Russia in Global Affairs

The world in which Russia lives and in which it will develop in the coming decades is undergoing an unprecedented, almost biblical transformation.

The main trends, which are also challenges and opportunities, are as follows:

The previously prevalent development model – globalist imperial-liberal capitalism, has almost exhausted itself. This model, based on the endless growth of consumption, leads to the degradation of humans and humanity, and is beginning to jeopardize the planet upon which human existence depends.

The 500-year-long period of Western global domination, which allowed it to rob the rest of humanity, is also coming to an end. This dominance in culture, politics, economics, and ideology rested on military superiority, which has been undermined by the Soviet Union and then Russia. Today, the West is putting up its hopefully last fight, seeking to defeat our country and reverse history.

By undermining the military foundation of the West’s dominance, Russia has liberated the world. Civilizations suppressed for centuries – Chinese, Indian, Arab, Persian, and Turkish-Ottoman – are beginning to rise again.

This is a great process, but one that carries many dangers: waves of crises and wars.

Not only the multipolar world, which existed roughly until the 16th century, but also Eurasia, which once was the main hub of human development, are beginning to reemerge on a new basis. The center of world politics, of spiritual and economic development, is rapidly shifting to the South and East.

These and a number of other related factors require Russia to decisively redirect the vector of its spiritual, economic, and political development. Our country is well-suited to this new world. But in order to take advantage of emerging opportunities and to fend off new threats, Russia needs a new Turn to the East: not just to Asia, but to itself, to its origins as a great Euro-Asian empire. And this requires a national strategy for the new movement towards “Siberization” of Russia, from the Urals to Kamchatka.

Since the 1990s, the Russian academic community, especially economic geographers, has repeatedly substantiated the feasibility and necessity of shifting the country’s development focus to Siberia. This shift has taken place at varying speeds for more than five centuries and fundamentally contributed to the creation of the country as a great state-empire, a civilization-state, as finally recognized in the 2023 Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation (Concept, 2023). Without the conquest and development of Siberia, Russia would likely not have survived on the Central Russian Plain, attacked from the west and south. Siberia’s development was greatly advanced by the Soviet Union, but then almost went into reverse due to the wretched reforms of the 1990s. Nevertheless, attempts to move the center of development to the East continued, at least on an intellectual level (Fartyshev, 2019). In 2000, the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy (SVOP) made the first attempt at a comprehensive program for the development of Siberia (Strategy for Russia, 2001), but the project did not take off; the ruling class was otherwise occupied.

In the late 2000s, a group of young colleagues and I started a new project to substantiate the utility and necessity of a turn to the east. (Sergei Shoigu, now Secretary of the Security Council, and his colleagues worked on the same subject in parallel.) Far Eastern specialists – whose work was particularly interesting – joined in the project (Savchenko and Zuenko, 2020), followed by their colleagues in Western and Eastern Siberia by the end of the 2010s (Kryukov, 2020). The turn was conceived as encompassing the whole of Siberia and the Urals as a single historical, economic, and human space.

It turned out differently: Eastern Turn 1.0, to Asia and its markets, administratively went mainly through the Far East, with the Arctic added later. Commenced in 2011–2012, it was insufficient and only partly successful.

Obstacles to it included the fading but still significant Western-centrism of the Russian elites, and the project’s technocratic, uninspiring nature. Nothing was proposed that could compare to the Trans-Siberian Railway’s slogan “Forward to the Great Ocean,” or to the Soviet Union’s development of the Arctic and Komsomol projects. Despite the Turn’s promised benefits, it also failed to excite the Far East’s residents, who viewed it as a project of the Moscow center. There was also resistance from locals who feared changes to their way of life (Karaganov and Likhacheva, 2020).

The concept’s omission of the Urals and part of Siberia was a fundamental mistake. Whether for bureaucratic reasons or out of malevolent thoughtlessness, Pacific Siberia and (absurdly) the Arctic were separated from Siberia’s historical, economic, and spiritual roots in Western and Eastern Siberia and the Urals. Siberia, which had been developing for many centuries as a single human, cultural, economic, and administrative organism, ended up torn apart.

