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Title: BLACK DRAGON RIVER , By: |
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ON THE EDGE OF EMPIRES
There is something very remarkable indeed about what
the Chinese call the Black Dragon River, the Heilong Jiang, and I remember
quite vividly first noticing it something in the late seventies, on a
blisteringly hot Sunday morning in the middle of summer.
I stepped up to a telescope in the dusty riverside town
of Heihe, where a few young entrepreneurs had found and set up ex-army
periscopes and telescopes so that the curious could see into the Russian town
of Blagoveshchensk, a place as alien as if it were on the far side of the moon.
The telescope's shutter opened when I paid its
persuasive owner the equivalent of a few pennies--and in an instant I saw for
myself the ordinary details of life in
All was so very ordinary--and yet all was so profoundly
different from everything that surrounded me on this bank of the river that the
impression struck me like a thunderbolt.
Here, beside me, were endless thousands of Chinese
people, all with black hair (or gray, if a little older), most of them wearing
drab blue uniforms and all in so many ways different from those people who were
no more than a slingshot's distance away.
Here most people worshipped--if they chose to worship
at all--or followed the precepts of either Buddha or Confucius. They ate rice.
They used chopsticks. They wrote in ideograms. They were--ethnically,
culturally, anthropologically--Asian people, descendants of people who had
inhabited these plains since time immemorial.
And yet less than 900 yards away, the people over there
were quintessentially Europeans--Russians, Ukrainians, Swedes, Germans--who had
been transplanted by immigration and colonization, and whose cultural and
linguistic and spiritual roots had remained defiantly unchanged for
generations. Over there they wrote in Cyrillic, they worshiped (if permitted to
worship at all) in Eastern Orthodox Christian churches, they ate borscht and
black bread and potatoes and wouldn't know what to do with chopsticks. They had
red and blond and brown and auburn hair. They dressed, if they could afford to,
in jeans and skirts and recognizably Western clothes and shoes. And they kept
pets--dogs, cats--which, unlike the birds and fish favored on the Chinese side
of the river, displayed affection, loyalty, and warmth.
Two more different cultures could hardly be
imagined--and yet here they were, separated simply by a narrow, swiftly flowing
river that one side called the Black Dragon and the other the Amur. Were it not
for a large Soviet gunboat moored by a buoy in midstream, it would have been so
easy to sail across, or to bridge, or even to swim.
The Black Dragon is the eighth longest river on the
planet and is sufficiently remote to be bridged only twice in its nearly 2,800
miles of length, carries nearly one hundred species of fish, and, in the six
months of the year when it is unfrozen, surges lustily eastward carrying vast
quantities of water and more than 25 million tons of silt into the North
Pacific. The engaging people who live along the river may drink reindeer's milk
or be Old Believers with beards who seem to have stepped out of some tsarist
time warp. But what is most unusual about the
This stark and simple reality underlies almost every
aspect of life for the eight and a half million people who live along the
river's length. With
Are the hopes and aspirations of those on both sides of
the
Is the
NOT FOR NOTHING has the remote and cold vastness of
Where the river eventually spills, by way of a large
gulf, into the
When I told a woman in
"So far away" said one old lady, bound for
The Amur River--let us settle, in this narrative, on
this one name in a region where place-names change constantly--rises in China,
curves through endless birch forests and taiga, and finally oozes out to sea by
the grim city of Nikolayevsk na Amure.
It was via airplane and the Trans-Siberian Railroad,
which joined the two ends of the Russian Empire together in 1904, that I
returned to the Amur after my 20 years away. I arrived just before dawn in the
middle of a blizzard at a forest town called Skovorodino, close to where the
Argun and the
As the blue-and-cream cars of the Rossiya express
creaked away, heading east for
So I was detained for most of an entire day by an
unsmiling youth named Roman Mikhailovich Sergeev, who worked in the local
office of the Federal Security Service--a child of the old KGB. Foreigners, he
told me, were not permitted in Skovorodino, so I should not have disembarked
from the train. Foreigners most certainly were not permitted within 30
kilometers of the riverbank--and so if I entertained any idea of going to see
the Albazino Lore and Historical Museum nearby, I should forget it: There was a
border security force checkpoint on the track to the riverside, and even if I
were lucky enough to be permitted the opportunity to remain in Skovorodino--not
an entirely pleasing prospect, since it appeared an almost wholly ruined town,
with few stores and one hotel with dirty beds and sporadic hot water I would
certainly not make it to the banks of the Amur.
