In Putin's Footsteps

9 BLAGOVESHCHENSK, HEIHE, AND YAKUTSK ^{ROUGHING IT TIME ZONE: MSK+6, UTC+9}

“I lack the skill to describe anything as beautiful as the banks of the Amur…. The Russian bank is on the left, the Chinese on the right. If I feel like it, I can look at Russia, and if I feel like it, I can look at China. China is just as barren and savage as Russia: villages and sentinel huts are few and far between…. The Chinese will take the Amur away from us, of that there is no doubt,” wrote Anton Chekhov in his letter to a friend in 1890.[40] The perceptive Russian writer may be right—today the Chinese empire seems to operate differently from the Russian one, its identity not in question, so unlike Russia, which rushes from imitation to negation of all things Western while China borrows from the world to strengthen its own power.

For a city whose name decodes as “the Place of the Annunciation” (by the Angel Gabriel, to the Virgin Mary, that she was to bear the Son of God), Blagoveshchensk, in the Russian Far East, arouses less than holy associations among those Russians who have heard of it. Chekhov stopped there on his way east across Siberia, a journey he describes in harrowing detail in Sakhalin Island. He had one thing in mind: sampling Japanese prostitutes—the Karayuki-san, or Ms. Gone Abroad, women who at the time offered their geisha services all over the world, including Siberia—working in doma terpimosti (houses of tolerance). They giggled ts-ts during sex and yet showed amazing skill, he wrote. They gave customers the impression they were “riding a highly trained horse,” and, afterward, ever so gingerly used tweezers to extract a cotton cloth from their shirtsleeve to wipe them dry, “tickling their belly” in the process.

Once dressed, Chekhov would have emerged from his “house of tolerance” in Blagoveshchensk to gaze upon rows of brightly painted, well-kept single-story wooden houses along the Amur river embankment, and, in their midst, men erecting an architectural curio no one would expect six thousand miles east of Europe: a small-scale, neo-Russian ornate replica of Paris’s chief landmark, the Arc de Triomphe. Erected in 1891 to honor Prince Nicholas, the future Nicholas II, the Russian version supports two towers crowned with the Russian state insignia, the double-headed eagle, their eyes perpetually looking up and down the great Siberian waterway on which the town stands. The arc itself faces China, on the Amur’s western bank—specifically, the town of Heihe.

Blagoveshchensk was tough to reach in Chekhov’s day, before the Trans-Siberian Railroad connected Moscow and Saint Petersburg with territories to the east (and Blagoveshchensk is not even on that line). Then, travelers made their way in carriages down bone-rattling dirt roads, muddy in warm months, iced-over in winter. We had an infinitely less arduous time in getting there. Yet still troubles beset us, even before we arrived one early August morn: fog closed Blagoveshchensk’s small airport, forcing our flight to land in Chita, some six hundred miles to the west. Grumpy flight attendants deplaned us into the lounge in Chita’s single-runway airport. Hours passed as we waited, wondering if we might end up spending all day there. Around us the other passengers sat glumly, patiently.

We asked airport staff for an update, but they responded only with miffed silence. A young woman holding a large bag with a map of Crimea and a “Crimea is Ours” logo gave us a dirty look, telling her little daughter, “Never mind them. Everybody is silent, but they vystupayut [speak out].” Truly, we decided, Russians are treated this way because they let themselves be treated this way.

Yet soon enough the fog relented and we found ourselves, for good or ill, aboard our plane and soaring east. We touched down just outside Blagoveshchensk, a city these days of 225,000 that embodies (and not because of the Amur River) the Russian noun glubinka—backwater.

It was a tense place. People seemed on edge. Don’t ask extra questions, don’t request extra service. In a restaurant the menu included a detailed “broken dishes” price list—from a teapot and a salad bowl to a place mat—in the event that customers were to become too unruly and start damaging equipment and dinnerware.

Just as we were settling into our hotel, a power blackout promptly killed the lights and, worse, the air-conditioning. It turned out that Putin was touring the Russian Far East to fish, hunt, and show off his aging but still taut strongman’s chest. Which meant he was set to visit Blagoveshchensk and discuss investment projects and so, along the way, had decided to stop by the Nizhne-Bureisk hydroelectric power plant under construction a hundred miles to the southeast of the city. To please Putin, the plant’s managers rushed to open one of its reactors ahead of schedule with, sadly, predictable results. The whole Far East went completely dark for hours. A million people suffered. That evening, bars and restaurants along the Amur embankment closed their doors; we couldn’t even find a place for a drink to toast Nina’s birthday. We had begun our Russia travels in Putin’s footsteps; now he was in ours, making our trip a challenge.

So, we kept strolling down the darkened embankment, our gaze fixed on the bright Heihe just across the Amur. We learned later that a few Chinese locations were affected by the blackout, too, those connected by an international power line to Amur-Heihe.[41] But from where we stood—not much wider than the Thames in London or the Seine in Paris—the Chinese bank was sending its shining lights, their shimmering reflections set on the river’s blue-gray surface, lending an impressionistic luminosity to our embankment. Here, women promenaded, bedecked in princesslike long mesh skirts—pink, turquoise, pale green. Couples, many with children, and mesh-skirted girls, despite the late hour, were ambling along, discussing the blackout. (We gathered it was not a rare occurrence.) A few bicycle riders zipped by us, jostling their lamps and ringing their handlebar bells to alert those walking.

Despite the darkness, there were a few stands selling kukly oberegi, little straw guardian dolls that are meant to be all-purpose protectors against all ills, from Satan to insomnia, bad luck, and of course the terrors of the night, the saleswomen assured us. Such pagan traditions have mostly disappeared elsewhere in Russia but, perhaps as embodiments of the Slavic spirit, have persisted here on the edge of the Chinese border, at the cusp of the non-Russian world.

We gravitated toward a bronze statue, glinting with light reflected off the waters from Heihe, of a vigilant border patrol soldier standing guard, a fierce-fanged German shepherd by his side. Erected in 2007, the statue conveyed the renewed patriotic spirit of Putin’s Russia—the very idea, “We are all border guards here!” we heard expressed by the “drill sergeant” cleaning woman in the Kaliningrad Cathedral.

Kaliningrad resembled a third-rate European city—imitative of a hardscrabble town in East Germany—that was nonetheless militant, hiding its sense of inferiority behind a screen of belligerence. One would expect that Blagoveshchensk, seven time zones to the east, would show Chinese influence. After all, it occupies territory that a mere century and a half ago belonged to China. And yet, the town feels like just another corner of outback Russia.

Never mind the dust and power outages, Blagoveshchensk asserts its European identity. The town’s Lenin Street features—with signs in Latin letters—a Charlotte Café, the tobacco shop Sherlock, the men’s club “Fishka (Chip) Strip and Smoke,” the LaLique beauty salon, the Austrian coffeehouse Julius Meinl. The best, by far, is a French restaurant Bel-Étage, which displays in English a quote from the German writer Goethe: “Beauty everywhere is a welcome guest.”

Many of these establishments occupy space in buildings displaying nineteenth-century neo-Russian style, which, incidentally, originated in Germany and was encouraged by the czar’s court architect Konstantin Thon, himself of German origins. A number of the structures look out onto the gilt Byzantine spires and domes of the town’s main Orthodox cathedral.

