Since 1990 Russians have been steadily leaving Siberia and the Russian Far East. Approximately one million people have moved permanently to central Russia. On the other hand, Chinese traders, workers and farmers have penetrated the southern districts of Russia's eastern regions -- both legally and illegally. No one knows exactly how many "new" Chinese live in Russia; estimates vary from 300,000 to two million. If this trend continues, though, the Chinese could form the majority of the population in the regions bordering China within twenty years.


During the Soviet period, the Far Eastern economy primarily served the needs of the huge military force -- as many as 1.5 million troops -- deployed along the border with China, as well as those of the Pacific fleet (the largest in the U.S.S.R.) and the many military bases along the eastern coast and on Sakhalin and the Kuril islands.


After 1991, the area began to be demilitarized, resulting in high unemployment and considerable economic dislocation. For the first time in 140 years, the region's population diminished. In 1992 alone, approximately 200,000 people left the Far East and Eastern Siberia. Although the fall in production became severe, reaching almost 50 percent in industry and 30 percent in agriculture, emigration slowed down somewhat in 1993-1994, as the sharp rise in rail- and airfares clearly held emigration down.


Although industry developed rapidly in the Far East during the Soviet period, agriculture always lagged behind. The urban population grew 13 times over, while the rural population fell by 30 percent. In 1988 the Far East produced only 30 percent of its food requirements. As a result, the prices of bread, meat and milk were two to three times higher in the Far East than in Central Russia.


When Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the liberal practice of "open borders" with China in 1991, food and other products flooded into the Far East. In 1993, for example, almost 70 percent of the fruit and vegetables, 71 percent of the sugar and 30 percent of the meat consumed in the Amurskaya region were imported from China.


At the same time, Chinese peasants began to cross the border and to cultivate the empty land in the region. There were even reports of cases of Chinese peasant families who had settled in deserted army pill boxes and were cultivating the deforested territory of military bases.


Relatively quickly, the Chinese began to dominate the trade in consumer goods. In 1992-93, about 800 Sino-Russian joint ventures and purely Chinese enterprises were registered in the Far East. With a general trade turnover of $7-8 billion, China became Russia's second largest (after Germany) trade partner in 1993. Approximately 75 percent of this trade took the form of petty commerce along the 4,375 kilometer border.


By the end of 1993, the number of Chinese immigrants in several border districts exceeded the number of Russian citizens. At the beginning of 1994, the Russian government ended Gorbachev's open border policy. Chinese citizens now had to purchase entry visas for $150, meaning that peasants and small traders could no longer afford to enter Russia. Quotas were also adopted to limit the number of Chinese workers who could be invited to work in factories and construction sites. Spontaneous small trade was also restricted, wholesale deals had to be registered, and payment for goods and services had to be settled through banks.


The Interior Ministry initiated a special program which involved checking the documents of Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants and deporting those living in Russia illegally. According to press reports, about 2,000 illegal Chinese immigrants were detained in Irkutsk at the beginning of October: 302 of them were deported, 18 were imprisoned and the rest were fined. By the beginning of October, more than 1,000 illegal Chinese immigrants had been deported from the Maritime Province alone.


These visa restrictions and trade limitations have caused a deterioration in the economy and financial situation of border regions. Whereas local authorities had formerly received tens of billions of rubles for their budgets from customs charges, the income from wholesale trade and the new visa charges went to the federal budget. Moreover, the local population, which had originally opposed Chinese expansion, very soon realized that the Chinese food to which they had become accustomed could not be replaced by deliveries from western Russia. To make matters worse, the harvest in the Trans-Baikal region and the Far East was very poor in 1994, and there were acute vegetable shortages in the Far East last autumn.


When the northern reaches of the Amur river froze, the Russian population of the Chitinskaya and Amurskaya regions found a temporary solution to the predicament. People began constructing "national trade zones" directly on the ice along the border in the middle of the river. On one side of the border, the Chinese set up their trading stalls on the ice; on the other side, Russian shoppers waited with their money and barter goods. It might well be the world's longest bazaar.


Moscow's Center for Demographic Research has reported another interesting trend: Between 1992 and 1994, the number of Sino-Russian mixed marriages increased sharply. One demographic consequence of the Chinese policy of restricting each family to a single child is that there are too few women for Chinese men to marry.


Simple economic and demographic factors, then, indicate clearly what the Russian Far East will be like in 15 or 20 years. It seems terribly ironic that the old Soviet militarization of the region has made it defenseless against foreign penetration now that the Cold War has ended.


Zhores Medvedev is a physicist and author of "Gorbachev" (1986), "Soviet Agriculture" (1987) and "The Legacy of Chernobyl" (1990). He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.