The View from Khabarovsk: Russia's End

By PETER SAVODNIK / KHABAROVSK

Russians perennially fear that Russia will fall apart. The country is so big and so unwieldy that it seems always on the verge of implosion - like a bolshaya deryevna, or big village, riddled with ethnic fissures and political upheavals, always teetering between calm and chaos. Hence the appeal of the strongman - say, Josef Stalin. Someone to keep everyone else in check.

So the Kremlin and its clients held an Anti-Crisis Economic Forum earlier this month in the city of Khabarovsk, seven time zones east of Moscow in the Russian far east. Whether anything of substance emerged from the forum is unlikely. (Vyacheslav Shport, the governor of the Khabarovsk region, sounded like any old congressman when he suggested the key to economic recovery was more cash for a local Air Force base. "This is an excellent Far East project for the creation of high-tech innovation that could attract investment and defend industries from crisis events," he said.) Of course, substance wasn't the Kremlin's goal. The goal was to send a message to the locals (and especially local officials): You are part of Russia. You are being taken care of. We are one.

Fears of spontaneous disintegration have grown in recent years. First, much of the country did, in fact, disappear after the 1991 communist collapse, only to reappear in the form of 14 independent, post-Soviet republics. Then came the Yeltsin era, with its newfound freedoms and widespread sense of dislocation. Then, in 2000, came the Putin era, in which state-orchestrated television stoked fears of a return to the Yeltsin era (lest the masses not entrust their president with lots of power). Then, in May 2008, came Dmitry Medvedev, causing many to fret that the new president would not be as tough or undemocratic as his predecessor. Then came last September's Lehman Brothers collapse, triggering a global financial meltdown; the downturn fueled fears in Russia that the country was facing another crisis a la 1998, when tens of millions saw their pensions wiped out by inflation and Russia did indeed look to be unraveling.

All these developments - coupled with a population decline of as much as 750,000 yearly and longstanding, sometimes-legitimate - sometimes-not-so-legitimate - nightmares involving a Chinese invasion of Siberia - have prompted Russian leaders to reassert their authority over the whole of Russia

So they flocked to Khabarovsk.

You could tell something important was happening. The business class cabin in the seven-and-a-half-hour Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Khabarovsk on the Friday night prior to the summit was peppered with Kremlin officials and their bodyguards. A cavalcade of black SUV's, with tinted windows and the blue lights that signal someone important is inside, was waiting on the tarmac in Khabarovsk.

At the Parus Hotel, the only hotel in town that's (sort of) equipped to handle a delegation of Moscow bigwigs, there were hordes of militia and security-service agents hanging out in the lobby and outside the hotel. (Wi-fi, fine dining and down comforters, among other amenities, are not common in Russia outside Moscow and St. Petersburg.) At night, the almighty descended on the bar in the first floor of the Parus for a spot of vodka or black tea. The bartender, who declined to give his name for fear of losing his job, quipped: "They ate, they drank, they did nothing."

There's another, much more invidious force contributing to the whole disintegration hubbub: Russian markets' growing integration into the international economy - "not only with regard to oil prices but also when it comes to financial markets," says Alexei Moisseev, an analyst at Renaissance Capital, in Moscow. "Nobody expected the extent to which the financial crisis would hit Russia."

Moisseev noted that a plane ticket from Moscow to the Russian port of Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan is four times as costly as a ticket connecting Vladivostok and any major city in China or Japan. It takes just hours by train for anyone in Vladivostok or Khabarovsk, separated by China by the Amur River, to reach Chinese commercial hubs like Jixi and Shuangyashan. It takes nearly a week to get to Moscow. In Khabarovsk, the Lada, the boxy, no-frills Soviet compact ubiquitous in European Russia, is vastly outnumbered by Toyotas, Nissans and Hyundais on the highway connecting Irkutsk, on the eastern fringe of Siberia, with Vladivostok. "They call the Far East the Land of the White Toyotas," Moisseev says. He added that First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov had been spending a great deal of time in the Far East; in March, Shuvalov had taken part in another anti-crisis forum in Khabarovsk.

The Kremlin, always eager to stomp out political rivalry, nationalize industry and control the flow of gas and oil, may have its reservations about globalization, with all its inherent unpredictability. But the future of Khabarovsk - riddled with sushi bars, Internet cafes, boutique hotels and endless streams of Chinese and Korean tourists - is not in Moscow. For now, most of the Moscow nomenklatura don't seem to get this. That's why they keep having forums and talking about Air Force bases and throwing back shots of Ruskiy Standart at the Parus Hotel.