ISSN 20799705, Regional Research of Russia, 2015, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 203–211. © Pleiades Publishing, Ltd., 2015. Original Russian Text © A.I. Treivish, T.V. Litvinenko, 2015.
REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Eastern Russia: Space, Role, and Problems of Development A. I. Treivish and T. V. Litvinenko Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia email:
[email protected],
[email protected] Received April 10, 2015
Abstract—Russia’s division into two, principally its European and Asian, parts looks very traditional. How ever, this regionalization does not necessarily coincide with division into West and East, which concerns internal spatial proportions and asymmetry of the country rather than its cultural identity and other not quite geographical connotations. The article clarifies the concept and the border of Eastern Russia and its position in the country and the world. Some of the economic, geopolitical, and other characteristics of the East, with its comparative advantages and disadvantages, are identified and discussed. It was determined that the strong socioeconomic sparseness of Eastern Russia has always been and remains the consequence of persistent underdevelopment of the territory, associated with harsh natural conditions, history, and geographical asym metry of the exploration process. At the same time, Eastern Russia is a huge resourceecological and ethnoc ultural reserve and not only Russian. Eastern Russia makes the country what it is, and it stands out in the world—first in total area; transcontinental and interoceanic in geographical location; rich in natural resources; and diverse in culture and historical traditions. This part of Russia reflects such a common feature of the country as the East–West asymmetry of its development. Keywords: Eastern Russia, Eastern Siberia and the Far East, East–West asymmetry, raw material specializa tion, socioeconomic scarcity of space, natural resources, internal spatial disproportion, vulnerable features and comparative advantages of Russia’s East DOI: 10.1134/S2079970515030107
Russia is traditionally divided into two parts. Due to the predominant latitudinal expanse of the country, the border is usually considered almost meridional, and the two parts, in essence, West and East. But where exactly should this line be drawn, and should it be shifted, taking into account the course of history, changes in territorial composition, and the character of Russia’s development? Where in the country do the modern West end and the East begin? What are the main features of these parts that determine their dif ferences and paths of evolution? This paper aims at refining the concept and borders of Eastern (and indirectly, like a mirror reflection, Western) Russia, as well as its place in the country and the world. The paper considers certain features of Eastern Russia’s development in the postSoviet period, as well as the concomitant possibilities and limitations, problems, and vulnerable aspects. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE QUESTION OF THE EAST–WEST BORDER AS BETWEEN EUROPE AND ASIA The geographical integrity of the continent of Eur asia and the resultant conditionality of its division into two parts of the world are obvious. Its division—not so much physical as historical or cultural and geographi cal, “civilizational” [4]—has long existed and contin
ues to generate interest. Whereas the borders of Europe and Asia (the Phoenician sunset, Erebus, and sunrise, Asu) along the Aegean Sea, the Sea of Mar mara, the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov, and the straits between them since ancient times have hardly been revised at all, land borders have and continue to be fought over. Moreover, Eurasia has been considered both unified and divided in two. Up to now Europeans call their part of the world the Continent, while Russia and Kazakhstan hold to the hypothesis of an integral Eurasia. V.N. Tatishchev and F.I. TabbertStralengerg’s canonical 18th century border delineated on land along the Ural Mountains and the Ural, Kuma, and the Manych rivers, was not the first, nor was it undis puted. In antiquity, it was drawn from the Black Sea and Sea of Azov along the Don River to the Volga and somewhere toward the Urals, where the knowledge of the ancient authors ended. In the 16th century, Gerar dus Mercator had drawn it rigorously north toward the White Sea, but his map of Europe ended with the lower reaches of the Ob together with the Russia of that day. In the same epoch Adam Olearius, and JosephNico las Delisle in the 18th century, were also inclined toward the border along the Ob, whereas academician and naturalist I. Gmelin and, already in the 19th cen tury, renowned geographer Élisée Reclus drew it along the Yenisei. According to P.P. SemenovTianShan
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skiy (1892) [16], up to the mid16th century, half of European Russia to the East from the Kharkiv–Perm line was “ethnographically Asian,” and toward the end of the 19th century, in this sense, Europe extended to the Pacific Ocean. Thus, the border was shifted thousands of kilome ters from West to East. However, many doubted its validity, beginning with A. Humboldt. D.I. Mendeleev wrote [12, p. 143]: “The division of Europe and Asia in all aspects is artificial and over time it will even out and probably disappear.” In the 1930s, it seemed it was 1
