Although 75 percent of Russia’s territory is in Asia, Tim Marshall emphasizes (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), only 22 percent of its population lives there:
Siberia may be Russia’s “treasure chest,” containing the majority of the mineral wealth, oil, and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming, and large stretches of swampland.
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China may well eventually control parts of Siberia in the long run, but this would be through Russia’s declining birthrate and Chinese immigration moving north. Already as far west as the swampy West Siberian Plain, between the Urals in the west and the Yenisei River one thousand miles to the east, you can see Chinese restaurants in most of the towns and cities. Many different businesses are coming. The empty depopulating spaces of Russia’s Far East are even more likely to come under Chinese cultural, and eventually political, control.
When you move outside of the Russian heartland, much of the population in the Russian Federation is not ethnically Russian and pays little allegiance to Moscow, which results in an aggressive security system similar to the one in Soviet days. During that era, Russia was effectively a colonial power ruling over nations and people who felt they had nothing in common with their masters; parts of the Russian Federation—for example, Chechnya and Dagestan in the Caucasus—still feel this way.
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The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, in support of the Communist Afghan government against anti-Communist Muslim guerrillas, had never been about bringing the joys of Marxist-Leninism to the Afghan people. It was always about ensuring that Moscow controlled that space in order to prevent anyone else from doing so.
Crucially, the invasion of Afghanistan also gave hope to the great Russian dream of its army being able to “wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean,” in the words of the ultra-nationalistic Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and thus achieve what it never had: a warm-water port where the water does not freeze in winter, with free access to the world’s major trading routes. The ports on the Arctic, such as Murmansk, freeze for several months each year: Vladivostok, the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean, is ice-locked for about four months and is enclosed by the Sea of Japan, which is dominated by the Japanese. This does not just halt the flow of trade; it prevents the Russian fleet from operating as a global power. In addition, waterborne transport is much cheaper than land or airborne routes.
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This lack of a warm-water port with direct access to the oceans has always been Russia’s Achilles’ heel, as strategically important to it as the North European Plain. Russia is at a geographical disadvantage, saved from being a much weaker power only because of its oil and gas. No wonder the forged will of Peter the Great advises his descendants to “approach as near as possible to Constantinople and India. Whoever governs there will be the true sovereign of the world. Consequently, excite continual wars, not only in Turkey, but in Persia…. Penetrate as far as the Persian Gulf, advance as far as India.”
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The exception to this rule are the “stans,” such as Tajikistan, whose borders were deliberately drawn by Stalin so as to weaken each state by ensuring it had large minorities of people from other states.
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In the pro-Russian camp are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Belarus, and Armenia. Their economies are tied to Russia in the way that much of eastern Ukraine’s economy is (another reason for the rebellion there). The largest of these, Kazakhstan, leans toward Russia diplomatically and its large Russian-minority population is well integrated. Of the five, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan have joined the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (a sort of poor man’s EU), which celebrated its first anniversary in January 2016. All, including Tajikistan, are in a military alliance with Russia called the Collective Security Treaty Organization. The CSTO suffers from not having a name you can boil down to one word, and from being a watered-down Warsaw Bloc. Russia maintains a military presence in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Armenia.
A comparison between the US and Russia’s social-cultural fault lines has always fascinated me; they’re so similar in general scale that we often miss some finer nuances in their scope.
They’re both large, continent spanning, resource rich, highly populated (but lacking in density), diverse, geographically isolated countries with rather extreme ideological tendencies with strong but increasingly distant European roots. Each of them has the potential to experience massive internal strife because of these factors, but the precise manifestation is a bit different in each case.
In the case of the USA, the diversity is largely blended together, geographically speaking, resulting in a population that responds very quickly and violently to the presence of differences, forcing minorities to feel the need to band together in disproportionately intense ways while their assimilation is taking place. This benefits the central government because they bind the minorities to themselves over time by acting as protectors of their rights against local majorities, while also diluting any explicitly self-reliant ethnic politics (it does encourage unspoken ethnic corruption for a time however).
For Russia the diversity is highly segregated and rooted in separate histories, meaning the various populations seldom have to interact with one another, lowering overall tensions between populations. Conversely, there can be no meaningful assimilation because the cultural nucleus of each nation is intact. It’s not the minorities that have to deal with the Central government as protector, but rather their local government becomes their protector against the Central gov’t, and the Russian central government doesn’t have to court the population by protecting their rights, but rather the local government by offering them power/wealth in exchange for cooperation.
It actually goes a long way in explaining why Native Born Americans prefer local government, and view the Central government with hostility; they’re situationally akin to the minority Republics within the Russian Federation, without the advantage of explicit ethnic identity.
We are close to peak world population, and the decline in world population should begin in 5 to 10 years. The East Asian population looks to decline the fastest; South Korea’s population will decline by two-thirds each generation. However, western Europe’s population will also collapse; Germany, Spain, Italy, et al., will lose half their population each generation.
The emptying world will experience major economic and political changes as people simply disappear. A world empire like the US’s may become impossible. The European colonial expansion occurred with a young, rapidly growing population, not an elderly, shrinking population.
So, there won’t be any Chinese to colonize Siberia, nor any Russians to resist them. Siberia will once again become the property of the local tribes. Will we see neo-Mongol steppe warriors once again?
And Canada, might that revert to the Cree and Inuit?
Bob,
That’s fascinating, since it means that both the USA and Russia will remain largely depopulated hinterlands (comparatively) throughout the next century or two, though I expect the USA will end up birthing several different nations from the populations presently within it’s borders as the demographics shuffle and re-entrench themselves into sustainable growth patterns.