Hiding in Plain Sight

On a cool evening last spring, I strolled down Vladivostok’s Verkhneportovaya Street, just south of the Trans-Siberian Railroad’s last station, and entered the Café Pyongyang for dinner. All that marked this modest outpost of the North Korean government was the curled edge of a green pagoda roof hung over an entryway in the side of the shabby Hotel Korona, and a red sign advertising a “Korean Cuisine.”

Inside, a cute North Korean waitress sat me at a booth near several brawny Russian men who toasted with glasses of champagne before opening a second bottle of vodka. Three Korean men entered after me and the waitress admitted them to a side room. The Café Pyongyang is segregated: one room for North Koreans, another for everyone else.

Murals of dramatic cliffs rising from a mountain stream adorn walls strung with fake bamboo leaves. The soft blue of the ceiling resembles the sky, which extends west to a dim area above the bar that is illuminated with flashing Christmas lights to create the illusion of day fading into starry night.

“What do you recommend?” I asked the waitress, but she didn’t speak enough Russian to answer.

The menu contained Korean staples, like kimchi (fermented cabbage with spices), Russian foods like fried pelmeni, and $200 bottles of cognac.

“I’ll have a seaweed salad and the kimchi with pork,” I said.

“Khorosho,” the waitress said with a smile.

From just above Vladivostok’s shipyards, the Café Pyongyang generates capital for the feeble North Korean regime. A chain of restaurants by the same name, long suspected as covers for North Korean money laundering operations, first appeared in northern China and has recently expanded to distant locales like Cambodia and even Amsterdam.

Tall wooden partitions around each table made observing the goings-on inside the café difficult. Anatoly Petrov, a Vladivostok-based photographer, told me that I wouldn’t learn much about North Korea here.

“It’s pretty mellow most nights,” Petrov said. “But once they were hosting a party when I was there. A waitress told me they were celebrating the anniversary of their Young Communist League, like the Komsomol we had during Soviet times. There were about 30 young North Koreans there, all dressed in nice suits, and singing karaoke, lot’s of American songs too, like Elvis and that one from the movie Titanic.”

Across from me an old Asian man sat alone with a pot of tea. A waitress carried a tray of beers into the North Korean section. Near the bar, an older, bespectacled Korean woman sat doing paperwork. A stout Russian man who looked like a regular entered the café and handed her a dozen roses. They embraced and he took a seat in a private booth. The woman stood up to put the roses in a vase on the bar and a Russian couple with a baby at a nearby table struck up a conversation with her.

“Your baby is beautiful,” I heard the Korean woman remark. “How old is he?”

“Eight months,” the proud mother responded.

The Korean woman approached my table after finishing with the roses.

“Zdrastvuitye. Hello,” she said with a thick accent. “What are you doing here?” She asked.

In the Russian Far East, curious locals who rarely meet foreigners often ask this question.

“I love traveling in Russia,” I said, giving my routine answer.

“Nyet. How... did you find this restaurant?” She tried in slow English.

“A friend recommended the food,” I explained.

“Where are you from?” she asked. She spoke English better than Russian.

“America,” I said. “Can you speak English well?” I asked.

She went back to her paperwork without responding.

The waitress soon returned with my food. Nobody talked to me again and I finished my meal in silence.

 

Borshch and Gochujang

My interest in the intersection of Russian and Korean culture began three years ago while studying at the Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok. During my walks past the tsarist-era buildings downtown, I often forgot that I was in Asia, not Eastern Europe. But upon entering the FEFU dormitory where I lived, this feeling disappeared. Inside, Chinese and Korean exchange students, many of whom had come to learn Russian for business, flooded the hallways. During lunch in the dorm’s cafeteria, Russian students in FEFU’s renowned Korean language program practiced speaking with South Korean students while slurping up steaming bowls of borshch. In the evenings, sizzling woks echoed through the hallways as young Koreans cooked in the communal kitchen. The intoxicating scent of tofu and fish simmering with garlic and gochujang – fermented red chili paste – filled the air.

