In one respect, for the handful of museums near the road, the new highway is a boon. Construction crews, cutting through low hills, have unearthed much of interest: mammoth bones, the fossils of giant elk, and the tools and detritus of prehistoric hunters. These have added fresh interest to dusty museum collections. But for all that, the new road has not brought many new visitors. Cars along the road remain few, and their drivers in a hurry. A favorite pastime of local police is to drive a borrowed truck at a snail’s pace up a no-passing hill, nab any cars that overtake it, and take the truck down to the bottom of the hill again for another run. Aside from the police, the chief users of the road are the mafia, ferrying drugs to the Russian Far East and bringing out the caviar of the Amur kaluga sturgeon—as well as goods, and sometimes people, smuggled from China. Katerina Pavlova called Route 58 a “criminal conveyor belt.”
And now I, too, was on Route 58. I was on the outskirts of Khabarovsk, and the road was rather busy. Grigory—everyone called him Grisha—was driving, and we were in (what else?) a secondhand Japanese Toyota. The Russian Far East is nearly boundless, but Grisha preferred to home in on the car in front and stick doggedly close to its rear bumper. From this position, he ran through a litany of occasions when the road cops had stopped him and fined him for minute infractions. Central white lines, which forbid passing, are painted seemingly arbitrarily on Far Eastern roads. A police favorite, Grisha said, was to catch you beginning to overtake even inches before the end of the solid white line.
“Fucking cops,” said Grisha. And, without warning, he stepped hard on the accelerator and veered to the right, not overtaking the car ahead from the outside lane, but rather charging along on the inside on what counted, in the abstract, for a hard shoulder. In the space of a couple of minutes, he twice repeated the maneuver until held up by a hulking, slow-moving coal truck ahead of us. I pined for a more sedate driving style.
“You know, Grisha, had you tried that in England, you would have ended up with no license, and quite possibly in prison.”
“You’ve got to be joking?” And then he spread a smile. “Well, at least you can say this for our fucking police: they don’t mess with ordinary folk just trying to get along in life.”
“Maybe. And maybe others aren’t as good a driver as you.” A combination of potholes, vodka, and a sense of fatality make Russia’s roads among the world’s most dangerous. “Grisha, I don’t want to be another statistic.”
“Well, you should take that stupid seatbelt off, for a start. They kill you.” This was an orthodoxy in the Russian Far East. And then, without warning, he gunned the car and pulled violently out to the left from behind the truck in front of us.
“Grisha, NO!” Two hundred yards ahead, another truck was grinding toward us: I could clearly see the driver sweating over the wheel. Meanwhile, a car was barreling past him. This had all the makings of a four-vehicle smash. To Grisha, sitting on the right, this was hidden from view until almost too late. He swerved back to his waiting station a split second before car and truck roared past us.
“It is the Russian way of overtaking,” Grisha explained, as if to a simpleton. “It’s much safer. Each place has its own ways, of course.” And then, an explosion: “Damn the bloody Russians telling us to do things the Western way! They’re so flaky, those types who pretend to be Western. My girlfriend says her boss has banned them from taking naps at work. Is it true they don’t take sleeps in the office in the United States? That’s all very well. But when Russian bosses strut about pretending to be so up-to-the-minute and banning naps: that’s just idiotic. Russians pretending to be Western: they just look ridiculous!”
The soundscape of all but the smallest settlement in the Russian Far East is colored by two things. The first is the relentless beeping, whirring, burping, and siren wailing of the alarms of stationary cars. I never did fathom why Russian alarms go off so readily. They fray the nerves of travelers, and keep them awake all night staring at the ceiling of cheap hotels, but locals appear to have become desensitized to the sound. On two occasions in broad daylight I saw a drunk breaking into a car. Passersby did not protest.
The other sound, as you lie abed in the early morning, is the high simpering voice of a perfectly polite Japanese woman echoing through the neighborhood. She is begging ladies and gentlemen, in her native language, to be careful as she turns right, turns left, or reverses. The woman inhabits ubiquitous mini-me trucks from Japan. Their dainty form matches the capillary-size back lanes of Tokyo, but they are out of scale in the Russian Far East. The trucks bear their orginal livery, in hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hosakawa and Co., plumbers of Kumamoto on Kyushu Island, have been pressed into service carrying stocky fishermen in camouflage overalls down to the river, their bulking forms pressed against the windows, steering wheel crushed between giant hands, the driver’s nose against the windshield. Eight out of ten vehicles in the Russian Far East are Japanese castoffs, with steering wheels placed on the right, the “wrong” side for Russia’s roads. If you want to know where all the right-hand-drive Toyotas, Nissans, and Suzukis from the 1990s and the 2000s are, Russia provides the answer. (As for the models from the 1970s and 1980s, they are either in Rangoon or Kabul.)
Back in Japan, where all cars are gleaming, I had wondered what happened to the older sorts and once went in search of them. I went to Niigata, the main port city on the main island’s western side, on the Sea of Japan. There, in parking lots that stretched in serried ranks along the quays to a vanishing point, were Japan’s hand-me-downs—a no-man’s-land punctuated by the odd tin hut bearing the shingle of an Armenian or Russian trader. Inside, these men sat morosely on decrepit furniture. No car carriers from Vladivostok came to the quays these days, they said; a once booming Russian car trade had collapsed. They swore graphically at Vladimir Putin.
