Vladivostok

Founded July 2, 1860

Far, far away from central Russia, in the vicinity of Japan, China, and Korea, there is a narrow bay that the Chinese called Sea Cucumber Bay and the English, who stopped by briefly in the nineteenth century, named Port May.

In 1859, Nikolai Muravyov-Amursky, the governor general of Eastern Siberia, surveyed this stretch of coast from his corvette and ordered that the bay be assigned the name Golden Horn (Золотой Рог). The following summer, Russia established a military outpost on the bay and called it Vladivostok.

Muravyov had his reasons for choosing these particular names. He claimed that the bay reminded him of the Golden Horn inlet in Istanbul, but in fact, the two bear little resemblance to one another. The nearby strait that wound up being dubbed the Eastern Bosporus has even less in common with the better-known channel that divides Europe and Asia.

Rather than telling us anything about the local geography, the names Muravyov-Amursky chose were evidence of his aspirations to establish firm control over what would become the Russian Far East. Muravyov – who had long argued that Russia should keep the lands north of the Amur River out of Chinese hands and consolidate its possessions along the Pacific coast – well deserved the Amursky epithet added to his distinguished family name.

The original Golden Horn and Bosporus figured in a dream long cherished by Russian rulers and philosophers that Russia should have a strong foothold in the Balkans and that Constantinople should be reclaimed for Orthodoxy. Muravyov-Amursky sought to couch his own ambitions for the empire’s eastern edge in similar terms: to extend Russian control over another Bosporus, another Golden Horn.

The naming of the Vladivostok outpost stemmed from a different tradition. Just as the name assigned Russia’s North Caucasus outpost, Vladikavkaz, nearly a century earlier sent a fairly clear linguistic message (being based on the verb владеть, to possess or gain mastery over, and the Russian word for the Caucasus, Кавказ), the naming of Vladivostok signaled Muravyov and Russia’s Far Eastern ambitions to gain mastery over the east (восток/vostok).

Such were Vladivostok’s origins, a small military outpost that first developed into a city largely in isolation from the rest of the empire, but that was nevertheless rather quickly transformed into a bustling port and highly fortified outpost at the empire’s eastern edge. On one hand, it was a part of Russia, but on the other, thousands of miles of virtually impenetrable taiga lay between it and even the cities of Siberia, to say nothing of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Muravyov-Amursky’s vision of a Far Eastern Constantinople was never meant to be. The empire’s energy was focused on Europe. From the standpoint of nineteenth-century geopolitics, the Balkans appeared immeasurably more important than the Pacific coast, although Russia did manage to sign a treaty with China and thereby took control of at least one side of the Amur River.

The Pacific port grew, but the rest of the country paid it little notice. Only once Russia turned its gaze eastward and started competing with Japan did Vladivostok gain recognition as more than a backwater. This competition turned heated during the first decades of the twentieth century, when the empire launched an all-out effort to penetrate China, including by building a railroad and leasing a fortress in Manchuria, bringing it into direct and bloody conflict with the Land of the Rising Sun.

For Russia, the highly unpopular Russo-Japanese War took tens of thousands of lives, fanned the flames of unrest during the Revolution of 1905, and ended in a humiliating peace treaty. For Vladivostok, however, the war marked a turning point. The city was relatively close to the theater of combat operations and became a hub for the transport of troops and supplies. Defending the city from the Japanese was a naval priority. No Japanese attack on Vladivostok every materialized, and the war came to an end, but the importance of the Pacific port was now recognized.

Soon, preparations began for yet another war with Japan, and a ring of underground forts, each an engineering wonder, was built around the city’s perimeter. Under a thick protective layer of concrete slab, an underground city was constructed: a network of corridors and rooms capable of accommodating entire regiments and storing vast supplies, designed so that soldiers could fire on an invading enemy without leaving the fortification.

People came from across Russia to build these forts, which were completed in record time, with a strictly enforced “dry law” in place. The work was hard, but in a year a man could earn enough to buy a house back home “in Russia.” Vladivostok was, of course, a part of the empire, but “Russia” was somewhere else, far to the west.

