Seen in historical perspective, Russia’s latest turn to the east is not new. “From the shores of the Pacific and the heights of the Himalayas, Russia will dominate not only the affairs of Asia but those of Europe as well.” The Russian statesman who wrote those words was not Vladimir Putin, as some might suspect, but Count Sergey Witte, Alexander III’s finance minister, in a memo to his monarch in 1893. Witte, the architect of Russia’s industrial revolution, launched the trans-Siberian Railroad, aimed at opening up the resources of the eastern two-thirds of Russia and giving Moscow the means to establish its presence as a great power in the Pacific.
In fact, the Russians have been “turning toward Asia” ever since they first crossed the Urals in the late 16th century; and successive rulers – tsars and commissars alike – have kept going. It is no accident that the name of the port city of Vladivostok, home to Russia’s Pacific Fleet, means in Russian, “Rule the East”.
Yet for the Kremlin today, the turn to the east has a special urgency. The break-up of the Soviet Union was a blow to the Russian economy as a whole, but for East Siberia and the Russian Far East it was a disaster. Jobs disappeared as military industry, the mainstay of the region, shut down. In Vladivostok, the fleet rusted at anchor. Today the regions are depressed and increasingly depopulated. Along a coastline equal in length to the entire North American seaboard from Florida to Quebec, Russia’s Pacific Coast has fewer than 5m inhabitants. China, to the south, has 1.3bn. From Moscow’s perspective, it is no longer a question of “dominating the affairs of Asia”, but of keeping Russia intact.