Despite Natural Riches, Russians Retreat From Far-Flung Eastern Areas

When Vladimir Tribuk was growing up on Sakhalin Island, a land filled with natural riches but short on people, he believed the one guarantee his future held was steady work.

But on a recent frigid morning, he reluctantly prepared to board a flight to South Korea to join the growing ranks of Russians in the Far East who have become migrant laborers.

“I couldn’t find any work here, and neither could my friends. There is nothing here for us,” said Tribuk, 23, who now has a job at a Korean furniture factory.

Many of his friends have moved to the Russian mainland, or headed off to Japan, Australia and the west coasts of Canada and the United States in search of jobs.

This exodus has reversed the old Soviet trend of sending generations of pioneers into the rugged, virgin lands of the Far East, which served the political aim of settling every nook and cranny of the world’s biggest country.

But these settlements on remote islands, the frozen tundra and isolated forests always relied on government subsidies and rarely made economic sense. So the Soviet collapse left their descendants stranded and broke in some of the most inhospitable corners of the land.

Now, people are bailing out. The thinly populated Far East has lost 10% of its residents this decade. Sakhalin Island, for example, has gone from 720,000 people to barely 600,000 and is still shrinking.

The entire Far East now has just 7.3 million people scattered across a territory more than half the size of the United States. But there still aren’t enough jobs to go around and this winter promises more hardship.

Sakhalin Gov. Igor Farkhutdinov speaks for most regional leaders when he says the greatest threats this winter will come from power shortages, not a lack of food.

“We have big problems with energy throughout the island,” Farkhutdinov said. “The situation is really quite grave.”

Sakhalin and other remote regions took another blow when Russia’s latest financial crisis hit in August, leaving the national government in Moscow with even less money to help far-flung provinces.

Life on Sakhalin was never a picnic. Russia’s czars used it as a penal colony and the dour Russian writer Anton Chekov visited a century ago and proclaimed it one of the most depressing places anywhere in Russia.

But at least there was work. Sakhalin’s young men used to labor in the coal mines, pulp mills and fish factories that are now abandoned and rusting victims of decades of mismanagement. At Sakhalin’s port of Korsakov, a short journey to the powerful economies of China, Japan and South Korea, not a single foreign ship is in sight, and the only working crane is dipping into a pile of scrap metal.

“People should only work in these hardship places for four or five months a year, when it’s warm,” said Yuri Yanitsky, the general director of the Korsakov port and an extensive traveler throughout the region.

“The [Soviet] idea was to populate all these places because they were part of the motherland. But the government should now take these people out and resettle them.”

With the Soviet-era aid gone, many people feel abandoned by Moscow, more than 5,000 miles and seven time zones from Russia’s east coast.

“When Moscow distributes resources, we are always last in line,” said Vladimir Sorochan, editor of the newspaper Sovetsky Sakhalin. “We don’t receive financing for anything.”

Shortages are so acute at hospitals in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk that surgery patients must sometimes bring their own canisters of anesthesia to the operating room, Dr. Vladimir Kasanyuk said.

“We are short of absolutely all medicines,” said Kasanyuk.

He hasn’t been paid since May, and makes his money driving a taxi in his off hours. With a wife, two kids and two elderly parents to support, he feels trapped on the island. “People with means head to the mainland, but I’m in no position to do that.”

For all its woes, Sakhalin is still faring a bit better than the Far East’s even more distant outposts.

In the southeast, some residents on the disputed Kuril Islands are so fed up with Moscow’s lack of help that they’ve signed petitions to lease their land to neighboring Japan, which lost the islands to the Soviet Union in the waning days of World War II and still wants them back.

On the Chukotka Peninsula, which juts out toward Alaska in the northeast, emergency officials evacuated more than 1,000 people in November because it’s too expensive to send in food and fuel. More may follow.

The Arctic settlements must receive their winter food and fuel supplies during the all-too-brief summer months, when enough ice has melted to make the seas and rivers navigable.

But many boats didn’t make the journey this summer because shipping companies weren’t getting paid. The ice has already frozen over and many points are now reachable only by plane.

Most foreign investors have been driven off by the region’s daunting problems, and those who have set up shop have faced endless hassles.

While Sakhalin’s governor complains of energy shortages, the building across the street from his office is filled with executives from some of the biggest Western oil companies.

They’ve been working for several years, and have already invested hundreds of millions of dollars, to drill for oil off Sakhalin’s northern coast. The biggest and most advanced project, Sakhalin-2, has anchored a state-of-the-art offshore rig designed to withstand nasty storms, gigantic ice floes and periodic earthquakes.

The first oil is expected to start flowing in the middle of next year, and should bring with it the most promising economic development since the Soviet collapse.

But the Western oil companies, including Shell, Exxon and Arco, are waiting impatiently on Russia’s cantankerous national legislature to give them legal guarantees on how the oil will be divided.

“You can’t have people investing billions of dollars without a stable business climate,” said Dinty Miller, chief representative of Arco.

As Miller expounded on the difficulties of working in the Far East, the building’s lights went out. It’s a daily occurrence, and Miller didn’t miss a beat. He whipped out a flashlight for a visiting reporter and the interview continued in the dark.

“I used to say this place had a future so bright that you needed to wear welding goggles,” Miller said. “I’m still an optimist, but I don’t say that anymore.”