already disappearing. After the war, the Ural Eco nomic District and, frequently, Transcaucasia, began to be referred to the European part of the Soviet Union. Soviet shifts to the East during the industrial ization period impressed many authors, including Western ones. Thus, the Frenchman Pierre Gourou wrote in his major book Asia that the demographic, economic, and political development of the Soviet Union every day weakened the meaning of border [7]. He was seconded by Canadian geographer D. Hoo son, who treated the industrialization of Siberia as a strengthening and expansion of Mackinder’s Heart land [18]. The recent pretentions of Turkey and Tran scaucasian countries to EU membership, to say noth ing of Cyprus’ presence in the EU since 2004, contin ued to loosen traditional divisions. On the other hand, such an approach, dynamic to the point of instability, divests both the division and the border concept of any stability and meaning. Sum ming up endless disputes, vicepresident of the Rus sian Geographical Society A.A. Chibilev [17] cited four types of significant borders (culturological, administrative–political, orographical, and hydrolog ical) and noted the tendency of their shift to the East. However, since “this could not have occurred ad infin itum,” he pointed to a return to the Ural canon, refin ing it to the southern steppe part, owing to the same shift to the East, yet a modest one: from the Ural to the Emba River and to the Mugodzhar–Ustyurt line. WEST AND EAST IN MODERN RUSSIA The question of West and East within the Russian Federation is related to that of Europe and Asia, but not identical to it. This second question is loaded, even overloaded, with political, civilizational, and other meanings that at times are quite far from the sphere of natural science and geography overall. The first ques tion is more neutral and mainly concerns the internal proportions, territorial structure of Russian society, its asymmetry, and the role of its main links. 1 Here
is a characteristic fragment from V. Kataeva’s novel For ward Oh Time! about the famous Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine (1932): “We are crossing the Urals. Flashing in the windows from left to right, twisting, the obelisk of Europe and Asia flies by. A meaningless pillar. It remained behind. What, are we in Asia? Funny. We move East at a crazy speed, carrying the revolution.”
For example, it is possible to calculate that the median longitude that divides the territory of the country into equal halves lies somewhat west of the 90th meridian. In Russia, it is frequently called the Yenisei meridian, because the large Siberian river intersects this longitude in its middle course, fitting completely in the interval between 85° and 95° E. For the population and the GDP, the middle is approxi mately 45° E, the Penza meridian (although the calcu lated geographical centers of these “masses” are closer to the Cisurals due to the large distances “pulling” these centers to the East). A discontinuity of 3000 km reflects the undoubted fact that, according to the ratios of the areas of the two megaregions, Russia is primarily an Asian country, but in terms of demo graphic proportions, it is European. There is no such difference in these features either in Kazakhstan or Turkey, whose European parts are more modestly Asian in all aspects. In this case, we are talking about the Eastern part of Russia’s territory, which mainly lies beyond the Yenisei and combines two large economic districts of the State Plan: Eastern Siberia and the Far East (but not all of the Siberian Federal District). The border along the Yenisei is by far not a formality. I.M. Maegrois wrote: “The Eastern part of the Soviet Union (more precisely, twofifths of its territory east of the Yenisei) differs by a unique system of complex geographical conditions” [[11, p. 90]. He also specified that it was the coldest in the country and the world, with almost solid perma frost. On the whole, it is elevated, mountainous, and seismically active, whereas the Western part is mainly lowlying plain, covered predominantly by tundra and sparsely forested taiga. The severe natural conditions are made worse by the remoteness from the main eco nomic centers of the country. This remoteness is mul tiplied by its lack of development: not all natural resources here have been discovered or even approxi mately surveyed. In the framework of the RSFSR and Russian Fed eration, the East was significantly larger, not two fifths, but a full threefifths of the territory. The basic characteristics of Eastern Russia have not changed from this. There is still the close relationship between its development and exploitation of natural resources. Of course, the same can be said of Western Siberia. In addition, by local standards, the foci of the “two Sibe rias” in the Kuzbass, Khakassiya, and Krasnoyarsk krai look similar. In the 20th century, this was expressed in the idea of Central Siberia as a region not so much naturally occurring as economic (this was expressed, e.g., by V.A. Krotov). Today, Central Sibe ria is usually reduced to the territory of Krasnoyarsk krai. As a matter of fact, the distance of 430 km (as the crow flies) between Kemerovo and Krasnoyarsk is two to three times larger than between contiguous urban vertex of the more compact Western Siberian rhombus of Novosibirsk–Tomsk–Kemerov–Barnaul. Omsk is even more remote from this structure, by 600–700 km.
