In Putin's Footsteps

10 VLADIVOSTOK ^{RULE THE EAST! TIME ZONE: MSK+7; UTC+10}

From the grim concrete ramparts of Vladivostok’s Fort Number Seven, the Gulf of Amur spreads to the west, its leaden waters barely rippling one August afternoon under an equally leaden sky. Turn north or south and your gaze falls on high-rises and apartment blocks scattered over hills that, with their two suspension bridges, give the city of some 600,000 the floating, elevated feel of a Russian San Francisco.

The fort’s hulking heptagonal walls enclose an array of cannons and heavy artillery guns and ammunition storage bunkers capable of withstanding sustained incoming fire. (Stalin’s executioners did their work within these dungeonlike structures.) Just beyond the walls, on the square in front, decommissioned Soviet-era missiles lie on mobile platforms, belying the age of the fort, built at the end of the nineteenth century.

The city itself, founded in 1860, is now the terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railroad—a column on one of the platforms reads “9,288 km” (5,771 miles), thus marking the distance to Moscow. It owes its origins to Russia’s successful attempt to secure the terrain from the Amur River east to its coast, on the Sea of Japan, which it legalized by signing the 1860 Treaty of Beijing with China, when that country was too weak to resist. (Japan lies only some five hundred miles away.) Head southwest for fifty miles, and you run into the border with the People’s Republic of North Korea. Just to the north is China’s Heilongjiang province. In strategic importance, Vladivostok rivals another port town we had visited, Kaliningrad, almost six thousand miles to the west, and well deserves its name, which translates as Ruler of the East.

As we rode in from the airport through leafy green hills, a sign caught our eye, proclaiming “Ostrov Russkiy, Krym Rossiyskiy” (The Island Is Russian—the island being the Crimean Peninsula—Crimea belongs to Russia). In Vladivostok, as in Kaliningrad, on the other end of the current empire, Crimea, though distant from both, haunts the Russian consciousness. Russia’s chief far-eastern port city celebrates the return to the motherland of another territory, a long way to the west and strategically vital for its own port, this one on the Black Sea.

“Ever since the 2012 summit”—the summit for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)—“things have been looking up here,” our taxi driver, a middle-age fellow named Nikolai, told us as we sped up and down the undulant highway toward town. “We got new roads, better services, and more investment. Before that Vladivostok was reeling from neglect, all the way back to the Yeltsin days.” But with Putin in charge, the city has built “three new bridges in less than ten years.”

For more than a century the town dreamed of a bridge to Russky Island. It was painted on postcards and drawn on city plans but never materialized on account of war and bad management—the usual reasons. But then, in 2009, the Kremlin announced that it was going to erect not one, not two, but three bridges, two to the nearby Russky Island alone. “Across Golden Horn Bay, the Golden Bridge—like the Golden Gate in San Francisco—the Russian Bridge over East Bosporus Bay, and another one across Amur Bay.”

Though China and Japan had, Russia had never endeavored to construct bridges over sea straits, as it did here. And yet, looking west as ever, or maybe following the Kremlin’s orders, the Russian east sought help not from Asia, but from the engineers in Saint Petersburg and France. Nobody believed construction could be completed in three years (in time for the APEC summit), and yet it was. “Another thing that ties us to San Francisco”—the construction of the Golden Bridge—“was also deemed impossible. The bridges are a Vladivostok miracle, a testimony to our spirit,” said Nikolai.

Taking advantage of a pause in his impromptu introduction to the city, we squeezed in a personal question.

“Are you from here?”

He was not; he had moved east from Krasnodar some thirty years ago. He wasn’t the only one. “People come from western Russia for a visit, see the fish swimming in the bluest of oceans, try Pacific smelt, and find it much tastier than smelt in the Baltic Sea, and stay.” (Apparently here in Vladivostok the east–west Russia rivalry boils down to fish.) “The population keeps renewing itself. The port is doing well, new international businesses are opening up, and our Far Eastern University is an international hub.”

We had heard his latter claim supported by others in Russia, though the year previous to our visit, at the Eastern Economic Forum, the Kremlin did announce ambitious plans to turn Vladivostok into Russia’s San Francisco, with investments of as much as $46 billion coming from the state alone, with outsiders invited to take part. In any case, this windy Russian city of many hills, with its offshore waters and sky at times melding in blue mist, with fog often blanketing inland vistas, and with its soaring bridges, already feels like the white and windy city of northern California. And as in San Francisco, the Paris of the West, so in Vladivostok, the Paris of the East (although, as regards the latter, it competes for this title with many other cities, from Irkutsk in Siberia to Harbin in China), foreigners abound.

Even Vladivostok’s railway station, so reminiscent of Moscow’s busy Yaroslavsky Station, has a cosmopolitan flare and bespeaks a connection to the center. It was built in the early twentieth century in neo-Russian style, with pink-and-white towers, arches, and columns decorated with the image of Saint George the Victorious on a white horse.

