Russian Far East

• 1. Introduction

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  The Russian Far East covers more than one-third of Russia's entire land area, yet fewer than eight million people live there. At slightly more than one person per square kilometer, it ranks among the most sparsely populated places on the planet. It stretches from Lake Baikal all the way to the Pacific Ocean, sharing land borders with Mongolia, China, and North Korea to the south, and sitting just across the Bering Strait from the United States to the northeast.

  What does it mean to hold a territory this vast, this remote, and this contested? How did Russia come to govern a region that foreign observers often lump together with Siberia, yet that Russians themselves have always counted as something distinct? And what happens to a place where the population has already dropped by fourteen percent in the span of fifteen years, with projections once forecasting a fall to just 4.5 million people?

  The answers run through Cossack expeditions, forced deportations, nuclear arms talks, and a highway that was not finished until 2010.

• 2. Reaching the Pacific

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  Russians reached the Pacific coast in 1647, when they established the settlement of Okhotsk. That single foothold began a process that would take two more centuries to consolidate.

  The decisive move came in the 19th century, when Russia annexed part of Chinese Manchuria between 1858 and 1860. Primorskaya Oblast was carved out as a separate administrative division of the Russian Empire in 1856, with its administrative center placed at Khabarovsk. The region began acquiring an identity of its own, separate from the vast Siberian interior to the west.

  When Russia needed a Pacific naval port in the early 1900s, the problem was ice. Vladivostok, founded in 1860, was only operational during the summer season. Port Arthur, leased from China starting in 1896, could operate all year and became the prize that drew Russia into a catastrophic conflict with Japan.

• 3. War With Japan

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  On the 8th of February 1904, Japan issued a declaration of war. Three hours before that declaration even reached the Russian government, the Imperial Japanese Navy had already attacked the Russian 1st Pacific Squadron anchored at Port Arthur.

  Russia's motivations for the conflict were as much domestic as strategic. The government saw war as a way to distract its population from repression and to rally patriotism following several general strikes. Japan, for its part, wanted to protect its dominance over Korea and the surrounding territories after negotiations with Tsar Nicholas II's government broke down in 1903.

  The war ended in September 1905 with a Japanese victory. The warring parties signed the Treaty of Portsmouth on the 5th of September 1905. Under its terms, Japan received the southern half of the island of Sakhalin from Russia, along with the right to lease the Liaodong Peninsula, which contained Port Arthur. Both sides agreed to evacuate Manchuria and return its sovereignty to China.

  Two years after the treaty, in 1907, Japan pressured Russia into confiscating land from Korean settlers, who at that point formed the majority of Primorsky Krai's population. Japan feared that Korean guerrillas could oust Japanese troops from the peninsula, and the settlers became the political casualty of that fear.

• 4. Deportations and Gulag

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  Between 1937 and 1939, Joseph Stalin ordered the deportation of over 200,000 Koreans from the Soviet Far East to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The stated rationale was suspicion that Koreans might spy for Japan. Many died during the journey, transported in cattle trains and exposed to starvation, illness, and freezing conditions.

  Soviet authorities also purged and executed many Korean community leaders. The survivors, known as Koryo-saram, were barred from traveling outside of Central Asia for the next fifteen years. The Korean language was suppressed; its use began to erode, giving way to a mixed dialect and to Russian.

  Through the same period and beyond, the Soviet Far East was built in large part on Gulag labor camps, concentrated especially in the northern half of the region. After Stalin died in 1953, the large-scale use of forced labor wound down. In its place, the government attracted volunteer workers with relatively high wages, trading coercion for economic incentive.

• 5. Cold War Flashpoints

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  Vladivostok hosted the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in 1974. At those talks, the Soviet Union and the United States agreed to place quantitative limits on various nuclear weapons systems and to ban the construction of new land-based ICBM launchers.

  The agreement did not reduce the military sensitivity of the region. Vladivostok and other cities in Primorsky Krai were subsequently designated closed cities because of the bases of the Soviet Pacific Fleet. American reconnaissance aircraft from Alaska sometimes crossed into Soviet-claimed airspace.

  That climate of suspicion produced one of the most notorious incidents of the Cold War. In 1983, concerns of the Soviet military led directly to the Korean Air Lines Flight 007 incident, in which a civilian aircraft was shot down over the region.

• 6. People and Movement

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  According to the 2021 Census, the Far Eastern Federal District held a population of 7.98 million. Seventy-five percent of those residents are urban, concentrated in a string of cities that runs from Khabarovsk and Vladivostok in the south to Yakutsk and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky further north.

  Ethnic Russians and Ukrainians make up the majority, but they share the territory with a remarkable range of indigenous peoples. The original population groups span at least seven language families: Mongolic peoples such as the Buryats; Turkic-speaking Sakha; Eskimo-Aleut groups including the Aleuts and Siberian Yupiks; Chukotko-Kamchatkan peoples such as the Chukchi and Koryaks; Tungusic groups including Evenks, Nanais, and Udegey; and language isolates such as Nivkhs, Yukaghirs, and Ainus.

  Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union the total population has dropped sharply, falling by fourteen percent in fifteen years, a decline steeper than for Russia as a whole. In 2016, President Vladimir Putin proposed the Russian Homestead Act as one attempt to reverse that trend and bring new settlers into the Far East.

• 7. Connecting the Region

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  Until 2010, the Russian Far East had no domestic highway connecting it to the rest of Russia. The completion of the M58 highway that year ended that isolation, though the connection came very late in the region's development.

  Railways were already doing heavier work. The Trans-Siberian Railway and the Baikal-Amur Mainline, which opened in 1984, link the Far East to Siberia and the rest of the country. A further project, the Amur-Yakutsk Mainline, aims to connect the city of Yakutsk to the national rail network; passenger trains already reach Nizhny Bestyakh as of 2013.

  One of the region's more unusual transportation facts involves cars. The Russian Far East has long imported used vehicles from Japan, and the result is that seventy-three percent of private cars in the region have right-hand drive, even though traffic runs on the right-hand side of the road. In many remote northern localities, aviation remains the only practical link to the outside world, though infrastructure at smaller airports is often poor. Maritime transport carries supplies to communities along the Pacific and Arctic coasts and ships out the region's major exports: oil, gas, and ores.