In Putin's Footsteps

12 PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKY ^{THE VERY FAR EAST TIME ZONE: MSK+9; UTC+12}

From the air, the Kamchatka Peninsula, strewn with erupting geysers and snow-streaked volcanoes, riven by crystalline rivers, and stalked by bulky brown bears, resembles a lost world, or perhaps our world at a prehistoric, certainly prehuman, stage. No roads connect the peninsula to continental Russia; there is also no logging, no pollution. Across its hundred thousand square miles live only 375,000 people, and most of those in a few scattered towns.

Arriving in August in its capital, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, one steps off the plane onto a runway abutted by a small functional hangar and feels the sun warm on one’s cheeks—an unexpected sensation given that the city almost shares a latitude with Seattle, across the Pacific, some 3,300 miles to the east. Alaska is only 1,800 miles away—Sarah Palin, once the state’s governor and the 2008 vice-presidential nominee, memorably saw Russia from her backyard. The arc of the Aleutian Islands, divided between Russia and the United States, reaches even closer.

Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky sits at the edge of Avacha Bay, just beneath the towering Koryaksky Volcano. Koryaksky imposes an atmosphere of precariousness on the town, as if a couple of tectonic jolts from the stony behemoth might, one day, dislodge the city and send it slipping into the sea. The region is in fact seismically active, with the most devastating earthquake in modern times having struck in 1952; it registered nine on the Richter Scale and caused a fifty-foot-high tsunami that killed as many as fifteen thousand people and reached as far away as New Zealand.

The Russians inhabiting this remote territory are in both the literal and figurative senses frontiersmen and women, dwelling in a border region and, also, often wresting their livelihood from its wilderness. Most famous of these are the fishermen, who risk life and limb to haul in the millions of tons of seafood that ends up on dinner plates across Russia and abroad—in Japan, Korea, and the United States.

As many around the world know from the Discovery Channel reality show Deadliest Catch, the commercial fishing industry is not for the weakhearted. Each year, it places thousands of workers at the mercy of the most hostile, wave-roiled seas on the planet, and job lists consistently rank commercial fishing as among the most perilous livelihoods. (The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has documented that the industry’s fatality rate is three times higher than that of the other most dangerous professions.) Deadliest Catch follows American fishermen laboring on the Bering Sea off the Alaskan coast. On the Kamchatka Peninsula their Russian counterparts do the same work but with less advanced technology and equipment, and with inferior insurance. All this they suffer to bring in their catches of king crab and, the most prized of all, the salmon that produces red caviar. Fully a third of the world’s Pacific salmon spawn in Kamchatka’s pristine streams. This luxury product has made Russia famous throughout the world, but the fishermen themselves say the fish eggs are not worth the dangers they undergo to harvest them.

Before arriving in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, we spoke in Moscow to one of these fishermen, Vladimir, a tall, tough, muscle-bound Kamchatka seafarer in his late thirties with a Popeye-like build and hands as rough as tree bark. (Local fishermen were out at sea during our visit; they pursue salmon mostly during the summer months, as the fish approach the peninsula to spawn.) Vladimir, who seemed to possess a propensity for colorful language, struggled to hide it in a woman’s company when he talked, which provided for some funny pauses and stumbles in the most unexpected moments. His face, reddened and chafed, had suffered the ravages inflicted by years of outdoor work in cold maritime winds. He had recently changed his profession and place of residence, having decamped to Crimea to cultivate apples and cherries in the region’s famed orchards, which Chekhov celebrated in his play The Cherry Orchard.

We asked Vladimir why he left Kamchatka.

“I’m sick of caviar,” he replied. “It’s hard to get, and to me it tastes like salty red fire in your mouth. Sometimes we would get so much of it that my wife used it as garden fertilizer. Yet for everyone else it was hugely expensive.”

Vladimir told us that he had long served as a crew member aboard huge trawlers, often disused craft ready for the junkyard, but bought from Norway or Japan at cut-rate prices, and not always sailing under Russian flags. The captains often, in years past at least, violated the law, heading out into international waters to fish for king crab and salmon; operating in other protected zones or during months when fishing was illegal; or, worst of all, in dangerous weather.

