The Russian Far East

The Far East was home to many peoples long before Russians came: Buryats and Evenks around Baikal, Sakha horse and cattle herders on the Lena, the Nivkh and Ainu on Sakhalin, the Itelmen and Koryaks on Kamchatka, and Chukchi and Yupik hunters on the Bering Strait. Cossacks reached the Pacific on the Sea of Okhotsk in 1639, and Yakutsk, founded in 1632, became the base for collecting fur tribute across the north-east. Qing China pushed Russia back from the Amur, and the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 kept it out for 170 years.

Vitus Bering's expeditions founded Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in 1740 and launched the push to Alaska. In 1858–60 Russia took the Amur and the Pacific coast from a weakened China, founding Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, whose name means "ruler of the East". Sakhalin became a penal colony, described by Chekhov after his visit in 1890, and Japan held its southern half from 1905 until the Soviet invasion of 1945, when the Kuril Islands were also taken — a dispute with Japan that is still unresolved.

After the revolution, a nominally independent Far Eastern Republic with its capital first at Verkhneudinsk (now Ulan-Ude) and then at Chita existed until 1922. The Soviet state created the Jewish Autonomous Oblast around Birobidzhan in 1934, and deported Koreans from Primorye to Central Asia in 1937. The Kolyma camps around Magadan became the most feared part of the Gulag, their gold mines worked by prisoners who built the Kolyma road. Later decades brought closed naval cities, the Baikal–Amur Mainline and, after 1991, a steep fall in population as subsidies ended and people moved west.

The Far East is Russia's most Asian region. Buryats, a Mongolic people, practise Tibetan Buddhism alongside shamanism, and Ulan-Ude is the centre of Tibetan Buddhism in Russia. The Sakha of Yakutia speak a Turkic language and celebrate Ysyakh at the summer solstice, a festival of ritual drinking of kumis, circle dancing called osuokhai, horse racing and greetings to the sun; their olonkho epic poetry is recognised by UNESCO, and the khomus, a jaw harp, is a national instrument. Chukchi, Yupik, Even, Koryak and Nivkh communities keep reindeer herding, sea hunting and carving traditions, often under great economic strain.

Russian settlers brought Cossack traditions, and the Pacific coast carries Chinese, Korean and Japanese influences: Korean salads in Vladivostok markets, Japanese-era buildings on Sakhalin, and Chinese traders and tourists along the Amur. Birobidzhan teaches Yiddish and Jewish traditions in its schools as part of the region's heritage.

Far Easterners see Moscow as distant and tend to feel overlooked by it. Khabarovsk saw weeks of large street protests in 2020 after the arrest of its elected governor. People talk of "the mainland" when they mean European Russia, and Vladivostok's residents follow East Asian fashions and drive second-hand Japanese cars with the steering wheel on the right.

About 8 million people live across more than a third of Russia. Khabarovsk and Vladivostok have around 600,000 each, Ulan-Ude and Chita several hundred thousand each, and Yakutsk around 350,000; Magadan, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and Anadyr are much smaller. Many northern towns have lost a large share of their people since 1991.

The economy is extraction and ports. Yakutia mines most of Russia's diamonds, around Mirny, as well as gold and coal; Sakhalin pumps oil and gas and exports liquefied gas to Asia; Magadan and Chukotka mine gold; Kamchatka and Primorye catch fish and crab; and Vladivostok, Nakhodka and Vostochny are the ports for trade with China, Korea and Japan. Since 2022 trade has turned sharply towards China, and Vladivostok's role has grown. The Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur Oblast is Russia's newest launch site.

Life is shaped by isolation, northern allowances on wages, expensive flights and long winters. Yakutsk is built on stilts above permafrost, and in winter cars are left running and fog of frozen exhaust fills the streets. Buryatia and the Indigenous north have sent heavily to the war in Ukraine relative to their size, and demographic decline remains the region's central issue.

The Pacific coast eats seafood: king crab from Kamchatka and the Sea of Okhotsk, scallops, sea urchin, squid, trepang (sea cucumber) and salmon, with red salmon caviar spread on bread and butter. Korean dishes such as morkovcha, spicy carrot salad, and Chinese-style dishes are part of everyday eating in Vladivostok and Khabarovsk.

Buryat food is Mongolic: buuzy, large steamed dumplings of minced mutton or beef, eaten by hand after biting a hole and drinking the hot juice, are the national dish, along with boiled mutton, blood sausage and salted milk tea. Omul from Baikal is smoked and sold around the lake.

Yakut cuisine is built for extreme cold: stroganina, frozen shaved raw fish or foal meat; indigirka, a salad of frozen fish cubes with onion; Yakut horse meat, prized for its marbling; kumis made from mare's milk; and kuerchekh, whipped cream. In Chukotka, Indigenous families eat walrus, seal and whale meat, and in Kamchatka salmon is dried, salted and smoked in every village. Wild berries — lingonberry, cloudberry, crowberry — and pine nuts round out the northern diet.

Vladivostok is the main city: hills over the Golden Horn Bay, the Golden Bridge and Russky Bridge, the Trans-Siberian's terminus, old forts and the Primorye coast of islands and bays, with Land of the Leopard National Park to the south-west. Khabarovsk has its Amur embankment and regional museum, and Birobidzhan its Jewish heritage.

To the west, Ulan-Ude has its giant Lenin head and the Ivolginsky Datsan, and Baikal's eastern shore offers the Barguzin valley, the Svyatoy Nos peninsula and Zabaykalsky National Park, quieter than the Irkutsk side. Chita keeps its church of the Decembrists, exiled here from 1827.

In Yakutia, Yakutsk has the Permafrost Kingdom and a mammoth museum, and the Lena Pillars, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, line the river upstream. Oymyakon, one of the coldest inhabited places on Earth, lies on the Kolyma road to Magadan, where the Mask of Sorrow memorial honours Gulag prisoners.

Kamchatka is the region's great natural wonder: the Volcanoes of Kamchatka, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with Klyuchevskaya Sopka, the highest active volcano in Eurasia, the Valley of Geysers in Kronotsky reserve, and bears at Kurile Lake, while Avachinsky and Koryaksky tower over Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Sakhalin has Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk's museum in a Japanese-era building and a long wild coast. Chukotka, half of it beyond the Arctic Circle, opposite Alaska, has Anadyr, reindeer herders, grey whales off the coast and Whalebone Alley, an ancient ring of whale jaws and skulls on Yttygran Island.