"Besides, why do you want to go there?" Roman
asked. "There is no need for you to go." I explained that I was
interested in the town's history. "It is all in books. Read the books.
Except they are all in Russian)' (He smiled at this.) "And the library is
closed)' (He smiled even more broadly.)
And so while the permissions to stay and to travel to
the riverbank were sought, Roman told me his guiding philosophy: that Stalin
was the greatest figure in world history, that North Korea was the only true
paradise left on Earth, that the gulag camps I would surely find toward the
lower end of the river were designed only to punish the criminals, and that no
one who was innocent had anything to fear from them.
His views were unsmilingly stated, implacably held, and
amenable to no reasonable argument. Roman seemed like a well-oiled
machine--never angry, wholly efficient, polite, and as cold as ice.
THE PERMISSIONS CAME TOO LATE. The small, half-deserted
riverside
Three centuries ago Cossack adventurers fanning out
into the region in search of furs, known then as soft gold, stumbled across the
village but had no clear idea of who its unfamiliar-looking inhabitants might
be, nor of their citizenry. They wiped them out and built a fort on what they
believed to be newly acquired Russian territory.
It in fact belonged to the Manchu, the dynastic rulers
who since 1644 had dominated northern
The Manchu swiftly forced the Russians to negotiate a
permanent settlement: The Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689 (with Jesuit priests
fluent in Russian, Latin, and Manchu acting as interpreters) placed the entire
In Skovorodino the chief of the border security
force--whose guards are armed with attack dogs that had been trained to bring
down any would-be Chinese immigrants-had more immediate concerns on his mind.
He said that as many as 300 people tried to get through each year-"more in
winter, because they can walk across the ice." Their motive was the same
as mine: to get aboard a train on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.
Yet in that regard we differed, the Chinese and I.
They, if they eluded the barbed wire and the attack dogs, would be heading
north and west, hoping to ride the rails to wide-open spaces and freedom. I, on
the other hand, was heading eastward, making first a long curving track toward
the south, precisely paralleling the now mighty river that flowed in the same
direction 30 miles away, and in whose valley the railroad had been built.
WHEN THE DAWN BROKE, the train had left the snow behind,
and we were deep in the green sea of the far eastern forests. These virgin
tracts of larch, pine, hemlock, spruce, and birch make up one of the largest
remaining stands of timber in the world, a priceless ecological and economic
resource. Unfortunately they are also terribly prone to summer fires: And there
was evidence on both sides of the railway-wrecked and blackened houses, twisted
iron, stretches of pale green new growth in acres of charred wood--to show that
this past summer had been no better than usual.
One of the greatest fires in the world occurred here in
May 1987: The Black Dragon fire--or the Great Chinese Fire, as it is also
known--raged for a month and devastated more than 46,000 square miles on the
Russian side of the Amur and perhaps 5,000 square miles on the Chinese side.
During the fighting of the 1987 fires, not one Chinese
helicopter or water-bombing plane was allowed to enter Russian airspace, nor
were any Russian firefighters, members of an elite enormously experienced in
controlling forest blazes, invited to come and help the Chinese. Relations are
better today: There is talk, up in these northern regions, of a joint fire
commission, to make sure that no such tragedy recurs and that the timber in the
valley is never subjected to such a threat again.
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when the train roared through the
dire industrial town of
This was important: I was about to see, the following
dawn, the mirror image of the sight that I had gazed at through the telescope
20odd years before. On the opposite bank of the river, if my map was correct,
stood the Chinese city of
It was barely believable. Heihe, little more than a
dusty, flyblown place of shacks and tenement blocks in the 1970s, was like a
sunburst: A gleaming city of new white-tiled skyscrapers, the horizon wild with
swinging cranes and the air humming with the sound of distant jackhammers
echoing across the river, Heihe stood as a modern, bustling monument to Chinese
pride. Everywhere there were towers of steel and glass stretching from side to
side on the far bank, which was crowded with hotels, casinos, department
stores, trade centers.