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Forestcovered area
North Northwest Center Central Chernozem North Caucasus VolgaVyatsk Volga Ural Western Siberia Eastern Siberia Far East
Riverine resources
North Northwest Center Central Chernozem North Caucasus VolgaVyatsk Volga Ural Western Siberia Eastern Siberia Far East
Territory
North Northwest Center Central Chernozem North Caucasus VolgaVyatsk Volga Ural Western Siberia Eastern Siberia Far East
% 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0
205
Fig. 1. Share of large areas of Russia in terms of certain natural resource indices: statistical profiles.
EASTERN RUSSIA’S PLACE IN THE COUNTRY AND THE WORLD The megaregion of Eastern Russia covers 60% of Russia’s entire area, and twothirds of it is forest (Fig. 1); it has more than 90% of explored national reserves of uranium, tin, and platinum; more than 80% of gold and molybdenum; more than 70% of nickel, copper, lead, and diamond (Table 1). It also contains half of Russia’s river flows and a significant share of marine biological resources; however, it has only 11–15% of reliable hydrocarbon reserves, 14% of agricultural lands, and 7% of arable land (the num
bers have been calculated from official statistics data and [6]). More than 14.5 mln people, around 10% of all Russians, live in the territory of Eastern Russia, which is approximately equal to the area of Canada and exceeds the entire area of the United States or China. Their mean density there is 1.4 people/km2 vs. 19 peo ple/km2 in the western half of the country and almost 6 people/km2 in neighboring Western Siberia. It is a very telltale contrast with the mean Chinese popula tion density of 135 people/km2 (the index varies from 12 to 84 in the three main Chinese regions contiguous with Russia). In truth, another Eastern neighbor and
Table 1. Eastern Russia’s share of all of Russia’s explored reserves of certain types of mineral resources, % (2011) Type of resource Areas Eastern Russia Eastern Siberi Far East
oil (including natural gas** condensate) 11.9 8.6 3.3*
15.4 8.4 7.0*
coal
uranium
iron ore
copper
nickel
46.5 35.7 10.8
94.3 42.2 52.1
15.6 8.2 7.4
70.5 65.7 4.8
74.1 73.2 0.9
diamond
Type of resource Areas Eastern Russia Eastern Siberi Far East
tungsten
molybdenum
tin
lead
zinc
zoloto
52.3 28.7 23.6
84.2 77.2 7.0
99.6 8.0 91.6
74.2 71.9 11.8
63.3 56.8 6.5
81.9 42.0 39.9
* Oil and natural gas reserves of shelf of Sea of Okhotsk are included in the Far East macroregion. ** Data on free gas (without dissolved gas). *** Yakutia. Sources: calculated from [5, 6 (oil and gas)]. REGIONAL RESEARCH OF RUSSIA
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77.3 – 77.3***
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Table 2. Eastern Russia’s share of all of Russia’s oil and natural gas extraction, 1990–2013, % Years Areas 1990 Eastern Siberia Far East Eastern Russia, total
0.0 0.4 0.4
Eastern Siberia Far East Eastern Russia, total
– 0.5 0.5
1995
2000
2005
Oil extraction (including condensate) 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.6 1.2 0.9 0.6 1.2 0.9 Natural gas extraction – 0.1 0.1 0.5 0.6 0.5 0.5 0.7 0.6
2010
2011
2013
0.0 1.4 1.4
4.2 4.0 8.3
6.2 4.0 10.3
0.1 0.6 0.7
0.7 4.1 4.8
1.0 4.5 5.5
Sources: calculated from Rosstat data and [6, 13, 14].
