Black Dragon River

by Dominic Ziegler

  The following day three thousand of these Chinese were herded back up the Amur bank to Verkhne-Blagoveshchensk, exactly where Nikolay Muraviev had first landed nearly a half century earlier. The twenty Cossacks and eighty fresh recruits guarding these Chinese forced a swift pace. It was an exceptionally hot day, and old men discarded their knapsacks and began to fall behind. The officer in charge ordered the stragglers to be axed. Even months later, the path the Chinese took was still strewn with clothing, skulls, and Chinese queues.

  An official investigation was later conducted into what happened next but was never made public. The facts emerged only years later, in an anonymous article that appeared in Vestnik Evropy, Russia’s leading liberal magazine before the revolution. At a point where the Amur River was about seven hundred feet across, flowing fast, the Chinese were simply driven into the water and ordered to swim to the other side. Those who swam began to drown. Those who hesitated were forced into the water by the nagaikas, the Cossacks’ thick, braided whips. Those Russians who had rifles—Cossacks and settlers, some old men, others children—opened fire. The shooting lasted half an hour, with Chinese bodies piling up on the Russian shore. Then the Cossacks began slashing with their sabers. The commanding officer ordered the recruits to cut down “disobedient” Chinese with their axes. When recruits hesitated, the soldiers threatened to behead them as traitors. Meanwhile, the Chinese survivors set up a terrible wailing; some crossed themselves. No more than one hundred reached the other shore. It was not, the official note stated, a crossing “but an extermination.”

  Days after the massacre, some citizens of Blagoveshchensk were already weighing the moral cost. “How shall we atone for our guilt?” ran an editorial in the Amurski Krai. “How shall we tell civilized people? We shall have to say to them: ‘Do not consider us as brothers anymore. We are mean and terrible people; we have killed those . . . who sought our protection.’” For the rest, there was a deafening silence. Once they had reinforcements, Russian troops marauded for weeks through Manchuria on a punitive expedition. “The name of the Amur Cossack will thunder through all of Manchuria and strike terror among the Chinese population,” Gribskii promised, and he this time delivered on his word, starting with the utter destruction of Sakhalian and Aigun. While the Amurski Krai urged Christian charity, other Russians dressed up the punitive expedition—indeed Russia’s very presence in Asia—as a deeply Christian and redemptive crusade against a barbarous people.

  Farther south, in early August, a twenty-thousand-strong expeditionary force of soldiers from Britain, Russia, France, the United States, and Japan marched on Peking from the east as the empress dowager and her retinue fled westward. The force lifted the siege, occupied the vacated Forbidden City, and in the capital began an orgy of reprisals and looting of palaces, temples, and homes. By this stage, it was unclear who were the civilized and who the barbarians. A year later, in the Boxer Protocol, the foreign powers extracted their price. Monuments were to be erected to the two hundred foreigners killed by the Boxers. The rebellion’s supporters were to be executed, including the governor-general of Shanxi province. Imports of arms were to be banned. Foreign soldiers were permanently to be stationed in the capital. Above all, a severe indemnity for damages was imposed: 450 million taels of gold, or nearly twice the Qing exchequer’s annual revenues. Perhaps steeper than the financial price, however, was the erosion of sovereignty. Western imperial powers, and the fast imperializing Japan, considered themselves to be the new rulers of China. Within a few years, the Qing had crumbled, and with it the end of thousands of years of dynastic rule.

  As for Russia, the Blagoveshchensk massacre was the first in a series of steps that led the country into a military adventure from which it did not want to extricate itself. The swift occupation of nearly all of Manchuria followed the destruction of Sakhalian and Aigun. The Russian Far East was in a bullish mood. The Russian presence in Manchuria threatened Japanese interests and so set in train events that in 1904–5 led to a bloody and dogged war between the two countries—and the first (and utter) defeat of a European power by an Asian one.

  But that was still in the future. For now, in that hot July of 1900 along the Amur, similar if smaller drownings of Chinese happened at Cossack posts up and down the river. The soldiers were urged on in telegrams and telephone calls by the impatient colonel commanding the Blagoveshchensk force. “You are bothering me with the Chinese,” he replied testily to the request from two subordinates for help in getting Chinese civilians to the other side. “It will be no tragedy if they be drowned and killed.”

