Don't just wait for Russia to look East

Russia's head lies in Europe while its feet paddle in the Pacific. It is the only European country that is also a Pacific nation, an attribute reflected in its former imperial, and now resurrected, emblem. "The Russian eagle has two heads, looking in two directions at once," the late Arkady Volsky, leading Soviet and post-Soviet industrialist, told me in the late 1990s. "It is just as important for Russia to look East to Asia, as West to Europe and the United States."

If Asian Russia - Siberia - were a country, it would be the continent's largest, one-third larger than China. Siberia has the abundant surplus energy, metals and other natural resources, from timber to fish, necessary for its neighbours' continued growth.

Yet Russia has seemed curiously detached from the rest of Asia. "Asia stops at the Amur River," a Hong Kong investment banker once informed me.

While trade and investment figures show progress, Russia is nonetheless far less integrated with its Asian neighbours than Canada or even Mexico is with the United States. The eagle, it seems, has generally been content just to look at Asia rather than build much of a nest here.

It was not always thus. A branch of the Trans-Siberian Railway originally took a shortcut via Harbin, Heilongjiang. Less happily, imperial Russia ruled what is now Dalian, in Liaoning. Anton Chekhov, the great Russian writer, visited Hong Kong in 1890 on his way back from Sakhalin (he was most impressed, writing: "A wonderful bay, such movement on the sea as I have never seen even in pictures...").

The Hongkong & Shanghai Bank, with exquisite timing, opened a branch in Vladivostok in 1917. It closed a few years later, but the Tsarist-era building - considerably more modest than the one on the Shanghai Bund - is still there, or at least was when I was asked to scope it out soon after Vladivostok opened up. Yul Brynner was born in Vladivostok.

The turmoil of the 20th century - the Russian revolution, the brief interregnum in which the region was the nominally independent Far Eastern Republic, the second world war and border skirmishes with China, brought an end to this. Vladivostok became home to the Soviet Union's Pacific fleet and was closed to foreigners.