These subregions’ ‘continental curse’ – isolation from promising neighboring (mostly Asian) markets, given a continued focus on remote and ever-less-promising Western ones – was not resolved. Only in recent years has Russia begun to build eastward gas and oil pipelines. The region almost entirely lacks north-south routes connecting it to the markets of the future. But, perhaps most importantly, the Turn did not include the regions most advanced in human capital, scientific potential, industrial capabilities, and mineral resources. They have continued to lose population faster than the rest of the country.

So far, this mistake has not been rectified. The government strategy for the development of the Siberian Federal District (not all of Siberia) looks miserable, prompting exhaustion and frustration rather than inspiring progress (Decree, 2023).

The confrontation that the West provoked and unleashed in Ukraine should not distract us from moving to the South and East where the center of human development is shifting.

This new, but long-predicted situation prompts us to return home from the European journey that has given us much but lost value more than a century ago. (I owe the term ‘return home’ to prominent Khabarovsk philosopher and historian Professor Leonid Blyakher (2017), with whom I worked on the previous round of the Eastern Turn). Without that journey begun by Peter the Great, there is much that Russia would not have achieved, such as the world’s greatest literature: a fusion of European culture with Russian culture, religion, and morality. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, and then Blok, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Tvardovsky, and other giants of the spirit that shaped our modern identity, likely would not have appeared without the ‘European injection.’

But we half-forgot for three centuries about the Oriental roots of our state and people. Byzantium, until it was defeated by rapacious crusaders and then by the Ottomans, was the most important cultural and economic center of Central and Western Eurasia, while Europe was in decline. The Mongols plundered, but also established conditions for development. In fact, through conflict and cooperation with them, we borrowed many elements of their statehood, which allowed us to build a powerful centralized state and fostered the continental mentality of the Russian people. It seems that we inherited our almost unique cultural, ethnic, and religious openness from Genghis Khan’s empire. The Mongols did not impose their culture or beliefs, but were religiously tolerant. Hence, to preserve Orthodox Russia against Catholic Teutons, one of the founders of Russia, Prince Saint Alexander Nevsky, forged an alliance with them. Russia would not have become great, and (being besieged from the west and south) likely would not have survived on the Central Russian Plain, if Russians had not moved en masse “beyond the Rock” (Urals), “to meet the sun” in the 16th century. There is no explanation for the speed with which they moved, except for divine intervention. It took the Cossacks just six decades to reach the Great Ocean.

The development of Siberia turned Old Russia, the Russian Tsardom, into Great Russia. Even before Russia was proclaimed an empire, Siberia’s resources―first “soft gold,” then silver, gold, and minerals – allowed Russia to create and equip a powerful army and navy. Northern Silk Road caravans, carrying Chinese goods through Kyakhta to Russia and beyond in exchange for furs, played a significant role. Siberia was also where Russians, competing and trading, began to interact with Central Asians (‘Bukharans’).

Siberia profoundly strengthened the best of the Russian character: cultural and ethnic openness, the craving for volya (Russian freedom), immense courage, and the collectivism necessary to survive and conquer such expanses and elements.

Siberia was developed by dozens of ethnicities intertwined with the local population. This is how the Siberian was formed, as a concentration of all the best in the Russian (whether a Russian Russian, Russian Tatar, Russian Buryat, Russian Yakut, Russian Chechen, etc.). Prominent Tyumen journalist and writer Anatoly Omelchuk calls Siberia the place where “the Russian character was brewed” (Karaganov and Omelchuk, 2023).

The elites (Count Sergei Witte, Pyotr Stolypin, etc.) and common people accomplished an unparalleled political feat by so quickly building the Trans-Siberian Railway, which helped Russia to keep Siberia under its control and develop the country. We should be grateful to them for their work and dedication, and to those who did not come to Siberia of their own free will; convicts and Gulag prisoners made a huge, not yet fully appreciated, contribution to Russia’s development.

Witte and his associates perfectly understood the spiritual importance of this forward-looking project. He launched a massive and successful PR campaign to promote it (Khesli, 2022). Now it is time for the slogans “To Meet the Sun” and “Forward to the Great Ocean” to be succeeded by “Forward into Greater Eurasia.”