By contrast, beside me on Russian soil were broken-down
buildings, half-completed monuments to long-forgotten political hacks, windows
of cracked glass, half-empty stores, old communist workers' halls and
administrative buildings. This
Here, almost in hailing distance, was a reality that
was the dominant feature of what tomorrow might mean for Russians, who often
viewed their neighbors with resentment and real apprehension--at least in
private. The publicly expressed opinion was another matter. Anatoliy Belonogov,
the genial and burly governor of Amur Oblast, the vast region that has its
administrative headquarters in
"We regard optimistically the development of
China-Russia relations," Belonogov said. "Our governments have agreed
on a strategic partnership in the 21st century. To promote trade, we have
signed an agreement on building a bridge across the Amur near Blago veshchensk
and Heihe. And we maintain regular business contacts with the leaders of the
Chinese territories on culture, economy, tourism, sports, and ecology. Our
region is developing relations with
A few hours away, in the small town of
"But we live, we smile, we are not going to
die," Tkachenko said. "We hear all this talk about selling our
produce to
"It comes in many ways" he added. "When
we had the celebrations of the 140th birthday of our town, it was only the Chinese
delegates who did not offer a toast of congratulations. I heard someone
congratulate the Chinese on building good-quality houses in
Down in Beijing, Russia's fears of Chinese expansionism
are dismissed as mere fantasy-a spokesman noted that talks were continuing even
today on the detailed definition of the river frontier, of just where in the middle
of the Amur channel the actual border should be sited. The notion that China
might ever want territory on the northern side of the river was nonsensical,
according to the spokesman. With Hong Kong and Macau now returned to the fold,
only Taiwan remains as an irritant to Chinese territorial pride. The
Russian-Chinese frontier line has, the spokesmen in the Chinese capital insist,
been settled to everyone's satisfaction.
The only talk you hear of the possibility-aside from
fears expressed in some offices in Russia--comes from merchants in towns on the
Chinese banks of the river, far away from authority. There are Chinese
merchants who look hungrily across the river and wonder, but their wondering is
heard and understood across the stream, and people worry.
I CROSSED THE RIVER into China the next day, aboard one
of the frequent daily ferries that make the ten-minute shuttle. The boat was
full of Russian men and women, all carrying empty plastic garbage bags or those
red-white-and blue striped plastic shopping sacks that can be seen all over the
poorer parts of today's Asia, particularly in the Philippines, and which are
known derisively as "Manila Vuitton." I spoke to one young woman,
named Irina, who worked in a Russian candy factory but who had not been paid
for six months. She gets by, as do all her friends on this boat, by working for
the Chinese, hauling back into Russia so-called bricks of inbound trade goods.
"I go over for the afternoon with my empty bags--I
meet my contact in the market, he fills my bag with stuff he wants to sell back
in Blagoveshchensk, and I carry it back. I get paid 150 rubles. Sure it's
humiliating, working for the Chinese, hauling their goods. But I need the
money. I can't argue.
"I just wish we had something to sell to them,'
she said. "But we don't make anything. And you wait and see what I bring
back. It'll be good stuff."
And an hour later, during which time I made my way to a
revolving restaurant on top of a brand new Heihe hotel and ate a lunch of fried
pork, rice, Chinese kale, mango pudding, and Tsingtao beer--all foods rare in
the Russian Far East--I met Irina again. She was slowly and painfully lugging
the full plastic bags down to the dock, past the idle gaze of the Russian
customs men. She opened a corner of one: There were T-shirts, sandals, blocks
of tea, and scores of heat-sealed plastic bags of Chinese-made whiskey and, of
all things, vodka.
Later in the day I met another woman carrying a similar
load: "Can you imagine the real humiliation of that--the Chinese getting
me, a Russian girl, to lug Chinese-made vodka back into Russia to help them
make money. It is totally shameful, don't you think?"
