Most cars in Russia's Far East have the steering wheel on the wrong side
In Russia's Far East, 73 percent of cars have right-hand drive, something unique within Russia, even though traffic keeps to the right. It suits a region that had no highway link to the rest of the country until 2010, and covers more than a third of Russia with fewer than eight million people.
The region runs from Lake Baikal to the Pacific, sharing land borders with China, Mongolia and North Korea and sea borders with Japan and, across the Bering Strait, the United States. Outsiders often lump it in with Siberia, but Russians have long treated the two as separate. Confusingly, what English speakers call the Far East, Russians call the Asia-Pacific region. Its largest city is Khabarovsk, ahead of Vladivostok.
Russians reached the Pacific in 1647 when they founded Okhotsk, but firm control came only in the nineteenth century after taking part of Chinese Manchuria between 1858 and 1860. Vladivostok, founded in 1860, froze outside summer, which is why Russia coveted Port Arthur's ice-free harbour in Manchuria. That ambition helped spark war with Japan, which opened in February 1904 with a surprise attack hours before the declaration arrived, and ended in a Japanese victory in 1905.
The twentieth century was harsh. Between 1937 and 1939 Stalin deported more than 200,000 Koreans to Central Asia, fearing they might spy for Japan. Gulag camps built much of the remote north until forced labour faded after 1953 and high wages lured volunteers instead. Vladivostok hosted Soviet-American arms talks in 1974, then became a closed city around the Pacific Fleet's bases.
Today the Far Eastern Federal District spans 6.2 million square kilometres, making it one of the emptiest places on Earth, with slightly more than one person per square kilometre. Three quarters live in cities, mostly in the south, and numbers have fallen faster than in Russia as a whole since the Soviet collapse. Railways, including the Baikal–Amur line opened in 1984, remain the main overland links, while remote settlements depend on aircraft and ships.
Source: Russian Far East