During a late winter snowstorm, I once went out with Sin Jun and Ju Jung, two of my South Korean classmates, to explore an area of town known as the Chinese Market. Together we boarded an old bus that stopped in a poor area of town near a sprawling bazaar surrounded by a tall, sheet metal wall. Sin Jun led us through the main entrance into a chaotic labyrinth of tin-canopied street stalls. As I shuffled through the crowds, two boys almost ran me over, shouting as they pushed a cart full of cabbages through the masses. Around us, throngs of Asian men and women stood smoking cigarettes and hawking their wares. They sold everything from blowtorches and stereos to pet supplies and stationary. Most items in the stalls retained their original packaging, written in English with prices listed in dollars. In Vladivostok, shoppers purchased these products in rubles for a quarter of what they were intended to sell for in the U.S.

At midday, we stopped for lunch at a cramped shack that offered Korean fare. Ju Jung struck up a conversation in Korean with the gaunt waiter who handed us menus, and their talk soon became impassioned. Well after the food was served, my friends stood up and exchanged warm embraces with the waiter.

“This is a very emotional moment for me,” Ju Jung said, nearly moved to tears as he sat down.

“That waiter defected to Russia from North Korea,” Sin Jun explained. “We’ve never met a North Korean before.”

To this day, the two Koreas are technically still at war, given that the Korean War (1950-53) ended in a cease fire, not a peace treaty.

In recent years, I have thought often about that North Korean waiter. China and Russia are the only countries that share an open border with North Korea, the isolated regime often referred to as The Hermit Kingdom. There are regular flights between Pyongyang and Vladivostok, and a train journeys from Moscow to Pyongyang, following most of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, twice each month.

Was there, I wondered, any special relationship between Russia and North Korea?

Was there any relationship at all?

The smaller of two, new cable-stayed bridges under construction in Vladivostok

 

A Displaced People

 

“Korean culture has always been deeply entwined with the Russian Far East,” said Dr. Alexey Starichkov, a professor of Korean Studies at FEFU. “In 1864, just several years after Vladivostok’s founding, the Korean Diaspora first took root in Russia. At the time, there was no clear enforcement of the seventeen mile stretch of the Tumen River which serves as the border between Russia and North Korea, and a bad harvest that year drove many Koreans northward.”

 

Russia gained control of the Pacific regions of northern Asia from China during the mid-nineteenth century. At the time, Chinese defenses had become weakened by years of fighting with Britain during the Opium Wars, and Nikolai Muravyov-Amursky, the Governor General of Eastern Siberia, began moving Russian troops into northernmost China, threatening to take the region by force. In 1858 and 1860, two treaties were signed that annexed China’s northern territory to the Russian Empire. With large portions of China transferred to small parties of Russian explorers, the area became an attractive spot for landless Korean peasants to resettle.

 

Russian imperialism in Asia sparked the Russo-Japanese War, a seven-month affair that erupted in early 1904 and resulted in Japan gaining control of Korea and the southern half of Sakhalin, a large Russian island north of Vladivostok. Japanese occupation led even more Koreans to flee east, and by the 1930’s over 150,000 Koreans were living in the Russian Far East. In the first two decades of the Soviet era, Korean was the official language in many villages in the region, Korean schools and several colleges thrived, and a Korean-language newspaper, Vanguard, was published in Vladivostok.

 

In 1937, reports that Soviet Koreans were acting as spies for the Japanese prompted Stalin to order that all Koreans in the Far East who did not immediately return to Japanese-occupied Korea would be deported to Central Asia. By October of that year, at least 100,000 Koreans were sent by train to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

 

The Soviet Koreans, accustomed to growing rice and fishing, had difficulty adapting to life in Central Asia. Thousands died that first winter. But most survived, and today over 300,000 ethnic Koreans, who identify themselves as the Koryo-saram (“Korean Humans”), live in Central Asia. Their influence remains throughout modern-day Russia. A popular dish at Siberian cafes is Morkov po-Koreysky – hot spices and oil with shredded carrots. And Viktor Tsoy (see Russian Life, May/June 2012), whose father was a Soviet Korean from Kazakhstan, became a rock icon in the late 1980’s.

 

While the Koryo-saram were shipped to Central Asia, the Japanese transported over 150,000 Koreans to Sakhalin, mainly to labor in coal mines. On August 9, 1945, the same day that the Allies bombed Nagasaki, the Soviet Union attacked Japan and quickly reclaimed all of Sakhalin. The Japanese evacuated the island, leaving thousands of Koreans behind.