Soon we reached our hotel—a modern, toffee-colored double-towered skyscraper with a view of the Gulf of Amur from one side and the Zolotoy Rog (Golden Horn) Bay from the other. Once inside we confronted an atmosphere we had never seen before. In the Soviet era Vladivostok was one of those “closed” military port cities, but now Chinese and Korean tourists and businessmen filled in the broad, high-ceilinged lobby, emitting an earsplitting roar of enthusiastic chatter that compelled us to shout so that the clerk could hear us and cup our ears so we could understand her response. There were Japanese guests, too, but they sat in small groups, quiet and reserved. Despite our having traversed Russia from east to west, we immediately sensed we had arrived in a place resembling no other in the country.

Later, as we walked Vladivostok’s paved, well-kept Sportivnaya Embankment along the Gulf of Amur, we encountered sailors—many of them—out and about in their blue-and-whites, strolling on leave under elegant lampposts, passing a gushing fountain, street acrobats plying their trade, and a pair of Amur tiger cubs (made of bronze, that is)—placed there in honor of the Amur tiger, a symbol of the Russian Far East.

A Ferris wheel rotated slowly, the children in its tilting cars laughing; sidewalk merchants sold candied corn and saucer-size pizzas from wheeled, multicolored carts; kebabs roasted on grills scented the air, recalling the North Caucasus homeland of their cooks. Here and there we heard American English and caught snippets of conversation, apparently American men courting young Russian women. The men wore sneakers and baseball caps; the women, dresses and sneakers, the global fashion of the young. On Svetlanskaya Street, an Orthodox church and a Lutheran cathedral coexisted—a rarity in Russia, which during the Putin years has become increasingly traditional. A Hare Krishna group walked by us, dancing and chanting, with many passersby looking on with amusement.

On the other embankment, Korabelnaya, facing Golden Horn Bay, we came across a well-executed bronze statue of the famed dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn, after decades of exile in the West, did arrive here in 1994—his first stop on Russian soil—to begin a journey on the Trans-Siberian that would end with him taking up residence just outside Moscow, where he remained until his death in 2008.

Further on, the Golden Bridge, with its twin suspension towers, linked one side of the bay to the other. It is no wonder that our driver Nikolai was so taken by the bridge. Before it appeared, the trip around the Golden Horn Bay often took almost two hours; but now, it took just five minutes. Above the bridge a funicular line climbed a hill to a lookout from which a statue of Cyril and Methodius (the Bulgarian monks who created the Russian alphabet) looked down on the city, holding a large Christian cross and an open book showing their creation. The statue, though smaller, resembles the cast-iron monument to Prince Vladimir in Kiev. Perhaps the officials who erected it meant to emphasize the city’s Russianness, but it also highlighted the diverse sources of the country’s civilization. The Cyrillic alphabet was itself created from the Greek.

Walking from the embankment up Vladivostok’s often steep, zigzagging streets we thought of a line from a poem by the Soviet poet Robert Rozhdestvensky, “Vladivostok is like a swing: up and down, up and down.” The landscape turned our trips by taxi into something like free-range roller-coaster rides, made hairier by the right-hand-drive steering wheels and the imprecision they necessarily introduced when maneuvering in left-side traffic.

On the historic Svetlanskaya Street we encountered a range of tony shops and fancy restaurants and eateries serving everything from pizzas to Chinese food to Russian dumplings (and burbling hookahs) to Italian cafés to French cuisine and locally caught seafood. Here and there hung banners announcing “Open to the World for 130 Years”—highlighting Vladivostok’s internationalist aspirations and ignoring its status as a “closed” city during most of the Soviet decades.

In fact, the buildings housing diverse private businesses betray Soviet-era origins, their owners having rented out premises in willy-nilly fashion, obligating customers to, for instance, pass through a drugstore to get to a dumpling eatery, or through a real estate firm’s lobby to reach a café. Mementos, at times chilling, of the Soviet era did appear: on Aleutskaya Street, for instance, sat a hulking, four-story building with turretlike domes belonging to the city’s branch of the Interior Ministry; it had once, naturally, sheltered Stalin’s dreaded NKVD, the KGB’s predecessor.

And on Ivanovskaya Street rises a memorial honoring border guards who perished in the line of duty: four guards (including a seaman), modeled in bronze and painted black, and dressed in uniforms from various eras of Russia’s history, stand vigilant, a German shepherd at their side. The statue is recent, dating from the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War, and manifests Russia’s concern for the future of this city and the Primorsky Krai (Maritime Region), of which it is the capital.

