The Soviet Far East

Abstract

T VHE vast territories of Russia from the Urals to the Pacific have long been remote and mysterious to the world. The impetus of pan-Russian development eastward has been clear. In the Stalin era, some impressive landmarks of modern industry appeared in this great 'Sleeping Land' (such was the ancient Tartar etymology of the name Sibir); also some new political eyesores, the concentration camps,' to add to the historical notoriety of Siberia as a place of penal and political exile. The industrial expansion of the 1930s certainly strengthened the Soviet Union's resistance to the German invasion; and enabled the Soviet Union to participate, a few minutes before the twelfth hour, in the Allied victory over Japan in 1945. Stalin's successors maintained the course of eastward industrialisation and the growing interest in Asia and the Pacific, but abolished the labour camps (though some milder aspects of the exile system continue). In the 1960s this became one of the world's largest and most acute areas of conflict, with the development of the titanic clash between the two huge Communist states, Russia and China. The trouble began behind the scenes as early as 1955; Russian co-operation and aid in China's industrialisation-the materials, the experts and the actual blueprintswere withdrawn about 1960. The middle 1960s probably saw the point of no return, with the exchange of denunciations unforgivable on either side (when each said that the other was in collusion with the United States), expungeable only by a complete ideological surrender by the one Government or the other. By the end of the decade, the whole world knew of the actual hostilities between the two countries, on the North Eastern and North Western Frontiers of China. Siberia has therefore to be considered in both a short-term and a long-term perspective, also in the broad setting of a conflict that is geographically global and ideologically many-sided-the struggle of two Great Powers for their world-situations in general, over their pretensions to political and development leadership in particular. The following lines can only sketch the general character and problems of the Soviet Far East (here abbreviated S.F.E.). The Soviet Union's Major Economic Planning Region of the S.F.E. at present comprises the Provinces (krai and oblasti) of the Amur, Khabarovsk, the Maritimes, Sakhalin, Kamchatka and Magadan. Immediately involved, however,