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.