“buffer” between the two giants, Mongolia, is also almost as sparsely populated (1.7 people/km2). Russia’s Eastern megaregion contains 6 out 26 national formations having the status of federal subjects, and if we count those that in the 2000s were included into other subjects (krais), the number is 11. Among 50 ethnicities that constituted the official Uni fied Census of Indigenous Peoples with Scant Popula tions, 32, i.e., twothirds, are in the East. The territo ries occupied by them, and frequently only them, reach millions of square kilometers, prevailing in area over those with a Russian or mixed population, which is usually far more concentrated and urbanized. In addition to the level of a territory’s development and its industrial and ecosystemic resources, this in many respects determined the specifics of the Eastern half of the country. In the geographical division of labor, Eastern Rus sia throughout its entire historical period has stood out primarily in its raw material specialization. Moreover, this resource character of the economy of the massive region, which has remained unchanged for centuries, only intensified in the postSoviet period. However, it should be noted that, here, in the Soviet epoch, there appeared large enterprises of the aviation industry (Irkutsk, UlanUde, KomsomolskonAmur, Arsen’ev); scienceintensive enterprises of the military industrial complex (Krasnoyarsk, Zheleznogorsk); giants of aluminum production (Bratsk, Krasnoyarsk, Sayanogorsk); very large enterprises of the pulp and paper industry; etc. All these industries, created during Soviet times, successfully operate on the domestic and foreign markets under modern conditions. FEATURES OF EASTERN RUSSIA’S POSTSOVIET DEVELOPMENT The postSoviet dynamic of a number of raw mate rial branches in the country’s East differed from Rus sia’s overall dynamic. Thus, in 1990–2010, against a backdrop of a fall in oil extraction in the entire coun
try, a more than threefold increase was noted in East ern Russia—in all four regions in which it was being extracted: Krasnoyarsk krai, Irkutsk oblast (extraction since 1998), the Sakha Republic, and Sakhalin oblast. The share of studied regions in Russian oil extraction also increased more than 25fold: from 0.4% in 1990 to 10.3% in 2013 (Table 2). Whereas natural gas extraction in the country decreased by 8% in 1990–1998 and then began to increase, in the East, growth was observed throughout the entire postSoviet period. Along with Yakutia and Sakhalin, where gas had been extracted in Soviet times, development began in Krasnoyarsk krai since 1998, and Kamchatka krai and Irkutsk oblast since 2000. Eastern Russia’s contribution to national extraction rose from 0.5 to 5.5% (Table 2). Thus, for the relatively low share of established Russian oil and gas reserves and their extraction, the Eastern megaregion after the fall of the Soviet Union still began to actively explore their resources, and the circle of explored areas continuously expanded. This corresponded to the historical scheme of macrowaves of resource exploration, beginning with the fur trade of the 16th–17th centuries, which was closely related to export and spurred Russia’s transcontinental expan sion [15, etc.]. The output of steel and and rolled steel with a high valueadded cost dropped more steeply in Eastern Russia in the postSoviet period than in the country as a whole. Industrial timber, fishing, and seafood pro duction in the East since 1990 decreased less, but the drop in lumber products of the first stage of timber processing was more significant, as well as other industrial timber products that undergo indepth processing [10]. On the whole, in the postSoviet period, statistics record the following in Eastern Russia: (1) active exploration of oil and gas resources; (2) intensified listing of the economy toward raw materials and a decrease of indepth processing of raw materials. The resource specialization of Eastern Russia intensified in
