On the other embankment, Korabelnaya, facing Golden Horn Bay, we came across a well-executed bronze statue of the famed dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn, after decades of exile in the West, did arrive here in 1994—his first stop on Russian soil—to begin a journey on the Trans-Siberian that would end with him taking up residence just outside Moscow, where he remained until his death in 2008.
Further on, the Golden Bridge, with its twin suspension towers, linked one side of the bay to the other. It is no wonder that our driver Nikolai was so taken by the bridge. Before it appeared, the trip around the Golden Horn Bay often took almost two hours; but now, it took just five minutes. Above the bridge a funicular line climbed a hill to a lookout from which a statue of Cyril and Methodius (the Bulgarian monks who created the Russian alphabet) looked down on the city, holding a large Christian cross and an open book showing their creation. The statue, though smaller, resembles the cast-iron monument to Prince Vladimir in Kiev. Perhaps the officials who erected it meant to emphasize the city’s Russianness, but it also highlighted the diverse sources of the country’s civilization. The Cyrillic alphabet was itself created from the Greek.
Walking from the embankment up Vladivostok’s often steep, zigzagging streets we thought of a line from a poem by the Soviet poet Robert Rozhdestvensky, “Vladivostok is like a swing: up and down, up and down.” The landscape turned our trips by taxi into something like free-range roller-coaster rides, made hairier by the right-hand-drive steering wheels and the imprecision they necessarily introduced when maneuvering in left-side traffic.
On the historic Svetlanskaya Street we encountered a range of tony shops and fancy restaurants and eateries serving everything from pizzas to Chinese food to Russian dumplings (and burbling hookahs) to Italian cafés to French cuisine and locally caught seafood. Here and there hung banners announcing “Open to the World for 130 Years”—highlighting Vladivostok’s internationalist aspirations and ignoring its status as a “closed” city during most of the Soviet decades.
In fact, the buildings housing diverse private businesses betray Soviet-era origins, their owners having rented out premises in willy-nilly fashion, obligating customers to, for instance, pass through a drugstore to get to a dumpling eatery, or through a real estate firm’s lobby to reach a café. Mementos, at times chilling, of the Soviet era did appear: on Aleutskaya Street, for instance, sat a hulking, four-story building with turretlike domes belonging to the city’s branch of the Interior Ministry; it had once, naturally, sheltered Stalin’s dreaded NKVD, the KGB’s predecessor.
And on Ivanovskaya Street rises a memorial honoring border guards who perished in the line of duty: four guards (including a seaman), modeled in bronze and painted black, and dressed in uniforms from various eras of Russia’s history, stand vigilant, a German shepherd at their side. The statue is recent, dating from the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War, and manifests Russia’s concern for the future of this city and the Primorsky Krai (Maritime Region), of which it is the capital.
And yet, not far away, two other statues convey a different, independent and cordial message. In a nearby park, a monument to bard Vysotsky shows him sitting in a relaxed pose with his guitar, and in the very center next to the main post office, built at the turn of the last century in Neo-Russian style, stands another figure in bronze—of a woman in a Victorian dress who is hurrying to drop a letter into a mailbox. This is the American Eleanor Lord Pray, a native of South Berwick in Maine. Before the revolution, Pray spent more than three decades here with her American husband turned local businessman. Every day for years she composed letters to relatives in America and China; they now constitute a detailed, if unofficial, chronicle of life in Vladivostok. (Her Letters from Vladivostok were recently published by the University of Washington Press.) Here they call her their “first blogger.”
Pray also sent her relatives pictures. Her texts and photographs show just how cosmopolitan this far-flung city was—more than anywhere in her native Maine, no doubt—with residents from Europe, China, Japan, and Korea living and working alongside Russians, Ukrainians, and indigenes. Vladivostok was, thus, a crossroads for a unique mixture of cultures from Europe, Asia, and even North America.
And that’s not all. On the previously mentioned Aleutskaya Street lived the most important regional entrepreneur of the time, Swiss-born Yuly (Jules) Briner, whose Far Eastern Shipping Company stood at the origins of Primorsky navigation. Yul Brynner, the future Oscar winner and star of The King and I and The Ten Commandments, was born here, in his grandfather’s home. Near the family house now stands a stone monument to the actor; its caption reads, “Yul Brynner, the King of Theater.” This seems fitting in such a city of inclusivity. Walking about, we encounter references, often uncanny, to other familiar places—Moscow in a train station, Kiev in a statue, San Francisco in a bridge, New York’s Fleet Week in gunnery sergeants and naval officers ambling around town.
The takeaway: Vladivostok, like the rest of Russia, though less dramatically, suffers from a split-personality syndrome. It is both open to the world and fearful, as it lies so close to China, a country with a population more than ten times Russia’s size.
One afternoon in our hotel’s lobby, we met Andrei Ostrovsky, the regional editor of Novaya Gazeta. The thin, tall, energetic Ostrovsky had traveled much in the Russian Far East and in China. To escape the ever-present din from the Chinese and Korean guests, we retired to a secluded table near the elevators. We asked him about the Chinese presence in town.
“We have about 300,000 Chinese visitors a year here,” he replied. “Most are tourists but some are investors, businessmen. Our Primorsky Krai has only six million people, but the province across the border has 100 million Chinese. We’ve had to make it illegal for them to enter Russia by car here, or our streets would be totally jammed.”
“Do you feel threatened here by the Chinese?” we asked, as we had asked in Blagoveshchensk, another city on the doorsteps of Asia. He gave the same answer we heard there: “No, I do not feel the ‘China threat’ you hear so much about.” He explained: “If the Chinese want something from us, they can just buy it. They hire Russians, which is good. The problem is they send their profits back to China, which doesn’t help us. But there’s no real xenophobia toward them. Our relations are all about doing business. The Chinese also come to study, too, at the Far Eastern University. We’re trying to attract investment and have just begun issuing electronic visas to twenty countries, including China.”
Tourism was also a major draw, he added, as “we have the most varied scenery in Russia. We have tigers, the Amur tigers! Plus killer whales off the coast.” Moreover, young Russians in Vladivostok study Chinese and other Asian languages to improve their chances of finding work. “Most of us have been to Japan or Korea or China, and much less to Moscow. We’re looking east; in fact, we’re looking everywhere.”
Surely the demographic trends of the region worried him, we insisted. But he denied this. “Look, the population in Primorsky Krai might be dropping, but Vladivostok’s isn’t. We have people arriving from all over the country. Historically, it was the risk-takers and entrepreneurial folk who came out here, and this is still true. They come to this special city of ours because they want to really achieve something. They are good for us and our economy.”