Okhotsk from the
Pacifi c. Fishing is the main economic activity. At the north, the Kurils approach the
mountainous peninsula of Kamchatka (total population 300,000, with about 60
percent living in Petropavlovsk). Like the islands, Kamchatka is located on the Pacifi
c Ring of Fire—the geologically active perimeter of the Pacifi c Ocean—and has 23
active volcanoes. Soviet authorities protected Kamchatka for decades as a military
area, and no signifi cant development activities occurred there. A Californiasize land
of rushing rivers, extensive coniferous forests, and gurgling hot springs, Kamchatka is
now one of the last great wilderness areas on earth, resembling the U.S. Pacifi c
Northwest landscape of a century ago. A struggle has been under way between those
who want to develop Kamchatka’s gold and oil resources and those who wish to set
the land aside in national parks and reserves where ecotourism would be the only
signifi cant source of revenue. Much to the surprise of environmentalists abroad,
Russia’s conservationists seem to have prevailed. Fossil fuel development will take
place, but so will an ambitious effort to set aside seven wilderness tracts totaling more
than 9,400 square miles (c. 24,400 sq km), or about three times the size of
Yellowstone National Park in the United States. The main goal will be to have
multiple uses from Kamchatka’s rich salmon stocks—for food, sport, study, and profi
t—and also protect this resource from the kind of overfi shing that has laid waste to
the cod fi sheries of the Atlantic and North Seas and to Russia’s sector of the nearby
Bering Sea.