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the postSoviet period mainly because of new market outlets. Whereas in Soviet times, Russia’s Eastern areas delivered raw materials to processing factories in Western Russia and its European partners, the Urals, and southern Siberia, after the fall of the Soviet Union, their place was taken by neighboring and closelying countries. Eastern Russia became the raw materials appendage of countries of the AsiaPacific Region [1, 10]. At the same time, a trend toward a worsening of certain types of raw materials was noted at the mesolevel: in Yakutia, from diamond mining to lapidary manufacture; in Magadan oblast, from gold mining to refining; in Sakhalin oblast, from gas extrac tion to the commissioning of a condensed natural gas factory in the Korsakov district; in Khakassia, from aluminum smelting at the Sayanogorsk foil factory, as well as aluminum alloys at the Khakassia Aluminum Factory, launched in 2006, one of the largest and most technologically advanced in the world. Such examples are limited at present; official statistics have barely recorded any at all. Already in the 1990s, liberalization of foreign eco nomic relations strongly changed the geography. As well, judging from the composition of foreign trade partners, investors, etc., all of Eastern Russia fell into the zone of attraction toward the AsiaPacific Region [2]. Since then, this zone has expanded. The trade vol ume with China alone for the 2000s increased by an order of magnitude. The hopes of regionalists to stop the postSoviet “flow” of Russia’s economy into its Western part were tied to the accelerated growth of the Eastern sector of Russia’s border region [3]. In con trast, such a choice may deprive Russia of new tech nologies the transfer of which from China is not very likely. The unilateral raw material specialization of East ern Russia’s economy, the strengthening in the selec tivity of mineral extraction, and the overall reduction in the fund to involve natural resources in the economy under postSoviet conditions facilitated the creation of a stable trend of population outflow from the east ern megaregion. One of the main reasons was the drop in production in different branches of resource use, due to a weakening (right up to total breakdown) in the horizontal and vertical economic relations of the tech nological chains between raw material sources and primary, secondary, and tertiary processing industries. The migration outflow was the largest under during the transitional crisis of the 1990s. In 1989–1998, 979 000 people left Eastern Russia (Table 3). The turn toward the market revealed “relative overpopulation” of the northern regions, from which inhabitants began to depart more actively and rapidly than in southern Siberian regions. For the period of 1989–2000, the decrease in northern Eastern Siberia was 14.6 vs. 1.6% in the South, and in the Far East, in the North it was 19.2 vs. 4.7% in the South [9]. The migration problem within Eastern Russia is extremely inhomogeneous. Each region located fur REGIONAL RESEARCH OF RUSSIA
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Table 3. Net migration of population of Eastern Russia’s economic regions, thou. people Areas Eastern Siberia Far East Eastern Russia, total
1979–1988 1989–1998 1999–2012 42 333 375
–190 –789 –979
–232 –373 –605
Sources: official population statistics and [8].
