The Russian Far East's Endless Winter
The Russian Far East's Endless Winter by Felix K. Chang efore the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Far East was well respected, if not feared, by many observers as a significant actor in Bregional and potentially global affairs. From its shores, the Soviet military could project its forces deep into the Pacific Ocean and, by the 1980s, as far away as the Indian Ocean. All that changed, however, during the 1990s, when evidence poured forth to indicate that the region was suffering from a profound economic dislocation, an awkward political estrangement from the center, and a general military demobilization.' Hopeful observers continue to believe that the region's abundant and varied natural resources might yet lift the Russian Far East into a more prosperous condition and Russia as a whole into a more powerful position in East Asia. But upon close examination, it can be argued that this future will arrive later rather than sooner, and require far more radical departures with the past than the region's inhabitants or Moscow's bureaucrats are currently willing to contemplate. One expert has observed that while the power of nations is customarily measured in terms of population, natural resources, geography, political effec tiveness, geostrategic position, economic and technical strength, and military might, Russian power on the Pacific has been "constrained by reliance on a single, increasingly ineffective instrument of statecraft-military might.:" Despite its many incarnations as diplomatic hub, economic window, hazardous waste site, natural resource reservoir, and political prison, the Russian Far East (hereafter RFE) has indeed been first and foremost a military bastion from czarist times through the Soviet period.
[Show full text]