Chinese restaurants, too, abound in Blagoveshchensk, yet in contrast to signs advertising European-style businesses, they announce themselves solely in Cyrillic. The only Chinese-Russian signs we observed graced the Heihe-sponsored racks for rental bikes and the Confucius Institute of the Blagoveshchensk State Pedagogical University. The latter, perhaps, not for long. With rumors of its closure surfacing, the institute’s future is now in doubt thanks to rising, Putin-inspired Russian cultural jingoism. In the 1990s the Chinese government backed the foundation of the Confucius Institute ostensibly to provide lessons in Chinese language and culture. Critics, however, worried that it aimed to support the “One Belt, One Road” strategy of augmenting China’s influence in neighboring countries. Eventually, the institute came under suspicion of being a “soft power” initiative to help China manipulate local affairs. The Russians have been pushing back against this effort. In recent years the Blagoveshchensk authorities have been investigating its records, which in Russia almost always signals the government’s displeasure.

There is a Chinese market—a shopping mall with a Russian name Avoska (String Bag) on the outskirts of town, where stores cater to Chinese traders and sell cheap Chinese goods. Although it sheltered Chinese staff, who gossiped in Mandarin as they slurped their instant noodles, all in all Avoska resembled so many other markets found in many Russian towns big and small.

On Lenin Street, few businesses orient themselves toward Russia’s Asian neighbor and Chinese visitors are rare. Except, perhaps, on Lenin Square, where Chinese tourists stand taking pictures of the granite reproduction of the onetime leader of the world’s working class. Yet, you see this all over Russia. Strangely, the central square and its statue evince neglect. Next to the weathered Lenin, though, stands a shiny, incongruous accretion from Putin’s era: a new monument to Saint Innokenty the Innocent, the famed nineteenth-century Orthodox missionary to Siberia and the Far East.

If Russians go to Heihe to shop, have meetings with Chinese clients, and visit the Chinese market, Blagoveshchensk remains, on the whole, oriented toward Europe, Moscow, or possibly Japan. In Ulan-Ude, by contrast, the Chinese language was everywhere: Buryats welcomed the Chinese building and owning business centers, hotels, and shops. However, we were told that Russian women in Blagoveshchensk have been increasingly marrying Chinese men, who are known to work hard, drink little, and rarely turn violent.

Nevertheless, in talking to locals, we discovered an interesting dichotomy—Russians don’t mind China as a neighboring country, but they are wary of the Chinese themselves.

“Do you fear that China may take over the Russian economy? Or even take over the region by moving in?” we asked one taxi driver.

“No,” he responded.

Ours, though, was a reasonable concern. China’s economy is the second-largest in the world, Russia’s is only twelfth. China’s military budget is three times Russia’s—$69 billion to $215 billion,[42] and Heihe counts the same number of inhabitants as does Blagoveshchensk, but by Chinese standards, Heihe is tiny. In fact, the whole Russian Far East contains about six million people, which is slightly more than the population of Saint Petersburg. China’s Heilongjiang province has twenty times that number and, theoretically at least, could disgorge quite a few of them into Russia east of the Amur. No current stats exist on just how many Chinese live in Russia, but estimates range anywhere from a few hundred thousand to a few million. If the Chinese, hankering after space and natural resources, further increase their migration to Russia, they may test the Russian infrastructure dramatically—and possibly transform it. After all, with China prospering, they are no longer just transient workers and tourists; they increasingly control banks and businesses, from shopping malls to medical centers and construction firms. Moreover, in recent years the Chinese government, using the investment policy of a richer nation, has made a concerted effort to augment the number of Chinese citizens in Russia: we are not giving you our money unless you take our people, too.

Much of Russia’s Far East, from the Amur to the Pacific Ocean, once belonged to China, with towns having their own historical Chinese names—Blagoveshchensk was Hailanpao, Vladivostok was Haishenwai, Sakhalin was Kuye. Should the border ever open completely, these territories may simply dissolve back into China. Visa restrictions currently impede mass Chinese entry into Russia.

“What if the Chinese do what the Russians did to them in the 1850s?” we wondered.

Then, a small contingent of Cossacks from the Baikal region wrested from the Chinese the left bank of the Amur around Blagoveshchensk (then Hailanpao). Since 1858 the Amur has been the mutually recognized border between Russia and China, and Blagoveshchensk began its official, czar-blessed existence that year. The Cossacks sought gold and found it. More Cossacks and gold prospectors soon followed, increasing the population of Blagoveshchensk to about eight thousand by 1877. The newcomer Russians eventually did brisk business, selling their precious metal to the Chinese across the water. In the early twentieth century peasants from central Russia moved in and began farming successfully, further securing the region for the czar.

When Chekhov visited Blagoveshchensk, he described it in letters to friends as a rich and liberal town. Yet the locals, he wrote—being mostly Cossacks, prospectors, and fugitives—were loud, aggressive, and fearless, just as one might expect in a frontier town. And they were predictably limited: “People here only talk about gold; those who buy, those who sell … and so on.” Nevertheless, Blagoveshchensk was “as liberal as it gets, so far away from the center…. Forget Europe…. There is no one here to arrest; and there is no place farther away to exile.”[43] (The twentieth century would prove him wrong.)

If Blagoveshchensk has, since Chekhov’s day, lost its lauded “liberalism,” it has retained much of its crude, even aggressive, frontier spirit. The city’s Regional Museum, located in a turn-of-the-century ornate redbrick building that was once the Kunst and Albert German–owned shopping center, hints at this by showing the Russian takeover of Chinese Outer Manchuria as something similar to the French mission civilisatrice in Africa or the settling of North America’s west.

The reality was simple: the Chinese could not resist the well-armed warrior Cossacks, whose raison d’être was the conquest and defense of land for the Russian monarch. The resulting 1858 Treaty of Aigun granted the expanding Russian Empire vast new territories in eastern Siberia at the expense of the declining China. The treaty legalized Russia’s settlements east of the Amur but was seen as unjust by the Chinese—it set the stage for a Russo-Chinese war, and, more than a century later, the 1969 Sino-Soviet conflict over Damansky Island (Zhenbao or “Precious” in Chinese) further downriver.

The museum depicts other skirmishes as the massacres of Blagoveshchensk, highlighting the heroic Russian defense against barbaric Asiatic hordes. On display are fascinating old photographs showing the Cossacks, gold prospectors, fur trappers, shopkeepers, and tradespeople as missionaries of the good. The Chinese, on the other hand, are portrayed as strange and inferior, similar to how Hollywood movies once depicted them as subordinate “coolies.”

On the other side, in the Heihe history museum, a guide in Blagoveshchensk told us disdainfully, the Chinese claimed their territory was stolen by the Russians in the nineteenth century. Before the Russian gold miners, there were Chinese gold miners, traders, and farmers during the Manchu Qing dynasty.

She went on, becoming quite worked up: “We allow the Chinese into our museum, but theirs is closed to Russians and other Europeans. They hide sensitive and inconvenient historical facts about Russo-Chinese conflicts over the Amur region, which we won. They depict Russians as murderous brutes. And who are they to call us lao maozi, hairy barbarians?”

“Why wouldn’t they permit Russians to enter their museum?” we asked.

“They want to avoid questions or debates. Their perception of facts is at odds with the current friendly relations between our two countries. For the time being, their history is reserved for them alone.”

What the Blagoveshchensk museum unequivocally displays is nothing less than a “white empire complex”—with people of the West (and Russians, for the Chinese, are, culturally, westerners) superior to those elsewhere. On and off throughout the Middle Ages Russia fought with Europe over influence and territory. Despite the two-century Mongol yoke, Russia retained its European identity, even as it rejected aspects of the West, including Catholicism, all the while admiring the West’s technological progress.

