Deeply isolated in Soviet days, when it was a closed military zone with a strategic submarine port, Kamchatka can still be reached from the mainland only by a single highway or ferry. Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, its decrepit capital, is a poster city for “forgotten by time.” Gray, water-stained buildings of crumbling concrete line lush hills that descend toward the Pacific Ocean. Besides the twenty-odd fishing trawlers that had been impounded for poaching when I visited and were moored a slight distance from shore, the once bustling port is crammed with rusting ships and scrap metal. The isolation and lack of infrastructure mean that apart from fishing, there’s almost no other way to earn a living.
Kamchatka’s human poverty seems heightened by its exquisite landscape. I’d traveled there to research a story about the potential for tourism in the region. The spectacularly verdant land of untamed rivers has twenty-nine active volcanoes, hot, spurting geysers, rare Steller’s sea eagles and the world’s densest concentration of brown bears. But any tourism that could help sustain at least some of the peninsula’s residents seems a very long way off in a region so poor I couldn’t help feeling depressed much of the time. Driving for several hours beneath snow-peaked mountains with two other journalists, I crossed the narrow peninsula from its eastern, Pacific coast toward the Sea of Okhotsk in the west. We encountered almost no one until we reached a crumbling village called Ust-Bolsheretsk, where fishermen in rusty trailers parked on the banks of the Bolshaya (“Big”) River were eating pieces of salted salmon on dark rye bread, washed down with vodka and tea.
Every year, millions of salmon fight their way up the Bolshaya and its sister rivers. When poachers deplete one species, they move on to another. One deeply weathered man in his fifties who wouldn’t give his last name said that everyone on Kamchatka poaches. “There’s no work here, only fish. Everyone feeds his family however he can, and that’s by catching fish. You go hungry if you don’t.”
The Sea of Okhotsk lies several miles south of Ust-Bolsheretsk, along a section of flat tundra that stinks of rotting fish. As murky waves lapped the volcanic sand on a barren beach on the day we were there, warmly dressed fishermen in rubber boats cast nets into the water. Officially they were catching halibut, but under their piles of fish, we glimpsed another species they’d hidden: wild sockeye salmon, out of season and illegal to catch.
Back in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, regional officials assured me that only 10 percent of the fish caught in and around Kamchatka is poached—and fishing department chief Alexander Krenge said the administration was dealing with the problem. But most Kamchatkans dispute the government’s figures, including businessman Valery Vorobiev, the frustrated head of Akros, one of the peninsula’s largest fishing companies. Standing on the bridge of one of his Norwegian-built fishing trawlers at dock, he said criminal gangs poach at least half the fish sold from Kamchatka. “That’s ruinous for salmon,” he said. “In Kamchatka alone, more than one hundred thousand tons are poached each year, and most only for their caviar. After the fish are slashed open, they’re thrown away.”
Vorobiev estimated some salmon species have declined by half in recent years. Inland, locals say criminal groups organize brigades of fifteen to twenty men who are flown upriver by helicopter. Their poaching deprives Kamchatka’s bears of their natural prey, forcing them to raid human settlements for food.
Kamchatka’s leading environmental activist, Andrei Abikh, told me the peninsula’s industrial-scale poaching is possible only because officials charged with protecting fish are thoroughly corrupt. “The racket goes all the way to the top,” he said. “Everyone wants a cut. It’s gotten to the point where police, secret service and even judges are participating in poaching from our rivers.”
A fish vendor named Vadim Chernov went further. Standing behind a line of tables laden with whole fish and fish heads at a busy outdoor market in the town of Elizovo, near the capital, the young man with a kindly demeanor and tidy clothes was the only seller who risked speaking to me. He said 90 percent of salmon sold there is poached. “The industry could easily be cleaned up, but that would cut into the authorities’ profits from bribes and fines. Most of the local catch goes abroad, so locals are forced to poach, and we have no choice but to buy their catch from them, although it’s just not right.”
