Op-Ed Contributor

So Much Land, Too Few Russians

Looking to become a homesteader these days? As of May 2, a new Russian law provides for a free land grant of 2.5 acres to any citizen willing to move to a vast territory along Russia’s Pacific Coast and China’s border. This is Russia’s Wild Far East, at 2.4 million square miles almost three times the size of Alaska, Washington State and Oregon combined, but populated by merely 6.3 million people.

Still, many Russians are suspicious of the government’s offer. For good reason. During Russia’s privatization phase in the 1990s, each citizen was issued a voucher for shares in government-owned enterprises. Very quickly, most of these shares ended up in the hands of a few people who became billionaires. Some suspect that this may be another such scheme to enrich a few well-connected Russians, who would buy up the land and bring in Chinese laborers.

Indeed, a large and increasing number of Chinese workers are already in Russia, and this is a delicate issue in itself — a case in point of a fundamental challenge to Russia’s future from a convergence of stresses: a weak and corruption-riddled economy, declining population, vast distances and a great diversity of ethnic minorities craving more autonomy.

Take the Far East as an example:

Russia urgently needs Chinese investments. In return, in the Far East’s southeast corner, China has made Russian land along the Amur River border a virtual colony, having secured the right for Chinese people to work there. In the last decade, huge tracts have been leased to China at rock- bottom prices. Nearly two million acres with gigantic pig farms and fields of soybean and corn are being worked by Chinese agribusinesses. Most recently, Moscow leased out about 300,000 acres in the Trans-Baikal region for 49 years. The price: $2 an acre and $368 million in promised investments.

The disparities in wealth and development between Russia and China are glaring when viewed from Blagoveshchensk, an administrative center of the Amur region. Once a booming frontier town, it now resembles a typical 1970s-era Soviet city — drab, dilapidated, economically depressed. Its population is 216,000. Just across the river is the bustling Chinese city of Heihe, with gleaming new high-rises and a population nearly eight times that of Blagoveshchensk.

In all, about 4.3 million people on Russia’s side of the border face at least 26 million Chinese on the other side. And Russia’s population over all has been declining, leaving the whole country desperately short of labor to cultivate and develop the vast expanses of Siberia. So densely populated China seems a natural, if uncomfortable, resource to turn to.

Neither country’s government wants to advertise the scale of Chinese migration into Siberia to fish, mine and grow produce. Most conservative estimates put the number of illegal Chinese migrants at two million, while the Center for Migration Research in Moscow says the number of Chinese residents in Russia is projected, conservatively, to reach 10 million by 2050, making them the predominant group in the Far East.

In an attempt to counterbalance that prospect, the Russian Ministry for the Development of the Far East is considering resettling in the region some two million migrants from neighboring Central Asian countries by 2030. But some Central Asian countries themselves share Russia’s worries about Chinese migration. On May 21, protests erupted in Kazakhstan over a proposal to let its government privatize land by selling it at auction. Kazakhs feared it was a plan to sell land to China. After arresting the protesters, the government decided to wait six months and reconsider holding the auction.

Meanwhile, many residents in Far-Eastern Russia are ambivalent about growing Chinese influence. They see the benefits of Chinese trade and investments but harbor longstanding xenophobic fears of the growing Chinese presence. Nevertheless, some Russian women have favored Chinese men for marriage, based on a cultural stereotype that they are more hardworking and sober than Russian men.

Historically, territorial expansion has always outpaced Russia’s ability to settle new regions. In the late 18th century, Catherine the Great invited tens of thousands of colonists from Europe into newly conquered territories that she called New Russia. Today, those lands form the southern belt of Ukraine and parts of Russia.

But the challenge of governing enormous spaces, especially those sparsely populated by diverse peoples, remains. The Russian Federation is home to more than 185 peoples with distinct ethnic and national identities. In ways similar to what is unfolding in the Far East today, Moscow has long been unable to fully assimilate them and unwilling to address their historical grievances.

Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia is no different. For example, it has redeployed a Soviet myth — the “friendship of peoples” — to sweep existing ethnic and religious tensions under the rug with euphemistic slogans, even as Russian sociologists regularly monitor the level of actual ethnic tensions. The common rating they give, vague enough to be read as optimistic, is “stable tension.”

But tension is hard to keep stable. The more economic and political complaints grow, the stronger movements for autonomy become. On May 1, thousands of protesters in Novosibirsk, the capital of Western Siberia, marched with the slogan, “This is no Moscow.” In the Muslim republics of the North Caucasus, Moscow’s tenuous control is largely limited to directing security forces to prevent further acts of terrorism. In the center of European Russia, the Kremlin has tried for years to tighten its rule over the largely autonomous Muslim republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, but local elites have been pushing back.

Meanwhile, Russia’s population is projected by the Pew Research Center to decline from 143.5 million in 2015 to 120.5 million by 2050, accompanied by a decreasing ratio of ethnic Russians to non-Russians. That portends even more clamor for regional autonomy, amid a worsening disparity between available human resources and Russia’s vastness.

And those trends, in turn, will most likely reinforce Russian ethnic nationalism. Historically, Russia’s rulers, whether czars or commissars, reached for autocracy at the center to control the extraordinary diversity of peoples, cultures and religions. In the end, though, the strong center failed. In the 16 years since Mr. Putin became Russia’s leader, he has done everything possible to take power away from the regions and concentrate it in his hands. But with an economy in steep decline, a corrupt political system that masks a form of dictatorship, and the growing regional and ethnic tensions, Russia is again approaching the brink.

The Russian state is unsustainable on its present course. Most experts within and outside Russia admit that it desperately needs reforms: economic, social and political. But the current occupiers of the Kremlin see any meaningful reform as a threat, and we should not be taken by surprise if one day Russia itself implodes, as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics did a quarter of a century ago.

Michael Khodarkovsky, a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago, is at work on a history of the Russian Empire.


A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: So much land, so few Russians. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe