On the river, we crabbed across to Heihe. On the Chinese side, a trail of sunflower husks led up the jetty and into a huge new immigration hall built of glass and granite. We are out in five minutes. Welcome, China seemed to be saying.
Heihe proved to be no Potemkin village at all. It was a thriving Chinese city, with a promenade along the waterfront and a bustling market behind, counters gleaming with river fish and farmers coming from the countryside in motorized carts piled with vegetables, mutton, and live chickens. The welcome continued. Street signs were in Russian as well as in Chinese (over in Blagoveshchensk Chinese characters were absent everywhere). In the parks, snack stalls were given the fretwork of a Russian izba, while vestigial onion domes hovered over the municipal lavatories. “Russians, feel at home” seemed to be the subliminal message.
Russians were not always minded to heed it. The petty haggling over shoddy stuff reeked of superciliousness. “Watch out,” said a Russian to me as he turned away from a counter of cheap sneakers, “this one will cheat you.” I would, too, if treated as if from an inferior race.
Not long ago, a minor diplomatic incident broke out over Heihe’s trash cans. The city government had, as part of its effort to mark an enduring Sino-Russian friendship, thought to make them resemble matryoshka, Russia’s nesting wooden dolls. No offense was intended—other Chinese cities use pandas as trash cans. But in Blagoveshchensk, nationalists seethed: it did not help matters that the municipal designers had insensibly decorated the matryoshka cans with crosses and church domes. To Russians, the articles were a clearly calculated insult against sacred Russiahood. The foreign ministry protested over the delinquent cans:
Our stance is that this destructive idea should not catch on in other regions of China. Its public should be aware they shouldn’t infringe Russia’s interests in such a manner.
In the face of surliness, China seems always mindful of keeping up appearances, always falling back on the myth of fraternal cooperation. Why? In part, perhaps, because what China wants these days from Russia is really nothing special: just lumber ripped out of the taiga forests, and oil and Siberian gas. And perhaps because in China, after all, stability is everything, and a peaceable northern frontier counts for much. It is why China still plays the bride forced to woo her groom. It is why Russians arriving across the border are greeted by reminders of the homeland: by facsimiles of Russian churches and busts of Pushkin and Dostoevsky. And by matryoshka cans.
On the other side, Russians keep up their guard. The inscription around the base of the triumphal arch put up for Czar Nicholas II has just got a lick of paint: “THE AMUR WAS, IS AND ALWAYS WILL BE RUSSIAN.” And though bulldozers are at work on the footings for a new development along the promenade—Blagoveshchensk’s retort to Heihe’s glitz—the old Soviet gunboat, its barrels pointed at China, most certainly stays.
PART SEVEN
Khabarovsk
CHAPTER 15
48°28.3' N 135°03.0' E
The last exile on the Amur breathes more easily than the first general in Russia.
CHEKHOV
I am on the slow train to Birobidzhan, assigned a seat in a third-class carriage with a chatty class of teenage schoolchildren from western Siberia. It is their fourth day on the train, and they are on their way to summer camp. They pepper me with questions, and their young teacher turns the occasion into an impromptu class about the life of a Western European, until she expresses dumbfoundment that anyone of my age should be unmarried. “Perhaps,” one of the girls, silent till now, blurts, “you will find your true Russian beauty in Vladivostok!” She blushes in confusion.
The Trans-Siberian trundles at best at a sedate, lulling pace, and with growing frequency we clang to a halt to allow the inevitable timber trains to pass: oily locomotives hauling forty, sometimes sixty, cars loaded with the trunks of oak, pine, spruce, and larch brought down from the near north, the telephone number of the middleman scrawled in chalk on the base of each.
The timber is all bound for China. In 1996 merely half a million cubic meters of Russian timber, eighteen million cubic feet, made its way across the border. Two years later the Chinese government instituted a countrywide ban on domestic logging, because recent floods had been lethal in part thanks to the erosion that deforestation brings on. It was a time when Russia was in the throes of a financial crisis, and badly needed money. And so the Siberian forests began to be raped. At the last count, some eighteen million cubic meters of timber a year makes its way to China. That is equivalent to six thousand of the enormous trainloads that are passing us, or an area logged equivalent in size to an Iceland a year.
