Russia and its regions. Beyond Siberia

The unintended consequences of the Kremlin's power grab over Russia's regions

IN FINE August weather, Vladivostok's grimy beach and rickety fairground are thronged. Children queue for reindeer rides. Tourists promenade in what was once a tsarist fort, then a closed Soviet city, but now feels freer than Moscow, seven time-zones to the west. Sergei Darkin, governor of the Primorsky region, and his close ally Vladimir Nikolaev, Vladivostok's young mayor, seem to be doing a better job than the corrupt ex-communist bureaucrats who run much of Russia.

Yes, but. Mr Nikolaev was elected only after his main rival was wounded in a grenade attack, then disqualified from last year's election. “They said I eat children for breakfast,” says the mayor of allegations about his criminal past. When your correspondent says that no, he himself has never been in jail, the mayor, who served time for violent crime, retorts that he “did not live in Russia and have to defend [his] business in the 1980s and 1990s.”

Like the north Caucasus, Vladivostok, Primorsky and the rest of the Russian far east were incorporated late into the Russian empire. Also like the Caucasus, the challenges that local bosses pose to Russia's government are peculiar to the district's geography and history. But they are also acute versions of the wider problems the Kremlin faces - and causes - in its handling of Russia's regions.

Soon after the bloody tragedy in Beslan a year ago, President Vladimir Putin announced that governors would be appointed by him, rather than being directly elected. This was the latest of Mr Putin's measures to take back powers that his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, had ceded to the 89 regions (several mergers are pending). As justification, the Kremlin conjured up the spectre of Russia's violent dissolution. The corruption and ineptitude of many governors almost vindicates Mr Putin's approach - until you look at his appointees.

The first was Mr Darkin, whose reputation, though less dark than Mr Nikolaev's, is still shady. It is true, says Mr Darkin, who submitted himself for re-approval by Mr Putin before his elected term expired, that the new way is less democratic. But, he adds, it is more effective: with direct elections, you spend too much time shaking hands, as in America. Other governors have been kept on after suitable obeisance. In a few cases, Kremlin choices have been foisted on regions with which they have little connection.

One idea in Russia's far east is to unload responsibility for remote regions on to pliant billionaires. Roman Abramovich, owner of Britain's Chelsea Football Club, was set to quit as Chukotka's governor when his term expired later this year. But, perhaps to prove that it can make appointments without reference to a governor's wishes, as well as to voters', the Kremlin seems keen to keep him on. Mr Putin's envoy in the district (such envoys are another part of the emasculation of the governors, as was ejecting them from the upper house of the Russian parliament) has suggested that Victor Vekselberg, another tycoon, might become the governor of Kamchatka. The common denominator, which trumps even criminality, is loyalty.

A second strategy to bind the regions to Moscow is to offer giant industrial projects. One is a mooted pipeline to carry Siberian oil to the Pacific coast near Vladivostok. But the project's popularity has declined because of the choice of an environmentally-sensitive bay as the site of the oil terminal. There are whispers of warped motives. “All our Russian governors are just businessmen,” laments one Vladivostok environmentalist. Another mega-project is on Sakhalin island.

Like the American west, Russia's far east has long been a frontier of opportunity. But it has also been a punishment, to which many went unwillingly - and left when they could. More than half the population of Chukotka and Magadan have fled the permafrost since the Soviet Union's collapse. The population of Sakhalin - which Chekhov, visiting when the island was a giant prison camp, considered the most depressing place in Russia - has fallen by around a quarter. But in 1999, the most advanced of the consortia drilling for oil and gas off Sakhalin began producing it. Now, says Sergei Osipov, the region's deputy governor, who also has a fishy reputation, “Only a very lazy person doesn't have a job on Sakhalin.”

Maybe; but the island is developing into a caricature of petrostate inequality. Its dismal towns are still dominated by statues of Lenin; factories built by the Japanese, who occupied the south between 1905 and 1945, are in disrepair; much of the fishing fleet is rusting in the water. In the north, says one worried islander, many people spend their time “poaching, drinking and killing each other”.

Sakhalin's main gripe is that almost all the Russian share of the revenues from energy deals goes to Moscow. Gennady Zlivko, the mayor of Korsakov, a town close to a huge oil-and-gas terminal being built at the island's southern tip, rages at the “nonsense” of his town having to burn coal to heat its houses. The resentment is currently focused on foreign oil companies, but that could change.

The Kremlin's combination of tightening and flailing carries risks. The big local fear in the far east is of China. Hordes of Chinese are said to be swarming across the Amur river, with maps showing the Russian far east as Chinese territory, to fill empty spaces. In fact, except on construction sites, and in the bigger markets where they hawk cheap clothes, fake furs and just about everything else, the Chinese are less obtrusive in Vladivostok than are ethnic Koreans in Sakhalin, descendants of the slave labourers once brought there by the Japanese. And the Chinese are a longstanding fixture: without them, wrote one 1897 visitor, “civilised life would simply cease to exist”. Governor Darkin says that any social problems the immigrants cause are no bigger than in London or New York.

The real danger is subtler. Mr Putin was this week due to meet relatives of Beslan victims, who are outraged by a lack of answers to basic questions about last year's atrocity. Since then, terror and instability have permeated the north Caucasus, aggravated by the lawlessness of the security services. In a different way, the far east may also realise the Kremlin's prophecy - and drift farther from Moscow.