In this, Russia is not the east, it is the edge of the West—the un-Western part of the West, perhaps—its relationship to Europe infected with a strain of envy, even of hostility. Kaliningrad wants to be German, even if Russians there might patriotically deny this. But few Russians want Russia to be China.

In his letters, Chekhov patronizingly described the Chinese as “good-natured and amusing, recalling kind pet animals.” Blagoveshchensk’s inhabitants do not speak of the Chinese this way now, but still their attitude reflects strong prejudice: the Chinese, for them, are more cunning than kind; they are pushy humans rather than pet animals.

For most of the twentieth century the Russo-Chinese border was closed, and Blagoveshchensk languished as a semi-industrial and remote city. The Soviets, with their planned economy and the collectivization of agriculture, wrought havoc on the local production of foodstuffs and consumer goods, but so did Yeltsin’s economic shock therapy and his chaotic privatization program. The result: when Yeltsin visited Blagoveshchensk in 1994 he was taken aback by the poverty he encountered.

One “Potemkin” food shop in town had been stocked for his inspection, but he ordered his motorcade to halt by a store he noticed by chance along his route. Seeing nothing on the shelves, he grew angry.

“The Amur has more than three hundred kinds of fish in it, and here there are three cans of sardines!” he shouted.

As Ostap Bender of The Twelve Chairs once said, “The rescue of drowning people is the responsibility of the drowning people themselves.” With little help from the newly democratic state, Russians, eager to become capitalists, were already, at the time of Yeltsin’s visit, taking full advantage of the abundant wares available in the communist, yet capitalist, China. People from Blagoveshchensk and nearby areas began flocking aboard shuttle boats to Heihe. There they purchased inexpensive food, electronics, and clothes and brought them across the river to be resold in impromptu markets at home. (Yeltsin, had he visited these, might have had a different impression of Blagoveshchensk.)

Here and elsewhere in Russia, such traders became known as chelnoki (“suitcase” or “shuttle” traders). A bronze statue of a bespectacled (and thus presumably educated) man lugging suitcases of merchandise now stands in downtown Blagoveshchensk; its inscription reads: “For the hard work and optimism of the Amur’s entrepreneurs.” The chelnoki included almost anyone, from scientists to doctors of philosophy to librarians to factory workers and military analysts. Suffering from the collapse of Soviet-era economic structures and hit hard by Yeltsin’s shock therapy, Russians from all walks of life found they needed to make a living any way they could. Shuttle trading offered them a chance to do so.

In recent years, Russia has touted its “pivot” toward China, and especially fraternal relations have prevailed between Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping, masters of the world’s largest formerly communist or communist giants. A special arrangement between Russia and China allows Russian citizens to travel visa-free between Blagoveshchensk and Heihe on the ferries making the trip several times a day. Not all the chelnoki are Russians going to China; many Chinese are crossing over to Russia to stock up on vodka, textiles, and foodstuffs. The Russians operate their ferries for Russians and everyone else with a proper visa—occasional foreign visitors, citizens of former Soviet republics; the Chinese boats take only Chinese nationals. Jeff, an American citizen, didn’t have a visa to make the trip, so Nina had to travel alone.

This is her story.

The next muggy morning, still unsettled by the blackout, I decided to venture across the river. Would this be a pleasant jaunt? After all, the distance was short, relations between Russia and China good, and the visa-free travel arrangement should have cut red tape to a minimum.

Blagoveshchensk’s River Station, a brick-and-glass box of a building, was orderly and easy to navigate. There was not even a line to buy the 2,300-ruble ($40) ticket. With ticket in hand, I moved on to the passport control booths. The hour was early, but in front of the booths, tight-knit groups of grumpy chelnoki—Russians with empty bags and Chinese toting giant, blue-white-red checkered satchels—crowded and shoved. I plunged in but repeatedly found myself pushed back, barred from advancing by the phalanx of traders. Alone, I was no match for them.

Twenty, thirty minutes passed. I was getting desperate. The boat’s departure time was nearing, but I, shoved this way and that, was no closer to the booths than when I entered the fray. A young man in a parallel line took pity and encouraged me to cut ahead of an old Chinese man just in front of me dragging three huge suitcases.

“He’s only Chinese,” he said, gesturing to me. I couldn’t do it.

Lyrics from a Soviet song from the 1950s came to mind: “All people are brothers, so I will hug a Chinese person.” Putin and Xi Jingping might be hugging each other, I thought, but no such amity was to be found here on the border between their two countries. Nevertheless, I reached passport control, got the requisite stamp in my travel document, and soon found myself pressed by the rushing crowd out of the station, over the gangplank, and aboard the ferry.

More and more chelnoki piled on behind me. But finally, a deckhand tossed the gangplank aboard the dock and slammed shut the gunwale door. With a toot of the horn, a roar from the engines, and a lurch, we were on our way, pressed far too intimately into one another. The ferry took fifteen minutes to chug across the Amur. As we neared the other side, a young man with kind eyes and a rare, old-fashioned sounding name, Innokenty (just like the Siberian missionary), offered me a blank Chinese entry form.

“Just hang on to me,” he said, offering his arm.

Innokenty turned out to be the son of bioengineers who took to shuttle trading after losing their university jobs during the Yeltsin years. He was leading a group of ten other traders. I lucked out! I could join his flock.

The horn blared again when we neared the port. As the boat maneuvered itself to the dock, the deckhand threw open the gunwale door and tossed down the gangplank. Our crowd rushed ashore, across the asphalt pier toward the customs building and through the glass doors. It was larger, more modern, and airier than its Blagoveshchensk equivalent. Inside, green-uniformed Chinese officers stood guard, indifferent to the frenzied Russians surging past. In the melee I lost Innokenty but navigated to passport control on my own.

“Nalog! Nado nalog! [Need to pay customs tax],” the officer barked in Russian, perhaps the only words he knew of the language.

I fought my way against the elbows and knees of the Chinese, mostly men, cutting the line and the Russian chelnoki battling them to move ahead. I broke free and ran to the payment booth near the entrance. Even in this rigmarole of immigration control I marveled at the cultural contrasts. The Russians looked at the Chinese shoppers with disdain; the Chinese treated the Russians with utter indifference, as if they were just obstacles to be overcome to reach a certain goal. But no time to waste, receipt in hand, I plunged back into the crowd. Panting, I made it to the passport line again and presented the officer with the receipt.

He waved, “Net, net [No, no].” Apparently their computer system had just gone down, which he and his comrades interpreted as a sign from heaven that lunchtime had arrived. They all stood up, formed a line, and marched out. Other officers pushed the remaining hundred of us back to the glass doors. No explanation.

The wait didn’t seem to be worth it. I gave up. After all, I just experienced the flesh-and-bone reality of “fraternal” Chinese-Russian relations; that was my purpose here, not shuttle trading. I had yet to officially cross into China, but the battle to enter was too much; I decided to return to the boat. I set off across the blissfully empty pier.

I didn’t get far.

“Hey! Hey!” shouted Chinese border guards, waving their automatic rifles at me, delivering incomprehensible commands in Mandarin. I halted, saying I didn’t understand. The sole female officer among at least five men stepped forward, speaking English somewhat and giving me a sympathetic smile.

“One minute, my boss,” she said, gesturing to the man at her side. He snatched my passport, slowly flipped through its pages, and then shoved it back into the young woman’s hands.

“So, can I go back to Russia?” I asked.

