We gravitated toward a bronze statue, glinting with light reflected off the waters from Heihe, of a vigilant border patrol soldier standing guard, a fierce-fanged German shepherd by his side. Erected in 2007, the statue conveyed the renewed patriotic spirit of Putin’s Russia—the very idea, “We are all border guards here!” we heard expressed by the “drill sergeant” cleaning woman in the Kaliningrad Cathedral.
Kaliningrad resembled a third-rate European city—imitative of a hardscrabble town in East Germany—that was nonetheless militant, hiding its sense of inferiority behind a screen of belligerence. One would expect that Blagoveshchensk, seven time zones to the east, would show Chinese influence. After all, it occupies territory that a mere century and a half ago belonged to China. And yet, the town feels like just another corner of outback Russia.
Never mind the dust and power outages, Blagoveshchensk asserts its European identity. The town’s Lenin Street features—with signs in Latin letters—a Charlotte Café, the tobacco shop Sherlock, the men’s club “Fishka (Chip) Strip and Smoke,” the LaLique beauty salon, the Austrian coffeehouse Julius Meinl. The best, by far, is a French restaurant Bel-Étage, which displays in English a quote from the German writer Goethe: “Beauty everywhere is a welcome guest.”
Many of these establishments occupy space in buildings displaying nineteenth-century neo-Russian style, which, incidentally, originated in Germany and was encouraged by the czar’s court architect Konstantin Thon, himself of German origins. A number of the structures look out onto the gilt Byzantine spires and domes of the town’s main Orthodox cathedral.
Chinese restaurants, too, abound in Blagoveshchensk, yet in contrast to signs advertising European-style businesses, they announce themselves solely in Cyrillic. The only Chinese-Russian signs we observed graced the Heihe-sponsored racks for rental bikes and the Confucius Institute of the Blagoveshchensk State Pedagogical University. The latter, perhaps, not for long. With rumors of its closure surfacing, the institute’s future is now in doubt thanks to rising, Putin-inspired Russian cultural jingoism. In the 1990s the Chinese government backed the foundation of the Confucius Institute ostensibly to provide lessons in Chinese language and culture. Critics, however, worried that it aimed to support the “One Belt, One Road” strategy of augmenting China’s influence in neighboring countries. Eventually, the institute came under suspicion of being a “soft power” initiative to help China manipulate local affairs. The Russians have been pushing back against this effort. In recent years the Blagoveshchensk authorities have been investigating its records, which in Russia almost always signals the government’s displeasure.
There is a Chinese market—a shopping mall with a Russian name Avoska (String Bag) on the outskirts of town, where stores cater to Chinese traders and sell cheap Chinese goods. Although it sheltered Chinese staff, who gossiped in Mandarin as they slurped their instant noodles, all in all Avoska resembled so many other markets found in many Russian towns big and small.
On Lenin Street, few businesses orient themselves toward Russia’s Asian neighbor and Chinese visitors are rare. Except, perhaps, on Lenin Square, where Chinese tourists stand taking pictures of the granite reproduction of the onetime leader of the world’s working class. Yet, you see this all over Russia. Strangely, the central square and its statue evince neglect. Next to the weathered Lenin, though, stands a shiny, incongruous accretion from Putin’s era: a new monument to Saint Innokenty the Innocent, the famed nineteenth-century Orthodox missionary to Siberia and the Far East.
If Russians go to Heihe to shop, have meetings with Chinese clients, and visit the Chinese market, Blagoveshchensk remains, on the whole, oriented toward Europe, Moscow, or possibly Japan. In Ulan-Ude, by contrast, the Chinese language was everywhere: Buryats welcomed the Chinese building and owning business centers, hotels, and shops. However, we were told that Russian women in Blagoveshchensk have been increasingly marrying Chinese men, who are known to work hard, drink little, and rarely turn violent.
Nevertheless, in talking to locals, we discovered an interesting dichotomy—Russians don’t mind China as a neighboring country, but they are wary of the Chinese themselves.
“Do you fear that China may take over the Russian economy? Or even take over the region by moving in?” we asked one taxi driver.
“No,” he responded.