And yet, not far away, two other statues convey a different, independent and cordial message. In a nearby park, a monument to bard Vysotsky shows him sitting in a relaxed pose with his guitar, and in the very center next to the main post office, built at the turn of the last century in Neo-Russian style, stands another figure in bronze—of a woman in a Victorian dress who is hurrying to drop a letter into a mailbox. This is the American Eleanor Lord Pray, a native of South Berwick in Maine. Before the revolution, Pray spent more than three decades here with her American husband turned local businessman. Every day for years she composed letters to relatives in America and China; they now constitute a detailed, if unofficial, chronicle of life in Vladivostok. (Her Letters from Vladivostok were recently published by the University of Washington Press.) Here they call her their “first blogger.”

Pray also sent her relatives pictures. Her texts and photographs show just how cosmopolitan this far-flung city was—more than anywhere in her native Maine, no doubt—with residents from Europe, China, Japan, and Korea living and working alongside Russians, Ukrainians, and indigenes. Vladivostok was, thus, a crossroads for a unique mixture of cultures from Europe, Asia, and even North America.

And that’s not all. On the previously mentioned Aleutskaya Street lived the most important regional entrepreneur of the time, Swiss-born Yuly (Jules) Briner, whose Far Eastern Shipping Company stood at the origins of Primorsky navigation. Yul Brynner, the future Oscar winner and star of The King and I and The Ten Commandments, was born here, in his grandfather’s home. Near the family house now stands a stone monument to the actor; its caption reads, “Yul Brynner, the King of Theater.” This seems fitting in such a city of inclusivity. Walking about, we encounter references, often uncanny, to other familiar places—Moscow in a train station, Kiev in a statue, San Francisco in a bridge, New York’s Fleet Week in gunnery sergeants and naval officers ambling around town.

The takeaway: Vladivostok, like the rest of Russia, though less dramatically, suffers from a split-personality syndrome. It is both open to the world and fearful, as it lies so close to China, a country with a population more than ten times Russia’s size.

One afternoon in our hotel’s lobby, we met Andrei Ostrovsky, the regional editor of Novaya Gazeta. The thin, tall, energetic Ostrovsky had traveled much in the Russian Far East and in China. To escape the ever-present din from the Chinese and Korean guests, we retired to a secluded table near the elevators. We asked him about the Chinese presence in town.

“We have about 300,000 Chinese visitors a year here,” he replied. “Most are tourists but some are investors, businessmen. Our Primorsky Krai has only six million people, but the province across the border has 100 million Chinese. We’ve had to make it illegal for them to enter Russia by car here, or our streets would be totally jammed.”

“Do you feel threatened here by the Chinese?” we asked, as we had asked in Blagoveshchensk, another city on the doorsteps of Asia. He gave the same answer we heard there: “No, I do not feel the ‘China threat’ you hear so much about.” He explained: “If the Chinese want something from us, they can just buy it. They hire Russians, which is good. The problem is they send their profits back to China, which doesn’t help us. But there’s no real xenophobia toward them. Our relations are all about doing business. The Chinese also come to study, too, at the Far Eastern University. We’re trying to attract investment and have just begun issuing electronic visas to twenty countries, including China.”

Tourism was also a major draw, he added, as “we have the most varied scenery in Russia. We have tigers, the Amur tigers! Plus killer whales off the coast.” Moreover, young Russians in Vladivostok study Chinese and other Asian languages to improve their chances of finding work. “Most of us have been to Japan or Korea or China, and much less to Moscow. We’re looking east; in fact, we’re looking everywhere.”

Surely the demographic trends of the region worried him, we insisted. But he denied this. “Look, the population in Primorsky Krai might be dropping, but Vladivostok’s isn’t. We have people arriving from all over the country. Historically, it was the risk-takers and entrepreneurial folk who came out here, and this is still true. They come to this special city of ours because they want to really achieve something. They are good for us and our economy.”

One evening, as the sun fell, casting its orange light over Vladivostok’s staggered cement warrens and the forested sopki beyond them, we took a taxi to the lookout point. (The funicular, for some reason, was not running.) The driver sped up and down the hills, but mostly up, until we reached the summit, with its view of the soaring, V-angled towers and taut cables of the Golden Bridge, teeming with traffic, over the Golden Horn Bay, busy with cutters and small chugging craft. In the time we had spent in town, no one had spoken to us about immigrating to Europe or the United States—a common topic of conversation elsewhere, including in Yakutsk, where we had just been.

Vysotsky’s lyrics came to mind about “the open ‘closed’ port of Vladivostok.” As did words from the next line, meant to be ironic: “Paris is open, but I don’t need to go there.” (He was married to the French actress Marina Vlady, so Paris was not off limits to him, as it was to other Soviet citizens who were not allowed to travel abroad.) Presumably, though, if Russians here wanted to go anywhere, it was not just to Europe, but to Seoul, Beijing, or Tokyo.

The bard penned these words in Moscow decades ago. But they hold now, in this hospitable port city, on the other end of this vast country.