“Sorry,” she replied.

“Sorry for what? I just want to go back to the boat!”

The other officers laughed and pointed at me. Who was I, a Russian, and a Russian woman at that—I imagined them to be thinking—to protest and demand answers to simple questions?

So, I was trapped between Russia and China, two militaristic states with little respect for the individual. I felt helpless, reduced to nothing. Here either the state or the mobs of citizens would crush you.

“Don’t make such a scene!” said my fellow Russians berating me, fearful that the Chinese would take out their displeasure at my protest on them, too.

The guards pressed us back until we could go no further, cramming us together in a sweaty mass. One hour passed. Then two. Then three….

I thought about what I was experiencing here on this far-flung border: the chelnoki hated me just because I was there, I was a competitor for space, for air to breathe, and for a turn at the passport booth. Why weren’t they furious with the officials and their callous treatment? They were brought up in a country where not only the mighty state takes all, but citizens count as little more than an inconvenience, as pestering peons. The peons, scared of the state, vent their frustration on each other, quick to turn on those who buck the established order, on those nagging reminders that resistance is still possible—but such acts entail risk. Besides, the chelnoki have it hard enough: they are perpetually in search of a client or a deal, hauling heavy luggage, paying bribes to handlers, competing with their fellows, and at times fearing for their lives. To do what they do, one needs strength, cunning, and sharp survival skills.

Being a shuttle trader “kills the humanity in you,” one woman in line said to me, sighing, as she nevertheless shoved her way into my space. “If I were without bags, like you, I’d just squeeze in.” She gave me a sinister smile. “But then, we’d beat you up, of course.”

Weary of all this conflict, I stepped back.

Finally, lunchtime ended. The guards marched back in and slowly started letting people pass.

I waited my turn patiently, dearly sick of Heihe, without having even officially entered it.

I almost made it to the passport booth. But one of the officers remembered me and my rebellion outside. He stepped in, blocked my entrance, and let a man in a camouflage T-shirt with a portrait of Putin in military fatigues pass before me.

The crowd cheered. The officer jabbed his finger at me, shouting, “Plokhaya! Plokhaya! [Bad! Bad!].”

This was too much for me to bear. After hours of such humiliation and scorn, I broke into tears.

The officer was stunned by this expression of humanity and, suddenly, let me through.

I stepped up to the booth and handed the official my passport and receipt, which he began examining. On the counter was a little digital monitor wishing you a good day in Chinese, Russian, and English and asking to rate your experience at the border by pressing either a smiley face or sad face.

I pressed sad. Does anyone ever press the smiley?

The official shoved my documents toward me and waved me on. I walked on toward the terminal’s doors, passing a pink stone plinth marking the border.

I still wanted to return to Russia. I glanced at the departure hall; more chaos reigned there. Crowds of Russians and Chinese were pouring in, dragging their unwieldy bundles of merchandise and amassing by the passport booths.

I stood there, dejected. Possibly my sad countenance prompted a passing striking-looking young woman, tall and willowy, to ask if she could help me. I told her what I had been through. Introducing herself as Tatyana, she nodded sympathetically at my recounted travails and encouraged me to go into town.

“It is usually much quicker, but can also be worse! If you go back now, you’ll be here for another two or three hours! So take a cab and see what’s here. Just tell the driver ‘Huaifu,’ pay no more than ten yuan [$1.59].”

It turned out that Tatyana was a student at Tomsk University and had been visiting Heihe with her parents, who were standing next to her. They smiled at me. Her father was Russian, her mother Chinese; they seemed like a loving couple. I thanked Tatyana and took her advice. I stepped out of the terminal and hailed a taxi, my faith in humanity restored.

My driver was a woman. (I learned there are quite a few female drivers in Heihe.) She drove me to that mysterious Huaifu along the embankment, where people were fishing, strolling, and posing for photographs with Blagoveshchensk as a backdrop, where Lenin and Europe seemed so close. Heihe itself looked well kept and cleaner than other Chinese cities, resembling a small Taiwan suburb rather than Shanghai. It was also green. High-rises along the Amur loomed above landscaped parks and squares.

But for a shopping paradise it seemed rather empty on a weekday afternoon. My cab rolled along almost alone on the road, except for a few cyclists pedaling the bright green bikes available for hire from curbside racks. In Blagoveshchensk such racks stand empty; the streets are too dug up and potholed to make biking much fun.

Just a village a few decades ago, Heihe, following the Soviet collapse, oriented itself toward trade with Russia and became a booming frontier town. It makes Blagoveshchensk seem poor indeed, though the Russian city looks more settled, with old trees lining the roads and a less mercantile atmosphere.

Ten minutes later we pulled up in front of Huaifu, which turned out to be Heihe’s main shopping mall. The cab deposited me on the Central Trade Pedestrian Street, which announced itself in Russian and Chinese on a pink stone plinth, similar to the one at the border. In front of me was a sight that Russians in the Putin era know all too well—a row of police cars, overseen by an expressionless border guard. Beyond them, out on the river, were anchored patrol boats—both Russian and Chinese. Their crews’ green uniforms show drill preparedness for a confrontation that, despite the claims of friendship made by the two countries’ governments, may occur at any moment.

Heihe’s Russia orientation was mostly nonmilitary and manifested all over the place. The Chinese had catered to Russians’ pride in their culture by erecting a statue of their favorite poet, Alexander Pushkin—with the words “Sun of Russian Poetry” engraved in gilt letters on the ocher-colored pedestal, in both Russian and Chinese—on a central square. After all, Heihe was trying to make money from its neighbor. Fur stores abound: Fur City of Paris stood on one side of Central Street, Catherine II [the Great] Fur on another, the presumption being that the notions of Old Europe and the Russian Empress would whet the Russian appetite for luxury.

They had done less well sating their appetite for Russian cuisine: the Café Arbat (named after Moscow’s main pedestrian street), Pitanie Strit (Feeding Street), and Russkyi Khleb (Russian Bread) had all been shuttered. As was Restaurant Putin. Much use, apparently, had been made of Google Translate, with results comical enough to evoke howls of laughter or inspire a Bulkgakovian short story, perhaps.

Why was Heihe so empty of Russians? The crush of bodies on the ferry had led me to expect otherwise. The crash in oil prices beginning a decade ago had something to do with it. But the post-Crimea economic sanctions had almost halved the Russian ruble’s purchasing power against the yuan, which left the shuttle traders with slimmer profits and thus less reason to travel here.

The Russian chelnoki who arrived with me must have dispersed among less central and touristy shops and malls, but a tribute to them stood right in the center of town: mimicking Blagoveshchensk, Heihe had raised a bronze statue to the Russian shuttle trader. It shows a young man sitting on a suitcase, mobile phone in hand, surrounded by bags of merchandise, looking tired and distracted.

If Blagoveshchensk’s service culture leaves much to be desired, the streets of Heihe churn with the tireless Chinese entrepreneurs and zealous hucksters. Vendors stand outside their shops clapping to attract attention; sidewalk traders beckon; arrays of multicolored, illuminated signs flash their Chinese characters, as if beaming inscrutable prophetic messages. At one point, I sat down on a bench to take in this Brave New World and was immediately surrounded by men and women trying to sell me everything from socks to toys, cigarette lighters and cell phone cases with Putin’s portrait. One especially forward young entrepreneur turned on his hand massager and was about to apply it to my neck until I fled to another bench.

