Stalin’s Siberian Enclave Revives as Putin Seeks Mines for China
By Ilya Khrennikov and Yuliya Fedorinova - Mar 30, 2012
When Alexander Gan fled the demise of Soviet-era industry in Siberia’s Jewish Autonomous District in 2000, it was a swampy backwater seven time zones east of Moscow. A decade later, its border with resource-hungry China is bringing work with iron-ore, copper and coal producers.
Gan, 48, left Russia’s Far East to find a job, part of an exodus that shrank the regional population by 22 percent between 1990 and 2011, the fastest rate in the country. His return from Israel to the Jewish enclave set up by Russian dictator Joseph Stalin in 1934 fits in with plans by President-elect Vladimir Putin to meet Chinese demand for raw materials.
“It was hard to live here after the U.S.S.R. collapsed; there was no proper work, industry wasn’t developing,” Gan said in his birthplace of Birobidzhan, a town on the Trans-Siberian Railway an hour-and-a-half drive to the frontier with China.“We are at the start of regional development and recovery. This is good, but not yet enough. We hope it’s just the beginning.”
More than two decades after the Soviet Union lost its European satellite states, the axis of Russian development is tipping to the east as rail, pipeline and resources companies gravitate toward Asia. Gan found a job as a fitter and metal turner at IRC Ltd. (1029), a Hong Kong-listed mining company that gets 90 percent of its sales from China.
bloomberg.com |
