I didn’t get far.
“Hey! Hey!” shouted Chinese border guards, waving their automatic rifles at me, delivering incomprehensible commands in Mandarin. I halted, saying I didn’t understand. The sole female officer among at least five men stepped forward, speaking English somewhat and giving me a sympathetic smile.
“One minute, my boss,” she said, gesturing to the man at her side. He snatched my passport, slowly flipped through its pages, and then shoved it back into the young woman’s hands.
“So, can I go back to Russia?” I asked.
“Sorry,” she replied.
“Sorry for what? I just want to go back to the boat!”
The other officers laughed and pointed at me. Who was I, a Russian, and a Russian woman at that—I imagined them to be thinking—to protest and demand answers to simple questions?
So, I was trapped between Russia and China, two militaristic states with little respect for the individual. I felt helpless, reduced to nothing. Here either the state or the mobs of citizens would crush you.
“Don’t make such a scene!” said my fellow Russians berating me, fearful that the Chinese would take out their displeasure at my protest on them, too.
The guards pressed us back until we could go no further, cramming us together in a sweaty mass. One hour passed. Then two. Then three.…
I thought about what I was experiencing here on this far-flung border: the chelnoki hated me just because I was there, I was a competitor for space, for air to breathe, and for a turn at the passport booth. Why weren’t they furious with the officials and their callous treatment? They were brought up in a country where not only the mighty state takes all, but citizens count as little more than an inconvenience, as pestering peons. The peons, scared of the state, vent their frustration on each other, quick to turn on those who buck the established order, on those nagging reminders that resistance is still possible—but such acts entail risk. Besides, the chelnoki have it hard enough: they are perpetually in search of a client or a deal, hauling heavy luggage, paying bribes to handlers, competing with their fellows, and at times fearing for their lives. To do what they do, one needs strength, cunning, and sharp survival skills.
Being a shuttle trader “kills the humanity in you,” one woman in line said to me, sighing, as she nevertheless shoved her way into my space. “If I were without bags, like you, I’d just squeeze in.” She gave me a sinister smile. “But then, we’d beat you up, of course.”
Weary of all this conflict, I stepped back.
Finally, lunchtime ended. The guards marched back in and slowly started letting people pass.
I waited my turn patiently, dearly sick of Heihe, without having even officially entered it.
I almost made it to the passport booth. But one of the officers remembered me and my rebellion outside. He stepped in, blocked my entrance, and let a man in a camouflage T-shirt with a portrait of Putin in military fatigues pass before me.
The crowd cheered. The officer jabbed his finger at me, shouting, “Plokhaya! Plokhaya! [Bad! Bad!].”
This was too much for me to bear. After hours of such humiliation and scorn, I broke into tears.
The officer was stunned by this expression of humanity and, suddenly, let me through.
I stepped up to the booth and handed the official my passport and receipt, which he began examining. On the counter was a little digital monitor wishing you a good day in Chinese, Russian, and English and asking to rate your experience at the border by pressing either a smiley face or sad face.
I pressed sad. Does anyone ever press the smiley?
The official shoved my documents toward me and waved me on. I walked on toward the terminal’s doors, passing a pink stone plinth marking the border.
I still wanted to return to Russia. I glanced at the departure hall; more chaos reigned there. Crowds of Russians and Chinese were pouring in, dragging their unwieldy bundles of merchandise and amassing by the passport booths.
I stood there, dejected. Possibly my sad countenance prompted a passing striking-looking young woman, tall and willowy, to ask if she could help me. I told her what I had been through. Introducing herself as Tatyana, she nodded sympathetically at my recounted travails and encouraged me to go into town.
“It is usually much quicker, but can also be worse! If you go back now, you’ll be here for another two or three hours! So take a cab and see what’s here. Just tell the driver ‘Huaifu,’ pay no more than ten yuan [$1.59].”
It turned out that Tatyana was a student at Tomsk University and had been visiting Heihe with her parents, who were standing next to her. They smiled at me. Her father was Russian, her mother Chinese; they seemed like a loving couple. I thanked Tatyana and took her advice. I stepped out of the terminal and hailed a taxi, my faith in humanity restored.