Environmentalists say plundering the region’s unique natural resources could cause the collapse not only of Kamchatka’s ecosystem but also the Pacific’s entire wild salmon population. Every Kamchatkan knows the danger but also understands that their region has descended too deep into crime for there to be any hope for change in the foreseeable future.
The poor are pawns in a political-economic system contrived to keep those in power powerful and rich. Although the stake most people have in the going scheme is tiny, it’s been enough to help isolate the majority of Russians from one another and keep them from acting in their common interests by joining forces against the country’s top-down corruption. Payoffs also undermine the police, judiciary and other institutions civil society must rely on to enforce the law. Unlike many corrupt countries where the strongest critics can still struggle to act honestly and call at least some officials to account, in Kamchatka as in most parts of Russia, there’s nowhere to turn.
Russian poverty is too pervasive to measure except by approximation. Even many Muscovites have only a sketchy impression of how bad things are in many rural communities. Ethnic minorities—of which there are hundreds in Russia, comprising some 20 percent of the population—often have it even worse. In the Nenets Autonomous region in Russia’s far north, a land above the Arctic Circle where the sandy soil is locked in permafrost, the indigenous Nenets people are under serious threat. When I visited the tiny settlement of Krasnoe, where hunting and fishing are the main economic activities, young people were leaving for towns and alcoholism was crippling many of those who remain.
Many Nenets men spend most of the year herding reindeer, their chief source of food, on the tundra. Piotr Vylka, who had retired two years earlier, passed his time building sleighs in the small wooden house where he lived. An avuncular type who complained of having too much time on his hands, Vylka sang a traditional song for me, the kind men sing for entertainment during the long months of lonely herding. The mournful guttural verses about a confrontation between a young girl and an old man who wants her jewelry end with her pushing him onto a bonfire.
Vylka said he’d helped herd up to six thousand reindeer in the north of the region, which, at the height of its nine-month winter, sees no daylight at all. Average temperatures hover around minus thirteen degrees Fahrenheit. During the brief summer, mosquito swarms can be savage enough to kill adult reindeer—or so said Vylka, adding that he nevertheless enjoyed life on the tundra and was bored at home.
Nenets people now comprise only about a tenth of the population of the Nenets Autonomous region. More than half its residents are Russian, most of whom work in the region’s oil industry and live in the nearby capital of Naryan-Mar, an old lumber port whose buildings are of wood, blackening Soviet concrete or corrugated metal. Beginning in the 1930s, the Soviet authorities forced many nomadic Nenets to settle in villages as a way of asserting political control and introducing modernization. Some Nenets continued to herd reindeer for collective farms while their children lived in state-run boarding schools. A local historian named Yuri Kanev, a former director of one of those schools, described how seriously the programs disrupt the traditional Nenets way of life. “Children from the age of seven to about sixteen are cut off from their families to live in school for most of the year under the direction of strangers. Little good can come of that.”
The forced change helped drive many to idleness and alcoholism. Victor Yanzinov, a psychologist who treats alcohol and drug abuse in Naryan-Mar’s ramshackle hospital, said 5 percent of the region’s population is now reportedly under treatment for serious alcoholism—a fraction of those who need it, he added—and the situation for local Nenets is far worse. “Conditions are ver
y bad in Nenets villages. Residents have gone crazy for drink and it’s putting the very existence of the Nenets under threat. Maybe the most frightening thing is that people don’t know the real situation. The statistics don’t begin to reflect the facts.”
The collapse of the USSR worsened the situation by ending Soviet subsidies. Young people began their migration to cities, where, as a young physician named Rais Ibragimov explained, unemployment and drugs awaited. “Not knowing how to function in an urban, industrial environment,” he said, “they just don’t mesh with the rhythm of city life and they’re oppressed by its social structure.” Both Ibragimov and Yanzinov bitterly criticized the authorities for doing virtually nothing to address the problems.
Back in the village of Krasnoe, Maria Vylka, the herder’s wife, insisted that life under the Soviet Union had been better and happier. “Things are worse now. Young people have started acting like bandits, even killing people; there was a murder right here! People were nicer before.”