Ours, though, was a reasonable concern. China’s economy is the second-largest in the world, Russia’s is only twelfth. China’s military budget is three times Russia’s—$69 billion to $215 billion,3 and Heihe counts the same number of inhabitants as does Blagoveshchensk, but by Chinese standards, Heihe is tiny. In fact, the whole Russian Far East contains about six million people, which is slightly more than the population of Saint Petersburg. China’s Heilongjiang province has twenty times that number and, theoretically at least, could disgorge quite a few of them into Russia east of the Amur. No current stats exist on just how many Chinese live in Russia, but estimates range anywhere from a few hundred thousand to a few million. If the Chinese, hankering after space and natural resources, further increase their migration to Russia, they may test the Russian infrastructure dramatically—and possibly transform it. After all, with China prospering, they are no longer just transient workers and tourists; they increasingly control banks and businesses, from shopping malls to medical centers and construction firms. Moreover, in recent years the Chinese government, using the investment policy of a richer nation, has made a concerted effort to augment the number of Chinese citizens in Russia: we are not giving you our money unless you take our people, too.
Much of Russia’s Far East, from the Amur to the Pacific Ocean, once belonged to China, with towns having their own historical Chinese names—Blagoveshchensk was Hailanpao, Vladivostok was Haishenwai, Sakhalin was Kuye. Should the border ever open completely, these territories may simply dissolve back into China. Visa restrictions currently impede mass Chinese entry into Russia.
“What if the Chinese do what the Russians did to them in the 1850s?” we wondered.
Then, a small contingent of Cossacks from the Baikal region wrested from the Chinese the left bank of the Amur around Blagoveshchensk (then Hailanpao). Since 1858 the Amur has been the mutually recognized border between Russia and China, and Blagoveshchensk began its official, czar-blessed existence that year. The Cossacks sought gold and found it. More Cossacks and gold prospectors soon followed, increasing the population of Blagoveshchensk to about eight thousand by 1877. The newcomer Russians eventually did brisk business, selling their precious metal to the Chinese across the water. In the early twentieth century peasants from central Russia moved in and began farming successfully, further securing the region for the czar.
When Chekhov visited Blagoveshchensk, he described it in letters to friends as a rich and liberal town. Yet the locals, he wrote—being mostly Cossacks, prospectors, and fugitives—were loud, aggressive, and fearless, just as one might expect in a frontier town. And they were predictably limited: “People here only talk about gold; those who buy, those who sell … and so on.” Nevertheless, Blagoveshchensk was “as liberal as it gets, so far away from the center.… Forget Europe.… There is no one here to arrest; and there is no place farther away to exile.”4 (The twentieth century would prove him wrong.)
If Blagoveshchensk has, since Chekhov’s day, lost its lauded “liberalism,” it has retained much of its crude, even aggressive, frontier spirit. The city’s Regional Museum, located in a turn-of-the-century ornate redbrick building that was once the Kunst and Albert German–owned shopping center, hints at this by showing the Russian takeover of Chinese Outer Manchuria as something similar to the French mission civilisatrice in Africa or the settling of North America’s west.
The reality was simple: the Chinese could not resist the well-armed warrior Cossacks, whose raison d’être was the conquest and defense of land for the Russian monarch. The resulting 1858 Treaty of Aigun granted the expanding Russian Empire vast new territories in eastern Siberia at the
expense of the declining China. The treaty legalized Russia’s settlements east of the Amur but was seen as unjust by the Chinese—it set the stage for a Russo-Chinese war, and, more than a century later, the 1969 Sino-Soviet conflict over Damansky Island (Zhenbao or “Precious” in Chinese) further downriver.
The museum depicts other skirmishes as the massacres of Blagoveshchensk, highlighting the heroic Russian defense against barbaric Asiatic hordes. On display are fascinating old photographs showing the Cossacks, gold prospectors, fur trappers, shopkeepers, and tradespeople as missionaries of the good. The Chinese, on the other hand, are portrayed as strange and inferior, similar to how Hollywood movies once depicted them as subordinate “coolies.”
