Eking Out a Life in Land of Wealth

From the beach where Vladimir Belov stands, he can see a dozen ships trawling for salmon in the Sea of Okhotsk. An unemployed plumber, Belov can’t afford a fishing license. In fact, he’s never seen one. But that doesn’t keep him from fishing for salmon too.

With a watchful eye for the police, the 39-year-old father of two sets out his homemade truba--a 20-foot pipe with a fishing net and floats attached--and waits for the only good luck his life is likely to offer.

In this desolate, Godforsaken town near the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East, the residents have little to live on but the fish they catch illegally. Local industry has collapsed. Crops refuse to grow in the sandy soil. Stores have closed, and commerce is nearly nonexistent.

“Life is all about poaching,” Belov says. “What do you think life is like when you don’t get paid at all? If someone gave us the money, we would be out of here in no time.”

Perched on the Pacific Rim just 700 miles northeast of Japan, Kamchatka is a land of missed opportunity--a lush region of wilderness and lakes held back by seven decades of Communist dictatorship and seven years of capitalist greed.

Two-thirds the size of California, Kamchatka is connected to the mainland by an isthmus only 52 miles wide. Nine time zones from Moscow, the region is so far east that it is closer to Rodeo Drive than to Red Square. But its culture, traditions and ways of doing business are distinctly Russian.

Its natural assets make it one of the richest regions in the country, but Russia’s poorly functioning economy provides little money to develop the resources. Towns such as Oktyabrsky, surrounded by a wealth of untapped resources, sit in poverty and squalor. The spectacular beauty of wild rivers and erupting volcanoes provides a backdrop for rampant lawlessness.

As in the rest of Russia, prices in Kamchatka have skyrocketed, salaries have plummeted and goods have become scarcer since last year’s financial collapse and ruble devaluation. During the winter, residents in the capital, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, shivered in near-freezing apartments because there was not enough fuel to run the city’s centralized heating plants. In recent weeks, each household has received electricity for only three hours every other day.

In Oktyabrsky, anyone who could manage it has moved away, leaving behind only the destitute and the desperate.

“Life is so terrible here we’re going to die like dogs,” says a 20-year Oktyabrsky resident who gives her name only as Yulia. “But before we die like dogs, we’re going to eat the dogs we have.”

Kamchatka’s economy has gone so haywire that much of its record 1998 salmon harvest went to waste. On the Bolshaya River near Oktyabrsky, dozens of Soviet-style work brigades conducted the same kind of industrial fishing operation they had for decades: Men in small motorboats placed their nets in the river and pulled them tight with tractors on the beach, trapping tons of fish at a time. Using cranes, they hauled the salmon out of the river and loaded them onto trucks.

Later, workers sliced open the female fish and extracted the rich, red caviar. But local canneries, run-down and poorly managed, could not process most of the salmon. As the brigades kept catching fish, trucks dumped an estimated 50,000 tons of salmon in fields to rot. The ground was so thick with fish that the trucks simply drove over the decaying salmon to dump their loads.

During Soviet times, Kamchatka was an important military area closed to all outsiders. It was from here that a jet fighter took off to shoot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983, killing 269 people in one of the worst disasters of the Cold War.

Under Communist rule, time was frozen and much of the peninsula’s wilderness was preserved. Kamchatka’s main economic function was to supply the Soviet Union with fish.

“Of course, this had a very negative effect on the development of the region and was one of the major reasons the economy was oriented to fishing and nothing else,” said Vladimir A. Biryukov, a former Communist Party functionary who has been Kamchatka’s governor since 1991. “Kamchatka has wonderful opportunities to develop other resources and could become a spectacular tourist attraction.”

With the Soviet Union’s collapse and Russia’s continuing depression, Kamchatka has developed stronger trade ties with some of its Pacific neighbors than it has maintained with Moscow.

Today, half the vehicles on the road are right-hand-drive cars bought used in Japan. Food and consumer goods imported from the U.S. and other Pacific nations are commonly available, if expensive. Wealthy Americans visit by cruise ship or fly in to catch trophy fish and hunt Kamchatka’s huge brown bears.

But as in Soviet times, fishing--legal or otherwise--dominates the region’s economy. Illegal fishing in Russia’s Far East is estimated to bring in as much as $5 billion a year, an amount equal to nearly a fifth of Russia’s annual budget. Kamchatka--jutting out from the Russian mainland into one of the world’s richest fisheries--figures prominently in the illegal trade.