 

The Japanese surrender, just days later, effectively ended the Second World War and left Korea divided, with the Soviet Union to manage the North, and the Americans to administer the South. Many of the Sakhalin Koreans came from South Korea. As relations between the separated Koreas deteriorated, they gave up hope of ever making it home.

 

Khan Voniliyevich, a 22-year-old from Sakhalin, traces his family tree through this history of conflict. His father descends from North Koreans brought to Sakhalin by the Soviets after the Second World War to fill labor shortages. The grandmother on his mother’s side was just six years old when the Japanese uprooted her family from South Korea to work in a Sakhalin coal mine.

 

“I grew up around many other Korean families,” Voniliyevich said. “The last Korean school in our town closed in the 1960s, when my father was still a teenager, so I grew up speaking Russian at home. But my family still ate traditional Korean food, like kimchi. And each year we celebrated the Korean Memorial Day, in remembrance of Koreans who died in war, by visiting a local cemetery, laying down an offering of food and vodka, and praying.”

 

The tradition of Koreans migrating to Russia, either to work or improve their quality of life, continues to this day. Most come from North Korea.

 

 

 

Into the Taiga

 

As a student in Vladivostok, I watched workers begin construction of the Russky Island Bridge, slated upon its completion to become the world’s longest cable-stayed bridge.

 

Three years later, I returned to Vladivostok and found a mammoth bridge dominating the city’s once empty skyline. In several months, heads of state would cross the nearly-finished bridge to attend the 2012 APEC summit on Russky Island. Vladivostok’s rolling hills, Pacific fog, and trolley cars inspire many visitors to dub it the San Francisco of Russia. Now the city had an iconic bridge to match.

 

On my first day in town, I headed straight for the Chinese Market. To my surprise, many of the shopkeepers now worked out of small buildings constructed to comply with a new city ordinance to hinder the growth of unofficial street markets. In the market’s northern end, a new discount mall had sprung up. I searched for the Korean restaurant, but it had been replaced by a row of flashy Chinese eateries.

 

I spent the afternoon talking with a Tajik man named Sasha who sold dried fruit and nuts.

 

“I’ve worked here for nine years,” Sasha said. “I run this stand for six months, then my brother takes my place for the next six and I go home. When I’m here, I share a small apartment with four other men. I’d rather be at home with my wife and three kids, but here, business is good. In Tajikistan I can only make $200 a month. Here I make ten times that.”

 

I asked Sasha if any Koreans worked in the market.

 

“Koreans?” he said, eyebrows raised. “I think you’ll find them working on the street.”

 

 

 

North Korean migrant workers have been employed in the Russian Far East since the Soviets installed Kim Il-sung as the North Korean leader in 1945. They enter Russia on three-year contracts as guest workers, with the option of staying longer if they perform well, to labor in construction, agriculture, and on remote logging camps in the Siberian taiga. Most studies estimate that 3,000 North Koreans currently work in Russian logging camps, while others put the figure at over 10,000. Still more inconsistent are the rumors concerning the workers’ quality of life in Russia. Some reports claim that North Korean guest workers are unfed and receive pitiful wages. Others suggest that North Koreans benefit by escaping their country’s harsh conditions and earning an income to send home to their families.

 

In a tradition that has persisted since Soviet times, the North Korean government gains valuable lumber in exchange for the workers it provides to Russian lumber companies, that, in turn, benefit by acquiring highly-motivated laborers willing to work for little.

 

After visiting the Chinese Market, I met with Serge Patlakh, a designer for the Vladivostok Film Festival, in his office downtown.

 

“Most newspapers in Vladi­vostok contain advertisements that list a phone number with two words: ‘Cheap Koreans,’” Patlakh explained. “North Korean workers live here in very closed communities with a chief who can speak Russian. You never see them alone, but I do often see groups of them on the street.”

 

“They are very good workers,” Patlakh added, “but not well paid, unfortunately. Most employers have to hire them though. Here, Russians are more expensive and mostly drunk.”