ther to the West, as a rule, loses population to regions even further West, being partially filled at the expense of regions lying to the East. Owing to such a replace ment by migrants, Eastern Siberia at the end of the 1990s was able to compensate westward population losses with the inflow from the Far East. The Far East ern Federal Okrug for many years was the leader in rel ative migration losses, replacing them only to a small extent with an inflow of foreign migrants (at least according to official data). Natural decrease also contributed to the post Soviet reduction in the population of Eastern Russia, although it was noticeably smaller than the country’s average due to the younger age structure of the popu lation [9]. The situation with its natural movement in the postSoviet era in Eastern Russian regions was dif ferent, at times unique. In 1993–2005, here, just like in Russia on the whole, a overall natural decrease was observed. Exceptions were the Sakha and Tyva repub lics and the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, where the natural increase coefficient remained positive throughout the entire postSoviet period. In 2006, this list was augmented by Buryatia, and in 2007, by Kam chatka krai. In the period from 2009–2012, Eastern Siberia was Russia’s only economic area having no region with a negative natural increase coefficient. Nevertheless, the combination of migration out flow and natural decrease, especially in the 1990s, led to a reduction in the population in the majority of Eastern Russian regions (with some exceptions). On the whole, the population of Eastern Russia for 1990– 2015 decreased by 2.9 mln people (Table 4). With a tenth of the population, Eastern Russia yields 17–18% of the national product of the mining industry, owing to which its contribution to Russia’s industrial production reaches 13.5%, and the total GRP, around 10.5% (Fig. 3). As well, the East’s share of consumption, reflected by the size of retail trade (8.4% in 2010), was lower than its share of the popula tion; in the number of unemployed (12.5%) it is, on the contrary, higher (see Fig. 2). In other words, this part of the country on the whole is poorer and has more problems than the West ern part in the social aspect. In addition, its share of all of Russia’s volume of investments in recent years has grown due to largescale projects, in particular, expen ditures related to the construction of the Eastern Sibe 2015
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% 35
Population
Unemployed
Size of population’s income
30 25
2013
2002
1989
20
2010
1995
2010
2000
2000
1990
15 10 5 North Northwest Center Central Chernozem North Caucasus VolgaVyatsk Volga Ural Western Siberia Eastern Siberia Far East
North Northwest Center Central Chernozem North Caucasus VolgaVyatsk Volga Ural Western Siberia Eastern Siberia Far East
North Northwest Center Central Chernozem North Caucasus VolgaVyatsk Volga Ural Western Siberia Eastern Siberia Far East
0
Fig. 2. Share of large areas of Russia in terms of certain demographic and social indices: statistical profiles.
ria–Pacific Ocean gas line, holding of the AsiaPacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vladivostok, and construction of the Vostochnyi Cosmodrome in Amur oblast. POTENTIAL ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF EASTERN RUSSIA The highly strategic value of the megaregion, which ensures the country an outlet to the Pacific Ocean, its relationships in this direction, its role in the world economy and politics, and in Russia’s foreign rela tions, is rapidly increasing. In the years of the last cri sis, China has become Russia’s trading partner. In truth, its share of Russian trade is just a little more than 10% (the share of the entire AsiaPacific Region is nearly twice as high) and Russia’s share of China’s for eign trade up to recently has not exceeded 2%. The contribution of Eastern Russia itself to this trade is determined, just like within the country, by natural
resources. On the other hand, in contrast to its ship ment to Russia’s western areas and European coun tries—to a significant extent limited to valuable low tonnage types of raw materials, deliveries to nearby Asian countries frequently include such “bulk” types as coal, timber, etc. Taken together, these facts reflect both the strong, advantageous and the weak, vulnerable facets of East ern Russia and the risks they generate—primarily, their location far from the main centers of their own country, their relative proximity to China, Korea, and Japan, and the chronic lack of development related to the harsh natural conditions, history, and geographical asymmetry of development processes, the waves of which have not always made it to the eastern reaches. As well, these waves have come at intervals during which raw material priorities changed substantially, and deposits, development areas of disperse resources and, at the same time, villages related to them, fell into neglect. As a result, this could have required repeat,
Table 4. Change in population number in areas of Eastern Russia and Russian Federation (within the corresponding years) for 1990–2015 Population, mln people
Change in population for 1990–2015
Areas Eastern Siberi Far East Eastern Russia Russia as a whole
1990
2015
mln people
%
9.207 8.064 17.271 148.274
8.189 6.211 14.400 146.267
–1.018 –1.853 –2.871 –2.007
–11.1 –23.0 –16.6 –1.4
Source: calculated from official statistics data. REGIONAL RESEARCH OF RUSSIA
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@
@
209
@
30 25 2010
2000
1990
2010
2000
2010 1990 2000
1990
20 2010
15 1990
10
2000
North Northwest Center Central Chernozem North Caucasus VolgaVyatsk Volga Ural Western Siberia Eastern Siberia Far East
North Northwest Center Central Chernozem North Caucasus VolgaVyatsk Volga Ural Western Siberia Eastern Siberia Far East
Far East
Eastern Siberia
Western Siberia
Volga
VolgaVyatsk
North Caucasus
Central Chernozem
Center
Northwest
North
0
Ural
5
Fig. 3. Share of large areas of Russia in terms of certain economic indices: statistical profiles.