Then there came the Soviet project to develop the Arctic and the great Komsomol construction projects in Siberia, where representatives of all the Soviet peoples worked together, made friends, and formed families. Siberian gas, minerals, grain, and fur coats, horses from Mongolia, Buryatia, and Tuva, and the Siberian regiments played a crucial role in defending Moscow and winning the Great Patriotic War. And before that, the countless horses from the Siberian and Ural steppes had been key to Russia’s victory over Napoleon and others. The Russian army was much more mobile than the European ones that occasionally invaded (Liven, 2012).

And then came Siberian oil and gas.

But Siberia’s main contribution to the national treasury is certainly its people: courageous, persevering, strong, collectivist, and enterprising―the embodiment of the Russian spirit. It is necessary not only to facilitate resettlement from the center of the country (including the reincorporated lands) to Siberia, but also to recruit Siberians (with their experience, outlook, and closeness to Asia) to run the country.

Most of our countrymen, in developing Siberia, did not fully realize that, by opening Russia up to the Asian markets of the future, they were transforming it into a great Euro-Asian power. That future has come now, and with it, the need to transfer some federal agencies and major corporations to Siberia.

Russia, with its unique culture and openness, is called to participate in shifting the center of global development and in leading it. Fate, God, and the selfless work of generations of our ancestors predestined Russia to become part of Northern Eurasia, its balancer and military-strategic core, the guarantor of the renaissance of previously suppressed cultures, countries, and civilizations, free from dictatorship (Kuleshov and Kryukov, 2017).

We are witnessing the birth of a new world. In many ways, we have become its midwife by ending the West’s military superiority that underpinned its 500-year-long hegemony. We are repelling what is hopefully the declining West’s final attack, an effort to strategically defeat our country in Ukraine and to reverse history. We must win this fight, even by threatening the most severe measures and, if necessary, using them. This is necessary not only for our victory, but also to prevent the world from slipping towards the Third World War.

But, I repeat, the fight with the West should not distract us from the most important constructive tasks. These include the new development of the entire east of the country. Geoeconomics, geopolitics, and the inevitable climate change of the coming decades necessitate, but also facilitate, a Siberian turn that shifts Russia’s spiritual, human, and economic center eastward.

Siberia’s lands, forests, minerals, and freshwater should become, with modern technologies and Siberians’ energy and intelligence, a driver of Eurasia’s development. So, our duty is to hold Siberia firmly, developing it for the benefit of our citizens, the country, and all humankind. At present, we mainly supply low-value-added products. The task is to create, under state regulation, nationwide full-cycle production complexes (Kryukov, 2023), and to use defense contracts to rebuild state-of-the-art Siberian manufacturing.

Federal administrative centers should also go east: ministries, legislative bodies, the headquarters of large corporations, to be followed by patriotic and, in the best sense of the word, ambitious young people. If Peter the Great lived today, he would have certainly found a new capital in Siberia and greatly expand the “window to Asia.”

Apart from Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia absolutely needs a third, Siberian, capital, not least because of the military-strategic situation of the coming decades.

It would be most logical to create the third capital near a preexisting center such as Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, or Krasnoyarsk. Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in 2019, President Vladimir Putin mentioned the desirability of founding a new development center in the Minusinsk Basin (SPIEF, 2019).

I personally like the idea of ​​establishing the third capital where it all began, in Tobolsk, with its magnificent kremlin and history. Tobolsk was the capital of the Siberian Governorate. It would be worth moving—to the Siberian capital or capitals – several federal departments, e.g., the Ministries of Culture, Education, and Natural Resources, as well as the Ministry for the Development of the Far East and the Arctic, expanded to include the rest of Siberia. It is obvious to me that it would also be advisable to move the headquarters of the Russian Academy of Sciences to Novosibirsk, а scientific center that generally works much more efficiently than the old capitals’ analogs. Naturally, the deeply-rooted bureaucracy is infuriated by the idea of such relocations. But such a (in this case, partial) transfer will greatly spur development, including spatially, and accelerate the renewal of the elites by infusing them with new energy and ideas. The President has agreed with the idea of moving the headquarters of some state-owned corporations to Siberia (SPIEF, 2024).