 

Before I left, Patlakh took me downstairs from his office to a children’s theater under renovation. In a wide hall with rows of upholstered chairs set before a stage, five North Korean workers furiously painted a banister in silence. One shot us a timid glance, then snapped his eyes back to the painting.

 

“Look,” Patlakh whispered, “aren’t they like zombies?”

 

That evening, I took a stroll along the Sea of Japan. I wanted to learn more about the North Koreans.

 

But that would require venturing further north.

 

 

 

Chuh-Chunk. Chuh-Chunk. Chuh-Chunk. Sounds of The Trans-Siberian trundling over railroad tracks lulled me to sleep on the thirty-six hour journey north to the isolated Russian coal-mining town of Chegdomyn.

 

In the mid-nineties, several foreign journalists reported that numerous North Korean lumber camps operated near Chegdomyn where loudspeakers proclaimed the glories of Kim Il-sung and workers lived in squalid conditions. An outdated Lonely Planet guide even describes Chegdomyn as an interesting side trip, where tourists could see North Korean monuments and workers.

 

On the journey north, my train stopped for a twelve-hour layover in Khabarovsk, and I looked up a librarian, Mariana Tambovtseva, whom I met years ago. Tambovtseva worked in the Khabarovsk branch of the American Corner, a special collections section in Russian libraries stocked with English books by U.S. consulates.

 

Over tea, I told Tambovtseva why I had come to Russia. Her mouth curved in a smile.

 

“Come with me,” she said.

 

Tambovtseva led me down the hall to a door marked, “Korean Center.” Inside, portraits of Kim Il-sung, North Korea’s “Eternal President,” and his son, Kim Jong-il, hung on the wall. A bookcase contained various Kim Jong-il biographies in Russian – this just down the hall from an American Center with its biographies of Bill Clinton and GRE study guides.

 

“The center was meant to be run jointly by representatives from North and South Korea,” Tambovtseva explained. “The North Koreans approached the library some time ago about creating a center and they’ve been sending us books ever since. But this is supposed to be a neutral place, unrelated to politics,” she said, nodding at the portraits, “for people interested in Korean culture or language. We’ve started receiving books from South Korea now, so the director recently told the North Koreans to remove the portraits.”

 

“I can’t believe this place exists so close to a U.S. Embassy-sponsored center,” I said.

 

“It’s strange, I know,” Tambovtseva said, laughing, “but here, living near North Koreans is normal. After all, Khabarovsk even has a North Korean Consulate.”

 

“For us they’re just Koreans,” she mused. “North or South, in the Russian Far East, we don’t see a big difference.”

 

 

 

An overnight ride on the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), the Trans-Siberian Railroad’s northern twin, brought me close to Chegdomyn. At dawn, I peered through the train window at stretches of swamp that fanned away to distant blue mountains.

 

I got off in Novy Urgal, a town founded during the BAM’s construction. Less than 40 years old, Novy Urgal was already decrepit. Uneven sidewalks led through a collection of concrete apartment buildings riddled with cracks resembling tree branches. In the 1970’s, Ukrainian workers flocked here to work on the BAM. Now, most of the buildings looked abandoned and Kievskaya Street, the town’s main drag, was all that hinted of their presence.

 

At the one road on the town’s edge, I stuck out my thumb and tried hitchhiking to Chegdomyn, about twenty miles north. A local named Sergey with bushy, white hair and wide eyes soon pulled over in his truck.

 

“My family came here from Ukraine when I was thirteen,” Sergey explained as we flew over the rough country road at a death-defying 80 miles an hour while I made a futile search for a seat belt.

 

“Life is wonderful here,” Sergey remarked, taking his hands off the wheel and pointing at a clear mountain stream. “Look, you can drink from that,” he said, “here you don’t need to buy water.”

 

The truck’s shocks screamed as we bounced over frost heaves and rough potholes.

 

“Are there roads like this in America?” Sergey asked.

 

“In America we have really nice roads and really bad roads,” I said.

 

“Ha,” he exclaimed, lighting a cigarette and shifting into high gear. “In Russia all the roads are bad!”