Even though suitcase trading has suffered a downturn recently, in Heihe people seemed to be particularly excited about the possibility of building a bridge between their town and Blagoveshchensk. In fact, for years China has been offering to fund the project.

“The Chinese always take the initiative. They need us more than we need them,” Innokenty had explained to me on the ferry that morning. “Especially now, Heihe is eager to restructure.” To overcome problems stemming from the dwindling border economy, the city, he said, plans to focus not on chelnoki, “but on turning itself into the new Harbin”—the capital of Heilongjiang province, the famed home for Russians displaced by the 1917 Revolution, and now a major manufacturing and tourist center.

“From the fake Russified China of Heihe, the bridge will lead to the real Russia, so the Chinese can come and enjoy our many Lenins on their Red Tour,” Innokenty added with a chuckle.

In Blagoveshchensk there is less enthusiasm for such a bridge. First suggested by Yeltsin but shot down by his economic advisors as unviable, the project has, at least until recently, lost what allure it had. Russians have become accustomed to the ferry and don’t see much need for another means of crossing the Amur. Recently Putin’s government has been displaying renewed interest in the idea. With the Crimea Bridge completed, he can now start another bold enterprise. The bridge, after all, would create more formalized and better functioning trade zones and areas of cooperation—matters Putin and Xi Jinping have discussed—and thus help better control Chinese emigration to Russia.

One of the reasons the Russians have been slow to respond to the Chinese advances is their fear of a further increase in economic and demographic inequality.

Trying to stave off a possible Chinese takeover of parts of Siberia, the Kremlin, in February 2017, announced the Far-Eastern Hectare project, which involves offering free, single-hectare plots to Russians who move there and exploit the land in the first five years. One would think that giving away land to encourage frontier settlement would excite a lot of interest. After all, the United States passed the Homestead Acts to settle parts of the country west of the Mississippi with offers of 160-acre plots to homesteaders. But Russia’s meager one-hectare plots, located in frigid Siberia, no less, are not attracting many takers.

For now, the Kremlin has been intensively funding just one project in Blagoveshchensk: its newly expanded embankment. The Chinese have made Heihe’s waterfront along the Amur shine, so Putin decided to follow suit. Blagoveshchensk’s new redbrick high-rises (resembling, incidentally, those we saw in Kaliningrad), the bronze border guard with the dog, the Soviet-era yet recently renovated stark gray monument to the Great Patriotic War (a none-too-subtle reminder that Russians know how to fight those), and even the Arc de Triomphe (spiffed up not long ago)—all these are symbols of Putin’s Russia.

After my taxi ride around town, I decided to get something to eat. This took some work, as waiters in the pizzeria-like cafeteria I stopped in spoke neither Russian nor English. Nevertheless, I managed to procure a small pizza, served with a plastic glove, instead of a napkin and a fork. While eating I stared at the wall adorned with an intriguing world map: on it, the Eurasian continent was titled Asia, and Russia wasn’t identified; Europe was small; and only the Americas and Africa were depicted in scale.

Once finished with my pizza, and having stripped off my glove, I set about searching for a cup of coffee. This, it turned out, posed a challenge here. Even in parts of Russia, it is sometimes tough to find anything but instant coffee. But in China a sign saying café rarely means coffee at all; there they mean food. In Heihe one café, Parizh (Russian for Paris), promisingly had fancy pastries in the window, an Eiffel Tower on its wallpaper, and a bistro table with two chairs in front of it. What was lacking was coffee. “Coca Cola?” the shopkeeper asked.

I then ventured down “The Street of Russian Goods” (as the sign in Russian translates). It called to mind Canal Street in New York’s Chinatown—behind every door they sell something—although here I was the only customer. Cheap, colored furs—red, yellow, orange, even green—hung from the awnings, marked RUSSIAN FURS, yet they were made in China. Huge shop windows displayed, in bulk, Russian canned goods, flour, sugar, and candy. Posters with writing in Chinese advertised Russian ice cream with a picture of Putin licking a cone—a clever mixture of hard and soft power.

Heihe, I came to think, seemed unreal, chintzy, slapped-together—a reified, steel-glass-concrete “made in China” slogan. Yet there were authentic moments—a group of older women sat on a bench, laughingly shielding a friend while she was changing into a new pair of trousers freshly purchased in the shop Mir-Bryuki Nizkoi Tseny (World-Pants at Low Cost). In the restaurant where I ate my pizza, teenage girls chatted away. On a side street, four men played mahjong, an ancient board game, with scores of spectators huddling around their table. I also uncovered a mystery of the Blagoveshchensk fashion of wearing princesslike mesh skirts in a variety of jewel tones—seemingly a dress code of every little girl in Heihe.

Evening was coming on. Still reeling from crossing the border, I considered spending the night in Heihe. I espied a new, palatial hotel, called the Saint Petersburg. At least from the outside, it seemed like a good option, so I dropped in to check it out. But in the fancy lobby, plastic glitz was already peeling off the walls, and I spotted a cockroach in the restroom.

Never did I want to return to Mother Russia as strongly as I did then and there, in the Saint Petersburg Hotel, Heihe-style.

So, I walked back to the port. This time, I would not go it alone. In the terminal, a young woman approached me.

“You don’t look like you’re from here,” she said. I replied that she didn’t look local, either.

Her name was Anastasia. We started chatting. It turned out Anastasia was originally from Blagoveshchensk but now lives in Beijing. It would be easier to battle stonewalling Chinese officials and angry fellow Russian travelers together, so we teamed up and got in line with a large group of men and women who oversaw a mountain of bulky bags and cardboard boxes and eyed us with outright disdain. And they were even angrier that the guards let any Chinese who showed up board, while leaving the Russians to wait—for hours.

Anastasia spoke fluent Mandarin. The impressed Chinese guards explained to her what was going on.

“Damaged by the blackout, the computer system doesn’t allow us to switch between Chinese and Russian travelers without a glitch,” Anastasia said, translating the guards’ explanation. The group was unconvinced.

“A payback to Putin! They hate the Russians. That Xi and Putin friendship is bullshit,” they grumbled.

I have never seen such angry people in my life, never felt as unsafe as then, while I languished between two gigantic, belligerent states and among those who have dedicated their lives to making small profits at any cost. Yet Anastasia and I boarded without incident, trying to find a spot to stand—the deck was jammed with merchandise, including even small tractors that enterprising Buryats were bringing back to Ulan-Ude.

Across the river on the Russian side, the rancor between the Chinese and Russians rekindled, with each group treating the other as inferiors. But now the might was on the Russian side: a stone-faced border guard pushed aside scores of Chinese and their bags to allow all the Russians to cross through customs first.

With last night’s blackout now a distant memory, Jeff and Nina settled in for a drink at the Europeanish Café Sharlot, where service was slow but not uncaring.

Over wine and coffee, we spoke about Nina’s day in Heihe. If they ever build the bridge, spending time on the other side of the water may prove less traumatic. But for now, a lone traveler feels like a nonperson when confronting the reality of the Russia–China alliance, an alliance between two countries vying for superiority and whose leaders value state might above the well-being of the citizens over whom they rule. What’s more, we thought, the Kremlin has turned a cold shoulder toward Europe in Kaliningrad, but when it turns east—the Chinese are overwhelming, making this edge of the frontier just as tense and testy, and more threatening perhaps, as the border to the West.

