Levin told us that although couples were, in Yakutsk, having fewer children than ever, the drop in population was compensated for by an influx of out-of-work youths moving in, as reindeer farms in the outback are running into hard times. The republic’s cultural rejuvenation, has, moreover, had one negative consequence no one expected: imbued with Yakut nationalism, many schools now offer education only in Yakut, which means students are not learning proper Russian.
“These kids,” he said, “will have no college in their future, since nobody teaches classes in the local language. Education levels and expertise in various fields will be falling.”
That being the case, how could the Sakha, if independent, run the diamond and gold businesses, revenues from which sustain the local budget? To take advantage of the recently emerged hesitation in Sakha about independent statehood, and also following his own growing autocratic tendencies, Putin did away with the title of “president” and replaced it with “Leader of the Sakha Republic.” It is unconstitutional to have two presidents in one country, Sakha was informed. Given all the potential complications from splitting away, perhaps it was for the best that Sakha remained part of Russia.
The day was ending, and we walked outside with Levin, where his son awaited him in a spotless black SUV. The languid blue-gold light of evening was coming on, the mosquitos and midges were whirling in dark columns against the sky. He had given us a frank assessment of how things were in his republic, free of the ethnic chauvinism so many Russians evince toward Yakuts. We thanked him for his time and parted ways.
* * *
In the Oyunsky State Museum of Yakut Literature (dedicated, as the name indicates, to the native-born poet and writer Platon Oyunsky, who lived from 1893 to 1939) our poet-guide Nikolai Vinokurov told us, in accented Russian, the heroic story of how the Yakuts both resented and embraced Russian culture. This Sakha man, like many here going by his Russian name, spoke of the “civilization” the Slavic outsiders brought with them. One panoramic painting illustrated the gist of his message. It showed a landscape of tundra, low hills, and yurts with hearth fires that kept burning in summer to ward off mosquitos and midges; Sakha herding cattle and riding horses; and old men reciting the tales of the Olonkho, their traditional oral epic. (The United Nations has recognized the Olonkho as part of humanity’s “intangible cultural heritage.”)
The Yakuts, as the painting had it, dwelled in a sort of prelapsarian, boreal idyll before the Russians arrived.
However, the story isn’t so simple. Sakha owes at least its written literary traditions to Russian missionaries who arrived in the nineteenth century. Under the direction of Bishop Innokenty—later canonized as the Siberian missionary—Saint Petersburg’s scholars and writers adapted the Cyrillic alphabet for the Sakha language, and priests began translating the Bible into it, thereby laying the foundation for the emergence of Sakha literature. As had Ammosov, Oyunsky stood at the beginning of Sakha’s transformation into a Soviet socialist republic; he composed his poems to resemble the Olonkho but imbued them with Soviet themes. Like many in the 1930s, he was arrested for his “counterrevolutionary” ideas and died in prison.
“It was strange that he was arrested,” said our guide, Nikolai. “He was a good Soviet citizen.” As if being a good Soviet ever protected anyone from Stalin and his security apparatus.
The city’s Museum of Local Lore exhibits document more than a hundred labor camps for political exiles on the Republic’s territory and also show the plight of the Sakha during the Stalin decades. By and large, the Sakha themselves were not victims of the Gulag. Most of the prisoners came from elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the state did prosecute untold numbers of Sakha for the alleged crime of ethnic nationalism.
After Khrushchev’s Thaw began, Soviet authorities maintained that no purges had taken place in Sakha. The Sakha saw things differently. Many farmers, accused of resisting collectivization (of reindeer herds, for the most part), were forcibly relocated to other areas but given little time to pack and prepare. Thousands died from cold on the road.
Yet contradictions abound. The 2003 monument to Oyunsky, a victim of such Soviet repression, stands on a square with Dzerzhinsky’s bust, on Dzerzhinsky Street, just behind him. Stalin’s own bust lurks a few blocks away—two monuments to murderers and one to a victim of Soviet repression.