My driver was a woman. (I learned there are quite a few female drivers in Heihe.) She drove me to that mysterious Huaifu along the embankment, where people were fishing, strolling, and posing for photographs with Blagoveshchensk as a backdrop, where Lenin and Europe seemed so close. Heihe itself looked well kept and cleaner than other Chinese cities, resembling a small Taiwan suburb rather than Shanghai. It was also green. High-rises along the Amur loomed above landscaped parks and squares.
But for a shopping paradise it seemed rather empty on a weekday afternoon. My cab rolled along almost alone on the road, except for a few cyclists pedaling the bright green bikes available for hire from curbside racks. In Blagoveshchensk such racks stand empty; the streets are too dug up and potholed to make biking much fun.
Just a village a few decades ago, Heihe, following the Soviet collapse, oriented itself toward trade with Russia and became a booming frontier town. It makes Blagoveshchensk seem poor indeed, though the Russian city looks more settled, with old trees lining the roads and a less mercantile atmosphere.
Ten minutes later we pulled up in front of Huaifu, which turned out to be Heihe’s main shopping mall. The cab deposited me on the Central Trade Pedestrian Street, which announced itself in Russian and Chinese on a pink stone plinth, similar to the one at the border. In front of me was a sight that Russians in the Putin era know all too well—a row of police cars, overseen by an expressionless border guard. Beyond them, out on the river, were anchored patrol boats—both Russian and Chinese. Their crews’ green uniforms show drill preparedness for a confrontation that, despite the claims of friendship made by the two countries’ governments, may occur at any moment.
Heihe’s Russia orientation was mostly nonmilitary and manifested all over the place. The Chinese had catered to Russians’ pride in their culture by erecting a statue of their favorite poet, Alexander Pushkin—with the words “Sun of Russian Poetry” engraved in gilt letters on the ocher-colored pedestal, in both Russian and Chinese—on a central square. After all, Heihe was trying to make money from its neighbor. Fur stores abound: Fur City of Paris stood on one side of Central Street, Catherine II [the Great] Fur on another, the presumption being that the notions of Old Europe and the Russian Empress would whet the Russian appetite for luxury.
They had done less well sating their appetite for Russian cuisine: the Café Arbat (named after Moscow’s main pedestrian street), Pitanie Strit (Feeding Street), and Russkyi Khleb (Russian Bread) had all been shuttered. As was Restaurant Putin. Much use, apparently, had been made of Google Translate, with results comical enough to evoke howls of laughter or inspire a Bulkgakovian short story, perhaps.
Why was Heihe so empty of Russians? The crush of bodies on the ferry had led me to expect otherwise. The crash in oil prices beginning a decade ago had something to do with it. But the post-Crimea economic sanctions had almost halved the Russian ruble’s purchasing power against the yuan, which left the shuttle traders with slimmer profits and thus less reason to travel here.
The Russian chelnoki who arrived with me must have dispersed among less central and touristy shops and malls, but a tribute to them stood right in the center of town: mimicking Blagov
eshchensk, Heihe had raised a bronze statue to the Russian shuttle trader. It shows a young man sitting on a suitcase, mobile phone in hand, surrounded by bags of merchandise, looking tired and distracted.
If Blagoveshchensk’s service culture leaves much to be desired, the streets of Heihe churn with the tireless Chinese entrepreneurs and zealous hucksters. Vendors stand outside their shops clapping to attract attention; sidewalk traders beckon; arrays of multicolored, illuminated signs flash their Chinese characters, as if beaming inscrutable prophetic messages. At one point, I sat down on a bench to take in this Brave New World and was immediately surrounded by men and women trying to sell me everything from socks to toys, cigarette lighters and cell phone cases with Putin’s portrait. One especially forward young entrepreneur turned on his hand massager and was about to apply it to my neck until I fled to another bench.
Even though suitcase trading has suffered a downturn recently, in Heihe people seemed to be particularly excited about the possibility of building a bridge between their town and Blagoveshchensk. In fact, for years China has been offering to fund the project.
