live in fear of being overwhelmed. The hemorrhaging of natural resources
from every port and border crossing is one reason Primorye still has the
feel of a colonial outpost—one that, despite its wealth and ecological
importance, gets short shrift from the distant capital. In Asia today,
wildlife trafficking is a multibillion-dollar industry, and roughly three
quarters of all trafficked wildlife ends up in China, which has become a
black hole for many endangered species. As Primorye’s irreplaceable
patrimony—the best timber, caviar, and animals—flows out, its citizens
eagerly accept second-rate surplus in return: the cars are cast-offs from
Japan, the buses are rejects from fleets in South Korea, and China
provides cheap polyester clothes and fresh fruit suffused with pesticides
and heavy metals. Import regulations put Russians in the humiliating role
of mules to bring the dry goods in.
Even as the number of Russians in the Far East decreases steadily due
to high mortality and relocation, shabby Chinese border towns that might
have hosted ten or twenty thousand people prior to perestroika have
mushroomed into gleaming centers of commerce with ten times their
former population and more on the way. Carefully coached and
chaperoned groups of Russian shoppers—powered by beer breakfasts—
make day trips to these emerging cities in order to buy all the things the
former Soviet Union’s national industry and distribution system now fails
to provide. Meanwhile, North Korea, at the very bottom of the pecking
order, supplies what amounts to slave labor, much of it to the logging
industry. “What went wrong in the Russian Far East?”^3 wondered John
Stephan in his comprehensive history of the region. “Why did it not
develop like British Columbia or Hokkaido? How did such a rich land and
littoral, settled by such talented and hardworking people, and bordering
on such dynamic economies, present a spectacle redolent of a Third
World basket case?”
There is no easy answer to this question, but the current situation is
deeply painful to many Russians who maintain a bittersweet sense of
national pride and—for those born before 1970 or so—a belief that they
once represented the vanguard of a grand and noble social project. For