It was a brilliant azure evening of the sort that lingers endlessly during the summer in these northern latitudes. Sinking into damp eluvium—a sediment composed of white pebbles and rocks, sand and silt—we descended the steep bank tentatively, backtracking at times when our feet would not take hold. We slow-walked toward the docks at the Yakutsk port, from where a captain named Georgy was supposed to take us on a boat tour up the Lena River. As we treaded, we gazed down at the numerous makeshift piers jutting out into the green-blue water. Which one was ours? We had arranged the tour by phone but had no idea what sort of craft awaited us. A taxi speedboat that takes people to the other side of Lena, and to its many islands, some large enough to be habitable? A sleek modern cutter? Once at the waterside, we traipsed among disorderly clusters of skiffs, dinghies, and schooners, asking for Georgy, but found our queries met with shrugs and blank stares. We finally located him standing by a serviceable wooden craft that could seat fifteen passengers but, this time, would take us alone.

We climbed aboard. Brawny, sun-bronzed, and about forty, Georgy untied the mooring ropes and switched on the engine. We lurched away from the dock and out onto the Lena.

The previous day we had arrived in the capital of the sprawling Sakha (Yakutia) Republic, whose 1.2 million square miles of taiga and tundra are home to fewer than a million people, about half of whom are Sakha, descendants from Turkic tribes from Central Asia. (Yakutsk itself has about 270,000 people.) This part of eastern Siberia was long called Yakutia, but after the Soviet Union ended, as nationalism rose, it renamed itself Sakha Republic. The Sakha now claim that the names Yakutia and Yakut were given to them by Russian colonizers, but Sakha is what they call themselves, their land, and their language. Most of the republic’s non-Sakha are ethnic Russians, in addition to small numbers of Evenks and Evens, people of Tungusic stock. During the Soviet decades, Russians involved in resource extraction made up a majority of the republic’s inhabitants and accounted for about 500,000 people, with the Sakha and other local peoples accounting for 300,000. Today indigenous folk far outnumber the Russians. And although the Kremlin has called for settlers to head out to Siberia and the Russian Far East, there is little evidence of new arrivals.

In mineral resources, Sakha is the richest administrative territory in Russia and ranks fourth globally in diamond production. Nevertheless, Yakutsk and its port were chaotic and shabby. The actual port building resembled an oversized, blue-and-white cement shoebox sitting atop matchbox pillars. A dock on the river served larger boats, but most craft had to make do with rickety piers and even gangplanks. This, in the wealthiest region of Russia. Where was all the money going?

The Lena, at 2,779 miles in length, is the third longest river in Russia and the eleventh in the world. It is the only major river flowing entirely through zones of permafrost; almost half of Sakha lies within the Arctic Circle. Unique among bodies of water, the Lena freezes from the bottom up. It originates as a narrow rocky stream in the mountains just west of Lake Baikal and courses northward to emerge into the Arctic Ocean’s Laptev Sea. At Yakutsk’s latitude, the Lena’s bed is some seven miles wide but strewn with a multitude of sandy islands overgrown with saw grass, so called for its serrated blades that can reach six or seven feet in height. Tributaries flow into the Lena from numerous tiny lakes—Yakuts say they are as many as stars in the sky—nestled away in the surrounding taiga.

Cossack explorers first reached this part of Siberia in the early 1600s. They took the name Lena from local appellations—Elyuene or Lenna, meaning “big river,” in the Manchu Tungus language. The Lena’s majestic expanses so impressed Vladimir Ulyanov, who did a stint of exile near its banks, that he adopted a version of it for his pseudonym, Lenin.

Georgy piloted his craft out onto the magnificent Lena, which resembles the region through which it flows—undeveloped and little exploited, despite its riches. We inhaled fresh air—there are no factories anywhere near. We watched the reedy islands slide by as we sailed south, against the current, our bow splitting the glassy turquoise panes of water spreading from shore to sandy shore.

Georgy, sounding bitter, commented on how strange Sakha and its chief river were.

“There are so many minerals out here. The Yakuts have a folk tale: when God was distributing riches around the world, he got so cold in Yakutia that he dropped all the minerals—a whole periodic table of elements of them. But they aren’t exploited as they should be.” He then pointed toward the banks and changed subjects. “Look at the grass on the islands. It only grows here and is so invasive that if you come back in five years, these islands will have been overtaken by the grass. Of course, in other places this growth would be managed. Here people leave the river alone.”

The Lena’s most famous natural wonder is the Lenskie Stolby (Lena Pillars), some 160 miles south of Yakutsk. There the river cuts through uplands, forming a channel of steep yellow-and-brown limestone and slate walls that, in places, reach more than a thousand feet in altitude. The pillars rival the Grand Canyon, although few outside Russia have heard of this Sakha marvel.

We would not make it that far, but Georgy often did.

“I make a lot of money taking people to the pillars,” he said. “For a group of eight I charge as much as a hundred thousand rubles a day [about $1,700]. All the Russian officials and diamond businessmen who come to Yakutsk want to visit them. The pillars, the beauty of the scenery, the vodka, the shashlyk (kebab)—they have a good time out here with me.”

We peacefully glided up the Lena, which now was growing astoundingly asymmetric: the eastern shore was flat, the western steep, high, and rocky. And the farther we got from Yakutsk the more stunning it was, erasing our memories of the messy port and docks.

Over the course of the next few hours, Georgy regaled us with his story, which was typical for this part of Russia—the difficulty of keeping a small business going and a desire to move out west, to the better lands with more opportunity. He had grown tired of Yakutsk and its ethnic tensions; he was thinking of moving to Novosibirsk or Krasnoyarsk and starting up a similar boat service on one of the rivers passing through them, the Ob or the Yenisei.

Part of the reason Georgy was thinking of leaving had to do with what happened to the port following the Soviet collapse of 1991. Here, as along so many river towns across Russia, in the Yeltsin era the government privatized the port, dividing it up between a number of owners. Owners tried to squeeze out as much profit as they could from their sections, bribing local authorities as necessary and creating, as a result, a generalized chaos that suited no one. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Russian railroads languished in similar disarray, owned by multiple proprietors. When Putin became president, he made it his priority to put crucial pieces of Russia’s infrastructure under full Kremlin control. And although he managed to reorganize the railroads, the exploitation of natural resources, and even the postal service, which he restructured, the waterways are still waiting their turn.

“Imagine,” Georgy complained, “despite its size, the Lena has no bridge across it. A bridge was in the works, but with the Crimea annexation the state shifted funding to Crimea, to the bridge that is being constructed there” across the Kerch Strait.

We nodded sympathetically—this Crimea diversion, we had seen, had happened in many other places across Russia. Reporting on the news of its opening in May 2018, one Italian newspaper quipped that Putin “built his career on bridges”[44]—in Ulyanovsk, Vladivostok, and elsewhere. It is also worth noting that the Crimea bridge construction dream dates back to the last czar. Stalin also made an attempt to build it in 1945, but it was quickly destroyed by ice. Putin then succeeded where the previous greats had failed, which must be a tremendous point of pride for the current Kremlin leader.

Answering our question about his own future, Georgy insisted that all ethnic Russians, like he is, would leave Yakutsk soon enough—a lack of opportunity and rising ethnic chauvinism were to blame. His sister had already moved to Krasnoyarsk—“a nice town, less to compete with than in Novosibirsk. They need entrepreneurs more there, so I am getting ready.”

Judging by his almond-shaped eyes, Georgy probably had Yakut blood, even though he spoke passionately of his Russianness, with a whiff of disdain toward the indigenes.

