Her smile had vanished. “What if, when you get to the border, they look at these pictures and say, ‘Why do you have all these photos of secret equipment?’” she asked. Just like that, she was as nervous as she’d been 20 years ago.
I was paranoid enough myself that I considered whether this could actually happen, even though the decades-old equipment was more appropriate for a museum than anything else. Then I realized that by the end of my trip, there’d be so many thousands of photos on my phone that anyone would give up before they scrolled all the way back to Vladivostok. “I think we’re OK,” I told Valya. “They’re not going to look at these pictures at the border.” But it was too late; she was spooked again.
“Let’s walk to the lighthouse,” she said.
We exited through the metal gate, then walked past cars and sunbathers as a couple of jet skis roared by, spraying water into the sky. We took a few photos with my selfie stick, then strolled back home. I asked if she wanted to see more of Gary’s pictures from 1995, and she said yes. So I pulled my laptop out of my backpack and booted it up.
At least, I tried to. Nothing appeared on the screen except for a flashing question mark. What was this? I had no idea, but it certainly didn’t look good. I shut the laptop. “It’s not working,” I said. “I’ll fix it later.”
Except that I couldn’t. When I got back to my hotel that evening, I used my iPad to research “flashing question mark on laptop” and then followed the instructions, trying every possible way to get the thing to boot up. It was no use: my laptop’s hard drive had died, on the very first day of my three-month trip. This was a horrific development, but fortunately, all I had to do was call Randi in L.A. and ask her to buy a new MacBook Air, load it with my data from our external hard drive at home, and ship it to me at the hotel. This, too, felt like a miracle of modern technology—that I could get a brand-new laptop, with all my documents and photos, delivered to me in Russia in just a matter of days.
Or so I hoped.
Two days later, Valya came to meet me at the big Lenin statue downtown, just steps from my hotel. This particular statue is of the “taxi-hailing” genre, with Lenin raising his right arm, gesturing toward the magnificent baroque train station perched on the waterfront of the Golden Horn Bay. Now, I was amused to see that Lenin appeared to be welcoming the massive Diamond Princess cruise ship docked just behind the station.
Tourism to Vladivostok is a relatively new phenomenon. As a high-security military port, this was a closed city during Soviet times, meaning no foreigners were allowed in. At the time of my 1995 visit, few Americans had ever been here—with the exception of Gerald Ford, who’d jetted over in 1974 for a quick visit to discuss arms control with Leonid Brezhnev. President Ford had been unimpressed, writing in his diary that the Okeanskaya Sanatorium, where the talks took place, looked like “an abandoned YMCA camp in the Catskills.” The rest of Vladivostok didn’t look much better, so even after the Russian government opened the city to foreigners in 1992, people kept right on not coming.
But now, everywhere I looked I saw souvenir stands, people in sun hats snapping photos, and guides with brightly colored flags leading groups of Asian tourists. Vladivostok’s proximity to China, combined with relaxed visa restrictions for Chinese visitors, had led to a boom in tourism from that country. What was previously a run-down, sleepy, Soviet-feeling outpost had transformed into a gleaming, modern, thoroughly renovated city—including two brand-new, multimillion-dollar suspension bridges. The Russian government had been promising to build these bridges since the Khrushchev era, Valya had told me, but “Putin got it done.” One of these was the bridge to Russian Island that she’d previously feared might obliterate their home.
With the opening of that bridge in 2012, the once-remote Russian Island had become a focal point of Vladivostok. The government built a sprawling new campus for the Far Eastern Federal University, with officials reportedly hoping to turn the area into a Silicon Valley of the East. This apparently entailed hosting numerous conferences, one of which, the Eastern Economic Forum, was going on right now. In fact, at the very moment I was meeting Valya at the Lenin statue, President Putin himself was at the Forum, delivering a major speech about Ukraine. This followed an opening-day speech by Pamela Anderson, the star of Baywatch (or, as it’s called in Russian, Lifeguards of Malibu) and a spokesperson for PETA, who spoke about climate change and endangered species.[4]
Valya was wearing a bright pink sun hat and a pink-and-white leopard-print blouse, part of what I was beginning to understand was an impressive collection of pink clothing. She’d brought a friend, a woman about her age named Katya, and as the three of us greeted each other, Valya smiled that wicked smile and said, “Look who’s coming.” She gestured behind me, and I turned, expecting to see Vasily. Instead, I saw a tall, striking brunette in a short dress and spiked heels heading our way. Was this who Valya meant?
“It’s my daughter! Lusya!” Valya exclaimed, and I turned to look again. I’d spent an afternoon chatting with Lusya 20 years ago, when she was 18, and I had no recollection of what she looked like back then. But now she looked—like so many Russian women seemed to these days—like a model. “She’s taking us to a place with a view,” Valya said, and we set off in a little pack, two five-foot-tall Russian grandmothers and one bemused American, all trailing behind our Amazonian guide.
Lusya took us to a deserted rooftop atop a nearby hill, a place with a 365-degree view of Vladivostok. It was a perfect, sunny day, just a few puffy clouds floating by, and I marveled at the city’s many new buildings, the suspension bridges, and the shimmering water of Golden Horn Bay. With its many hills, coves, and scenic bays, Vladivostok is often compared to San Francisco, and from here the similarity was obvious.
As quickly as she’d come, Lusya said, “I have to get back to work,” and she clack-clacked off in her high heels. Valya, Katya, and I meandered back down, and we set off toward the pedestrian mall, Admiral Fokin Street.
This was the stroll in which Katya informed me that “Americans think that in Russia, we have bears roaming in the streets.” When I said I wasn’t sure that was true, she waved her hand dismissively.
“A big part of the problem,” she informed me, “is that President Obama doesn’t like President Putin.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because three years ago, Putin was late for a meeting with him,” she said. “It wasn’t his fault; his plane was late. And because Putin is a well-mannered person, he apologized, but Obama took offense and he’s never gotten over it.” I’d never heard of this incident, but I knew better than to ask whether it had really happened. With her seen-it-all demeanor and deadpan proclamations, Katya was a woman who appeared never to have been troubled by uncertainty.
“You know,” Katya went on, “President Putin is in Vladivostok right now. He’s speaking at a conference on Russian Island.”
“Katya!” hissed Valya under her breath. “Why do you tell her everything?”
4
A headline the next day read, “Pamela Anderson Presented with White Tiger,” which I initially took to mean she was going all Michael Jackson and starting an exotic petting zoo with the help of exuberant Russians. However, the white tiger turned out to be a small statuette, which she obligingly kissed for photographers.