Psychologist Yanzinov said that despite the prevalence of alcoholism and drug abuse, the government provides almost no funds for its treatment or research. His clinic had no computer, so he couldn’t maintain a database of medical conditions, for example—let alone connect to the Internet. Still, there’s little doubt about the relationship between poverty and Russia’s widespread epidemics, including tuberculosis, the frequency of which—in a country with one of the world’s highest number of billionaires—has more than doubled since 1991. In Russia’s gruesome prisons, the disease kills some five thousand people a year, and many of the hundred thousand prisoners released annually are infected. In the general population, tuberculosis kills more than twenty thousand people a year, compared to around five hundred in the United States, which has a population more than twice as large. World health experts have warned about a time bomb waiting to go off that could greatly damage many more countries than Russia alone.
The epidemic of HIV and AIDS, the largest in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, is even more worrisome. Registered cases in 2012 numbered more than seven hundred thousand, up from fewer than half a million as recently as 2008, but no such figure can be trusted in a country that blamed the Pentagon for AIDS during the Cold War. Experts say the real rate is at least double the official number—and growing, thanks largely to the use of heroin, which is also rapidly spreading.
Although AIDS is the third leading cause of premature death—compared to the twenty-third in the United States—Moscow no longer accepts funding from the United Nations UNAIDS program or other international organizations because it sees itself as a donor country, not a recipient of help. However, the government doesn’t finance programs that had been until recently supported by foreign agencies.10 Insufficient funding for known cases of AIDS virtually guarantees that patients receive generally inferior treatment, and poor people get by far the worst from the badly fraying social services and healthcare system. The United Nations places Russia seventy-first in the world in human development, after Albania and just above Macedonia. (Norway is first; the United States thirteenth.)
Still, despite the turmoil wreaked in Krasnoe by sickness and substance abuse, life is relatively good compared to other tundra villages, many of which are barely self-sufficient. That’s largely because it is the only settlement connected to the region’s capital by a dirt road. And, a villager assured me, the fact that it sits on its own supply of natural gas, which residents use to heat their houses, makes it “almost paradise.”
Faced with obvious disintegration of the social fabric, the authorities in Moscow have issued appeals for radical change. In 2009, then-President Medvedev published a manifesto specifying the urgent need for everything from overhauling the country’s flagrantly corrupt legal system to reducing the number of its time zones from eleven to nine in order to make life more efficient in the sparsely populated far east. However, Kremlin policies supposedly designed to tackle some of the problems are actually making them worse. Tinkering with the time zones and scrapping daylight saving time in 2010 did the country far less harm than Putin’s decision five years earlier to abolish elections for the country’s regional governors in favor of Kremlin appointments. Although he partly restored direct voting in 2012, the inclusion of new restrictions made the concession virtually meaningless. With little oversight from the federal government and no need to answer to voters, local administrations have become mired in corruption and infighting and pay even less attention to their people’s well-being.
When I traveled through the country’s far east, it seemed clear to me that the massive distance from Moscow heightened people’s sense of abandonment by their government. Anton Chekhov encountered some of the same sentiments when he visited the region in 1890. The distance from Moscow, he said, meant people “are not afraid to talk aloud here.”
There’s no one to arrest them and nowhere to exile them to, so you can be as liberal as you like. The people for the most part are independent, self-reliant, and logical… An escaped convict can travel freely on the steamer to the ocean, without any fear of the captain giving him up. This is partly due to the absolute indifference to everything that is done in Russia. Everybody says: “What is it to do with me?”11
Today, many Russians in the far-flung region have left to seek work elsewhere, and those who remain increasingly look to China for their survival.
