The discussion section of the Valdai Club took place this year in Yakutia (or in the indigenous language, Sakha) in eastern Siberia, mainly in cruise ships on the river Lena. This was fascinating, but I must confess that there were moments when I found myself repeating Dr. Samuel Johnson’s remark about the Giant’s Causeway: “Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.” Going to see Yakutia involves a six-hour flight and a six-hour time difference from Moscow, with the result that I fell fast asleep during several of the sessions.
Yakutia’s statistics are staggering. At 1.2 million square miles, the autonomous republic is almost as large as India, and covers three time zones. With nine hundred sixty thousand people, it has around a twelve hundredth of India’s population. Even so, you do not really understand this until you look across the immense expanse of the river Lena and realize that it still has another one thousand five hundred miles to go before it reaches the Arctic Ocean, and stand on a hill and look westwards over a forest that extends without visible end, unbroken by human settlement.
The ethnic Yakuts now dominate the local administration, and seem to be doing rather well for themselves. This is perhaps not surprising, given that Yakutia sits on some of the world’s greatest diamond deposits—but the money appears to be being spread around reasonably well. Yakutia is a useful reminder that with the dreadful exception of Chechnya and to a lesser extent the other North Caucasus republics, Russia’s record of relations with its ethnic minorities since the breakup of the Soviet Union has not been a bad one by world standards.
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