“The Chinese always take the initiative. They need us more than we need them,” Innokenty had explained to me on the ferry that morning. “Especially now, Heihe is eager to restructure.” To overcome problems stemming from the dwindling border economy, the city, he said, plans to focus not on chelnoki, “but on turning itself into the new Harbin”—the capital of Heilongjiang province, the famed home for Russians displaced by the 1917 Revolution, and now a major manufacturing and tourist center.
“From the fake Russified China of Heihe, the bridge will lead to the real Russia, so the Chinese can come and enjoy our many Lenins on their Red Tour,” Innokenty added with a chuckle.
In Blagoveshchensk there is less enthusiasm for such a bridge. First suggested by Yeltsin but shot down by his economic advisors as unviable, the project has, at least until recently, lost what allure it had. Russians have become accustomed to the ferry and don’t see much need for another means of crossing the Amur. Recently Putin’s government has been displaying renewed interest in the idea. With the Crimea Bridge completed, he can now start another bold enterprise. The bridge, after all, would create more formalized and better functioning trade zones and areas of cooperation—matters Putin and Xi Jinping have discussed—and thus help better control Chinese emigration to Russia.
One of the reasons the Russians have been slow to respond to the Chinese advances is their fear of a further increase in economic and demographic inequality.
Trying to stave off a possible Chinese takeover of parts of Siberia, the Kremlin, in February 2017, announced the Far-Eastern Hectare project, which involves offering free, single-hectare plots to Russians who move there and exploit the land in the first five years. One would think that giving away land to encourage frontier settlement would excite a lot of interest. After all, the United States passed the Homestead Acts to settle parts of the country west of the Mississippi with offers of 160-acre plots to homesteaders. But Russia’s meager one-hectare plots, located in frigid Siberia, no less, are not attracting many takers.
For now, the Kremlin has been intensively funding just one project in Blagoveshchensk: its newly expanded embankment. The Chinese have made Heihe’s waterfront along the Amur shine, so Putin decided to follow suit. Blagoveshchensk’s new redbrick high-rises (resembling, incidentally, those we saw in Kaliningrad), the bronze border guard with the dog, the Soviet-era yet recently renovated stark gray monument to the Great Patriotic War (a none-too-subtle reminder that Russians know how to fight those), and even the Arc de Triomphe (spiffed up not long ago)—all these are symbols of Putin’s Russia.
After my taxi ride around town, I decided to get something to eat. This took some work, as waiters in the pizzeria-like cafeteria I stopped in spoke neither Russian nor English. Nevertheless, I managed to procure a small pizza, served with a plastic glove, instead of a napkin and a fork. While eating I stared at the wall adorned with an intriguing world map: on it, the Eurasian continent was titled Asia, and Russia wasn’t identified; Europe was small; and only the Americas and Africa were depicted in scale.
Once finished with my pizza, and having stripped off my glove, I set about searching for a cup of coffee. This, it turned out, posed a challenge here. Even in parts of Russia, it is sometimes tough to find anything but instant coffee. But in China a sign saying café rarely means coffee at all; there they mean food. In Heihe one café, Parizh (Russian for Paris), promisingly had fancy pastries in the window, an Eiffel Tower on its wallpaper, and a bistro table with two chairs in front of it. What was lacking was coffee. “Coca Cola?” the shopkeeper asked.
I then ventured down “The Street of Russian Goods” (as the sign in Russian translates). It called to mind Canal Street in New York’s Chinatown—behind every door they sell something—although here I was the only customer. Cheap, colored furs—red, yellow, orange, even green—hung from the awnings, marked RUSSIAN FURS, yet they were made in China. Huge shop windows displayed, in bulk, Russian canned goods, flour, sugar, and candy. Posters with writing in Chinese advertised Russian ice cream with a picture of Putin licking a cone—a clever mixture of hard and soft power.
