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The Earth hosts many vast and harsh spaces, but few governments have put as much energy into the development of such places as Russia did under the Soviet government. 

The effort to develop Russia’s eastern areas was substantially increased under Stalin’s rule. A forced industrialization attempted to shift production to the east and create new economic bases in the country’s geographic heart. Equalization of economic (especially industrial) mass across Russia was seen as the way to make development uniform across space. “Balanced industrial growth” remained a slogan for a long time. In the 1930s the new areas received more than 50 percent of the central investment, financed mainly by expropriating wealth from agriculture. The new areas absorbed only capital at first. Visible effects appeared during World War II, although the most productive zones were close to the front, like the Ural-Volga, where 58 percent of factories evacuated from the west of the USSR were placed.

An accounting of this centralized, directive effort to spread out economic mass is depressing. Alexei Mints, the Soviet geographer, dismissed as propaganda the claims that directed investment boosted backward areas and created cities “from zero” under the five-year plans. The reality was more prosaic: the “opening up” of eastern raw material fields coincided with the growth of manufacturing in the west. The shift eastward, Mints wrote, occurred mostly in the European part.a In reality, Russia’s demographic and economic geocenter had moved only as far east as the river Belaya in Bashkiria by 1990; eight of Russia’s 11 time zones lay to the east of the Belaya. Industrial Siberia grew in absolute terms, but its share did not exceed one-fifth under the Soviet price system that favored final goods at the expense of raw materials, transportation, and energy (see the table below).

The Soviet social infrastructure overlapped with industrial development. Health centers, schools, recreational, cultural, sports, and communal-housing facilities—called sotscultbyt—generally belonged to enterprises. This overlap was especially evident in large companies in remote areas, such as the transpolar city of Noril’sk. This tradition was combined, somewhat paradoxically, with a vigorous redistribution of funds between sectoral and regional departments. Profits were seized and then given back—not necessarily to the same place—in capital goods and assets. The share of enterprises under the all- Union jurisdiction reached 70 percent in the reigns of Stalin and Brezhnev. The central government (Sovmin) controlled less than 20 percent of industrial profits obtained on Russian soil.

Industrial deconcentration, together with price system distortions and an expensive arms race, would bring the Soviet system down. In the late 1980s both the elite and the masses in almost every area or republic claimed that it bore the burdensome duty of a land that “fed the others.” The slogan of regional khozraschet (self-repayment and economic accounting) soon grew into political separatism and contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union.

Click to enlarge After the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian Federation became more integrated with the world market. Russia found itself more resource abundant, but also less populated. The market revaluation of resources and assets shrank the economic mass of distant zones and poles, but deteriorating infrastructure did not reduce, and in some cases, increased economic distance. Industry-tied public services also collapsed in the 1990s, as firms were privatized or transferred to their sotscultbyt to municipal authorities. For some time under Yeltsin, the revenues of federal and regional/local budgets were officially equal (50:50). In the 2000s, though, the rules were changed in favor of the Federation (60:40 when the external debt payments were made, reduced later to 55:45). But expenditures stayed at 50:50 because of growing transfers. Today, center-region financial relations are again based on the principle of redistribution, though less so than in the Soviet Union. But industry is now more fuel and material based. After decades of equalization plans, the economy sees widening disparities in regional per capita product. Contributed by Andrei Treyvish