The biggest threat to the fishery comes from commercial ships that haul in fish without regard to legal limits in the three bodies of water that surround the peninsula: the Pacific Ocean, the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea.

Officials say Russian vessels working out of Kamchatka, Vladivostok and Sakhalin Island are steadily depleting the region of crab, salmon and herring, among other species.

To avoid fishing limits, steep taxes and stifling bureaucracy, Russian ships commonly take their catch directly to Japan, where they can sell it at premium prices. Officials say it is common practice for Russian fishing vessels to export a dozen catches illegally for each one they bring home and report.

“A business that tries to operate legally and pay its taxes cannot afford to stay in business,” said Vladimir N. Burkanov, head of the regional agency in charge of protecting fishing resources. “It’s much easier to open an account abroad, deliver fish to another country and stay in business while technically being bankrupt in Russia.”

Russia’s rich fishing grounds also lure ships from other nations to fish illegally. Some pirate companies send several vessels at a time to fish nonstop and a shuttle ship to meet up with them, take their haul and deliver it to port.

“Right now, the poachers have become really brazen,” said Federal Border Guards Service Col. Valery D. Yunoshev, who oversees the agency’s naval sector in the region. “They don’t even leave the spot where they drop their nets. They know the economic situation in the country is terrible, and they know the chances are unlikely that a patrol boat will show up.”

While fishing remains the mainstay of Kamchatka’s economy, officials are wrestling with how to shape the region’s future and tap into its wealth of resources.

Kamchatka has fewer than 390,000 people and only 150 miles of paved road. With 28 active volcanoes, the peninsula sits at the end of the Aleutian Islands chain opposite Alaska--a part of what economists call the Pacific Rim and what geologists call the Ring of Fire.

Much like Alaska in climate and terrain, Kamchatka has a wealth of gold, oil and gas, as well as other mineral deposits. Its volcanic activity provides potential for geothermal power as well as abundant hot springs for tourists. It has more than 100,000 lakes and more than 14,000 rivers.

As the region tries to diversify its economy, tourism competes with the mining industry for limited investment funds.

Officials are proud that 27% of the region has been set aside as national parks and nature preserves, a figure they say will soon rise to 31%. UNESCO has designated five parks as the “Volcanoes of Kamchatka” World Heritage site. One of the most popular tourist destinations is the Valley of the Geysers, where steam rises from vents in the earth, mud boils in open pits and geysers spurt almost as regularly as Old Faithful.

But harsh weather and a shortage of hotels make Kamchatka a tourist destination only for the wealthiest--or hardiest--travelers. Traveling by helicopter is the only practical way to reach most destinations, including the Valley of the Geysers. And Kamchatka’s aging, Soviet-made helicopters are expensive and prone to crashing.

Even at the height of the short summer tourist season, it is not unusual for restaurants in Petropavlovsk to close at dinner time because the city water supply has been shut off. To keep away cockroaches, one prominent hotel in the capital is known to spray pesticides in guests’ rooms while they are out for the day.

For now, officials are investing little in tourist facilities and are trying instead to attract cruise ship passengers, who have no need for hotels, and big-game hunters, who expect to camp out.

“We are very much aware that tourism could become the major sector of the economy in the long run,” said Alexander M. Potiyevsky, head of the region’s foreign economic affairs and tourism agency. “But let’s be frank. You’re in Russia, and you should understand there can’t be an island of well-being in one place while the whole country is suffering.”

Oktyabrsky, 100 miles west of Petropavlovsk, is as grim a town as any in Russia. The main street--a treeless dirt road--is strewn with garbage and lined by half-empty apartment blocks. The street is so rutted that large mounds have formed at intervals across it, making a drive through town a bit like riding a roller coaster. Undernourished children entertain themselves by jumping onto the backs of trucks as they go by.

Along the beach, dozens of men put their trubas into the sea and wait for salmon to swim close to shore. On the best of days, one truba can bring in a ton of fish. In a constant game of cat-and-mouse, the men are ready to run at the first sign of the police, who frequently come to issue fines and cut their nets.

“Whether or not you call it poaching, we don’t have a choice,” unemployed crane operator Alexander Belashov, 31, says as he watches over his homemade fishing rig. “We depend entirely on the sea. If we get some fish, we know we’re going to survive. If we don’t, God knows what will happen.”