Much of the trade is technically illegal, but everyone is in on it. Everything is possible, for a fee, including certificates of origin and customs receipts. Some of the logging companies are big, aboveboard concerns operating forest concessions. For every one of these are hundreds of hit-and-run affairs, a couple of lumberjacks raiding the forests with a truck and chain saws, spiriting away a few logs of valuable hardwood. The impact on fragile ecosystems is profound, and not only from the forests’ fragmentation. Take the Siberian tiger, of which fewer than five hundred remain. All the oak trees felled have curtailed the supply of acorns, a prime food source for wild boar. And with fewer wild boar, a key prey species for the tigers, their habits are changing, out of desperation. Tigers are coming into human contact more frequently, mainly because domestic dogs make easy prey. And the dogs are infecting the tigers with the fatal canine distemper virus. It is of no concern to those in the timber trade. Once the trees are felled, the Chinese step in, as dealers, wholesalers, sawmill operators, exporters. Much of Siberia’s timber makes its way out through the oblast, or province, of which Birobidzhan is the capital, and across the Amur into China at Tongjiang. The Chinese border towns are booming from the timber business: from across China people are coming to look for work in furniture and other wood-processing factories or on the construction sites where new malls and car showrooms are going up.
The China timber boom is having one almost whimsical consequence in the province on the Russian side. What prosperity rubs off there is helping underpin a Jewish revival, of sorts. For the province is the Jewish Autonomous Oblast of Birobidzhan, nothing less than the modern world’s first Jewish homeland, predating Israel; forgotten now, it was once the “Jerusalem on the Amur.” Today, much of the capital looks like any crumbling Siberian town. Except that at the station, the town’s name, in big letters, is in Yiddish. A giant menorah greets you outside. You can buy a Yiddish newspaper. You can attend Yiddish theater. A new synagogue and a Jewish community complex rise across the street.
Quite why and how Stalin came to propose a Jewish Autonomous Region in 1928 and set out to settle Jews in remote Birobidzhan—a land of swamp and forest named after two left tributaries of the Amur, the Biro and the Bidzhan, seven time zones east of Moscow—remains in part obscure. That there was in Russia a “Jewish problem” had passed as received wisdom from the time of the Russian Empire to its successor, the Soviet Union—even if people disagreed over what the problem was. At the end of the nineteenth century, the empire had the biggest Jewish population in the world. Over five million lived within the Yiddish-speaking Jewish Pale of Settlement that covered much of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova, and the Ukraine. By the time of the revolution, nearly half had emigrated to escape poverty, discrimination, and persecution. Now the Bolsheviks promised economic and social equality. They denounced the virulent anti-Semitism. And they backed the rights of ethnoreligious minorities, Jews above all.
For a time, many Jews thought they might be the chief beneficiaries of the revolution. But in the longer run both Lenin and Stalin expected socialism to sweep away all ethnic and religious identities. And in the meantime, the Bolsheviks despised the Jews’ traditional trades of moneylending, leaseholding, and vodka selling as much as did the anti-Semites. Though few Jews had farming experience, the Bolsheviks’ solution
was to settle Jews on the land. That way, Soviet Jewry could be assimilated as part of an anodyne peasantry, the shtetl Jew becoming a productive Soviet citizen. But where to do this? The overpopulated, Jew-hating former Pale was hardly the place. Thoughts turned east. An Amur enclave dovetailed with Soviet promises of a homeland for all national groups. It would also serve as a buffer against Chinese or Japanese encroachment.
Left-leaning Jews in North America gave enthusiastic support, lending the Kremlin money for the Birobidzhan project. With the Jewish region’s establishment in 1934, a full-blown propaganda campaign was under way to recruit 150,000 Jews for the new homeland. In the event, only a fifth of that number heeded the call—Birobidzhan was at the other end of a continent, and a prosperous life far from guaranteed. But the propaganda worked on some foreign Jews fired by Zionism and socialism. A contingent came from Argentina, and thirty-two Jewish families moved from Los Angeles.