“The Yakuts don’t even know how old they are,” Georgy said. A giant banner on top of the port building announced Yakutsk’s 380th anniversary. Yet on Lenin Square it is listed as 385, and 384 elsewhere.

Nevertheless, Yakutsk is indeed old. Once a settlement in the taiga, it existed long before the Cossacks, led by the Ataman (chieftain) Pyotr Beketov, who reached it in 1632. The Sakha had fled north from the rampaging armies of Genghis Khan and finally settled here, where the freezing winters and summer swarms of mosquitos and midges would dissuade intruders. The Sakha herded reindeer and cattle, hunted, fished, and even bred horses—diminutive, robust ungulates capable of surviving on limited fodder during fierce winters. The coldest winters on earth—temperatures at times hit −94 Fahrenheit—preclude much in the way of agriculture. Not surprisingly, in recent decades scientists have found more remains of woolly mammoths—three entire specimens—in the republic than anywhere else. Proud of these discoveries, Yakutsk hosts a mammoth museum—the only one in the world—though its unique exhibits, as we would see, could use better upkeep.

The indigenous peoples lived in harmony with nature, unforgiving as it was, whereas colonizers brought their own habits and rules. In the seventeenth century, the newly arrived Russians were brutal in establishing themselves here, killing Sakha by the thousands, according to numerous sources, when the natives rebelled against taxation or relocation.[45] The Russians trapped for furs but also prospected for gold and diamonds, resources not previously exploited in the region. Unfortunately, they also introduced alcohol. As is the case with Native Americans, the indigenes lacked the enzyme that metabolizes alcohol efficiently, which left them prey to alcoholism. Alcoholism is a plague now as it was then, with a frightening death toll, more than three times higher than in the rest of the country.[46] During the week, we noticed an unusually high number of intoxicated young Sakha begging for money on the streets but saw few Russians out and about. Russians joked to us that they work while the Sakha drink. On weekends, though, the ethnicities mix and tipple together. The climate here, at least in winter, surely drives many to drink.

Walking around Yakutsk, we couldn’t shake the feeling that even after almost four hundred years since the Cossack arrival, the Russian world is still colliding with the indigenous one. It was hard to call Yakutsk Russian at all. Russian towns, as a rule, have a certain logic—there is a Lenin Square, a Lenin Street, and central avenues and streets, usually well maintained, radiate from there before falling into disarray further afield. Here, from Lenin Square—the only one in good shape—radiate streets as dusty and rough as gravel roads.

Just stepping off Lenin Avenue to a side street, we encountered a huge pile of dung—from the times of the woolly mammoth, perhaps. It was a few yards before we got to the Treasury of Sakha, an ultramodern structure of slate-gray glass and steel. Inside we would gaze upon the pride of the republic, the national treasures of Sakha: gold, precious stones, diamonds, and figurines carved from bone depicting hunters, animals, and scenes from traditional family life. Wouldn’t someone think to clean the street in front of the building housing such a stunning collection? To be fair, though, even if Yakutsk were to spend a fortune paving and maintaining its roadways, it might not do much to make the city more livable. During the all-too-brief summer, temperatures reach 104 Fahrenheit, and, we discovered, midges and gnats swirled around our faces all day long and even after sunset. No surprise, really, given that the terrain surrounding Yakutsk is bog. Locals say, “Repellant doesn’t help, but a paste of reindeer fat and gasoline does.” But who wants to walk around town smelling like a car!

The Siberian chain of cafés, Traveler’s Coffee, often provided us with some consolation, though we spent thirty minutes waiting for a cappuccino. We took greater pleasure in the flower market covering the giant Ordzhonikidze Square. Even stands selling simple petunias drew scores of buyers—Russians, Yakuts, Evens, and others—from all walks of life. In Sakha, where it is cold nine months a year, petunias must seem as fancy as orchids. One Sakha woman confirmed that any flowers are better than none: “With this climate we have here—the pole of cold—we do like flowers.”

Yet just a couple of blocks from Lenin Square, in the wooden quarter of town called the Old City, we came upon tall, yellow-orange-scarlet-pink Siberian lilies (the Lilium dauricum, scientifically speaking) peeping through patches of overgrown grass. Elsewhere such flowers would be considered precious and rare, but here they grow unattended, unnoticed. The Old City itself seemed more rundown than antique—a few dilapidated Russian huts, a handful of “traditional” restaurants, and incongruously standing amid them, the boutique Mascotte; a beauty salon called, puzzlingly, Lime.Fink; and the log-cabin Museum House of Maksim Ammosov, one of the founders of the Yakut Soviet Autonomous Republic and one of its first leaders. Nearby stood the nineteenth-century Cathedral of the Transfiguration. In front of it lay another pile of dung. No one was rushing to clean it up.

We did find a stately and well-kept street in Yakutsk—Dzerzhinsky Street, named in honor of Felix Dzerzhinsky. Iron Felix, as he was known for short, was the founder and first leader of the dreaded Soviet Cheka, or secret police, a precursor to the KGB and other Soviet security organs. Putin’s own KGB past may have contributed to Dzerzhinsky’s standing in Yakutsk. Still, if the notorious Dzerzhinsky is no longer considered the villain he was before Putin, few cities rush to memorialize him with statues and street names. In Yakutsk, Dzerzhinsky’s bust rests in a little birch park on Dzerzhinsky Street next to the imposing, sleek, cream-and-chocolate Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Sakha Republic, which looks more like a five-star hotel than a Sakha version of the FBI. Next to it stands the less pompous but still impressively sleek police headquarters. Such is the current Russian trend—public infrastructure for simple citizens might be deteriorating, yet the karatelnye organy (punitive organs) are doing just fine.

This is no accident: the city has even tried to rehabilitate Stalin, in a way. Plans were made to install a Stalin bust in the Veterans Park further down the street, but Yury Zabolev, then mayor of Yakutsk, supported by the journalist and media entrepreneur Leonid Levin, pushed to sway public opinion against the idea. Surprisingly, they won out. Off the dusty Chernyshevsky Street, though, in a private yard belonging to the Diamonds of Anabara company, a Stalin bust was nevertheless erected. Beneath his stern gaze, veterans, pensioners, and communists now gather to remember the Soviet’s grandeur during his decades in power.

We wondered, why would the Sakha still esteem Dzerzhinsky and Stalin? After all, their republic for centuries suffered under the Russian yoke. Only since 1991, with the emergence of a movement for self-determination, have they begun to reevaluate their history. In fact, Sakha was originally determined to achieve independence. Its first post-Soviet leader, Mikhail Nikolaev, negotiated with Yeltsin and won the right to be called president and quasiindependence from Moscow. Not that Yeltsin meant it, really—two Chechen separatist wars followed his declaration. The Sakha would not revolt against Moscow, though. Eventually, the independence movement waned. The Kremlin no doubt rejoiced, since the republic paid so much in taxes to the federal government. Yet the movement had a salutary effect on Sakha’s finances: revenues from at least some of its resources—fur, gold, diamonds, copper, and other precious and semiprecious metals—would go to the development of the republic. In previous years, only limited funds went to local projects, leaving the Sakha to mostly drink and waste away in poverty.

Enjoying, for the first time, revenues from their minerals, the Sakha have turned away from the phony internationalism that was such a strong part of Soviet communism and begun to reevaluate their own heritage. Glorifying Dzerzhinsky and Stalin, we thought, should have had nothing to do with that. So what was going on?

