The Russian Far East

The largest and emptiest region of the largest country, acquired late and held with difficulty. Russia reached the Pacific by 1639, barely sixty years after crossing the Urals, driven by the fur trade rather than by settlement, but ceded the Amur basin to Qing China at Nerchinsk in 1689 and did not get it back until the treaties of 1858 and 1860, signed while China was preoccupied by the Second Opium War. Vladivostok was founded in 1860, and its name - roughly, ruler of the east - states the intention plainly. The region's problem has always been distance. The Trans-Siberian Railway, built between 1891 and 1916, was the response, and the ambition it expressed in Manchuria led directly to defeat by Japan in 1905. It was the last part of the country to fall to the Bolsheviks, surviving as the nominally independent Far Eastern Republic until 1922 while Japanese and Allied troops occupied Vladivostok. Under Stalin the region became the destination rather than the frontier: Kolyma and the Magadan camps, where gold was mined in the worst conditions of the entire Gulag, and the deportation of the Korean population to Central Asia in 1937. Today it holds an eighth of Russia's territory and about four per cent of its people, with the population falling, and its economy is oriented towards China, Japan and Korea far more than towards Moscow. Vladivostok is the eastern terminus of the Trans-Siberian, nine thousand kilometres from Moscow. The city was closed to foreigners from 1958 to 1991. Kamchatka and Sakhalin are part of the region. Its time zone is seven hours ahead of the capital.

• Existed: 1860 CE – present
• Type: Entity