As we walked out to look for a place to dine one evening, black clouds massed over the flat bogs and taiga sweeping away from the Old City at the edge of town. We came across the Dikaya Utka (Wild Duck) pub, one of Yakutsk’s restaurants offering “traditional” cuisine, and chose it for our meal.
We walked inside to confront a bizarre scene: diners, all Sakha, were playing Hollywood Bingo. Images of Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts, and other American actors flashed on a giant plasma screen as the players marked their cards accordingly. In this remote city on the shore of the Lena River, where the wilderness is vast enough that it has served as a realm of exile, and where woolly mammoths are the objects of local pride, American movies serve to connect the inhabitants to people in the outside world.
The juxtaposition of Mel Gibson’s image above Sakha gamesters, of bingo inside and bog outside, combined with the palpable sensation of being far from anywhere we knew induced a disorienting feeling of alienation. Yakutsk, even though ever more “Sakha” and less Russian, did not seem to belong to Asia, but, like Russia as a whole, to a middle area, a gray zone. Often presenting themselves as “prisoners of the empire”—their 64 percent vote for Putin’s fourth term was one of the lowest in the country—the Sakha still seem to embrace their in-between status more than ever before.8 They now freely foster their ethnicity but can leave big decisions on statehood to the man in the Kremlin.
10
VLADIVOSTOK
RULE THE EAST!
TIME ZONE: MSK+7; UTC+10
Beyond Paris, Vladivostok is probably the most fascinating city on Earth at the moment.… We are so very lucky to witness so many interesting things happening around us here and now in Vladivostok!
—Eleanor Lord Pray, Letters from Vladivostok
From the grim concrete ramparts of Vladivostok’s Fort Number Seven, the Gulf of Amur spreads to the west, its leaden waters barely rippling one August afternoon under an equally leaden sky. Turn north or south and your gaze falls on high-rises and apartment blocks scattered over hills that, with their two suspension bridges, give the city of some 600,000 the floating, elevated feel of a Russian San Francisco.
The fort’s hulking heptagonal walls enclose an array of cannons and heavy artillery guns and ammunition storage bunkers capable of withstanding sustained incoming fire. (Stalin’s executioners did their work within these dungeonlike structures.) Just beyond the walls, on the square in front, decommissioned Soviet-era missiles lie on mobile platforms, belying the age of the fort, built at the end of the nineteenth century.
The city itself, founded in 1860, is now the terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railroad—a column on one of the platforms reads “9,288 km” (5,771 miles), thus marking the distance to Moscow. It owes its origins to Russia’s successful attempt to secure the terrain from the Amur River east to its coast, on the Sea of Japan, which it legalized by signing the 1860 Treaty of Beijing with China, when that country was too weak to resist. (Japan lies only some five hundred miles away.) Head southwest for fifty miles, and you run into the border with the People’s Republic of North Korea. Just to the north is China’s Heilongjiang province. In strategic importance, Vladivostok rivals another port town we had visited, Kaliningrad, almost six thousand miles to the west, and well deserves its name, which translates as Ruler of the East.
As we rode in from the airport through leafy green hills, a sign caught our eye, proclaiming “Ostrov Russkiy, Krym Rossiyskiy” (The Island Is Russian—the island being the Crimean Peninsula—Crimea belongs to Russia). In Vladivostok, as in Kaliningrad, on the other end of the current empire, Crimea, though distant from both, haunts t
he Russian consciousness. Russia’s chief far-eastern port city celebrates the return to the motherland of another territory, a long way to the west and strategically vital for its own port, this one on the Black Sea.
“Ever since the 2012 summit”—the summit for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)—“things have been looking up here,” our taxi driver, a middle-age fellow named Nikolai, told us as we sped up and down the undulant highway toward town. “We got new roads, better services, and more investment. Before that Vladivostok was reeling from neglect, all the way back to the Yeltsin days.” But with Putin in charge, the city has built “three new bridges in less than ten years.”
For more than a century the town dreamed of a bridge to Russky Island. It was painted on postcards and drawn on city plans but never materialized on account of war and bad management—the usual reasons. But then, in 2009, the Kremlin announced that it was going to erect not one, not two, but three bridges, two to the nearby Russky Island alone. “Across Golden Horn Bay, the Golden Bridge—like the Golden Gate in San Francisco—the Russian Bridge over East Bosporus Bay, and another one across Amur Bay.”