 

 

 

The forest eventually opened to a clearing with a line of log cabins and the tall shaft of a coal mine painted in white, blue, and red stripes to resemble the Russian flag. Sergey floored it up a steep hill towards the town and we passed a bus full of miners, their faces black with soot. Sergey turned off to a lookout point at the hilltop. Football stadium-sized heaps of coal and rock rose around the mine. In the distance, snow-capped peaks of the Stanovoy-Khrebet Mountains glistened in the sun.

 

Sergey dropped me in the town center. Like Novi Urgal, Chegdomyn was a Soviet relic that consisted of one main street lined by rows of aging, rectangular apartments, some only half-built and deserted. Coal extraction had become Chegdomyn’s lifeblood. Dark smoke billowing from a slender smoke stack filtered down into the town square and blew about in murky cyclones. Even the muddy ruts between the apartment blocks were stained black.

 

From the town square, I walked downhill to Chegdomyn’s museum and a friendly curator, her blonde hair faded to a luminous silver, met me at the door. Inside, children participated in after-school arts projects. Some of their drawings depicting Chegdomyn miners hung on the walls. They resembled Soviet propaganda posters done in the Socialist Realist style.

 

“Are these copies of posters?” I asked the curator.

 

“No, originals,” she said proudly.

 

Inside the museum I strolled past dioramas on coal mining and taxidermied sables and black bears. A small exhibit about the lumber industry displayed several black and white photos of North Koreans sawing massive trees nearly the size of giant redwoods. The curator said that the Koreans had left years ago.

 

I asked the guard at a nearby school where I might find Korean architecture in Chegdomyn. Instead of answering my question, he returned with an English teacher named Lena.

 

“The North Koreans left here ten years ago, after the timber companies decided not to renew their contract,” Lena said. “They once built an oriental pavilion in our market, but they burned that down, and any other construction they made before leaving, I think, because they were angry.”

 

“I’m not surprised they were upset,” she added. “Their lives were much better here than in North Korea.”

 

It was late afternoon and Lena invited me to tea in her apartment, a cramped three-room affair with new linoleum covering the walls and floors to give it a modern look.

 

“There were once many North Koreans in Chegdomyn,” Lena said. “During the day, they could walk around and go shopping. Many spoke enough Russian to get by. At night, they had to return to their camp because they did a head count. In Russia they at least had some freedom to work and earn money for their families. But their lives weren’t easy here. They all wore the same clothes, one long sleeve shirt and pants with no coat, even in winter.”

 

“You know, when the Koreans were here they ate any dogs they could find,” Lena explained. “Because Koreans eat dogs! And snakes too! In summer, they hunted snakes to make traditional medicines.”

 

“When did you last see North Koreans here?” I asked.

 

“Actually,” she said, “several weeks ago I saw three North Korean men walking through town. I’m certain they were North Korean because they wore badges with a picture of Kim Il-sung. It’s possible that Koreans still work in our region, somewhere far away in the forest.”

 

Lena’s theory may be correct. In 2009, the reporter Simon Ostrovsky made a documentary for the BBC about North Korean logging camps near the Siberian city of Tynda, about 500 miles northwest of Chegdomyn. Two years later, Ostrovsky returned with photographers from the online media company, Vice News, and found the once bustling camps abandoned. The photographers later discovered that the camps had been moved to locations deep in the taiga, accessible only by seldom-used rail lines.

 

After speaking with Lena, I hitchhiked back to Novi Urgal. A corpulent old man named Ivan, whose round belly unfolded about the lower part of his steering wheel, pulled over in a gray sedan. He drove even faster than Sergey.

 

“Are you traveling alone?” Ivan asked.

 

“Yes,” I said.

 

To avoid a washed out section of road ahead, Ivan swerved towards the ditch into a patch of loose sand and hit the gas. The car fishtailed as we careened back onto the rutted asphalt.

 

“That’s very dangerous,” he said, shaking his head with concern

 

“Why,” I asked.

 

“Things here are different now,” he said. “During Soviet times, men treated each other like brothers. Now, they act like wolves.”

