Putin

The Russian towns and cities near the border with China are forlorn and dilapidated, whereas their Chinese counterparts gleam with steel, glass, and commercial energy. China’s cheap goods, especially clothing and electronics, draw Russian customers from far and near. The few shopping centers and high-rises in the Russian towns tend to be built by Chinese companies.

But it is not only Chinese laborers who cross the border into underpopulated Russia to exploit its natural resources, and not only Russian shoppers who cross in the other direction to buy goods for themselves or for resale; there is also a flow of educated professionals moving from Russia to China, where their skills are more in demand and better paid. And, to further complicate the picture, there are cross-border romances as well, usually between Russian women, known for their beauty and warmth, and Chinese men, who, compared to Russians, have the reputation of earning more and drinking less.

Different as they are, the Russians and Chinese both share a sense of being humiliated nations. The Chinese even speak of their “century of humiliation” from the middle of the nineteenth century, when foreigners, especially the British, forced unequal treaties on them, until 1949, when Mao’s victory began China’s comeback. (The Map Department of the People’s Press in Beijing has even published Maps of the Humiliation of China over One Hundred Years.)

Siberia’s richness and emptiness cannot help but stimulate China’s appetite for resources and lebensraum. Though all border differences were successfully negotiated in 2004, there remains a lingering sense on the Chinese side that much of the territory along the border was taken unfairly by Russia when China was weak. In some Chinese textbooks the areas on the Russian side of the border are shown in the same color as China itself. Though the borders have been fixed, that alone cannot provide Russia with much reassurance, having itself just recently violated the 1994 Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Siberians, moreover, have never been too happy about their domination and exploitation by distant Moscow. Theirs is a mentality of self-sufficiency, rugged individualism, and distrust of the central government. In the chaos of the Russian Revolution and civil war, Siberia even briefly seceded, establishing its own republic, its flag’s green and white symbolizing forest and snow. A similar logo is used by the currently existing National Alternative of Siberia—known as the Siberian Liberation Army until the group’s leader was visited by the security police curious as to his choice of words, since private armies are frowned upon, to say the least. This fringe group has a near-zero chance of having any impact at the moment, though the Russian authorities are always mindful that, given the right set of conditions, small groups like the Bolsheviks and Nazis can dart from the margins to the center.

Russia and China are both content with the current arrangement and will remain so until some new dynamic brings the borders back into question. It would be a delicious historical irony if at some point China began aiding the Siberian equivalent of the breakaway groups that set up the phantasmagorical People’s Republic of Donetsk.

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A mixture of half-real paranoia and quite real ambition caused Putin to create an enemy out of NATO, which had obliged him by expanding its borders to outflank Russia from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Putin needed that enemy for political purposes, his rule secured by the security services, the armed forces, and the wealthy elite he has created. Funds flowed to them, which meant that they would not flow to education, nonmilitary R&D, and high-tech centers imitating Silicon Valley, where those funds could have a substantial impact on the country’s economic future. Russia produces little that the world wants; its top ten exports, with the exception of some industrial machinery, include oil, gas, iron, steel, precious stones and metals, fertilizer, aluminum, wood, and cereal. Russia does of course sell weapons, planes, warships, and other military equipment, but not enough to make the top-ten list.