  Not everywhere on the Amur were Chinese mistreated. At the Cossack posts of Zhalinda, Ignashino, and Markova, Chinese were put into the available boats and, pushed from the shore, were told: “Now, friends, depart.” As for the rest, a few words from General Gribskii would have saved them. In the inquiry that followed, the brutal colonel in Blagoveshchensk was discharged, serving just three months in prison. Gribskii was relieved of his duties, but kept on full pay. His Manchurian expedition was praised.

  Three weeks after the massacre, the Russian writer Alexander Vereshchagin was traveling by steamer from Blagoveshchensk to Khabarovsk. The vessel passed a swollen corpse floating facedown in the stream:

  Waves from the boat shake it, making it disappear in the water . . . More bodies of the Chinese appear, and now they float along the width of the Amur as if haunting us. “Breakfast is served,” announces a waiter.

  The Blagoveshchensk regional museum is a fine big building with high ceilings, wide staircases, and marble floors. It had, until the revolution, been the pride of Blagoveshchensk, a department store belonging to the trading firm of Kunst & Albers. I came in search of clues about the drowning of the three thousand Chinese in Blagoveshchensk in 1900. I asked to see the curator, and in the meantime strolled about the exhibits, which appeared to have been undisturbed for years. It was the familiar narrative of the Russian Far East: mammoth teeth, sables, medieval Cossack halberds, early farm tools, and a tin of halva, a special schoolchild treat brought from the “mainland,” as European Russia was often called, by late-nineteenth-century immigrants. There were some artifacts of mystery: an ancient Buddhist figurine dug up by a Russian hand plow, and a threadbare, stuffed flamingo, its pink feathers now bleached gray—the poor bird had apparently flown far, far astray. There was also something of great beauty, a religious text from 1645, illuminated in polychrome patterns and bird-topped scrolls, bound in soft leather covers. Long ago the treasure of an Old Believer moving into the country, the book lay in its glass case, its vellum pages blown open like the petals of a bloom going over.

  Yet in the museum, there was nothing about the drownings. I called on the curator to learn more. She was in her forties, dressed with style and sitting in a wired, modern office, a contrast to the fusty museum. I asked to know more about those days in 1900. She led me upstairs to an empty room. A large oil painting leaned against the wall, unhung. It was a depiction of Blagoveschensk’s bombardment by Manchu troops, or rather, of the town’s defense. And the striking thing about it was that the artist had conveyed—whether he meant to or not was unclear—something of a fairground mood. The shells exploded like fireworks about the Russian steamboats in the river. In the foreground was the Blagoveshchensk promenade. Some of the townsfolk in their Sunday best are working with shovels to dig out trenches and foxholes. Others are manning the defense. Leaning forward with long rifle shouldered and pointed toward the Chinese side is a fine young Russian girl in a blue frock and ribbons streaming in the breeze from her straw hat.

  But about the noyage that followed, I drew a blank. “As for that,” the curator said distantly, “you will have to ask an expert.”

  • • •

  I was curious to know more about the Chinese and their place in the Russian Far East today. Perhaps, twenty-five years ago, the common description of the awestruck Chinese looking at his first hair dryer held true. At any rate, it was ab
out then, during perestroika, that Chinese began crossing the Amur in search of work, and the pace quickened after the Soviet Union’s collapse. There is a paradox in this: rates of economic growth in China had begun to sizzle, which could not be said for the Amur regions of the Russian Far East. But unemployment in crowded, agrarian northeastern China was always high. Meanwhile, the Russian Far East was suffering—continues to suffer—from postsocialist malaise. Workers in the old metal-stamping industries were used to perks and status, and Blagoveshchensk had its share of shipyards and foundries. Overnight, these industries were on the scrap heap. And then the demands of an economy in need of restructuring were not ones that Russian workers were psychologically prepared to meet: many preferred meager unemployment benefits to work with lower wages and stricter discipline. Chinese slipped across the border to fill the vacuum, on farms, in forestry operations, and on construction sites. Post-Soviet government failed to foster the kind of climate in which private enterprise might flourish—in part out of fear of Chinese doing well at Russians’ expense. And so the Russian Far East remains blighted with predatory tax collectors, mindless regulations, the baneful presence of the Russian mafia, and a population sliding into degrading poverty.