Novosibirsk 625 Omsk
Irkutsk
762 1087 Krasnoyarsk
Chita
456 557 UlanUde
Khabarovsk 1777
767 Blagoveshchensk
766 Vladivostok
Fig. 4. Large and mediumsized cities of Transiberian Railroad: relative diagram. Size of symbols corresponds approximately to the population number of a city. Numerals indicate distances in km between centers of federal subjects listed in the diagram.
and not especially stable, development of approxi mately the same territories. The result of similar processes remains the strong socioeconomic vacuum of Eastern Russia’s spaces. Even in the south, along the main Transiberian axis, for more than 1600 km between Chita and Svobodnoe there is not only no city with 100 000 people, but not even a mediumsized populated one with 50 000 peo ple. Even between large cities, regional centers lying on the same axis to the West and East of the Chita– Svobodnoe segment, the distances are 2–2.5 times shorter (Fig. 4). Of course, this discontinuity is by no means an accident (any geographer will immediately list several reasons for its existence); it does not mean that some where in the middle, e.g., at Yerofei Pavlovich station a significant city should emerge. Neither will the dis continuity disappear with the construction of the Vos tochnyi Cosmodrome near the village of Uglegorsk in Amur oblast or even in the implementation of the old project of the creating the Amur metallurgical base on ores from the Garin OreDressing Combine. Both REGIONAL RESEARCH OF RUSSIA
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projects are of strategic value and require massive expenditures, but they do not reduce the gap in the Transiberian route. In reality, accelerated growth of big cities in Eastern Russia (as well as in some other parts of the country) in recent decades has been noted in the capitals of republics and regions where the rural population has long predominated; i.e., the urbaniza tion process was far from completion, but it was able to fuel itself with its own local demographic resources. One of the properties of the most highly populated cities in both of Eastern Russia’s macroregions was the fact that they are shared capitals: Krasnoyarsk shared its functions as the leader of Eastern Siberia with Irkutsk, and Khabarovsk and Vladivostok were the “tandem team” in the Far East. Each pair had approx imate equal centers in terms of size, although in East ern Siberia, it was less stable. In the first half of the 20th century, Irkutsk took the lead over its more West ern partner, and it then began to fall more and more noticeably behind. Now, within the official boundary of Krasnoyarsk, the capital of the economically pow erful MidSiberian Region, there are more that 1 mln 2015
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inhabitants, 1.7 times larger than in Irkutsk, the popu lation of which has hardly changed since lateSoviet times, stuck at something over 600 000 people. Both of the Far East leaders retain these sizes, identical even up to now. However, the picture will change somewhat if we consider not individual cities, but their agglomerations and looser—although still quite compact (against the backdrop of large distances typical of this part of Rus sia)—groupings. Whereas east of Krasnoyarsk there are no millionaire cities, groupings taken together have a populations of a million or exceed this symbolic number. The leaders are, first, Irkutsk with the 130 km strip of cities near Angarsk and, second, Vladivostok, the leader of the South Primor’e urbanization area, where the straightest and shortest distance from Ussuriisk to Nakhodka is also 130 km, the population is substantially greater than 1 mln, and it noticeably exceeds the population of Khabarovsk with its less dense environment. Communications within this for mation are complicated by the relief and the tortuous coastline, but they can be improved. Corresponding measures and, on the whole, rapid development of both mentioned groupings are quite desirable under the conditions of the Eastern reorien tation of Russia’s foreign relations, the aforemen tioned increased significance of China and the Asia Pacific Region. Another matter is