10
VLADIVOSTOK
RULE THE EAST!
TIME ZONE: MSK+7; UTC+10
Beyond Paris, Vladivostok is probably the most fascinating city on Earth at the moment…. We are so very lucky to witness so many interesting things happening around us here and now in Vladivostok!
From the grim concrete ramparts of Vladivostok’s Fort Number Seven, the Gulf of Amur spreads to the west, its leaden waters barely rippling one August afternoon under an equally leaden sky. Turn north or south and your gaze falls on high-rises and apartment blocks scattered over hills that, with their two suspension bridges, give the city of some 600,000 the floating, elevated feel of a Russian San Francisco.
The fort’s hulking heptagonal walls enclose an array of cannons and heavy artillery guns and ammunition storage bunkers capable of withstanding sustained incoming fire. (Stalin’s executioners did their work within these dungeonlike structures.) Just beyond the walls, on the square in front, decommissioned Soviet-era missiles lie on mobile platforms, belying the age of the fort, built at the end of the nineteenth century.
The city itself, founded in 1860, is now the terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railroad—a column on one of the platforms reads “9,288 km” (5,771 miles), thus marking the distance to Moscow. It owes its origins to Russia’s successful attempt to secure the terrain from the Amur River east to its coast, on the Sea of Japan, which it legalized by signing the 1860 Treaty of Beijing with China, when that country was too weak to resist. (Japan lies only some five hundred miles away.) Head southwest for fifty miles, and you run into the border with the People’s Republic of North Korea. Just to the north is China’s Heilongjiang province. In strategic importance, Vladivostok rivals another port town we had visited, Kaliningrad, almost six thousand miles to the west, and well deserves its name, which translates as Ruler of the East.
As we rode in from the airport through leafy green hills, a sign caught our eye, proclaiming “Ostrov Russkiy, Krym Rossiyskiy” (The Island Is Russian—the island being the Crimean Peninsula—Crimea belongs to Russia). In Vladivostok, as in Kaliningrad, on the other end of the current empire, Crimea, though distant from both, haunts the Russian consciousness. Russia’s chief far-eastern port city celebrates the return to the motherland of another territory, a long way to the west and strategically vital for its own port, this one on the Black Sea.
“Ever since the 2012 summit”—the summit for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)—“things have been looking up here,” our taxi driver, a middle-age fellow named Nikolai, told us as we sped up and down the undulant highway toward town. “We got new roads, better services, and more investment. Before that Vladivostok was reeling from neglect, all the way back to the Yeltsin days.” But with Putin in charge, the city has built “three new bridges in less than ten years.”
For more than a century the town dreamed of a bridge to Russky Island. It was painted on postcards and drawn on city plans but never materialized on account of war and bad management—the usual reasons. But then, in 2009, the Kremlin announced that it was going to erect not one, not two, but three bridges, two to the nearby Russky Island alone. “Across Golden Horn Bay, the Golden Bridge—like the Golden Gate in San Francisco—the Russian Bridge over East Bosporus Bay, and another one across Amur Bay.”
Though China and Japan had, Russia had never endeavored to construct bridges over sea straits, as it did here. And yet, looking west as ever, or maybe following the Kremlin’s orders, the Russian east sought help not from Asia, but from the engineers in Saint Petersburg and France. Nobody believed construction could be completed in three years (in time for the APEC summit), and yet it was. “Another thing that ties us to San Francisco”—the construction of the Golden Bridge—“was also deemed impossible. The bridges are a Vladivostok miracle, a testimony to our spirit,” said Nikolai.
Taking advantage of a pause in his impromptu introduction to the city, we squeezed in a personal question.
“Are you from here?”
He was not; he had moved east from Krasnodar some thirty years ago. He wasn’t the only one. “People come from western Russia for a visit, see the fish swimming in the bluest of oceans, try Pacific smelt, and find it much tastier than smelt in the Baltic Sea, and stay.” (Apparently here in Vladivostok the east–west Russia rivalry boils down to fish.) “The population keeps renewing itself. The port is doing well, new international businesses are opening up, and our Far Eastern University is an international hub.”
We had heard his latter claim supported by others in Russia, though the year previous to our visit, at the Eastern Economic Forum, the Kremlin did announce ambitious plans to turn Vladivostok into Russia’s San Francisco, with investments of as much as $46 billion coming from the state alone, with outsiders invited to take part. In any case, this windy Russian city of many hills, with its offshore waters and sky at times melding in blue mist, with fog often blanketing inland vistas, and with its soaring bridges, already feels like the white and windy city of northern California. And as in San Francisco, the Paris of the West, so in Vladivostok, the Paris of the East (although, as regards the latter, it competes for this title with many other cities, from Irkutsk in Siberia to Harbin in China), foreigners abound.
Even Vladivostok’s railway station, so reminiscent of Moscow’s busy Yaroslavsky Station, has a cosmopolitan flare and bespeaks a connection to the center. It was built in the early twentieth century in neo-Russian style, with pink-and-white towers, arches, and columns decorated with the image of Saint George the Victorious on a white horse.
Soon we reached our hotel—a modern, toffee-colored double-towered skyscraper with a view of the Gulf of Amur from one side and the Zolotoy Rog (Golden Horn) Bay from the other. Once inside we confronted an atmosphere we had never seen before. In the Soviet era Vladivostok was one of those “closed” military port cities, but now Chinese and Korean tourists and businessmen filled in the broad, high-ceilinged lobby, emitting an earsplitting roar of enthusiastic chatter that compelled us to shout so that the clerk could hear us and cup our ears so we could understand her response. There were Japanese guests, too, but they sat in small groups, quiet and reserved. Despite our having traversed Russia from east to west, we immediately sensed we had arrived in a place resembling no other in the country.
Later, as we walked Vladivostok’s paved, well-kept Sportivnaya Embankment along the Gulf of Amur, we encountered sailors—many of them—out and about in their blue-and-whites, strolling on leave under elegant lampposts, passing a gushing fountain, street acrobats plying their trade, and a pair of Amur tiger cubs (made of bronze, that is)—placed there in honor of the Amur tiger, a symbol of the Russian Far East.
A Ferris wheel rotated slowly, the children in its tilting cars laughing; sidewalk merchants sold candied corn and saucer-size pizzas from wheeled, multicolored carts; kebabs roasted on grills scented the air, recalling the North Caucasus homeland of their cooks. Here and there we heard American English and caught snippets of conversation, apparently American men courting young Russian women. The men wore sneakers and baseball caps; the women, dresses and sneakers, the global fashion of the young. On Svetlanskaya Street, an Orthodox church and a Lutheran cathedral coexisted—a rarity in Russia, which during the Putin years has become increasingly traditional. A Hare Krishna group walked by us, dancing and chanting, with many passersby looking on with amusement.