  A rise in racial tensions only complicates matters. Russians in the Far East are not simple racists. Speak Russian and pray like a Russian, and often it seems that you can be of any race you like. But the Chinese sojourners in the Far East do not speak Russian, for the most part, and they do not pray. And so the fears and fantasies about them—as a yellow horde sweeping across the Far East, as criminals, and as carriers of epidemics—are flickering into life again. The “China question,” talking heads call it on Russian television. Dmitry Medvedev, when president, called for vigilance in the Russian Far East, if Russia was not to “lose everything.” A deputy prime minister warned against Chinese “crossing the border in small groups of five million.” Vladimir Putin once said: “Unless we make a serious effort, the Russians in the border regions will have to speak Chinese, Japanese and Korean in a few decades.” It takes a paranoid country to think a second language is a bad idea.

  It is the return of the yellow peril fear a century ago. The resonances are striking. Then, the number of Chinese farmers on Russian soil had grown from ten thousand in the Manchu Chinese villages along the Zeia when Muraviev founded Blagoveshchensk to seventy-eight thousand in the whole of the Russian Far East by 1916. At the time, Russian writers were struck by the zeal with which Chinese applied themselves to their plots, with astonishingly productive results. Vladimir Arseniev, a surveyor and ethnographer, said that the Chinese peasant “put his whole soul into his vegetable patch.” The usual Chinese farm would have what the Russians called a fanza (from the Chinese fangzi, a house), with a cow-shed, a field, and a vegetable plot. Usually, one room in the fanza was given over to distilling spirits or manufacturing opium. On not much ground, such a farm would produce wheat, oats, beans, corn, hemp, tobacco, poppies, potatoes, beets, cabbage, carrots, onions, garlic, long beans, tomatoes, and herbs. Chinese adapted appreciably quicker to Far Eastern growing conditions than did Russian peasants, to whom the state allotted the best land. Within a season or two, Arseniev said, the Chinese settler was living better than his Russian neighbors. One Chinese farm could feed two dozen Russians, and a Russo-Chinese pidgin sprang up in the Far East as the medium for interaction.

  Now, as then, not all Russians appreciate the dependency. Chinese have reappeared on the land, renting plots and paying the landlord in kind. They are present not in their millions, numbering perhaps fifty thousand scattered along a 1,500-mile ribbon of Russian land—enough to make a pleasurable difference in what you can eat in the Russian Far East. Now, as then, a Chinese field in the Russian Far East looks different. There is something halfhearted about a Russian patch, as if its keeper had moved on after sowing. In a Chinese patch there is not a weed, and carefully husbanded crops are packed tight. Chinese farms now supply half the vegetables in the Russian Far East. On summer roadsides and outside railway stations, even watermelons are piled up high for sale. And so the early Russian pioneers’ hopes of a cornucopia in their Amur Eden have come to pass, only in the hands of others.

  A century ago, Chinese workers outnumbered Chinese farmers. It is the same today. It used to stick in the craw of Russian imperialists that their newly seized Far Eastern lands depended upon Chinese and to a lesser extent Korean labor to secure and develop them. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese contract workers were brought in to mine, fish, and log. In the Far East the Chinese built the railways, the roads, the military garrisons. They made bricks and lime, and they cut stone. They laid out city streets and threw up municipal buildings. They brewed beer, canned salmon, and stuffed sausages. Chinese workers were well organized and able to put up with hardship. Only for the relatively careful work of plastering, joinery, and oven building were Russians preferred over Chinese in the Russian Far East.

  Today, Chinese contract workers are in demand again in gold mines and in the lumberyards stripping out the taiga: no days off, ascetic living conditions, and bound, as a century ago, to a headman with opportunities for exploitation. Some things have changed. There are no massacres of Chinese. Nor, any longer, is there the frequent mimicking or scragging of Chinese in the street that caused one sardonic editorialist a century ago to say that “beating the manza [the pejorative term for a Chinese] has become a custom with us. Only the lazy don’t indulge in it.” Still, the interactions with Chinese are kept to a minimum in the Russian Far East and rarely are they friendly. In the face of Russian nationalism, the Chinese workers lie low. To Russian paranoia, invisibility remains proof of dastardliness.

