Field glasses clamped to his chest, moustaches flaring defiantly, Count
Nikolai Muravyov stares out across the Amur river towards China while at
the foot of his statue nervous young couples pose for wedding photographs
on a summer afternoon.
Khabarovsk, where Muravyov planted his military command post in 1858,
is the fortress and keystone of the Russian far east. It is still a garrison
town. Every young man on the street, in or out of uniform, seems to have
the shaved head and heavy build of an army boy.
On a hot day, you can smell China in the air. It is there in the lazy
river, in the flat sandy banks, in the scudding hydrofoils taking Russian
shoppers on visa-free day trips to the market town of Fuyuan.
For those who cannot go to China, a little bit of China will come to
them. In the suburb of Viborgskaya, the Khabarovsk authorities have set
up a regulated market the size of an aerodrome where hundreds of Chinese
traders run makeshift stalls. Their main lines are the counterfeit branded
tracksuits, dirt-cheap electronics and melt-in-the-rain sports shoes that
China gave up selling to the west 20 years ago. But here there is still
money to be made - at least, to judge from the presence of a grandiose
Chinese restaurant, the New Century. The king prawns sell for $30, rather
more than the average Russian weekly wage.
Close as China may be, there can be no doubt about the country on this
side of the river. Khabarovsk has the elements common to almost all Russian
cities: an Intourist hotel, a sprawl of prefabricated high-rise apartment
blocks, a smoke-belching power station on the skyline and a few graceful
older buildings built before the revolution. It may be east of Beijing,
north of Osaka and in the same time zone as Sydney but it is Russian to
a fault.
It is here because Muravyov ordered its creation and because he signed
a treaty with China staking Russia's claim to a great curve of Asia, starting
east of Lake Baikal, running on to Khabarovsk and then south to Vladivostok,
taking in the Pacific coast above the Korean peninsula. An oil painting
of that occasion, the signing of the treaty of Argun in 1858, is the pride
of the Khabarovsk history museum. It shows Muravyov in a magnificently
swagged and braided silver uniform, surrounded by advisers in black frock
coats and white starched shirts. They confront a huddle of elderly mandarins
in pigtails and wispy beards. Muscular Europe triumphs over decadent Asia.
By and large, China has come to accept the land grab. In July, it signed
a "treaty of neighbourliness, peace and friendship" with Russia in which
both countries said they renounced territorial claims on one another. Both
promised to draw a line under a long history of border disputes, the most
recent of which brought them to the brink of all-out war on the Amur river
in 1969.
But, in a nice piece of diplomatic legerdemain, the treaty also declared
its opposite. It said two sections of the 4,259-km border had yet to be
agreed and would remain the subject of negotiations. The more delicate
of these points lies within Count Muravyov's iron gaze, in the river off
Khabarovsk. It has become the most conspicuous physical test of China's
and Russia's real willingness to trust and compromise.
It consists of two islands, Bolshoi Ussuri and Tarabarov, lying just
off Khabarovsk where the Amur and Ussuri rivers meet. Russia took them,
along with other strategic islands in the Amur and Ussuri, when it fortified
the border in the 1930s, despite claims that they lay on the Chinese side
of the river.
Looking at Bolshoi Ussuri from the Khabarovsk bank, it is easy enough
to see the problem. The island dominates the city, with Tarabarov beyond
it. If China had its way, the stare of Count Muravyov would be met by the
no less defiant stare of Chinese soldiers and farmers a mere 200m away.
For the Russians of Khabarovsk, it is much more comforting to have the
Chinese border safely out of sight, some 30km to the west, with guard posts
and barbed wire.
Looking at a map, many people would come to the same conclusion as the
Chinese government. The islands are Chinese. But for Russia to admit as
much would be a big concession in a place where even small concessions
are scarcely possible.
Russians in the far east worry about China to the point of paranoia.
An opinion poll conducted last year in Primoriye, the province around Vladivostok,
to the south of Khabarovsk, found 74 per cent of the population expected
China to annexe all or part of their region "in the long run".
Half the respondents to another poll thought that Chinese immigrants
already made up 10-20 per cent of Primoriye's population. But official
data, even allowing for an equal measure of illegal immigration, suggest
a figure no higher than 3 per cent - less than a third of the proportion
at the start of the 20th century. President Vladimir Putin himself, during
a visit to Siberia last year, warned that "if we do not make a real effort,
even the indigenous Russian population will soon speak mostly Japanese,
Chinese and Korean".
Russia fears its own weakness here, as much as China's strength. Fewer
than 8m people populate the trackless expanses of the Russian far east.
More than 100m are packed into the provinces of China just across the border.
And as the Russian population shrinks because of emigration and a high
mortality rate, the fear of encroachment grows.
The economic imbalance is equally striking. Ten years ago Russia's economy
was as big as China's. Today China's economy is three times bigger, even
if per capita incomes in China are still lower. All China really wants
to buy from Russia are oil and weaponry. The Chinese troops across the
border are armed with Russian-made weapons that are newer and probably
better maintained than those of Russia's own forces.
There is an imbalance, too, in individual enterprise. Chinese small
traders cross to Russia, legally and illegally, with their suitcases of
cheap consumer goods. They take work in construction and agriculture. They
do jobs that Russians cannot and will not do, competing in Primoriye with
even cheaper labour from North Korea. The Russians say they take away jobs
and bring in crime - the complaints that all local people make about immigrants.
In the end, the Chinese are guilty of being Chinese, in a country short
of Russians.
As for the Russians, they are guilty, like many other great powers down
the centuries, of imperial over-reach. When they seized and settled Siberia
and what is now the Russian far east from the early 17th century through
to the mid-19th century, they increased their country's size and resources
but also its vulnerability. These chilly expanses could be made to pay
for themselves when their mines and forests were worked by serf labour
or by the prisoners of Stalin's gulags. But without such forced labour,
Russia has far more territory here than it will ever manage or populate
adequately.
You will need a strong nerve and a stiff drink, of course, to argue
that sort of thing in Khabarovsk. Geopolitics are not popular here when
they start to catch Russia itself on the defensive. It is an article of
faith among Russians that their country covers a seventh of the world's
land mass and 11 of its time zones - and they are not planning to give
any of those time zones away easily.
The people of the Russian far east may fear they cannot hold these lands
for ever. But for the moment there is a border - and they plan to keep
it there.
ко-мент