“We surely have an incentive to take risks, earning up to $150,000 a year,” Vladimir explained. In doing so, boat owners kept their activities secret from the port authorities and tended to ignore regulations meant to ensure the safety of their crews. The Federal Fishing Agency now administers the business, so illegal fishing, he said, has diminished. Nevertheless, “things in the trade were as chaotic as the Wild West capitalism we had in Russia in the 1990s,” when rules were few, profits high.

He was already tiring of practicing his profession in such punishing conditions when the capsizing, in 2015, of a trawler took sixty lives and convinced him that he needed to move on with his life. He and his wife moved to Crimea, a “gift from our great president … a dream, really.”

The dream had faded since then, though, Vladimir admitted, and so had his admiration for the president, who failed to deliver on promises of the bucolic life described by Chekhov. The Russian government called on Russians to settle the Far East and launched a similar campaign to revive the cultivation of apples, pears, and cherries in Crimea on the Black Sea. Ten-foot-tall apple trees had been left unattended for decades, reflecting the ruinous legacy of Soviet collective agriculture. But with lands now handed over to new Russian owners, the Russian authorities plan to restore to glory the Crimean apples—an uncommonly tasty variety.

“Yet the five-year subsidies,” Vladimir complained, “are not enough.” The old trees had been neglected for too long—“by the Ukrainians,” he added resentfully—to render decent crops, and the new ones they planted on their eight-acre lots would take a few years before they were ready for harvesting. At the moment, he said, the orchard hardly produced anything. Their second crop, gathered in 2017, was meager owing to frosts and summer hail. Whatever they grew, fortunately, a local cooperative bought, and at prices “higher than those for foreign-grown bananas…. For now, the sanctions from the West and Russian countersanctions, when we no longer buy Polish apples, have helped local farmers sell on the Russian market, but subsidies they receive will soon be discontinued. And if the weather is poor again, we will not be able to survive.” He chuckled. “The tough job of fishing still leaves you more in control of your fortune.”

All the uncertainty involved with agriculture has taken its toll on Vladimir, and since our talk he had signed up as a fisherman on a trawler in the Black Sea.

Beside the fishing industry, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky hosts the military port where Russia’s Pacific fleet is moored. It is also, at least theoretically, a tourist town, a place from which aficionados of rugged outdoor sports embark on adventures into the pristine wilds. We, however, would remain within its urban confines, so we set out to walk, always finding the soft azure waters of the bay within view and the maritime breeze refreshing and welcome given the heat of the summer day.

Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is young for a Russian city, having been founded as the settlement of Petropavlovsk by Vitus Bering (a Dane on a mission for the czar, after whom the strait and sea separating the United States and Russia were named) in 1740, and receiving the status of city seventy-two years after that. Backset on three sides by green sopki, with a concave seafront, the city sits only a two-hour flight from Tokyo, yet there is little discernible Asian influence, with, rather, a plethora of kebab eateries overseen by owners hailing from Russia’s mostly Muslim Northern Caucasus region. True restaurants, we discovered, are few. Grocery stores brim not, as one would expect, with fresh seafood, but rather with fish one might call, charitably, in a phrase from Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, “secondhand fresh.” The state, as Bulgakov noted, sold truly fresh fish in Torgsin stores, where only foreigners and party apparatchiks had the right to shop and had to pay in hard currency. He wrote of the ridiculous incongruity between the communists’ promise of a better, more just world, and the government’s practice of restricting the sale of certain foodstuffs to a privileged few. Torgsin stores exist no more, of course, but the victory of capitalism in Russia now means that fresh fish goes to those who pay top prices for it, which means to big cities in Russia or abroad. Our tour of seafood stores put us in mind of Yeltsin and his moment of discovery in Blagoveshchensk—in a town supposedly chock-full of fresh fish, fresh fish is, in fact, in “deficit.”