Isolated from the rest of the country by the taiga—endless tracts of unsettled land covered by scrubby evergreens—the city of Blagoveshchensk offers insight into Russia’s relationship with China, its flourishing southern neighbor. It stands on the Amur River, which divides the two countries along a line the supposedly congenial Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China contested during bloody skirmishes in the 1960s. When relations began thawing twenty years later, consumer-starved Chinese flocked across the border to buy Soviet cars, farm machinery, pots and pans and anything else they could lay their hands on. Now the trade moves in the opposite direction. From Blagoveshchensk’s barren, litter-strewn riverbank, the Chinese city of Heihe, on the other side, is clearly visible in the form of skyscrapers and giant cranes that are helping construct ever more buildings. As the Chinese city grows, stagnation continues to depress Blagoveshchensk across the river, where the Chinese are helping sustain life.
In winter, trucks and buses cross the ice in both directions. In spring, when the ice begins melting, passengers board small, battered hovercraft that skim over the river and up the sandy banks, kicking up large dust clouds. I watched as people bent over plastic bags bulging with clothing and other goods crammed themselves onto the ferries, which left every few minutes from the Chinese side. Most of the passengers were Russians whom Chinese vendors pay to carry goods to Blagoveshchensk, where—as in other cities of Russia’s far east—they sell the goods at a bustling outdoor market.
In stark contrast to largely apathetic Russians, the Chinese who work in Blagoveshchensk do more than sell merchandise. Next to a market stall, a lanky cobbler named Yo Xiaoching, who was nailing new soles onto a pair of shoes, said it was far easier to find work in Blagoveshchensk than in China. The numbers explain why. While fewer than a million people occupy Russia’s vast Amur region, the Chinese region of Heilongjiang, across the river, is bursting at the seams with almost forty million people. And despite strict new Russian laws limiting the number of Chinese permitted to work in Blagoveshchensk, Yo said it was still attractive to go there because “there’s no work at all on the Chinese side.”
With racist hate crimes endemic in Russia and nationalists spreading fear of a swelling menace on Russia’s border, most Chinese in Blagoveshchensk keep to themselves, maintaining a determinedly low profile. Nevertheless, Blagoveshchensk residents tend to be less suspicious of them than they were during the years immediately following the Soviet collapse. A smartly dressed middle-aged clothes designer named Tatyana Sorokina said she actually felt more reliant on China than Moscow, thousands of miles west. “It’s just a fact of life,” she ex
plained. “We depend on the Chinese for so many things; any development they accomplish here is also good for us.”
Dependence on China isn’t new. Residents told me they wouldn’t have weathered Russia’s steep economic decline in the 1990s without affordable Chinese products. Eighty-year-old Nikolai Alexandrovich said he survived mainly on Chinese potatoes during the worst years of Stalinism in the 1930s. “If it weren’t for the Chinese, we’d be walking around naked and hungry today because our authorities have only helped Russia’s far east decline. All they care about is battling each other for control and lining their pockets.”
In addition to clothes and electronics, most food sold in Blagoveshchensk comes from China. And in a city principally consisting of decaying log houses and prefabricated Soviet concrete hulks, the most prominent sign of the Chinese presence is new construction. The city’s only world-class accommodations are at the Asia Hotel. With its towering glass facade, the building is Blagoveshchensk’s tallest by far. He Wenyan, the CEO of the Chinese company that built it, drives a Bentley coupe said to be the only such car in the Amur region. In the hotel’s massive revolving restaurant on the top floor, He, a proud but soft-spoken man, argued that Blagoveshchensk would be far worse off without the Chinese. “We’re good for the Russians. We help sustain their market economy,” he said. But while locals tend to agree, political experts say that the Kremlin is in denial about the long-term threat to Russia’s far east.
Russia took Blagoveshchensk from the Chinese relatively recently, in 1856, as a voluble sociologist named German Zheliabovsky reminded me in his cramped first-floor office, predicting that China may again control the city sooner rather than later. Beijing has been buying Russian arms for a major military buildup, and Moscow, he said, doesn’t realize that Russia will eventually have to share some land with China to avoid conflict. “Our military alone won’t be able to hold the far east. Russian people will have to live here.” For that to happen, he added, after apologizing for stating the obvious, there will need to be jobs.
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