Vladivostok

THE last time I came to Vladivostok, I couldn’t. That may sound a little Irish, but in 1974 foreigners and hundreds of classes of Soviet citizens could not enter the Soviet Union’s Far East port, which was closed to all but the Soviet navy and a vast fishing fleet. There was an allowance for logs to flow from Siberia, but that was it. As from Tsarist times, Russia’s all-weather Pacific port was closed to foreigners. In 1974, travelling on a Soviet ship, the Baikal, from Hong Kong to Yokohama, and then on to Nakhodka, you could only manage a glimpse of the waterways of Vladivostok before boarding the train for a full day’s journey to Khabarovsk to begin the real journey, six days and nights on the Trans-Siberian Express to Moscow.

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It is interesting, then, that the fare of about $1,800 is about the same as the lowest fare intrepid Australian travellers, such as my daughter Majella-Rose, are prepared to pay to go to Europe via Shanghai or other Asian cities. Back then I worked out that for the same price I could make my trip to Moscow, then go by rail to Berlin via Poland and fly from West Berlin to London with a return from Europe for about the same price ($1,800) as the return airfare. Given the land travel and included accommodation, it was a miracle then and remains a miracle that airfares are essentially the same.

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In 1974, to cross the Soviet Union — which included seeing prisoners in black pajamas barefoot atop hideous mounds of rough-bark logs in wire-studded camps — was a socialist’s dream as we listened to the demise of Richard Nixon as President of the United States. On the train, nothing was plentiful except Soviet hubris and buckwheat, and both were indigestible. The bottles of sour milk and boiled potatoes wrapped in newsprint bought from peasants on the stations were barely better, but at least they alleviated hunger without an ideological hangover. In 2012, landing in Vladivostok, despite the billions of roubles spent on the new runways, was a scheduling nightmare as dozens of world leaders and their entourages descended on a city not prepared for such an assault. What is a small neglected and hilly city reminiscent of Stalinist Auckland peopled by friendly and beautiful people (well, the women anyway) is in danger of being swamped by visitors it cannot yet hope to satisfy.

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In 1890 Anton Chekhov, whose short stories, like those in Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, had fired my thirst to go to Russia, said his visit to Hong Kong had impressed him so much he thought Russia should ‘look east’. Since then Vladivostok has been used as a closed fortress, armed and facing east, to keep out Japan, China and the West, whether under the imperial or communist tsars. This week, to justify the billions in spending which critics have suggested involved corrupt skimming of public expenditure, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he was looking simultaneously to the east (read heavily populated and resources-poor triangle of China, Japan and Korea surrounding an underpopulated and resources-rich Siberia) and the future (read the highly-financed China and a growing Asia-Pacific rim). Once again, the left of the Russian eagle’s double head is looking east with lust and hope.

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Returning to Vladivostok last week, the atmosphere was meant to have changed and we attendees at the 2012 APEC leaders’ summit in the new Far East Federation University campus on Russky Island were meant to be the first bits of foam on a cresting $20 billion wave breaking upon the Vladivostok shores. A great deal had changed and yet a great deal remained the same. The FEFU campus, on a military island which remained isolated longer than Vladivostok itself, was as much a 21st century concrete and steel monument to Soviet-era planning as anything Stalin planned in the Far East. Perfectly operating local campuses and students were transferred across a multi-billion dollar bridge to a site. It was without piped water, vastly bigger than necessary and suffering from drainage problems which included a lift well full of sewage. If there is a candidate for a Field of Dreams philosophy of ‘build it and they will come’ or hideous Potemkinisation of a university, it is FEFU.

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For his part, Putin is leaving no doubt as to his personal commitment to Asia-Pacific as he rounds on the Europeans for attempting to ‘burden’ Russia with its financial problems and sees APEC as an area of ‘future-looking’ countries. Putin’s political style is breathtaking. He led a campaign to get grey cranes to migrate south from Siberia with him as he rode in an ultra-light plane apparently making encouraging crane noises, and shook hands with an octopus in the new aquarium on Russky Island. In a political metaphor, he described those cranes who did not follow him as ‘weak’ and also criticised the plane’s pilot for going too fast. As I lunched in the vast dining hall at FEFU Putin approached and sat next to my table to hold an informal discussion and demonstrate his unity with the workers. His sensitive handling of the unscheduled departure of Julia Gillard after her father’s death suggested there was more to him than a slightly democratic despot.

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Vast state-directed projects, attempts to change even the course of nature, a leader promoted through larger-than-life images, a people angry about everything but prepared to accept the crumbs of progress and a Vladivostok long-neglected and insufficiently serviced: all are sad echoes of 1974, long before it was thought the Soviet Union was vulnerable.

Dennis Shanahan is political editor of the Australian.