For now, the Kremlin has been intensively funding just one project in Blagoveshchensk: its newly expanded embankment. The Chinese have made Heihe’s waterfront along the Amur shine, so Putin decided to follow suit. Blagoveshchensk’s new redbrick high-rises (resembling, incidentally, those we saw in Kaliningrad), the bronze border guard with the dog, the Soviet-era yet recently renovated stark gray monument to the Great Patriotic War (a none-too-subtle reminder that Russians know how to fight those), and even the Arc de Triomphe (spiffed up not long ago)—all these are symbols of Putin’s Russia.
After my taxi ride around town, I decided to get something to eat. This took some work, as waiters in the pizzeria-like cafeteria I stopped in spoke neither Russian nor English. Nevertheless, I managed to procure a small pizza, served with a plastic glove, instead of a napkin and a fork. While eating I stared at the wall adorned with an intriguing world map: on it, the Eurasian continent was titled Asia, and Russia wasn’t identified; Europe was small; and only the Americas and Africa were depicted in scale.
Once finished with my pizza, and having stripped off my glove, I set about searching for a cup of coffee. This, it turned out, posed a challenge here. Even in parts of Russia, it is sometimes tough to find anything but instant coffee. But in China a sign saying café rarely means coffee at all; there they mean food. In Heihe one café, Parizh (Russian for Paris), promisingly had fancy pastries in the window, an Eiffel Tower on its wallpaper, and a bistro table with two chairs in front of it. What was lacking was coffee. “Coca Cola?” the shopkeeper asked.
I then ventured down “The Street of Russian Goods” (as the sign in Russian translates). It called to mind Canal Street in New York’s Chinatown—behind every door they sell something—although here I was the only customer. Cheap, colored furs—red, yellow, orange, even green—hung from the awnings, marked RUSSIAN FURS, yet they were made in China. Huge shop windows displayed, in bulk, Russian canned goods, flour, sugar, and candy. Posters with writing in Chinese advertised Russian ice cream with a picture of Putin licking a cone—a clever mixture of hard and soft power.
Heihe, I came to think, seemed unreal, chintzy, slapped-together—a reified, steel-glass-concrete “made in China” slogan. Yet there were authentic moments—a group of older women sat on a bench, laughingly shielding a friend while she was changing into a new pair of trousers freshly purchased in the shop Mir-Bryuki Nizkoi Tseny (World-Pants at Low Cost). In the restaurant where I ate my pizza, teenage girls chatted away. On a side street, four men played mahjong, an ancient board game, with scores of spectators huddling around their table. I also uncovered a mystery of the Blagoveshchensk fashion of wearing princesslike mesh skirts in a variety of jewel tones—seemingly a dress code of every little girl in Heihe.
Evening was coming on. Still reeling from crossing the border, I considered spending the night in Heihe. I espied a new, palatial hotel, called the Saint Petersburg. At least from the outside, it seemed like a good option, so I dropped in to check it out. But in the fancy lobby, plastic glitz was already peeling off the walls, and I spotted a cockroach in the restroom.
Never did I want to return to Mother Russia as strongly as I did then and there, in the Saint Petersburg Hotel, Heihe-style.
So, I walked back to the port. This time, I would not go it alone. In the terminal, a young woman approached me.
“You don’t look like you’re from here,” she said. I replied that she didn’t look local, either.
Her name was Anastasia. We started chatting. It turned out Anastasia was originally from Blagoveshchensk but now lives in Beijing. It would be easier to battle stonewalling Chinese officials and angry fellow Russian travelers together, so we teamed up and got in line with a large group of men and women who oversaw a mountain of bulky bags and cardboard boxes and eyed us with outright disdain. And they were even angrier that the guards let any Chinese who showed up board, while leaving the Russians to wait—for hours.
Anastasia spoke fluent Mandarin. The impressed Chinese guards explained to her what was going on.
“Damaged by the blackout, the computer system doesn’t allow us to switch between Chinese and Russian travelers without a glitch,” Anastasia said, translating the guards’ explanation. The group was unconvinced.
“A payback to Putin! They hate the Russians. That Xi and Putin friendship is bullshit,” they grumbled.
I have never seen such angry people in my life, never felt as unsafe as then, while I languished between two gigantic, belligerent states and among those who have dedicated their lives to making small profits at any cost. Yet Anastasia and I boarded without incident, trying to find a spot to stand—the deck was jammed with merchandise, including even small tractors that enterprising Buryats were bringing back to Ulan-Ude.
Across the river on the Russian side, the rancor between the Chinese and Russians rekindled, with each group treating the other as inferiors. But now the might was on the Russian side: a stone-faced border guard pushed aside scores of Chinese and their bags to allow all the Russians to cross through customs first.
With last night’s blackout now a distant memory, Jeff and Nina settled in for a drink at the Europeanish Café Sharlot, where service was slow but not uncaring.
Over wine and coffee, we spoke about Nina’s day in Heihe. If they ever build the bridge, spending time on the other side of the water may prove less traumatic. But for now, a lone traveler feels like a nonperson when confronting the reality of the Russia–China alliance, an alliance between two countries vying for superiority and whose leaders value state might above the well-being of the citizens over whom they rule. What’s more, we thought, the Kremlin has turned a cold shoulder toward Europe in Kaliningrad, but when it turns east—the Chinese are overwhelming, making this edge of the frontier just as tense and testy, and more threatening perhaps, as the border to the West.
It was a brilliant azure evening of the sort that lingers endlessly during the summer in these northern latitudes. Sinking into damp eluvium—a sediment composed of white pebbles and rocks, sand and silt—we descended the steep bank tentatively, backtracking at times when our feet would not take hold. We slow-walked toward the docks at the Yakutsk port, from where a captain named Georgy was supposed to take us on a boat tour up the Lena River. As we treaded, we gazed down at the numerous makeshift piers jutting out into the green-blue water. Which one was ours? We had arranged the tour by phone but had no idea what sort of craft awaited us. A taxi speedboat that takes people to the other side of Lena, and to its many islands, some large enough to be habitable? A sleek modern cutter? Once at the waterside, we traipsed among disorderly clusters of skiffs, dinghies, and schooners, asking for Georgy, but found our queries met with shrugs and blank stares. We finally located him standing by a serviceable wooden craft that could seat fifteen passengers but, this time, would take us alone.
We climbed aboard. Brawny, sun-bronzed, and about forty, Georgy untied the mooring ropes and switched on the engine. We lurched away from the dock and out onto the Lena.
The previous day we had arrived in the capital of the sprawling Sakha (Yakutia) Republic, whose 1.2 million square miles of taiga and tundra are home to fewer than a million people, about half of whom are Sakha, descendants from Turkic tribes from Central Asia. (Yakutsk itself has about 270,000 people.) This part of eastern Siberia was long called Yakutia, but after the Soviet Union ended, as nationalism rose, it renamed itself Sakha Republic. The Sakha now claim that the names Yakutia and Yakut were given to them by Russian colonizers, but Sakha is what they call themselves, their land, and their language. Most of the republic’s non-Sakha are ethnic Russians, in addition to small numbers of Evenks and Evens, people of Tungusic stock. During the Soviet decades, Russians involved in resource extraction made up a majority of the republic’s inhabitants and accounted for about 500,000 people, with the Sakha and other local peoples accounting for 300,000. Today indigenous folk far outnumber the Russians. And although the Kremlin has called for settlers to head out to Siberia and the Russian Far East, there is little evidence of new arrivals.