Except, that is, in one store where we stopped, a grocery coop affiliated with the Lenin Fishery Kolkhoz. There we came across quite a few varieties of salmon and at least a half-dozen types of red caviar ranging in taste from highly salty to hardly salty, with all available for the absurdly low price of 1,000 rubles ($16) a kilogram (2.2 pounds). We remarked on our delight to a stall owner named Natalia, who was busy ordering her wares in a large freezer. In the Soviet era, she told us, centralization and a state-dominated market hardly helped the caviar business, but there were, back then, “many more species of fish, rainbow trout, char, and certainly other seafood products you could buy. You could just head out to a fishing village in the morning and buy everything fresh. These days many suppliers opt out of this coop and try to sell on their own”—something prohibited by law, as fish stocks have diminished with overfishing. At least here they still have red caviar; in the Caspian Sea and Volga, the most prized caviar of all, black, has almost disappeared.

In Lenin Square, in the shadow of the imposing, five-story granite-and-glass Kamchatka Krai Government Headquarters, and not far from a statue of Lenin striking a defiant pose with a cape flaring as if fluttering in the wind, young families push baby carriages and teenagers practice their skateboarding moves. The leader of the world’s proletariat shares a space with the recently constructed red-marble column topped by a double-headed eagle—the sight we no longer found surprising. Beneath them, coffee vendors dispense their beverage from stands, and locals sell ice cream from rickety carts. The unmistakable atmosphere of a seaside resort resembling that of Sevastopol in Crimea prevails. One would expect decent beaches here, but a disappointing, gravelly strip of sand runs along the water; people sit and stand tanning, with few venturing into the possibly less than clean sea. Elsewhere, the government has restricted access to the coast for security reasons; this is, after all, a border zone. Although the city hosts all sorts of tourists, the paucity of amenities recalls a salient fact: most visitors use Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky as a stopover on their way out, by Jeep or by helicopter, into the wilderness yawning just beyond the city’s boundaries.

On Leninskaya Street we came upon a statue, erected only in 2008, of Saint Nicholas the Miracle Worker. In accordance with church tradition, the saint faces east, but somewhat untraditionally, he holds aloft a sword in one hand and a miniature cathedral in the other. The message: the formidable holy potentate, backed by the true faith, is warding off invaders. (Legend has it that Saint Nicholas fended off the Mongols for a time.) The monument put us in mind of the aggressive angels who, so said local Solovetsky Islands lore, beat up a fisherman’s wife because she accidentally strayed onto God’s territory, and of the mighty bronze Saint Nicholas—also armed with a sword and a cathedral—rising above the Preloga River embankment in Kaliningrad. A ways farther down the street, an old, gray Stalinist behemoth of a building, decorated with red hammer-and-sickle flags, hosts both the headquarters of the Communist Party and the Gazprom Bank, the epitome of Russia’s capitalist wealth. This seems like a puzzling juxtaposition, but it is not: Gazprom, in supplying hydrocarbons to Europe, was a principle source of hard currency in Soviet days, just as it is now. Political power and money go together.

On our last day, we decided to do what most visitors do: take a boat tour of the coast. We discovered that Russia’s confused identity manifested itself once again in the tourist business, which now, privatized, operates solely for profit. Attracted by a sign showing a ship surrounded by cheerful dolphins and playful sea walruses and promising the “true Kamchatka fishing experience,” we stopped by a tour company office near our hotel and inquired about schedules for the morrow.

Departure, the young man told us, would be at 8:30 a.m., but “assembly” was obligatory at 8:15, and the cost was a mere $5 per ticket. He showed us pictures of what we would see. We thought we might check out other options—perhaps there was a later trip? We could book by phone at our convenience, he told us. This was fine by us.

So, a few hours later we called to make reservations.

“I can’t take reservations until I have copies of your passports.”

“What?” we asked. “Why? We’re not crossing the border!”

“You heard me, you have to bring me your passports! We will be sailing into the border waters of the Russian Federation!”

“But you said we could reserve by phone!”

“Of course! But you have to bring me your passports! And you can’t do that by phone!”

“Can we do that in the morning?”

“Must I repeat myself? I’m not going to spend all afternoon repeating what should be obvious!” he snapped. “I need your passports before I can guarantee you tickets!”

“Why are you being so hostile? We’re your customers!”

“Customers have to follow the regulations! We have to comply with the authorities just like everyone else!”