 

 

 

Vyatskoye

 

Official North Korean biographies claim that Kim Jong-il, the former North Korean leader, was born on North Korea’s Mount Paektu as a double rainbow and bright star appeared in the sky. But the mundane truth is that Kim Jong-il was born in Russia. In the early 1940’s, his father, Kim Il-sung, sought exile from the Japanese with a group of Korean guerillas in an army barracks in Vyatskoye, a small village east of Khabarovsk. While there, the elder Kim’s first wife gave birth to Kim Jong-il.

 

Two days after visiting Chegdomyn, I boarded a small bus in Khabarovsk. Outside, sheets of cold rain lashed the bus windows. On a lonely road, the driver pulled over by a sign reading “Vyatskoye” that pointed down a muddy road. I buttoned my poncho, wishing that the ride had been longer.

 

A two-mile walk ended in several cabins on a hill above the mighty Amur River, the world’s ninth largest. The foul weather tore the great expanse of mucky water, interminable as the Mekong or Mississippi, into a fury of white-caps.

 

Nothing could have prepared me for Vyatskoye. Even in remote Russian towns, I could usually count on finding a store located in the house of a surly babushka, willing to share a hot cup of tea and indulge the curiosities of an eccentric foreigner. But Vyatskoye was different. Prefab houses were built alongside old cabins. Each structure was enclosed by lines of sheet metal or brick walls. Fences are rare in small-town Russia. At first, it appeared that Kim Jong-il’s birthplace might have been bought up by a Khabarovsk businessman and cordoned off as a new summer retreat under construction.

 

I followed the one road to the town’s eastern edge and over a rickety wooden bridge. Ahead stood tall, Soviet-era army barracks. A guard dressed in camouflage marched out to meet me before I got close.

 

“Hello,” I said, “is there a store around here?”

 

“No,” the guard uttered with disinterest, grabbing my arm and leading me back towards the bridge without another word.

 

Back in town, I spotted a middle-aged man walking with an old woman.

 

“Excuse me,” I said, “do you know where I can find historical information about Vyatskoye?”

 

“Well,” the man said, looking me over with wide, perplexed eyes, “you can see the house where Kim Jong-il was born. There’s a plaque on the opposite side of town that marks its location.”

 

As we spoke, the old woman stood in the rain, her body grown telephone-pole-tense with annoyance.

 

“Let’s go,” she grumbled to her husband.

 

Despite its high-profile native son, information about Vyatskoye is scarce. And trudging through the mud in my waterlogged hiking boots was not very revealing. Besides the old couple and the soldier, the only signs of life I saw were one curlicue of smoke drifting from a cabin’s chimney and a few guard dogs growling from behind fences.

 

On the western side of Vyatskoye, the road ended at a beach where several Japanese cars were parked. A line of storage facilities, some with doors hanging open to reveal piles of rusting tools, extended along the shore. Concrete stairs led up a hill to another stand of army barracks. An open gate at the stairway’s bottom creaked in the breeze. Through the din of pelting rain I could hear men’s voices echoing. I gave the road a careful inspection on the long trek back, but found nothing that marked Vyatskoye as the birthplace of Kim Jong-il.

 

I took refuge in a concrete bus shelter on the main road and did pushups to stay warm. A truck driver, also named Sergey, stopped in response to my soggy thumb stretched over the road.

 

With his long dirty blond hair and skinny frame, Sergey resembled a toothless version of Kid Rock. He swerved towards the shoulder while queuing up a song by the American rock band Linkin Park on his smartphone, along with a home movie of him racing a Kawasaki dirt bike. He handed me the phone.

 

“Three years ago, I got first place at a race near Khabarovsk,” he boasted while lighting up a Marlboro, “they recorded me doing 170 miles an hour!”

 

“What do you think about our Russian roads?” he asked.

 

“Normalno. Okay.” I said.

 

Sergey erupted in laughter.

 

 

 

The SoCal Effect

 

After returning to Vladivostok, I took a bus south and west toward the North Korean border. As we sat in traffic, I watched migrant workers from Uzbekistan or North Korea rebuild the sidewalks in anticipation of the APEC summit. A Russian student I met once compared migrant workers in Russia’s Far East to Mexican laborers in the U.S. From the bus, I observed blonde Russian girls strut past workers laying bricks on fresh mortar, and, for a moment, Vladivostok actually resembled a city in southern California.