Work on the underground fortifications continued until 1915, even after World War I broke out, in anticipation of a Japanese invasion. When it became clear that the war would be fought elsewhere, the grandiose project was brought to a close.

The twentieth century was not kind to Vladivostok. The Civil War stormed here long after the Bolsheviks had subdued the rest of the country, and in the 1930s Vladivostok became a Gulag transit center. Caravans of prisoners passed through on their way north, to Magadan. The city was encircled by a ring of camps, and it was here, just outside Vladivostok, that the poet Osip Mandelstam died of hunger. Two great chroniclers of life in Soviet labor camps, Varlam Shalamov and Yevgenia Ginzburg, passed through here, as did thousands upon thousands of ordinary people, chilled to the bone by the penetrating winds that blew in from the ocean, and baked by the region’s summer heat waves. The underground forts were adapted to serve as transit prisons, and prisoners were lined up and shot along their thick outer walls. The bullet marks can still be seen today.

After Stalin’s death, the city enjoyed a period of relative calm and prosperity. The camps disappeared almost entirely, and Vladivostok became a “closed city,” a military base that could be entered only with a special pass. Residents look back on those days with nostalgia. Salaries were higher here (thanks to the северная добавка or “northern supplement”). Giant ships stood in port, and the city’s population, most of which had at least one family member serving on these ships, was proud of its role as defender of the fatherland. From whom? American imperialists, Japanese militarists, or Chinese revisionists? Nobody was entirely certain. What mattered was that life was good and people enjoyed a sense of security.

More time passed, and the wheel of history took another turn. The port fell into disrepair, and today, although there are still ships in the harbor, they are mostly there for purposes of commerce, not defense. A veritable torrent of Japanese and Chinese goods of every imaginable sort flows through Vladivostok. Everyone here is dressed in clothing manufactured in China, and bus loads of cheap blouses and shoes regularly pass through the local customs facilities. The Chinese villages across the border have sprouted into booming metropolises dotted with skyscrapers, and everyone is ready to wheel and deal in Russian. Ships brimming with Japanese used cars sail into port regularly.

What the Russian population of Vladivostok fears most now is not an invasion by Japanese aggressors or American imperialists, but that the city and its surrounding territory will soon be overrun by the Chinese. It already feels a bit like a foreign country.

When you arrive in Vladivostok, you truly feel as if you’ve left Russia. The flora and fauna seem strange, the ocean air is unfamiliar, and all the rivers and mountains are very oddly named, as if they escaped from Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island: Explanation River (речка Объяснения), First River and Second River (Первая речка and Вторая речка), and Refrigerator Hill (сопка Холодильник). The cars all have steering wheels on the right hand side (being imported from Japan), and half the advertisements are in Chinese characters. When someone proposes eating in a restaurant that serves local cuisine, they’re probably referring to sushi.

Vladivostok’s relationship with the rest of the country is further complicated by local attitudes toward the city’s history. Of course Vladivostokers revere the memories of explorer Gennady Nevelskoy and governor general Muravyov-Amursky, and the anniversary of the city’s founding on July 2, 1860, is celebrated with great fanfare. But locals would rather not remember the thousands of political prisoners who perished in the area’s camps. A memorial to those who died at the Second River transit camp, where Mandelstam breathed his last, is regularly vandalized, as is another to soldiers who starved to death in 1992 on Russky Island in Peter the Great Gulf, a kilometer from Vladivostok, after their commanders failed to send them provisions (the island is now connected to the mainland by the world’s longest cable-stayed bridge).

It is hard to accept that your hometown is dotted with abandoned prisons and camps. It is more appealing to look back on the towering white ships that were once anchored in Vladivostok harbor. They were marvelous, of course. But if you pick and choose what you remember, how will that affect the future?

Today the Golden Horn is home to Russia’s most polluted waterway. Unless you acknowledge the dirt, it will never be cleaned up.