On the other side, in the Heihe history museum, a guide in Blagoveshchensk told us disdainfully, the Chinese claimed their territory was stolen by the Russians in the nineteenth century. Before the Russian gold miners, there were Chinese gold miners, traders, and farmers during the Manchu Qing dynasty.
She went on, becoming quite worked up: “We allow the Chinese into our museum, but theirs is closed to Russians and other Europeans. They hide sensitive and inconvenient historical facts about Russo-Chinese conflicts over the Amur region, which we won. They depict Russians as murderous brutes. And who are they to call us lao maozi, hairy barbarians?”
“Why wouldn’t they permit Russians to enter their museum?” we asked.
“They want to avoid questions or debates. Their perception of facts is at odds with the current friendly relations between our two countries. For the time being, their history is reserved for them alone.”
What the Blagoveshchensk museum unequivocally displays is nothing less than a “white empire complex”—with people of the West (and Russians, for the Chinese, are, culturally, westerners) superior to those elsewhere. On and off throughout the Middle Ages Russia fought with Europe over influence and territory. Despite the two-century Mongol yoke, Russia retained its European identity, even as it rejected aspects of the West, including Catholicism, all the while admiring the West’s technological progress.
In this, Russia is not the east, it is the edge of the West—the un-Western part of the West, perhaps—its relationship to Europe infected with a strain of envy, even of hostility. Kaliningrad wants to be German, even if Russians there might patriotically deny this. But few Russians want Russia to be China.
In his letters, Chekhov patronizingly described the Chinese as “good-natured and amusing, recalling kind pet animals.” Blagoveshchensk’s inhabitants do not speak of the Chinese this way now, but still their attitude reflects strong prejudice: the Chinese, for them, are more cunning than kind; they are pushy humans rather than pet animals.
* * *
For most of the twentieth century the Russo-Chinese border was closed, and Blagoveshchensk languished as a semi-industrial and remote city. The Soviets, with their planned economy and the collectivization of agriculture, wrought havoc on the local production of foodstuffs and consumer goods, but so did Yeltsin’s economic shock therapy and his chaotic privatization program. The result: when Yeltsin visited Blagoveshchensk in 1994 he was taken aback by the poverty he encountered.
One “Potemkin” food shop in town had been stocked for his inspection, but he ordered his motorcade to halt by a store he noticed by chance along his route. Seeing nothing on the shelves, he grew angry.
“The Amur has more than three hundred kinds of fish in it, and here there are three cans of sardines!” he shouted.
As Ostap Bender of The Twelve Chairs once said, “The rescue of drowning people is the responsibility of the drowning people themselves.” With little help from the newly democratic state, Russians, eager to become capitalists, were already, at the time of Yeltsin’s visit, taking full advantage of the abundant wares available in the communist, yet capitalist, China. People from Blagoveshchensk and nearby areas began flocking aboard shuttle boats to Heihe. There they purchased inexpensive food, electronics, and clothes and brought them across the river to be resold in impromptu markets at home. (Yeltsin, had he visited these, might have had a different impression of Blagoveshchensk.)
Here and elsewhere in Russia, such traders became known as chelnoki (“suitcase” or “shuttle” traders). A bronze statue of a bespectacled (and thus presumably educated) man lugging suitcases of merchandise now stands in downtown Blagoveshchensk; its inscription reads: “For the hard work and optimism of the Amur’s entrepreneurs.” The chelnoki included almost anyone, from scientists to doctors of philosophy to librarians to factory workers and military analysts. Suffering from the collapse of Soviet-era economic structures and hit hard by Yeltsin’s shock therapy, Russians from all walks of life found they needed to make a living any way they could. Shuttle trading offered them a chance to do so.
In recent years, Russia has touted its “pivot” toward China, and especially fraternal relations have prevailed between Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping, masters of the world’s largest formerly communist or communist giants. A special arrangement between Russia and China allows Russian citizens to travel visa-free between Blagoveshchensk and Heihe on the ferries making the trip several times a day. Not all the chelnoki are Russians going to China; many Chinese are crossing over to Russia to stock up on vodka, textiles, and foodstuffs. The Russians operate their ferries for Russians and everyone else with a proper visa—occasional foreign visitors, citizens of former Soviet republics; the Chinese boats take only Chinese nationals. Jeff, an American citizen, didn’t have a visa to make the trip, so Nina had to travel alone.
