The federal government in Moscow has billed the September 2012 summit as something of a coming-out party for Vladivostok, the largest city in the Russian Far East and the home of Russia's Pacific Fleet. The formerly neglected region is awash with cash. A total of 426 billion rubles (just over $15 billion) is being poured into the Primorsky region ahead of the summit -- an amount equivalent to 60 times Vladivostok's annual city budget. Highways leading into the city are being chewed up and expanded; in addition to the Russky Island bridge, another massive suspension bridge is reaching out across the Golden Horn Bay, the hook-shaped inlet in the city center.



The huge injection of cash represents Russia's renewed attention towards its Far Eastern territory, a region long plagued by neglect and economic stagnation. In Soviet times, the vast region -- four-fifths the size of Australia -- was heavily propped up by state subsidies, but as Asia's economies have boomed, the region has fallen into precipitous decline.

The once-proud Pacific Fleet has shrunk to a fraction of its size, while a large part of the region's defence industries, the lifeblood of many towns and cities, have long ceased production. In their place, corruption has flourished. David Satter, a Russia expert at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, told me that in the years after 1991 the Primorsky region was subject to "criminal looting" under the governorship of Evgeny Nasztradenko, a former Soviet official backed by powerful local oligarchs. "During the 1990s, it was the most criminalized enclave in the whole country," Satter said. "It became a law unto itself."

Low fertility, high death rates, and collapsing infrastructure added to the rot, leaving much of the region barren. The population of Vladivostok, the capital of the Primorsky region, has contracted from a peak of 648,000 in 1991 to 578,000 last year, while the population of the Far East as a whole has dropped from 8.05 million to just 6.44 million, according to official statistics.

"There was a huge system that provided employment, money, and everything for this region, but the market reforms happened, and the plants stopped work and the population started moving," said Alexandr Latkin, an economist at the Vladivostok State University of Economics and Service, a major institution here. The exodus has included some of the region's best and brightest. As one recent analysis of the Far East put it, the intellectually vibrant Vladivostok of Soviet times has turned into "an ordinary provincial city where uncouth and boorish traders dealing in used Japanese cars now set the tone".

"This is why the Russian government is putting huge amounts of money into the Far East and into Vladivostok," said Latkin. "They want to bring back the status of the Far East that was lost during the '90s."



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Vladivostok, which means "Lord of the East" in Russian, began its life in 1859 as a naval outpost on the periphery of the Russian Empire, and became the main garrison in the Tsar's newly-acquired Pacific territories. There has always been something geographically implausible about the city: it teeters on the edge of the Eurasian landmass, separated from Moscow by thousands of miles of largely uninhabited wilderness, sustained for many years via the single narrow artery of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The distance encompasses seven time zones; when Muscovites are sitting down for lunch, easterners are drawing their shades.