 

The bus made a wide arc around Amur Bay and turned south into Khasansky Rayon, a remote corner of Russia that ends at a point on the Tumen River where Russia, North Korea, and China meet. Jagged mountains shaped like a stegosaurus tail descended into valleys where herds of horses cantered. The region looked dense and uncharted. It seemed fitting that the last Amur Leopards, the world’s rarest cat, lived in the wilds beyond.

 

Less than 50 miles from North Korea as the crow flies, the bus pulled to a stop in the bustling port town of Slavyanka. Traveling onward to Khasan, the Russian border town with North Korea, requires special permits and a hired car. According to some sources, foreigners cannot even enter Khasansky Rayon without permission. Given that my last trip to a Russian border region ended with lengthy interrogations by immigration officials and a 24-hour stint in jail (see Russian Life, Mar/Apr 2011), Slavyanka was the furthest south that I dared to go.

 

In a small store I bought supplies – morkov po-koreysky, bread and cheese – and asked directions to the beach. From the town park, a road went up a long hill that revealed a line of mountains that cascaded into the sea below.

 

And what was happening in one of the last Russian towns before the North Korean border?

 

A Russian beach party, of course.

 

Outside a café located in a trailer by the beach, couples and families sat in small booths made of corrugated tin. The 1990’s dance hit, Macarena, blared from a speaker on the trailer’s roof. In a nearby road, several young men sprayed bottles of beer at each other and then smashed them on the asphalt.

 

A tall pile of rotting seaweed and kelp had collected on the beach. The smell was unbearable. Nevertheless, families bundled up to ward off the chill and gathered around picnics and vodka bottles.

 

“You must visit Slavyanka in summer when they clean the beach,” a babushka with dyed-red hair told me. After I said goodbye, she drew me close and kissed my cheeks. Once. Twice. I pulled away as she planted me with a third.

 

“Russians kiss goodbye three times,” she exclaimed, the smell of vodka on her breath stronger than the decaying seaweed.

 

Behind us the music blasted: Come and find me my name is Macarena. Always at the party ‘cause the chicos think I’m buena.

 

As the sun set, I walked past a line of cabins complete with a fake plastic palm tree – Russian beach bungalows – in search of a camping spot. Tall reeds grew from marshland along the beach. This part of Russia resembled an undeveloped Cape Cod with the Rocky Mountains superimposed in the background. I eventually set my tent up by a cold river that was over waist deep.

 

That night, I sat on the beach. Waves pounded the shore. Out at sea, a line of rugged islands were silhouetted against the night sky. The place reminded me of Imperial Beach in San Diego. Years ago, I followed Imperial Beach to the Tijuana River, which drains from Mexico into the U.S., and watched the polluted waters enter the Pacific.

 

Borderlands are funny places. Slavyanka and Imperial Beach highlight how circumstantial reality is. A last minute negotiation or other historic vagary could have put the Tijuana River’s estuary in Mexico. Likewise, Slavyanka could have easily become part of China or North Korea. The possibilities of what Slavyanka might have been, made reality feel strangely malleable.

 

While I was breaking camp the next morning, a Russian man with a barrel chest and silver hair bounded toward the river. He wore long rubber gaiters that extended to his groin and carried a small trowel, which, judging by the proliferation of bleached clam shells on the beach, I guessed he used to dig up mollusks.

 

Unashamed by my presence, the Russian man removed his gaiters, pants, and underwear. Then waded into the river, his pale rear end disappearing in the icy current. He stood for a moment on the other side and let the frigid gale blowing off the ocean air-dry his body, before dressing and continuing down the beach.

 

The act was a perfect example of Russianness: peculiar logic that looks absurd to the outsider but makes perfect sense in context. I might have spent years trying to cross the river, constructing scores of failed bridges, and never even considered wading through the frigid water.

 

I had sought to learn how one of Russia’s Asian neighbors had influenced the Far East. But a dominant force still shaped life in Slavyanka and the surrounding regions.

 

Here, and for the next 5,000 miles across northern Asia and Europe, Russian eccentricity reigned supreme. RL

In the southern region of Russia’s Far East, dramatic stretches of beach extend south from Vladivostok, along the Sea of Japan, to the nearby North Korean border.