Free land — with a catch
What do you do when you’ve got enormous tracts of underdeveloped, resource-rich land but precious few people to populate it? If you’re Russia, you simply give it away. At least that’s the plan for the Far Eastern Federal District, a far-flung territory that juts out to the Pacific Ocean and borders China — and which is home to roughly one person per square kilometre.
President Vladimir Putin signed a law this month granting one hectare of land to any Russian citizen who wants it. If they can prove they’ve done something with it after five years, primarily by agricultural means, it’s all theirs.
Officials hope the program will rejuvenate a region that researchers estimate has lost nearly two million people since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
“It will allow Russians, especially the youth, to discover in the Far East a real chance for self-realization,” said Alexandr Galushka, the minister for Far East development.
Despite occupying roughly one-third of Russia, the Far East — with its vast forests, forbidding tundra and spectacular volcanoes — is now home to only 4 per cent of its population.
As one leading daily newspaper points out, the government’s new plan is a bit like the resettlement program enacted during the twilight years of the Russian Empire, which brought three million people to the region.
Except back then — more than100 years ago — the overwhelming majority was composed of peasants. Today, urbanites make up about 70 per cent.
According to Richard Connolly, co-director of the Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Birmingham, U.K., settling the region isn’t the same as it used to be.
In the middle of the last century, the Soviet Union and its planned economy could afford to toss huge sums of money at developing the area.
But Russia’s ailing market economy, he says, just doesn’t have the muscle to convince private investors and ordinary citi- zens to move where it’s cold and expensive, because of things like import costs.
“It’s a way of trying to overcome the problem that it’s extremely expensive to get people to move there, to live there, and to carry out economic activity there,” Connolly said of the program.
Nevertheless, optimistic Russians see the program as a way to help boost Rus- sian sovereignty in the greater Asia-Pacific region, where it faces a powerful — and far larger — China right next door.
“This is not about agriculture or even about settling the Far East,” wrote political commentator Pyotr Akopov in the prominent nationalist journal, Vzglyad. “It is about the government’s ability to build a strong and self-sufficient Russia.”