The creation of a Siberian capital (capitals) will not only rejuvenate the Moscow and St. Petersburg elites, stuck in the 1980-1990s, by infusing them with new energy. (Engaging elites from Sverdlovsk under Boris Yeltsin, and especially from St. Petersburg under Vladimir Putin, was effective but has run its course). It will also help to shift elite attention and social development from Eurocentrism, which has been retrograde in nature for more than a century, to internal economic and civilizational development, and to alignment with Asia, the region of the future. Siberia’s potential capitals are 3-6 hours by air from Asia’s capitals, compared to 8–14 hours for Moscow.

The Eastern Turn should be prepared in Moscow. If handed over to the Siberians, unfortunately, it will likely be undermined by Siberia’s localism and inter-region rivalry.

At the end of the 19th century, Siberian patriots Nikolai Yadrintsev and Grigory Potanin opposed the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which they feared would undermine the region’s distinctive identity. Their efforts were largely futile and even counterproductive. (They were exiled even ‘further’ than Siberia, to the Arkhangelsk Governorate.)

Today, many projects authored by Siberian academics are fraught with parochialism and provincialism. For instance, the idea of Siberia as a colony, even though it is an indigenous part of Russia and historically destined to become Russia’s center. (Had history gone differently, it would have become part of China or a colony of Japan. The latter twice – during the Russian Civil War and World War II – hoped to capture it, with possible consequences that are illustrated by the near-genocidal losses that were suffered by the Chinese and other Asian peoples under Japanese occupation.)

However, while the new policy of developing Siberia and shifting to it should be directed from Moscow, it must engage the Siberian people’s intellectual capital, energy, experience, and character, and be implemented mainly by them. They know their land, its problems, capabilities, and peculiarities better. The first Eastern Turn began to fizzle out partly because of Far Eastern specialists’ minimal engagement.

Siberia has seen tsarist penal colonies and Stalin labor camps, but itself embodies the spirit of the people at its best and freest. There are thousands of creative people, scientists, writers, and filmmakers in our country who are in love with Siberia. We should make way for them.

I know that the people of the Urals and beyond, many carrying the fiery spirit of the great discoverers who preceded them, wish for Russia’s revival and prosperity, beginning with Siberia’s priority development. Unfortunately, many, seeing no prospects to realize their ambitions and abilities, move to the country’s developed center or quietly burn out in their small towns and villages.

It is in our power and interest to utilize this colossal human potential and destroy unnecessary barriers between the Siberian hinterland, the large administrative centers, and the rest of Russia, thus bringing together the great geographical and civilizational axis of history.

Uniting our consciousness and mentality with Siberia’s glorious past, present, and future – in the interests of the whole country – will certainly resonate in the hearts of the Siberians themselves. I repeat, we need a Siberian strategy for the whole of Russia, not strategies specifically for the Ural, Siberian, or Far Eastern Districts, which are too narrow to be effective.

The economic calculations of Novosibirsk analysts, assisted by their Moscow colleagues, are more than convincing (Kuleshov and Kryukov, 2017; Kryukov and Seliverstov, 2022; Siberia, 2008; Yefimov, 2017), but the Siberian strategy should begin with the development of the Asian part of Russia, a magnificent and breathtaking history, spiritually and culturally returning to the center of Russian identity. The history of Siberia, full of romanticism, victories, and adventures, should be taken to heart by every patriot of our country. The well-known conquest of the American West is but a pale shadow of the exploits of our ancestors, who intertwined with the local population instead of committing genocide. Most of our people and even intellectuals are barely aware of this chapter in our history, such as Alexander Nevsky’s 18-month journey in the late 1240s, through Central Asia and Southern Siberia, to the Mongol capital Karakorum, to receive a yarlyk outranking Batu Khan. Kublai Khan, soon to be the emperor-unifier of China and founder of the Yuan dynasty, was there at the time (as we know through Marco Polo), and probably met Nevsky. Perhaps the history of Siberia’s development and of Russo-Chinese relations – now a de facto alliance destined to become the backbone of the new world order – should be dated right from Nevsky’s journey.

We need to build new north-south routes connecting Southern Siberia to the Northern Sea Route, and to China and thereby Southeast Asia. The Urals and Western Siberia should acquire effective access to India, the rest of South Asia, and the Middle East. It is gratifying that we have at last begun completing the railway connecting Russia, including Siberia, to Iran and the Indian Ocean.