The trade goes on throughout the year, the summertime
boats being replaced in mid-November by motor buses that shuttle across the
ice. In recent years the Chinese have set up a duty-free market on a sandspit
lying just on their side of the midline that officially divides the two
nations; Russian citizens can shop there openly--on those rare occasions when
they have money to spend.
And the result of all the trade is a steadily more
prosperous China, and a Russian Far East that is becoming, with equal
steadiness, more impoverished. "We have dreams" said Belonogov.
"We sell them soybeans, scrap metal, lumber, and electricity. But they
sell what the people want. And their profits go to making new cities like
Heihe. Our profits-where do they go? I hate to think."
The answer to that last question is known. The profits
go to the shadowy Russian underworld--to the dealmakers and brokers and legions
of sharp-suited, fast-talking, SUV-driving, heavily armed men without whom, it
seems, no commercial deal in Russia is possible. The corruption remains almost
willfully uncontrolled, and the long-term effects are dramatically visible when
comparisons are made--as here on the Amur-between what is accomplished and what
is possible, by the two peoples who live, essentially, in one and the same
place. If the Black Dragon River Valley of China is so very rich, then why is
the Amur River Valley of Russia, which is geographically essentially the same
place, so desperately poor?
TO AN EXTENT--and leaving aside such chronic problems
as corruption and inefficiency--this part of Russia remains firmly trapped in
poverty because it remains so mired in history and, in these outer reaches of
the nation, so mired as well in outdated ideology. Nowhere along the Amur
Valley is this combination more obvious than in a tiny autonomous region, some
two hundred miles downstream, known generally as Birobidzhan but officially
known as the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR). Here is the site of one of
Stalin's great follies, and one of the more bizarre remnants of the Soviet
order.
Joseph Stalin, like many Russian rulers, had long
sought to do something with the three million Jewish people in his country.
These citizens, lacking a nation and yet having a formidable array of skills
and a powerful social cohesion, made their Russian neighbors feel eternally
uncomfortable. Stalin's plan was to create a homeland for the Jews, a Zion
within Russia--a land of wilderness and hardship to which the Jewish community
could go and create from its barren plains a land of milk and honey.
He had chosen for the Jews a 14,000square-mile tract of
land north of the Amur River between Blagoveshchensk and Khabarovsk. Doubtless
part of his purpose was to put the Chinese and the Japanese on notice that this
was Russian soil and could never be taken away.
Henceforth as many Russian Jews as possible--including
those who had once lived in the so-called Pale of Settlement west of
Moscow--would be encouraged to live in this corner of Siberia. Some Jewish
leaders around the world took up the cause. Jews would receive subsidies, run
their own government and their own schools, collect their own taxes. Moreover,
they would be free to speak and read and write in their traditional language,
Yiddish.
The language is still spoken in Birobidzhan; there is
even a Yiddish radio station--but almost no Jews. The residents of JAR did not
escape Stalin's purges during the 1930s.
Of the 210,000 inhabitants of today's JAR, only about
8,000--4 percent--are Jewish. "And several times a month a plane leaves
Khabarovsk Airport[' said Abram Ginzburg, who retired here when he was 60.
"They go off to Israel. The Jewish Agency is extolling the virtues of
Israel, helping those--most of them young--who want to leave. Five hundred
leave every month.
"The experiment was a good one. But it failed.
There is no synagogue here. No rabbi. The only Torah scrolls are in the museum.
We have to accept that this is no longer a Zion. The idea that this is a Jewish
Autonomous Region is outdated now. Most of the people are Russians, like
everywhere else. And the Chinese are coming in too--there are three authorized
river crossings and trading places here, and they are setting up markets,
infiltrating the region, just as they do everywhere else up and down the
Amur."
THERE ARE KOREANS in Birobidzhan today also, adding to
the impression that the strictly European nature of the region is steadily
being eroded, its identity becoming more Asian. In this case it is a firm from
Seoul that has a joint-venture factory, making coats and jackets for the
American market.
This clothing plant is modern and well heated, has its
own day-care center and bakery, and pays its workers on time--a rare privilege
in Russia.
