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.
3
“Military Power of Russia and China,” ArmedForces.eu, http://armedforces.eu/compare/country_Russia_vs_China.