It was a time when Route 58 should have been budding into promise, and especially for Russia’s importers of secondhand cars. The new road should have been the answer to the dream of rattle-free vehicles. Putin thought differently. His cronies were carmakers back in the Russian heartland around Moscow, cars so shoddy no one wanted to buy them. Putin decreed that the problem was not the Russian cars, but the imports of Japanese secondhand cars flooding into Vladivostok and beetling west along the new highway to European Russia. Putin issued a simple decree. He banned the imports. The consequence was one of very few open revolts during Putin’s rule. Vladivostok’s car dealers, their families, and even their customers took to the streets of the port city in numbers. Incensed at the impudence, Putin ordered the local security forces to put an end to the protests. The militias declined. Putin flew in the Federation Guards, in effect the president’s loyal palace guard. When the crack forces showed up on Vladivostok’s streets, the city’s militias sided with the locals. There was an almighty fracas, but the outcome was never in doubt: broken bones, bloody noses, hundreds of arrests, and an end to the protests. The Japanese car trade has not properly resumed. Like the early Muravievan hopes for commerce and prosperity on the Amur, the promise of Route 58 has come to little.
• • •
Khabarovsk, named in honor of the Cossack who opened the Amur three centuries earlier, was founded six hundred miles below Blagoveshchensk, on a great sweep of the Amur River opposite the point where the Chinese claim to the right bank gave out. The city is laid out along three ridges that run in parallel toward the Amur. On the central ridge a boulevard still carries the name of Muraviev the conqueror, the latter-day Yermak.
Grisha was driving me down the broad boulevard now, the evening sun picking the decorated brickwork out in relief, and after our desolate road trip through badlands and broken towns, China always just off to the south, I rubbed my eyes at a settled, European tableau: young couples strolling arm in arm or buying ice creams as they wandered down to the riverfront; impossibly long-legged blondes checking their reflection in the shop windows; scarved worshippers creeping into the blue-domed c
hurch of Theotokos, Mother of God.
Nineteenth-century Khabarovsk began life as a garrison town guarding the new territories of the Russian Far East. The site lacked Vladivostok’s vulnerability to naval attack, and was less exposed than was Blagoveshchensk to possible hostilities emanating from Manchuria. Khabarovsk soon began to flourish. At the department store of Kunst & Albers on Muraviev-Amursky Boulevard sales clerks showed off Swiss timepieces and the latest cuts from Savile Row. The firm moved into shipping and insurance, and imported farm machinery for those opening up the Amur Valley for cultivation. It soon had branches not only in the Priamur—the Amur district—but in Kobe and Nagasaki in Japan as well.
The Russian Far East, wrote an observer more than a century ago, “acts like an independent country.” It was also, almost from the start, an amazingly diverse one. The Priamur was filling with border Cossacks, whose stanitsa—self-governing communities—were strung out along the river. The Cossacks always got the best land, and came to be seen, and often resented, by other settlers as something of a privileged caste. Very quickly Cossacks rented out their lands to new arrivals, assuming the position of the hated landlords of European Russia. Later, the Soviets took to persecuting them.
Like the Chinese, Koreans ran fresh crops into Khabarovsk from ground rented from Cossacks or newly settled Russian or Ukrainian peasants. Where the Chinese failed to assimilate and rarely stayed long, the Koreans sought Russian citizenship, learned the Russian language, and got baptized into the Orthodox Church. They wore Western coats and boots, and intermarried with Russians. Soon there was a Russian-Korean bourgeoisie of tradesmen, shopkeepers, and schoolteachers. Numbers of Koreans swelled after Japan annexed Korea in 1910. Later, Koreans suffered disproportionately during Stalin’s purges.
Han Chinese outnumbered Koreans. They had for centuries carried on a special trade in the forested mountain range of the Sikhote-Alin, between the Ussuri River and the Pacific coast. The forests were a rich source of the wild ginseng root. It was—still is—in great demand in China as a stimulant and aphrodisiac. Chinese in remote settlements were organized into self-governing guilds, buying ginseng off aboriginals and supplying provisions and credit in return—a dependence that often led to locals’ enslavement. Deer antlers, ground up, were another Chinese aphrodisiac from the Sikhote-Alin. And in Chinese clearings, opium grew.
When Beijing eased restrictions on migration to Manchuria in 1878, the flow of Han Chinese spilled over as a flood into the Russian territories of the Far East. In Khabarovsk at the turn of the century, one in three of the population was Chinese. For all that, Russia billed its annexation and settlement of the Amur lands as an exercise in state building; foreigners were indispensable, Chinese above all. Merchants from Shanghai and Canton filled Russian bazaars. They opened bars and ran gambling dens. In Khabarovsk, the Kitaiskaya sloboda (“Chinese village”) ran along the Amur’s bank, with another Chinese settlement behind the railway station. The Trans-Siberian Railway and the Ussuri Railway, linking Khabarovsk with Vladivostok, could not have been built without Chinese coolie labor, overseen by Chinese foremen. In Khabarovsk, Manza, the Russian Far Eastern slang for Chinese, ran the stores and the river piers. Khabarovsk, with its turn-of-the-century brickwork and decorative tiling, is the most European city in the Far East. The bricks and the tiles were all fired in Chinese kilns.