I came across a woman sewing labels into identical
jackets. Both labels had the recommended U.S. retail prices. One said: Old
Navy. $18. The other: Chaps Ralph Lauren. $38. The costs for each were
identical: five dollars for labor, two dollars and fifty cents for material.
Koreans are to be found working in the Amur Valley in
much more straitened circumstances too. North Koreans, impoverished and
brainwashed by years of propaganda from their Stalinist leaders, have been sent
regularly into the bleakest parts of Russia and China to perform labor of the
lowest kind. There have long been tales of heavily guarded camps of North
Koreans working deep in the northern Siberian forests, cutting trees in winter
conditions that would cause even the toughest Russians to balk.
Rarely are these stories proven, but I came across a
similar camp at a village called Tatyanovka, close to Blagoveshchensk: dozens
of the most miserable wretches, living in a barracks-camp of utter squalor,
salting cabbages for the Russian Army. I spent about an hour there before the
sentries noticed me and sent me packing. I was able to see the tiny rooms--each
bare except for a chair, a table, and a picture of the now dead Great Leader,
Kim I1 Sung, or his son Kim Jong I1 in pride of place above a thin folded
mattress. I was able to see, too, the brine pits for the cabbage and two lines
of men working ankle-deep in mud, pulling the cabbages from the icy ground,
their bare hands raw with work and salt water.
I managed to speak to one man. He had been there for
six years of an eight-year contract, and the little money he was able to make
he sent home to his wife in Pyongyang. "The work is hard" he said,
"but I think it is better than at home. There is some kind of freedom
here." But I was in mid-conversation when one of the Russian co-owners
drove up in a fast car, having been alerted by radio. He demanded that I leave,
and when I took a few parting photographs, another man appeared and made it
clear he would tolerate no more.
THE WORRIES that some Russians express over the
long-term intentions of the Chinese are matched only by their reputed concern
over the region's environmental future. The millions of acres of virgin forest
and mountain range are still home to an extraordinary variety of wildlife:
sable, roe deer, reindeer, boar, brown bear, moose, snow sheep, the endangered
Amur leopard--and about 350 endangered Siberian tigers, Panthera tigris
altaica. The Russian intention is to keep that habitat intact.
One afternoon I stopped my car to talk to an elderly
couple in their typical Siberian house--ancient, wooden, with fret-worked
windows, with sleeping dogs on the porch and honeybees buzzing in the
wildflowers outside. The couple, speaking in the kind of hushed tones one might
use in church, said with reverence that they had seen a mother tiger and two of
her cubs pass by in the woods just a few weeks before. It seemed to me that
they reflected a devotion to the environment in which they are privileged to
live.
That contrasts powerfully, many Russians insist, with
what is seen as a lack of feeling for the environment across the river in
China. Poachers, said the couple, still stalk the forest to kill the tigers and
take their skins and skeletons to China to sell. The officers at the border
security force headquarters in Khabarovsk said much the same: They were kept
busy catching tiger poachers and arresting those fishermen who would try to
catch the endangered sturgeon known as the kaluga, Huso dauricus, which, like
the tiger, is renowned as the pride and joy of the region. And now the Russians
grumble about Chinese plans for building a huge dam across the river in the
Khingan foothills.
Vast quantities of pollution wash into the river from
northern China. When I was there, floods in the middle section of the Nen had
flooded an oil field near the industrial city of Qiqihar, where I saw pollution
washing downstream. Then later, at the city of Khabarovsk, the Ussuri River
joined the Amur, bringing yet more filth into the main stream, making a river
that is clean, beautiful, and magnificent at Albazino seem no more than a
memory.
Not, of course, that Russia has an especially good
reputation in the environmental world: far from it. The tragedies of nuclear
pollution, deforestation, industrial waste, the drying of the Aral Sea, the
ruin and poisoning caused by old copper mines and smelting plants--the legacy
of the irresponsibility of Russia's communist past is everywhere to be seen. Yet
there does seem something different about the popular attitude, now and before,
toward Siberia and the Russian Far East.