  • • •

  I had arranged for the son of Vasily and Marina, who had a car, to take me to Verkhne-Blagoveshchensk, Old Blagoveshchensk, upstream from the current town. There Muraviev had first landed and named the place “Glad Tidings” or “Annunciation” in gratefulness for his famous land grab. Following him ashore from the barges was the Albazino Madonna, carried by adoring Cossacks and blessed on the land by accompanying priests. It was in Old Blagoveshchensk that the helpless Chinese were pushed at bayonet point into the river. The place now was a rundown settlement of wooden shacks strung along the Amur on top of an escarpment. The settlers here show me where the memorial to Muraviev’s landing had once stood, before it was swept away by floods. No one knew anything about the drownings.

  We drove back to town, to the cathedral, a blue-and-white confection two blocks back from the river. On the steps was a burly priest in late middle age with lively eyes and a gold tooth that flashed through his beard in the sun’s low clear stream. Father Sergey Bondarenko was not just a priest but a colonel in an infantry division. He had turned to God as a junior officer, he said, when Communism rang hollow as a belief, bringing ruination to the Soviet Union. Things had been no better since. The country’s ruling elite chased Mammon. Power and wealth intermingled until they became indistinguishable, leaving the poor behind in the mud. “Government has lost its belief, and so the people suffer much, much more than we can know. Only belief sustains you. Otherwise, everyone died for nothing—under Stalin, in the Great Patriotic War, the drunks with vodka bottles. Personal belief is all that counts. Faith.”

  “What kind of faith?”

  “I’ll show you. Orthodox, Catholic, Malokan, Starovertsi: it doesn’t matter. They all pass by. Come!”

  Inside, women in scarves were taking candles into the depths. “She went away during the godless times,” said Father Sergey. “She was ripped from our cathedral, and put in an atheist museum, mocked as a superstition. But she was restored in a Moscow ceremony, and now she will not leave again.”

  The women stopped, in turn, before a high column. On it hung an icon, framed in hammered silver, hung with rosaries, and shimmering in the candlelight. Out of the slate-blue background gazed a dark-eyed Madonna in golden robes. Two tiny figures, as much birds as angels, fl
uttered in red over each shoulder. She was making as if to give the sign of the cross—two- or three-fingered was not yet clear. And out of her breast a dazzling light carried the boy Jesus: dark, Ethiopian dark, in white loincloth. Here the ancient Albazino Madonna had come to rest to work her wonders. And she was exquisite.

  • • •

  Later, in the ground-floor window of a new tower block, I saw a photograph of a shiny, well-fed businessman grinning proudly for the photographer. The apparently endless hood of his car rolled toward the cathedral, which loomed in the background. The man had come to have his car blessed. It was, after all, Blagoveshchensk’s first Rolls-Royce. But what was striking was that the businessman was not Russian, nor even from the North Caucasus. He was Chinese. He had put up Blagoveshchensk’s highest building. Some say the Chinese invest more in the Russian Far East than the Russians themselves.

  For some Russians, it is a world turned upside down. Once, Moscow was China’s biggest provider of aid. Even after the relationship soured (Mao Zedong never forgave Khrushchev for denouncing Stalin soon after his death), at least the Russians had hair dryers when the Chinese did not. Now most of the Russian “tourists” who take the ferry across to Heihe and return with huge bundles work for Chinese bosses. These Russians are known as “camels.” Because they attract less harrassment at the hands of Russian customs officials, they are paid by Chinese distributors to bring into Russia the manufactures of southern China: platform boots, rhinestone belts, and leatherette bomber jackets lined with fake fur; shoddy batteries; cheap hunting binoculars; knockoffs of Johnnie Walker whisky with typos on the label. The fine stuff of the Chinese industrial revolution—iPads and the like—makes its way to the West. The dross comes across the Amur River to Blagoveshchensk.

  I wanted to cross over to Heihe. At the ferry terminal on the Russian side, all was shoddiness, sloth, surly commands, and high prices. While Chinese cross the river on a Chinese-owned service, Russians (and Englishmen) must use a Russian service belonging to a good friend of the governor. At $40 for a brief crossing, it is ten times the Chinese rate. An official gruffly directed a party of Chinese to line up before a particular immigration counter. When the party, after a long patient wait, reached the front of the line, the border officer drew down her blind and without an explanation clacked off in stiletto boots.