The Land Run

What do Vladimir Putin and Abraham Lincoln have in common?

Vladimir Putin is often compared with Soviet leaders – Brezhnev, Andropov, even Stalin – but you could just as easily make comparisons with American presidents, from the telegenic Kennedy to hard-bitten Reagan.

In 2007, not long before the end of his second term in office, Putin’s administration even suggested such an association itself by citing Franklin Roosevelt’s four terms during the Great Depression, and his slogan, “Don’t swap horses in midstream.”

It would seem, however, that our beloved president is preoccupied with the achievements of yet another famous American leader – Abraham Lincoln. Not because he wants to liberate the slaves or bring an end to the Civil War (on the contrary, freedoms have diminished, and enmity towards “national traitors” has increased). No, the Kremlin has adopted an entirely practical idea from ‘Honest Abe’ – homesteads, free parcels of land on the “frontier;” in this case, the frontier is Russia’s Far East.

In 1863, at the height of the conflict between North and South, Lincoln signed a federal law that allowed any man not fighting against the US government to receive up to 160 acres of unoccupied land. It was this act that led to the influx of settlers in the deserted and mountainous states of the Mid West at the end of the nineteenth century; and the remarkable development of areas of the country that not long before had essentially been wilderness. There were so many takers that special “Land Runs” were arranged in which potential settlers would line up before hurtling off to lay claim to a parcel of land.

Mr Putin would undoubtedly like something similar to happen in Russia’s Far East, and bring about a result that Pyotr Stolypin, prime minister under Nicholas II, was unable to achieve a hundred years ago, when he urged peasants from over-populated areas of central Russia to move to deepest Siberia.

The idea has merit; only, as so often, it’s the execution, which fails. The population of the entire Far East federal region’s six million square kilometres is six million people. That is extremely low. By contrast, in the neighbouring Chinese province of Heilongjiang (Amur River region), which is thirteen times smaller, there are six times as many inhabitants – 38 million people. The land from Vladivostok to Chukhotka, and from the Kuril islands to Yakutsk is a virtual wilderness; economically speaking, the sooner people move there, the better.

Whoever advised President Putin to do this was right, of course. And the rest was, well, just a formality: a law was passed fairly quickly, and came into effect on 1 June, allowing all inhabitants of the Far East to receive gratis a hectare of land per person (about 2.5 acres). And in a year’s time this right will be extended to all of Russia’s citizens.

You will perhaps have noticed the difference between Lincoln’s 160 acres breadth of vision, and Putin’s backyard proposal. Lincoln understood that for the land to be utilised to its utmost, dividing it up almost into allotments, “don’t amount to a hill of beans.”

Setting aside the fact that nobody can do much with 2.5 acres, this wonderful idea is almost certain to fail, for the same reasons that currently and very effectively paralyse everything else in Russia – non-functioning institutions and corruption. It’s hard to imagine that the tempting beaches close to Korea and Japan won’t soon be dotted with the seaside dachas of politicians and officials, that the rare minerals of the Kuril islands won’t fall prey to “approved” businessmen, or that the well-connected bureaucrats who love a spot of hunting, won’t soon be flying above the wildlife, shotguns blasting away from their helicopters.

For the rest of us, there will be the icy mountains of Yakutia, for example, or the Chukhotka tundra – not by the sea, no, but next to the Magadan slag heaps; or else the bogs of Khabarovsk. Added to which, the authorities are not obliged, by the law they so carefully considered, to provide settlers with any services; they don’t even have to build roads. Just take the land and do what you want with it. That’s real Wild West for you …

In other words, it’s the 1990s privatisation all over again: “we wanted the best, but it turned out as it always does,” to quote former Prime Minister Chernomyrdin.

To answer the question: what do Vladimir Putin and Abraham Lincoln have in common? Absolutely nothing.