The vast tracts of purity--endless forests, millions of
acres of taiga, huge and unpolluted rivers--that long existed in these parts
seemed to imbue those who came to live here with the feeling that they ought to
be preserved and protected. The result is that while eastern cities like
Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk Kamchatskiy are every bit as grimy and unpleasant
as the more notoriously ruined towns closer to the Urals, the Siberian
countryside and the Siberian villages seem, by and large, untouched. And in
this somewhat unusual context, the ruin to be seen across the river in China
and the eccentric attitudes some Russians feel the Chinese have toward
wildlife--making so-called cancer remedies and aphrodisiacs from animal
parts--deepen the Russians' mistrust of the Chinese.
FROM KHABAROVSK downstream, where the river ceases
being a frontier and turns north to flow through the muddy coastal flatlands
that are entirely Russian territory, any thought of the Amur being any longer
magnificent is quickly dashed. The noble statue of Count Muravyov-Amursky,
which presides over the region he opened up so bravely a century and a half
ago, looks down over a river whose character changes profoundly for the final
600 winding miles of its life.
"A most difficult, dangerous river," said a
former steersman, Mikhail Sergeevich Kile, who now administers a village 50
miles downriver from Khabarovsk. "A stormy and uneasy stream, feared and
loathed by most of us. It is so difficult to keep a boat to the midpoint of the
channel, which changes every day, almost every hour.
"Many's the time I was in a big ship bringing iron
scrap or soybeans down to the Sea of Okhotsk, and I was in a part of the river
so wide that you couldn't see the banks, and yet I knew it was shallow beyond
the buoys--and there was a fierce crosswind, and we were being blown across the
channel. Ayaaah! It is a difficult river. I'm so glad to be working in an
office now."
The villages below Khabarovsk--like the one Mr. Kile
administers--are home to the Nanai, the Ulchi, and the Evenk. They cling to
their traditions in the face of creeping Russian influence. There are dances,
exhibitions, theatrical performances--the village elders teaching the
youngsters the traditions. In some villages there are shamans still, travelers
of the spirit world and healers of the sick. One old lady I met was nearly
blind, and more than 90 years old, and deaf--but was accorded respect verging
on veneration. Neighbors brought children to her in the hope they might be
cured of ailments great and small.
And there are communities too, some far away from the
riverside, of Orthodox Old Believers. In one village called Tavlinka there are
about 600 of them, the men heavily bearded, the women modest and devout, the
children numerous, the attention to the holy book complete.
And then the river spills muddily and slowly out of its
great estuary, into the Sea of Okhotsk. The few shipyards stand idle. A cluster
of rusty freighters from Pakistan and North Korea wait for stevedores to load
cargoes. A few miles across the Tatar Strait is Sakhalin Island. Chekhov went
there once, to write a book about its prisons. The difference today is that
geologists have found oil off Sakhalin, and there are Americans there, and the
island has a promising economy. The plains of the lower Amur are by contrast
dismal and ugly and poor, deservedly forgotten by most.
"Why are you going there?" the woman at
Domodedovo Airport had asked me. I could see why. The Amur is a river that
begins mighty pretty, but one that becomes pretty mighty and ends downright
ugly.
The Amur I had seen through the Chinese telescope all
those years ago separates an impoverished and corrupt and troubled outpost of
Europe from a rich and assertive part of the ancient nation that stands at the
very heart and soul of Asia. And from this the Amur derives its importance for
the foreseeable future.
The Amur is a river at a pivotal point of a region that
is about to be of great geopolitical interest. Ignored and forgotten by most of
the world, the Amur is at long last a river of gathering significance. It is
going to be a river in the headlines; it is going to be heard of and
remembered. The Amur, or the Black Dragon, is, in short--and for perhaps not
the very best of political reasons--a river whose time has come. A river to be
watched, and watched with care.
MAP: China/Russia
PHOTO (COLOR): The Chinese call it Heilong Jiang, or
Black Dragon River. The Russians--and most Western maps--name it the Amur. For
1,100 miles this frontier river, the world's eighth longest at 2,744 miles,
forms a sometimes uneasy border between two world powers. Near the mouth in
Russian territory, a fishing boat traffics the wide passage.