To seek answers, we arranged to meet Leonid Levin, one of the opponents of the Stalin bust, and editor and publisher of the Vecherny Yakutsk (Evening Yakutsk) newspaper, in his office, a wooden two-story bungalow on the outskirts of town. (It happened to stand adjacent to the London Hotel, another bungalow whose only connection to the British capital was a painting of Big Ben on the front wall.) Upbeat and charismatic, Levin, to our surprise, blamed the local government for the glorification of Stalin, but he absolved Putin.

“Putin is not a Stalinist,” said Levin. “He just uses elements of Stalinism as tools to unify the country.”

Isn’t it the same thing, we wondered? In Russia, there is almost always a desire to justify the central state even among those who suffer from it. We were surprised to hear such words from one who militated against glorifying Stalin.

Our talk turned to other topics. After 1991, Levin told us, when the Republic began receiving revenues from its diamond mines, the leadership chose to spend them on transforming the city into a megalopolis, at least as the Sakha understood it, rather than on health care and education. Yet they did designate some funds for the cultural sphere. The resulting ethnic revival helped quell separatist aspirations, with the Sakha finding themselves free to be Sakha in their own land. A more practical question did arise: namely, just what purpose independence would serve. Yes, Sakha’s resources would make it the richest country, at least per capita, on earth, but most businesses, particularly those in the diamond sector, are run and owned by Russians. Ethnic divisions do remain: the Sakha tend to hire Sakha; Russians prefer to deal with Russians.

“A balance between ethnicities has not been found on the republic’s level,” Levin said.

He was right. Time and again, we heard from Yakutsk Russians, who had little positive to say about their city, “We’ll all leave, and those Yakuts can stay and do what they want.” On the flight from Blagoveshchensk, a young Russian woman sitting next to us kept repeating, “I can’t wait to move to Blagoveshchensk, from this godforsaken Yakutsk—hot, cold, dirty, with mosquitos and nothing to do.”

Yet these Russians vastly underrated their Sakha conationals. We saw evidence of this in Vecherny Yakutsk, where Russian and Sakha journalists worked side by side, and a young Sakha photographer whose name, Saidam (“talented, savvy” in translation), described him well: he really impressed us with his knowledge of cities via 2GIS, a Russian search engine company (developed in Novosibirsk). He was also an expert on New York jazz clubs, though he had never traveled abroad. So removed from the world, the Sakha were as ambitious as anyone. Perhaps, in fact, their remoteness gave them special incentive to nurture their ambitions.

Levin told us that although couples were, in Yakutsk, having fewer children than ever, the drop in population was compensated for by an influx of out-of-work youths moving in, as reindeer farms in the outback are running into hard times. The republic’s cultural rejuvenation, has, moreover, had one negative consequence no one expected: imbued with Yakut nationalism, many schools now offer education only in Yakut, which means students are not learning proper Russian.

“These kids,” he said, “will have no college in their future, since nobody teaches classes in the local language. Education levels and expertise in various fields will be falling.”

That being the case, how could the Sakha, if independent, run the diamond and gold businesses, revenues from which sustain the local budget? To take advantage of the recently emerged hesitation in Sakha about independent statehood, and also following his own growing autocratic tendencies, Putin did away with the title of “president” and replaced it with “Leader of the Sakha Republic.” It is unconstitutional to have two presidents in one country, Sakha was informed. Given all the potential complications from splitting away, perhaps it was for the best that Sakha remained part of Russia.

The day was ending, and we walked outside with Levin, where his son awaited him in a spotless black SUV. The languid blue-gold light of evening was coming on, the mosquitos and midges were whirling in dark columns against the sky. He had given us a frank assessment of how things were in his republic, free of the ethnic chauvinism so many Russians evince toward Yakuts. We thanked him for his time and parted ways.

In the Oyunsky State Museum of Yakut Literature (dedicated, as the name indicates, to the native-born poet and writer Platon Oyunsky, who lived from 1893 to 1939) our poet-guide Nikolai Vinokurov told us, in accented Russian, the heroic story of how the Yakuts both resented and embraced Russian culture. This Sakha man, like many here going by his Russian name, spoke of the “civilization” the Slavic outsiders brought with them. One panoramic painting illustrated the gist of his message. It showed a landscape of tundra, low hills, and yurts with hearth fires that kept burning in summer to ward off mosquitos and midges; Sakha herding cattle and riding horses; and old men reciting the tales of the Olonkho, their traditional oral epic. (The United Nations has recognized the Olonkho as part of humanity’s “intangible cultural heritage.”)

The Yakuts, as the painting had it, dwelled in a sort of prelapsarian, boreal idyll before the Russians arrived.

However, the story isn’t so simple. Sakha owes at least its written literary traditions to Russian missionaries who arrived in the nineteenth century. Under the direction of Bishop Innokenty—later canonized as the Siberian missionary—Saint Petersburg’s scholars and writers adapted the Cyrillic alphabet for the Sakha language, and priests began translating the Bible into it, thereby laying the foundation for the emergence of Sakha literature. As had Ammosov, Oyunsky stood at the beginning of Sakha’s transformation into a Soviet socialist republic; he composed his poems to resemble the Olonkho but imbued them with Soviet themes. Like many in the 1930s, he was arrested for his “counterrevolutionary” ideas and died in prison.

“It was strange that he was arrested,” said our guide, Nikolai. “He was a good Soviet citizen.” As if being a good Soviet ever protected anyone from Stalin and his security apparatus.

The city’s Museum of Local Lore exhibits document more than a hundred labor camps for political exiles on the Republic’s territory and also show the plight of the Sakha during the Stalin decades. By and large, the Sakha themselves were not victims of the Gulag. Most of the prisoners came from elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the state did prosecute untold numbers of Sakha for the alleged crime of ethnic nationalism.

After Khrushchev’s Thaw began, Soviet authorities maintained that no purges had taken place in Sakha. The Sakha saw things differently. Many farmers, accused of resisting collectivization (of reindeer herds, for the most part), were forcibly relocated to other areas but given little time to pack and prepare. Thousands died from cold on the road.

Yet contradictions abound. The 2003 monument to Oyunsky, a victim of such Soviet repression, stands on a square with Dzerzhinsky’s bust, on Dzerzhinsky Street, just behind him. Stalin’s own bust lurks a few blocks away—two monuments to murderers and one to a victim of Soviet repression.

As we walked out to look for a place to dine one evening, black clouds massed over the flat bogs and taiga sweeping away from the Old City at the edge of town. We came across the Dikaya Utka (Wild Duck) pub, one of Yakutsk’s restaurants offering “traditional” cuisine, and chose it for our meal.

We walked inside to confront a bizarre scene: diners, all Sakha, were playing Hollywood Bingo. Images of Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts, and other American actors flashed on a giant plasma screen as the players marked their cards accordingly. In this remote city on the shore of the Lena River, where the wilderness is vast enough that it has served as a realm of exile, and where woolly mammoths are the objects of local pride, American movies serve to connect the inhabitants to people in the outside world.

The juxtaposition of Mel Gibson’s image above Sakha gamesters, of bingo inside and bog outside, combined with the palpable sensation of being far from anywhere we knew induced a disorienting feeling of alienation. Yakutsk, even though ever more “Sakha” and less Russian, did not seem to belong to Asia, but, like Russia as a whole, to a middle area, a gray zone. Often presenting themselves as “prisoners of the empire”—their 64 percent vote for Putin’s fourth term was one of the lowest in the country—the Sakha still seem to embrace their in-between status more than ever before.[47] They now freely foster their ethnicity but can leave big decisions on statehood to the man in the Kremlin.