Among the Russians, a Far Eastern esprit de corps formed at the turn of the century, with a strong intellectual flavor. Some thought of themselves as amurtsy in open emulation of the Amur spirit that flourished around Muraviev decades earlier. Soon, however, the word transmuted into zaamurtsy—“trans-Amurians,” for Manchuria was by now as much part of what the great historian of the region, John Stephan, called a cosmopolitan ecumene in the Russian Far East. The area’s vigorous intellectual life did not run along the familiar lines of metropolitan Russia. “Conservative” and “liberal” had little meaning as labels when exiles, military men, and administrators mixed so freely. The zaamurtsy were Orientalists who, like Russia’s Far Eastern businessmen, moved between the Priamur, Manchuria, China, Korea, and Japan.
There was much pride in what the region had to offer in terms of ethnographic and scientific wealth, and those who were involved in uncovering it took pleasure in having interests, even obsessions, that were very different from those of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Among the intelligentsia, political exiles played a powerful part. Lev Yakovlevich Shternberg, a mentor of Arseniev’s, had been exiled to the Russian Far East in 1889 for his membership in the People’s Will, the terror group that had assassinated Alexander II. He was passionate in studying the Nivkh and the Ainu tribes on Sakhalin, notable for their ceremonial bear sacrifices. The Polish nationalist Bronisław Piłsudski, brother of Poland’s great statesman Józef Piłsudski, was another ethnographer exile. He threw himself into work for the newly established Amur Society.
The most passionate of the zaamurtsy, Vladimir Klavdievich Arseniev, son of a former serf, became director of the Khabarovsk Museum of Regional Studies in 1910. Into it he poured the fruits of his countless collecting expeditions into the Sikhote-Alin range and along Amur tributaries: plants, butterflies, animal skins, Nanai fishskin anoraks, decorated wooden drinking bowls fashioned by the Udege, Nivkh baskets, the skin drums and shambolic outfits of shamans, finely wrought birch-bark canoes. The museum remains the finest for hundreds of miles. Though, as we shall see, Russians have more recently not been as comfortable about some of the ethnographic conclusions as were the earlier, and more open-minded, zaamurtsy.
The Russians exploring the archeology and anthropology of their new Far Eastern lands, Arseniev included, were, more than anything, struck by the powerful Chinese influence that appeared for millennia to have shaped local cultures, and during certain periods dominated them.
At a site in the southern Primorye, a passionate ethnographer, Ivan Lopatkin, uncovered substantial fortifications and earthworks. On top of a grave tumulus he found an enormous stone turtle, with a depression in its back as if made to accept a heavy granite stele. You can see nearly identical turtles in Beijing’s Forbidden City, symbolizing longevity, strength, endurance. Nearby, Lopatkin also found four stone tigers, marking the corners of a large square. Locals told Lopatkin that the ruins were the remains of Fengtangchang, a city in which Chinese princes once resided. Members of the Amur Society wanted to roll back the layers concealing this Chinese influence and give it due credit. There was a contemporary political angle to championing of all things Chinese: these zaamurtsy abhored the official racism in the Far East toward all “yellows.”
Arseniev, too, uncovered just such a turtle as Lopatkin’s, at one of more than two hundred archeological sites he described during the course of his immense investigations. The stele atop it commemorated a clearly Sinicized Jurchen chief from the twelfth century. At that time, the Jurchen actually ruled northern China, as the Jin dynasty. To press home the Chinese cultural associations in the region, Arseniev brought the turtle back to the Khabarovsk museum. In an old copy of Arseniev’s book Russen und Chinesen (I could locate only a German version), I had found the century-old black-and-white photograph of this turtle, sitting in a bay outside the museum. It was topped by the stele and flanked by other stone inscriptions in bold Chinese script, as well as by two carved monkeys on stone columns. Later, in Khabarovsk, I went in search of Arseniev’s turtle.
• • •
The regional museum is a fine redbrick building in the High Victorian manner, just behind the river and park over which Muraviev-Amursky on his pedestal looks haughtily toward China. To my amazement, the turtle was still in its bay, though great cracks suggested that at some point it had been broken and then stuck together again. The monkeys were there too. The old stele still sat atop the turtle, but it had been broken and reassembled, too, while a skin of cement wash had been troweled over the Chinese writing. The stone inscriptions that once flanked the animal were nowhere to be seen.
We looked down at the note together, and then up at the count. A brief silence. And then Nikolay Ivanovich told me that only just before he was appointed to the museum, Lenin still grimaced from the same pedestal. Muraviev had been toppled long before, in the 1920s, when his deeds were denounced as naked imperialism. But neither Lenin nor Stalin proposed giving back the Amur lands to China.
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