PHOTO (COLOR): Clad in skins and furs, an Oroqen
hunter, member of a once nomadic people on the Chinese side of the river,
braves minus 30 degrees F to track moose and deer. Forests and wetlands hem
long stretches of the Amur, its watershed increasingly exploited by farmers and
loggers.
PHOTO (COLOR): Indelible loyalty to a cause led Gennady
Vaslyevich as a soldier to tattoo his chest with the heroes of Russian
communism--Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. Today a poor pensioner living on
the streets of capitalist Khabarovsk, he weeps when asked to recall his better
times.
PHOTO (COLOR): A big payday--completely illegal--awaits
poachers hauling aboard a kaluga sturgeon, the largest of which can supply 400
pounds of caviar. The poachers snare the threatened sturgeons near the river's
mouth as kaluga chase spawning salmon. Undeterred by authorities--a policeman
ordered meat from this haul--poachers instead fear the pollution that recently
has been fouling the roe.
PHOTO (COLOR): Rising on a distant height in China's
Inner Mongolia, the Amur exits undammed in the Russian Far East, coursing
through a plush floodplain near the Tatar Straight. The Amur's fertile
bottomland and its access to the North Pacific roused Russian settlers in the
mid-1800s to colonize the northern bank, negating Chinese treaty claims.
PHOTO (COLOR): Vodka on the rocks: Front row seats for
the best show in Khabarovsk lure dealers from the local casino to watch river
ice break up and parade toward the sea on a late April day. For half the year
the river freezes to depths of six feet or more, serving as a truck route in a
region with few roads. In warm months the Amur is navigable for much of its
length, carrying barges, ferries, and gunboats.
PHOTO (COLOR): Simple fare of bread, soup, and corn
fuels laborers at a privately owned gold mine in the hills near Komsomolsk na
Amure. Enduring stifling heat and swarms of mosquitoes as they bulldoze a
streambed, the workers expect to earn $1,500 for six months' toil, a decent
wage in post-Soviet Russia.
PHOTO (COLOR): The mine's take of gold--four kilos
after several days--is guarded by armed sentries in response to a rash of
thefts in the region.
PHOTO (COLOR): The Russian forest swallows the barracks
of a former penal camp, its grounds and prisoner-built road marked by the fresh
green of young trees.
PHOTO (COLOR): At the ruins of camps along the Tatar
Straight, researchers found poignant remains: a guard tower, a heap of boots,
bent iron bars. Though most sites were abandoned and most prisoners released by
1956, "corrective labor camps" persisted in the region. The brutal
history of the gulag and the names of its mostly innocent victims--information
long suppressed by authorities--are now coming to light. Says investigator
Marina Kuzmina: "We must not forget the totalitarian past when every human
right was abused. Our task is to unveil these layers of history so such actions
will never be repeated."
PHOTO (COLOR): a heap of boots
PHOTO (COLOR): bent iron bars
PHOTO (COLOR): Walking a barbed-wire trail near
Kazakevichevo, Russian border guards provide the first line of defense against
a Chinese invasion--of illegal immigrants seeking work. Russian officials say
that each year hundreds of Chinese from the overcrowded south are crossing the
border, many sneaking across the frozen Amur, here hidden by trees. Russian and
Chinese troops last clashed near the river in 1969.
PHOTO (COLOR): Within shirt-waving sight of
PHOTO (COLOR): Last-minute shoppers pedal and pace down
a car-restricted street in frigid Heihe as Chinese New Year approaches.
Profiting from trade with
PHOTO (COLOR): Western pinups and a noisy TV district
Oroqen family members near Heihe from the language and traditions of their
ancestors.
PHOTO (COLOR): A featherweight is no competition for an
Amur tiger confined to a game park in the Chinese city of
PHOTO (COLOR): Innocent war games break out on an ice
rink in
PHOTO (COLOR): A candy-coated skyline of ice sculptures
sweetens the celebration of Chinese New Year in the boomtown of Heihe. Across
the river in dimly lit
EBSCO is reproducing the article exactly as it appears
in the magazine.
~~~~~~~~
By Simon Winchester
Simon Winchester, author of the
best-selling book The Professor and the Madman, has traveled extensively in