The official shoved my documents toward me and waved me on. I walked on toward the terminal’s doors, passing a pink stone plinth marking the border.
I still wanted to return to Russia. I glanced at the departure hall; more chaos reigned there. Crowds of Russians and Chinese were pouring in, dragging their unwieldy bundles of merchandise and amassing by the passport booths.
I stood there, dejected. Possibly my sad countenance prompted a passing striking-looking young woman, tall and willowy, to ask if she could help me. I told her what I had been through. Introducing herself as Tatyana, she nodded sympathetically at my recounted travails and encouraged me to go into town.
“It is usually much quicker, but can also be worse! If you go back now, you’ll be here for another two or three hours! So take a cab and see what’s here. Just tell the driver ‘Huaifu,’ pay no more than ten yuan [$1.59].”
It turned out that Tatyana was a student at Tomsk University and had been visiting Heihe with her parents, who were standing next to her. They smiled at me. Her father was Russian, her mother Chinese; they seemed like a loving couple. I thanked Tatyana and took her advice. I stepped out of the terminal and hailed a taxi, my faith in humanity restored.
My driver was a woman. (I learned there are quite a few female drivers in Heihe.) She drove me to that mysterious Huaifu along the embankment, where people were fishing, strolling, and posing for photographs with Blagoveshchensk as a backdrop, where Lenin and Europe seemed so close. Heihe itself looked well kept and cleaner than other Chinese cities, resembling a small Taiwan suburb rather than Shanghai. It was also green. High-rises along the Amur loomed above landscaped parks and squares.
But for a shopping paradise it seemed rather empty on a weekday afternoon. My cab rolled along almost alone on the road, except for a few cyclists pedaling the bright green bikes available for hire from curbside racks. In Blagoveshchensk such racks stand empty; the streets are too dug up and potholed to make biking much fun.
Just a village a few decades ago, Heihe, following the Soviet collapse, oriented itself toward trade with Russia and became a booming frontier town. It makes Blagoveshchensk seem poor indeed, though the Russian city looks more settled, with old trees lining the roads and a less mercantile atmosphere.
Ten minutes later we pulled up in front of Huaifu, which turned out to be Heihe’s main shopping mall. The cab deposited me on the Central Trade Pedestrian Street, which announced itself in Russian and Chinese on a pink stone plinth, similar to the one at the border. In front of me was a sight that Russians in the Putin era know all too well—a row of police cars, overseen by an expressionless border guard. Beyond them, out on the river, were anchored patrol boats—both Russian and Chinese. Their crews’ green uniforms show drill preparedness for a confrontation that, despite the claims of friendship made by the two countries’ governments, may occur at any moment.
Heihe’s Russia orientation was mostly nonmilitary and manifested all over the place. The Chinese had catered to Russians’ pride in their culture by erecting a statue of their favorite poet, Alexander Pushkin—with the words “Sun of Russian Poetry” engraved in gilt letters on the ocher-colored pedestal, in both Russian and Chinese—on a central square. After all, Heihe was trying to make money from its neighbor. Fur stores abound: Fur City of Paris stood on one side of Central Street, Catherine II [the Great] Fur on another, the presumption being that the notions of Old Europe and the Russian Empress would whet the Russian appetite for luxury.
They had done less well sating their appetite for Russian cuisine: the Café Arbat (named after Moscow’s main pedestrian street), Pitanie Strit (Feeding Street), and Russkyi Khleb (Russian Bread) had all been shuttered. As was Restaurant Putin. Much use, apparently, had been made of Google Translate, with results comical enough to evoke howls of laughter or inspire a Bulkgakovian short story, perhaps.
Why was Heihe so empty of Russians? The crush of bodies on the ferry had led me to expect otherwise. The crash in oil prices beginning a decade ago had something to do with it. But the post-Crimea economic sanctions had almost halved the Russian ruble’s purchasing power against the yuan, which left the shuttle traders with slimmer profits and thus less reason to travel here.
The Russian chelnoki who arrived with me must have dispersed among less central and touristy shops and malls, but a tribute to them stood right in the center of town: mimicking Blagoveshchensk, Heihe had raised a bronze statue to the Russian shuttle trader. It shows a young man sitting on a suitcase, mobile phone in hand, surrounded by bags of merchandise, looking tired and distracted.
If Blagoveshchensk’s service culture leaves much to be desired, the streets of Heihe churn with the tireless Chinese entrepreneurs and zealous hucksters. Vendors stand outside their shops clapping to attract attention; sidewalk traders beckon; arrays of multicolored, illuminated signs flash their Chinese characters, as if beaming inscrutable prophetic messages. At one point, I sat down on a bench to take in this Brave New World and was immediately surrounded by men and women trying to sell me everything from socks to toys, cigarette lighters and cell phone cases with Putin’s portrait. One especially forward young entrepreneur turned on his hand massager and was about to apply it to my neck until I fled to another bench.
Even though suitcase trading has suffered a downturn recently, in Heihe people seemed to be particularly excited about the possibility of building a bridge between their town and Blagoveshchensk. In fact, for years China has been offering to fund the project.
“The Chinese always take the initiative. They need us more than we need them,” Innokenty had explained to me on the ferry that morning. “Especially now, Heihe is eager to restructure.” To overcome problems stemming from the dwindling border economy, the city, he said, plans to focus not on chelnoki, “but on turning itself into the new Harbin”—the capital of Heilongjiang province, the famed home for Russians displaced by the 1917 Revolution, and now a major manufacturing and tourist center.
“From the fake Russified China of Heihe, the bridge will lead to the real Russia, so the Chinese can come and enjoy our many Lenins on their Red Tour,” Innokenty added with a chuckle.
In Blagoveshchensk there is less enthusiasm for such a bridge. First suggested by Yeltsin but shot down by his economic advisors as unviable, the project has, at least until recently, lost what allure it had. Russians have become accustomed to the ferry and don’t see much need for another means of crossing the Amur. Recently Putin’s government has been displaying renewed interest in the idea. With the Crimea Bridge completed, he can now start another bold enterprise. The bridge, after all, would create more formalized and better functioning trade zones and areas of cooperation—matters Putin and Xi Jinping have discussed—and thus help better control Chinese emigration to Russia.
One of the reasons the Russians have been slow to respond to the Chinese advances is their fear of a further increase in economic and demographic inequality.
Trying to stave off a possible Chinese takeover of parts of Siberia, the Kremlin, in February 2017, announced the Far-Eastern Hectare project, which involves offering free, single-hectare plots to Russians who move there and exploit the land in the first five years. One would think that giving away land to encourage frontier settlement would excite a lot of interest. After all, the United States passed the Homestead Acts to settle parts of the country west of the Mississippi with offers of 160-acre plots to homesteaders. But Russia’s meager one-hectare plots, located in frigid Siberia, no less, are not attracting many takers.