Though China and Japan had, Russia had never endeavored to construct bridges over sea straits, as it did here. And yet, looking west as ever, or maybe following the Kremlin’s orders, the Russian east sought help not from Asia, but from the engineers in Saint Petersburg and France. Nobody believed construction could be completed in three years (in time for the APEC summit), and yet it was. “Another thing that ties us to San Francisco”—the construction of the Golden Bridge—“was also deemed impossible. The bridges are a Vladivostok miracle, a testimony to our spirit,” said Nikolai.
Taking advantage of a pause in his impromptu introduction to the city, we squeezed in a personal question.
“Are you from here?”
He was not; he had moved east from Krasnodar some thirty years ago. He wasn’t the only one. “People come from western Russia for a visit, see the fish swimming in the bluest of oceans, try Pacific smelt, and find it much tastier than smelt in the Baltic Sea, and stay.” (Apparently here in Vladivostok the east–west Russia rivalry boils down to fish.) “The population keeps renewing itself. The port is doing well, new international businesses are opening up, and our Far Eastern University is an international hub.”
We had heard his latter claim supported by others in Russia, though the year previous to our visit, at the Eastern Economic Forum, the Kremlin did announce ambitious plans to turn Vladivostok into Russia’s San Francisco, with investments of as much as $46 billion coming from the state alone, with outsiders invited to take part. In any case, this windy Russian city of many hills, with its offshore waters and sky at times melding in blue mist, with fog often blanketing inland vistas, and with its soaring bridges, already feels like the white and windy city of northern California. And as in San Francisco, the Paris of the West, so in Vladivostok, the Paris of the East (although, as regards the latter, it competes for this title with many other cities, from Irkutsk in Siberia to Harbin in China), foreigners abound.
Even Vladivostok’s railway station, so reminiscent of Moscow’s busy Yaroslavsky Station, has a cosmopolitan flare and bespeaks a connection to the center. It was built in the early twentieth century in neo-Russian style, with pink-and-white towers, arches, and columns decorated with the image of Saint George the Victorious on a white horse.
Soon we reached our hotel—a modern, toffee-colored double-towered skyscraper with a view of the Gulf of Amur from one side and the Zolotoy Rog (Golden Horn) Bay from the other. Once inside we confronted an atmosphere we had never seen before. In the Soviet era Vladivostok was one of those “closed” military port cities, but now Chinese and Korean tourists and businessmen filled in the broad, high-ceilinged lobby, emitting an earsplitting roar of enthusiastic chatter that compelled us to shout so that the clerk could hear us and cup our ears so we could understand her response. There were Japanese guests, too, but they sat in small groups, quiet and reserved. Despite our having traversed Russia from east to west, we immediately sensed we had arrived in a place resembling no other in the country.
Later, as we walked Vladivostok’s paved, well-kept Sportivnaya Embankment along the Gulf of Amur, we encountered sailors—many of them—out and about in their blue-and-whites, strolling on leave under elegant lampposts, passing a gushing fountain, street acrobats plying their trade, and a pair of Amur tiger cubs (made of bronze, that is)—placed there in honor of the Amur tiger, a symbol of the Russian Far East.
A Ferris wheel rotated slowly, the children in its tilting cars laughing; sidewalk merchants sold candied corn and saucer-size pizzas from wheeled, multicolored carts; kebabs roasted on grills scented the air, recalling the North Caucasus homeland of their cooks. Here and there we heard American English and caught snippets of conversation, apparently American men courting young Russian women. The men wore sneakers and baseball caps; the women, dresses and sneakers, the global fashion of the young. On Svetlanskaya Street, an Orthodox church and a Lutheran cathedral coexisted—a rarity in Russia, which during the Putin years has become increasingly traditional. A Hare Krishna group walked by us, dancing and chanting, with many passersby looking on with amusement.
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.
In Putin's Footsteps Page 22