Heihe, I came to think, seemed unreal, chintzy, slapped-together—a reified, steel-glass-concrete “made in China” slogan. Yet there were authentic moments—a group of older women sat on a bench, laughingly shielding a friend while she was changing into a new pair of trousers freshly purchased in the shop Mir-Bryuki Nizkoi Tseny (World-Pants at Low Cost). In the restaurant where I ate my pizza, teenage girls chatted away. On a side street, four men played mahjong, an ancient board game, with scores of spectators huddling around their table. I also uncovered a mystery of the Blagoveshchensk fashion of wearing princesslike mesh skirts in a variety of jewel tones—seemingly a dress code of every little girl in Heihe.
Evening was coming on. Still reeling from crossing the border, I considered spending the night in Heihe. I espied a new, palatial hotel, called the Saint Petersburg. At least from the outside, it seemed like a good option, so I dropped in to check it out. But in the fancy lobby, plastic glitz was already peeling off the walls, and I spotted a cockroach in the restroom.
Never did I want to return to Mother Russia as strongly as I did then and there, in the Saint Petersburg Hotel, Heihe-style.
So, I walked back to the port. This time, I would not go it alone. In the terminal, a young woman approached me.
“You don’t look like you’re from here,” she said. I replied that she didn’t look local, either.
Her name was Anastasia. We started chatting. It turned out Anastasia was originally from Blagoveshchensk but now lives in Beijing. It would be easier to battle stonewalling Chinese officials and angry fellow Russian travelers together, so we teamed up and got in line with a large group of men and women who oversaw a mountain of bulky bags and cardboard boxes and eyed us with outright disdain. And they were even angrier that the guards let any Chinese who showed up board, while leaving the Russians to wait—for hours.
Anastasia spoke fluent Mandarin. The impressed Chinese guards explained to her what was going on.
“Damaged by the blackout, the computer system doesn’t allow us to switch between Chinese and Russian travelers without a glitch,” Anastasia said, translating the guards’ explanation. The group was unconvinced.
“A payback to Putin! They hate the Russians. That Xi and Putin friendship is bullshit,” they grumbled.
I have never seen such angry people in my life, never felt as unsafe as then, while I languished between two gigantic, belligerent states and among those who have dedicated their lives to making small profits at any cost. Yet Anastasia and I boarded without incident, trying to find a spot to stand—the deck was jammed with merchandise, including even small tractors that enterprising Buryats were bringing back to Ulan-Ude.
Across the river on the Russian side, the rancor between the Chinese and Russians rekindled, with eac
h group treating the other as inferiors. But now the might was on the Russian side: a stone-faced border guard pushed aside scores of Chinese and their bags to allow all the Russians to cross through customs first.
With last night’s blackout now a distant memory, Jeff and Nina settled in for a drink at the Europeanish Café Sharlot, where service was slow but not uncaring.
Over wine and coffee, we spoke about Nina’s day in Heihe. If they ever build the bridge, spending time on the other side of the water may prove less traumatic. But for now, a lone traveler feels like a nonperson when confronting the reality of the Russia–China alliance, an alliance between two countries vying for superiority and whose leaders value state might above the well-being of the citizens over whom they rule. What’s more, we thought, the Kremlin has turned a cold shoulder toward Europe in Kaliningrad, but when it turns east—the Chinese are overwhelming, making this edge of the frontier just as tense and testy, and more threatening perhaps, as the border to the West.
Yakutsk: Prisoners of Empire?
It was a brilliant azure evening of the sort that lingers endlessly during the summer in these northern latitudes. Sinking into damp eluvium—a sediment composed of white pebbles and rocks, sand and silt—we descended the steep bank tentatively, backtracking at times when our feet would not take hold. We slow-walked toward the docks at the Yakutsk port, from where a captain named Georgy was supposed to take us on a boat tour up the Lena River. As we treaded, we gazed down at the numerous makeshift piers jutting out into the green-blue water. Which one was ours? We had arranged the tour by phone but had no idea what sort of craft awaited us. A taxi speedboat that takes people to the other side of Lena, and to its many islands, some large enough to be habitable? A sleek modern cutter? Once at the waterside, we traipsed among disorderly clusters of skiffs, dinghies, and schooners, asking for Georgy, but found our queries met with shrugs and blank stares. We finally located him standing by a serviceable wooden craft that could seat fifteen passengers but, this time, would take us alone.
In Putin's Footsteps Page 20