that local concen trations are unable to solve problems related to the 1 overall sparseness of Eastern Russia or, formulatively speaking, to its socioeconomic and geodemographic emptiness, the “friction” of distances, etc. Here, some kind of fundamentally new, unconventional solutions and tools are needed. CONCLUSIONS No matter how modest Eastern Russia’s share of the country’s population and its contribution to the Russian economy, this part is important at least because it makes Russia what it is, standing out sharply in the world: first in terms of space; size of territory; transcontinental and interoceanic in terms of geo graphic position; rich in natural resources; the diver sity of cultures, historical traditions, and experience of many peoples. At the same time, the Eastern megare gion also reflects Russia’s general property of the Western–Eastern asymmetry of its development, which is ever more starkly in contradiction with the changing ratio of foreign global powers in favor of Eastern AsiaPacific neighbors. With a little schematization, it can be stated that Eastern Russia is a large resource, ecological, and eth nocultural reserve that is not Russian alone. Along with the Amazon and a few other large green areas of the planet, it represents its lungs. It holds the world’s freshwater reserves (we need only mention Lake Baikal). This is a valuable area for ecologists, paleon tologists, archeologists, and anthropologists. The
problem is that such assets are for the most part non marketable in the usual commercial understanding of this word. Currently, it is impossible to extract a direct return from them. Meanwhile, obviously, Russia must preserve them for itself and all of humankind, if possible, in a pure, unspoiled, and unspent form, which is in Russia’s own longterm interests. This depends, in many respects, on how it deals with them today and tomorrow. Disputes continue on the fate of Eastern and Northern Russia, their wide spaces, and harsh natural conditions. Diametrically opposing viewpoints exist, including in the direction of socalled new geographi cal determinism. They are reflected, e.g., in the rela tively recent, sensational books by A.P. Parshev Why Russia Is Not America (1999), by likeminded people abroad, and by implacable critics like F. Hill and K. Geddy: The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold (2003), as well as a number of other publications. However, this is a particular topic requiring separate and detailed consideration. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The work was carried out under the Basic Research Program I.16P of the RAS Presidium “Russia’s Spa tial Development in the 21st Century: Nature, Society, and Their Interaction” (project 5.1). REFERENCES 1. Baklanov, P.Ya., Integration and disintegration pro cesses in Russian Far East, Reg. Issld., 2002, no. 1, pp. 11–19. 2. Vardomskiy, L.B. and Treivish, A.I., Problems of sus tainability of economic space of Russia in the context of the external economic liberalization, in Vneshneeko nomicheskie svyazi i regional’nyoe razvitie Rossii (For eign Economic Relations and Regional Development in Russia), Moscow: EPIKON, 1999, pp. 189–205. 3. Vardomskiy, L.B., The problems of economic develop ment and cooperation in the borderlands zone of Rus sia, in Geograficheskoe polozhenie i territorial’nye struk tury (Geographical Position and Territorial Structures), Moscow: Novyi Khronograf, 2012, pp. 631–658. 4. Gorkin, A.P., Where, finally, is the border between Europe and Asia ? Geografiya, 2010, no. 10. http://geo.1september.ru/view_article.php?id=201 001020 5. State report “On the state and use of mineral resources of the Russian Federation in 2011”. http://www.mnr.gov.ru/regula tory/detail.php?ID=131017. Cited June 10, 2013. 6. State report “On the state and use of mineral resources of the Russian Federation in 2012”. http://www. mnr.gov.ru/regulatory/detail.php?ID=134151. Cited August 1, 2014. 7. Gourou, P., L’Asie, Paris: Hachette, 1953. 8. Zaionchkovskaya, Zh.A., Migration crisis and burst in the 1980’s and 1990’s, in Rossiya i ee regiony v XX veke:
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