Russia is literally giving
away land for free, by Dan Peleschuk, 5/10/16, Global Post
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 around two people per square mile.
President Vladimir Putin signed a law this
month granting 2.5 acres 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 2 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 Aleksandr 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 percent 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 some 3 million people to the region. Except back then,
more than 100 years ago, the overwhelming majority of the population was
composed of peasants. Today, it’s the other way around: Urbanites make up
about 70 percent, the paper adds, and they probably won’t be jumping at
the opportunity to decamp east.
According to Richard Connolly,
co-director of the Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies at the
University of Birmingham, UK, 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, which is roughly double the size of India.
But Russia’s ailing market economy, he
says, just doesn’t have the muscle to convince private investors and ordinary
citizens to move where it’s cold and expensive, because
of things like import costs and heating.
“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.
Simple bureaucracy might even get in the
way, especially in a sparsely populated expanse where the local real estate
market isn’t exactly booming. For instance, officials in Primorsky Krai, one of
the nine administrative regions of Russia's Far East, recently said most settlements there haven’t even
provided information on their official boundaries.
For now, Russians will only be able to
apply for a handful of selected municipalities. Starting February 2017, they’ll
be able to snatch up any plot of land in the Far Eastern Federal District so
long as the respective provincial authorities approve.
Nevertheless, optimistic Russians prefer
to see the program as a way to help boost Russian 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.”
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