“We will bring you the passports.”

Passports are, indeed, a Russian obsession. You need a document to prove your existence—as Bulgakov once memorably stated, in the Soviet Union “if there’s no document, no person exists.” This goes for just about everything—from making a simple bank transaction to buying a cell phone to voting for president. It comes from the Soviet system of control, of the government’s efforts to keep track of its citizens. In 1991 communism disappeared, but the rules and mentality have remained. This was the case even in the Yeltsin years, and all the more so now. The state collects information not only for possible use; the constant registration of words and deeds required of citizens reminds them that the system is watching.

We stopped by the tour office a couple of hours later with, as required, passports in hand. When we tried to pay for our tickets as well, the man barked, as if we were requesting a special privilege, “You will pay on the boat, like everyone else! And don’t think of showing up for the tour without your passports. You have to show them or they won’t let you on board. Be at the mekhzavod”—fur-processing plant—“gate at 8:15 sharp! Remember, 8:15 at the mekhzavod!”

“The mekhzavod?” This seemed odd, but then not; furs were probably shipped here from other parts of the peninsula and unloaded, before being processed, made into clothing, and sent elsewhere.

“Of course! That’s where the dock is!”

The next morning a dense fog hung in the warm air, hindering visibility even on the streets. Down at the mekhzavod’s blue gate, passengers, some giddy with excitement, others lethargic from their early rise, huddled by our tour-company martinet and his female assistant, a young woman with stark red hair and a military bearing. She examined our passports and led us through the gates where border guards once again inspected our travel documents. Through a gangplank with a railing, we climbed aboard what looked to be a tugboat with an observation deck.

We pulled out into the dense mist and began circling around Avacha Bay. From large speakers emanated a prerecorded spiel about the wonders of the coast, urging us to catch sight of them, to look right, look left, glance straight ahead. Yet there was only fog and the cries of birds: of cormorants as they dove into the sea, white with the fog’s reflection, of gulls as they circled above, and of orange-billed ducks as they paddled by—a lonesome litany of lyrical cries.

Yet soon the sun limned through the fog, clearing the air and leaving us to contemplate green rolling sopki, three stark rock outcroppings in the sea dubbed the Three Brothers—a legend has it that they defended the city from the deadly tsunami and now stand there to protect it from all misfortunes. Eventually the majestic slopes of three snow-mottled volcanoes—Vilyuchinsky, Koryaksky, and Avacha—opened in front of our eyes. We passed out through the bay’s narrow neck and into the Pacific, chugged along for an hour or so, and dropped anchor.

While we thought of cheerfully waving at Sarah Palin in her backyard on the other side of the ocean, the rest of the passengers tossed in their lines, at times retrieving flounders, a local delicacy.

Surprisingly, and uncharacteristically for events such as this (involving strangers, not just friends) in Russia, several of the young men among us stripped off their shirts and lounged back as they waited for bites, striking poses resembling those seen in photographs of Putin in the Siberian wilds, where just a few weeks before he fished bare-chested, his trip coinciding with our stay in Blagoveshchensk. They were, one could not help thinking, emulating the Putin power, the ever-cool James Bond hero of modern Russia.

The sun eventually waned past the meridian, the captain turned on the motor, and we chugged ahead, heading for the bay’s narrow mouth. We did not get far before halting. Instructions came over the loudspeaker telling us to fish once again: there would be an unspecified delay.

We waited and waited, floating within view of the volcanoes and rocks, as gulls flocked and cried out around us. Small private yachts buzzed, passing by us back and forth from the shore. One hour passed, then two. We mounted the stairs to the captain’s booth and inquired about the delay.

“For reasons of national security we have to stop here,” answered the captain. “We’ll be here as long as necessary.”

“Any idea how long?”

“As long as necessary!”

And so we floated. And floated. And floated.

Espying the young man from the tour office, we tried to pay for our tickets.

“Can’t you see I’m busy?” he barked. “Pay later!”

Two hours after that we pulled into port by the fur plant. The boat’s crew, including the tour-company martinet, dispersed, failing to collect ticket fares.

From what we had seen from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka, Bulgakov, were he alive today, would still have much to write about.