We should develop water-rich Siberia by cooperating with water-poor but labor-rich fraternal countries in Central and South Asia, not through stupid river diversion projects, but by together setting up water-intensive industries that will export “virtual water” in the form of food and other goods. Symbiotic Siberian and Central Asian development will hugely benefit everyone.

It is long past time to create at least two more research-industrial centers in the Krasnoyarsk-Yeniseisk and Irkutsk-Chita regions, focused on new technology’s advanced processing of the region’s unique mineral resources. These centers should be integrated less with foreign (even friendly) countries, and more with domestic value chains, including with Russia’s Far East and Center.

The labor shortage must be partially compensated for by the large-scale recruitment of hardworking and disciplined North Koreans. We are at last no longer following the stupid Western policy towards the DPRK, but are restoring friendly relations with it. I know that India and Pakistan are also interested in providing at least seasonal workers.

Naturally, we should improve living conditions for indigenous Siberians, including those in small towns like Yeniseisk.

We need a program for the resettlement of people from Russia’s new regions. Siberian cities can be attractive to the growing wave of valuable immigrants, including from the West. But we must finally tear down the bureaucratic barriers to this and put one agency in charge of it, with Rossotrudnichestvo being the most obvious candidate.

The Higher School of Economics is now working together with the Institute of Economics and Organization of Industrial Production (within the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences), with other institutes from the Academy’s Siberian and Far Eastern branches, and with universities in Tomsk, Vladivostok, Barnaul, Khabarovsk, and Krasnoyarsk, to draft a “Turn to the East 2.0” for the Siberization of Russia.

We also need an ambitious national program for developing Eastern studies and for teaching Eastern languages, histories, and cultures at school. Uniquely culturally and religiously open Russia has a huge competitive edge, inherited from our ancestors, who en route to the East did not enslave and destroy, as the Europeans did, but merged with local peoples and cultures.

Sun Tzu, Confucius, Kautilya (aka Vishnugupta), Rabindranath Tagore, Ferdowsi, King Darius, Tamerlan, Al-Khwarizm (founder of algebra), the great Turkmen Magtymguly, Abu Ali ibn Sina (aka Avicenna, founder of medical science), and Fatima Al-Fihri (founder of the first university in the world) should be as familiar to Russian secondary school graduates as Alexander the Great, Galileo, Dante, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, or Goethe. We must understand the essence of not only Orthodox Christianity but also of Islam and Buddhism. All these religions and spiritual movements are already present in our spiritual memory. We only need to preserve and develop them.

Siberia, with its multiculturalism, multiconfessionality (Orthodoxy, Islam, Buddhism, and various paganisms), natural riches, and vast spaces, is an excellent springboard for Russia’s leap into the future (Bezrukov, 2015).

In conclusion, I will recall a recent uplifting episode. Several years ago, I was in Tobolsk at the invitation of Arkady Elfimov, an outstanding Siberian, Kulturträger, and philanthropist, creator of many monuments, and author of amazing books, including on the history of Siberia. He invited me to a concert at a local Roman Catholic church built in the 19th century by exiled Poles. Inside the church, an ethnically Armenian citizen of Russia, who had converted to Catholicism during the church’s restoration and had learned the organ with the financial support of Siberia’s Armenian community, played Bach, Vivaldi, and Tchaikovsky. Strong men and beautiful women of different ethnic backgrounds were present, but all of them were Russians. Children were running around. This is the essence of Siberia.

In addition, the coming decades of inevitable climate change will expand the area of comfortable life in Siberia. Nature itself and God Almighty invite Russia to make a new turn towards Siberia and the East. To repeat: by drafting and implementing an Eastern Turn, we are not only returning home to the source of our power and greatness but also opening new horizons for ourselves and future generations. We are creating and fulfilling the new old Russian dream, for national greatness, prosperity, volya [free will], and the realization of what is best in us―the Spirit of the Russians. There are already many excellent plans for the new development of Siberia. One of the most striking and convincing was prepared for the Izborsk Club by academics from Novosibirsk, Barnaul, and other cities (Ivanov et al., 2022).

We only need to join efforts and force the ruling elite to do what is obviously necessary: to accelerate the shift of Russia’s center of spiritual, moral, human, and economic development to its proper place, as determined by history and the modern world: the Urals and all of Siberia.

The article was published in Russian in the scientific journal Russia and the APR, 2(128), June 2025.