This is her story.
The Russia “Made in China”
The next muggy morning, still unsettled by the blackout, I decided to venture across the river. Would this be a pleasant jaunt? After all, the distance was short, relations between Russia and China good, and the visa-free travel arrangement should have cut red tape to a minimum.
Blagoveshchensk’s River Station, a brick-and-glass box of a building, was orderly and easy to navigate. There was not even a line to buy the 2,300-ruble ($40) ticket. With ticket in hand, I moved on to the passport control booths. The hour was early, but in front of the booths, tight-knit groups of grumpy chelnoki—Russians with empty bags and Chinese toting giant, blue-white-red checkered satchels—crowded and shoved. I plunged in but repeatedly found myself pushed back, barred from advancing by the phalanx of traders. Alone, I was no match for them.
Twenty, thirty minutes passed. I was getting desperate. The boat’s departure time was nearing, but I, shoved this way and that, was no closer to the booths than when I entered the fray. A young man in a parallel line took pity and encouraged me to cut ahead of an old Chinese man just in front of me dragging three huge suitcases.
“He’s only Chinese,” he said, gesturing to me. I couldn’t do it.
Lyrics from a Soviet song from the 1950s came to mind: “All people are brothers, so I will hug a Chinese person.” Putin and Xi Jingping might be hugging each other, I thought, but no such amity was to be found here on the border between their two countries. Nevertheless, I reached passport control, got the requisite stamp in my travel document, and soon found myself pressed by the rushing crowd out of the station, over the gangplank, and aboard the ferry.
More and more chelnoki piled on behind me. But finally, a deckhand tossed the gangplank aboard the dock and slammed shut the gunwale door. With a toot of the horn, a roar from the engines, and a lurch, we were on our way, pressed far too intimately into one another. The ferry took fifteen minutes to chug across the Amur. As we neared the other side, a young man with kind eyes and a rare, old-fashioned sounding name, Innokenty (just like the Siberian missionary), offered me a blank Chinese entry form.
“Just hang on to me,” he said, offering his arm.
Innokenty turned out to be the son of bioengineers who took to shuttle trading after losing their university jobs during the Yeltsin years. He was leading a group of ten other traders. I lucked out! I could join his flock.
&nbs
p; The horn blared again when we neared the port. As the boat maneuvered itself to the dock, the deckhand threw open the gunwale door and tossed down the gangplank. Our crowd rushed ashore, across the asphalt pier toward the customs building and through the glass doors. It was larger, more modern, and airier than its Blagoveshchensk equivalent. Inside, green-uniformed Chinese officers stood guard, indifferent to the frenzied Russians surging past. In the melee I lost Innokenty but navigated to passport control on my own.
“Nalog! Nado nalog! [Need to pay customs tax],” the officer barked in Russian, perhaps the only words he knew of the language.
I fought my way against the elbows and knees of the Chinese, mostly men, cutting the line and the Russian chelnoki battling them to move ahead. I broke free and ran to the payment booth near the entrance. Even in this rigmarole of immigration control I marveled at the cultural contrasts. The Russians looked at the Chinese shoppers with disdain; the Chinese treated the Russians with utter indifference, as if they were just obstacles to be overcome to reach a certain goal. But no time to waste, receipt in hand, I plunged back into the crowd. Panting, I made it to the passport line again and presented the officer with the receipt.
He waved, “Net, net [No, no].” Apparently their computer system had just gone down, which he and his comrades interpreted as a sign from heaven that lunchtime had arrived. They all stood up, formed a line, and marched out. Other officers pushed the remaining hundred of us back to the glass doors. No explanation.
The wait didn’t seem to be worth it. I gave up. After all, I just experienced the flesh-and-bone reality of “fraternal” Chinese-Russian relations; that was my purpose here, not shuttle trading. I had yet to officially cross into China, but the battle to enter was too much; I decided to return to the boat. I set off across the blissfully empty pier.
In Putin's Footsteps Page 19