We asked Vladimir why he left Kamchatka.
“I’m sick of caviar,” he replied. “It’s hard to get, and to me it tastes like salty red fire in your mouth. Sometimes we would get so much of it that my wife used it as garden fertilizer. Yet for everyone else it was hugely expensive.”
Vladimir told us that he had long served as a crew member aboard huge trawlers, often disused craft ready for the junkyard, but bought from Norway or Japan at cut-rate prices, and not always sailing under Russian flags. The captains often, in years past at least, violated the law, heading out into international waters to fish for king crab and salmon; operating in other protected zones or during months when fishing was illegal; or, worst of all, in dangerous weather.
“We surely have an incentive to take risks, earning up to $150,000 a year,” Vladimir explained. In doing so, boat owners kept their activities secret from the port authorities and tended to ignore regulations meant to ensure the safety of their crews. The Federal Fishing Agency now administers the business, so illegal fishing, he said, has diminished. Nevertheless, “things in the trade were as chaotic as the Wild West capitalism we had in Russia in the 1990s,” when rules were few, profits high.
He was already tiring of practicing his profession in such punishing conditions when the capsizing, in 2015, of a trawler took sixty lives and convinced him that he needed to move on with his life. He and his wife moved to Crimea, a “gift from our great president … a dream, really.”
The dream had faded since then, though, Vladimir admitted, and so had his admiration for the president, who failed to deliver on promises of the bucolic life described by Chekhov. The Russian government called on Russians to settle the Far East and launched a similar campaign to revive the cultivation of apples, pears, and cherries in Crimea on the Black Sea. Ten-foot-tall apple trees had been left unattended for decades, reflecting the ruinous legacy of Soviet collective agriculture. But with lands now handed over to new Russian owners, the Russian authorities plan to restore to glory the Crimean apples—an uncommonly tasty variety.
“Yet the five-year subsidies,” Vladimir complained, “are not enough.” The old trees had been neglected for too long—“by the Ukrainians,” he added resentfully—to render decent crops, and the new ones they planted on their eight-acre lots would take a few years before they were ready for harvesting. At the moment, he said, the orchard hardly produced anything. Their second crop, gathered in 2017, was meager owing to frosts and summer hail. Whatever they grew, fortunately, a local cooperative bought, and at prices “higher than those for foreign-grown bananas…. For now, the sanctions from the West and Russian countersanctions, when we no longer buy Polish apples, have helped local farmers sell on the Russian market, but subsidies they receive will soon be discontinued. And if the weather is poor again, we will not be able to survive.” He chuckled. “The tough job of fishing still leaves you more in control of your fortune.”
All the uncertainty involved with agriculture has taken its toll on Vladimir, and since our talk he had signed up as a fisherman on a trawler in the Black Sea.
Beside the fishing industry, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky hosts the military port where Russia’s Pacific fleet is moored. It is also, at least theoretically, a tourist town, a place from which aficionados of rugged outdoor sports embark on adventures into the pristine wilds. We, however, would remain within its urban confines, so we set out to walk, always finding the soft azure waters of the bay within view and the maritime breeze refreshing and welcome given the heat of the summer day.
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is young for a Russian city, having been founded as the settlement of Petropavlovsk by Vitus Bering (a Dane on a mission for the czar, after whom the strait and sea separating the United States and Russia were named) in 1740, and receiving the status of city seventy-two years after that. Backset on three sides by green sopki, with a concave seafront, the city sits only a two-hour flight from Tokyo, yet there is little discernible Asian influence, with, rather, a plethora of kebab eateries overseen by owners hailing from Russia’s mostly Muslim Northern Caucasus region. True restaurants, we discovered, are few. Grocery stores brim not, as one would expect, with fresh seafood, but rather with fish one might call, charitably, in a phrase from Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, “secondhand fresh.” The state, as Bulgakov noted, sold truly fresh fish in Torgsin stores, where only foreigners and party apparatchiks had the right to shop and had to pay in hard currency. He wrote of the ridiculous incongruity between the communists’ promise of a better, more just world, and the government’s practice of restricting the sale of certain foodstuffs to a privileged few. Torgsin stores exist no more, of course, but the victory of capitalism in Russia now means that fresh fish goes to those who pay top prices for it, which means to big cities in Russia or abroad. Our tour of seafood stores put us in mind of Yeltsin and his moment of discovery in Blagoveshchensk—in a town supposedly chock-full of fresh fish, fresh fish is, in fact, in “deficit.”
Except, that is, in one store where we stopped, a grocery coop affiliated with the Lenin Fishery Kolkhoz. There we came across quite a few varieties of salmon and at least a half-dozen types of red caviar ranging in taste from highly salty to hardly salty, with all available for the absurdly low price of 1,000 rubles ($16) a kilogram (2.2 pounds). We remarked on our delight to a stall owner named Natalia, who was busy ordering her wares in a large freezer. In the Soviet era, she told us, centralization and a state-dominated market hardly helped the caviar business, but there were, back then, “many more species of fish, rainbow trout, char, and certainly other seafood products you could buy. You could just head out to a fishing village in the morning and buy everything fresh. These days many suppliers opt out of this coop and try to sell on their own”—something prohibited by law, as fish stocks have diminished with overfishing. At least here they still have red caviar; in the Caspian Sea and Volga, the most prized caviar of all, black, has almost disappeared.
In Lenin Square, in the shadow of the imposing, five-story granite-and-glass Kamchatka Krai Government Headquarters, and not far from a statue of Lenin striking a defiant pose with a cape flaring as if fluttering in the wind, young families push baby carriages and teenagers practice their skateboarding moves. The leader of the world’s proletariat shares a space with the recently constructed red-marble column topped by a double-headed eagle—the sight we no longer found surprising. Beneath them, coffee vendors dispense their beverage from stands, and locals sell ice cream from rickety carts. The unmistakable atmosphere of a seaside resort resembling that of Sevastopol in Crimea prevails. One would expect decent beaches here, but a disappointing, gravelly strip of sand runs along the water; people sit and stand tanning, with few venturing into the possibly less than clean sea. Elsewhere, the government has restricted access to the coast for security reasons; this is, after all, a border zone. Although the city hosts all sorts of tourists, the paucity of amenities recalls a salient fact: most visitors use Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky as a stopover on their way out, by Jeep or by helicopter, into the wilderness yawning just beyond the city’s boundaries.
On Leninskaya Street we came upon a statue, erected only in 2008, of Saint Nicholas the Miracle Worker. In accordance with church tradition, the saint faces east, but somewhat untraditionally, he holds aloft a sword in one hand and a miniature cathedral in the other. The message: the formidable holy potentate, backed by the true faith, is warding off invaders. (Legend has it that Saint Nicholas fended off the Mongols for a time.) The monument put us in mind of the aggressive angels who, so said local Solovetsky Islands lore, beat up a fisherman’s wife because she accidentally strayed onto God’s territory, and of the mighty bronze Saint Nicholas—also armed with a sword and a cathedral—rising above the Preloga River embankment in Kaliningrad. A ways farther down the street, an old, gray Stalinist behemoth of a building, decorated with red hammer-and-sickle flags, hosts both the headquarters of the Communist Party and the Gazprom Bank, the epitome of Russia’s capitalist wealth. This seems like a puzzling juxtaposition, but it is not: Gazprom, in supplying hydrocarbons to Europe, was a principle source of hard currency in Soviet days, just as it is now. Political power and money go together.