With great hardship, the new settlers cleared the virgin ground in the communes of Waldheim and Amurzet. The settlement of Birobidzhan grew into a town, one that hosted Yiddish theater troupes, published a Yiddish newspaper, the Birobidzhaner Shtern, and seemed to speak to Jewish cultural aspirations. But disillusion set in fast amid the squalor and oppressive climate, wet and muggy in summer, scything cold in winter. One visitor described the Birobidzhan barracks in which new settlers were put up as worse than a prison; they remain tenanted today. As American artists celebrated the Birobidzhan experiment with an exhibition of constructivist works, a doctor in the homeland itself was deploring the “disgraceful” sanitary conditions. During the 1930s, as Stalin’s purges reached Birobidzhan, the foreign Jews began returning home while they still could.
From the start, Birobidzhan’s was to be a secular Yiddish culture. Schoolchildren learned Yiddish through poems idolizing Lenin. Religious observance among Jews was at the best of times discouraged, at the worst persecuted. Jews met to worship in makeshift prayer houses or in apartments, for there was no synagogue in those days. At the time of Passover the League for the Militant Godless was energetic in delivering factory lectures. By the start of the Second World War—the Great Patriotic War—all minority expression, cultural or religious, was suppressed. In Birobidzhan, nearly all Yiddish schools closed.
Peace brought a revival of Jewish culture in Birobidzhan as well as fresh efforts at Jewish recruitment. In 1946 the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults approved a synagogue. Artists, novelists, and poets took part in what some called a national awakening. But the revival was short-lived. To the Communist Party’s alarm, hundreds attended High Holy Day services, among them army officers and the elderly parents of notable cadres. In 1948, suspicious of Jews’ loyalty, Stalin set out to destroy Jewish intellectual and cultural life across Russia. To be accused of “rootless cosmopolitanism” meant banishment to the gulag. Even praising the Jewish Autonomous Region was deemed a crime. Its party general-secretary, after he was arrested for gross ideological errors, said in his defense that he hadn’t understood that “what is said at one time cannot be said mechanistically at another.”
Birobidzhan’s contact with Jews outside Russia ended here. The theater closed. The staff of the Birobidzhaner Shtern were hauled off by the secret police. The synagogue shut its doors and then burned down. The Jewish section of the local museum closed, and a pyre was made of thirty thousand volumes on Judaism. Night came down on Birobidzhan’s Jewish existence, and there was no glimmer of a dawn until the fresh tolerance under Mikhail Gorbachev toward the Soviet Union’s end.
At the Jewish cultural center, I am in the office of Roman Leder. With gray hair and an air of competence, he is the leader of the Jewish community, now down to just six thousand in the region. Above him hangs a copy of Marc Chagall’s exuberant Wedding in Birobidzhan. Roman Leder is upbeat. As far as he is concerned, in the Russian Far East the Jewish dream is still alive. “The hard times are over, I tell you. In the early 1990s, once Jews were free to leave for Israel, many went—Russia was in crisis then. But now, more Jews are returning than leaving. Eighty families left last year—but over one hundred arrived: from Germany as well as Israel. Some come because they were born here. Some have relatives, others have friends. Just last week my nephew was married. He came back from Israel. He’d been in the army for six years. But his parents live here—they haven’t left for Israel. Last year he came back to visit his parents . . . met the girl of his dreams . . . was married on Friday.”
Roman talks of a Jewish revival. A teacher of Hebrew set up recently. Books, some kept for decades under floorboards, are filling the new library; I admired the oldest, a Talmud from 1859, its leather binding chipped and frayed. An academy teaches Yiddish, and Roman cherishes the idea of Birobidzhan as the world capital of Yiddish—though people say you can go a year without hearing it spoken on the streets.
After decades of suppression, definitions seem to blur of what makes a Jew. “One thousand eight hundred Russians use our library,” said Roman. “We consider them all to be Jews. Americans are sending food aid to the poor here in Birobidzhan, 450 of them. It’s given only to Jews, so everyone who gets it of course is a Jew. Jewish children get help. Around here, if you want to call yourself a Jew—well, you’re a Jew.” With such a definition, it is perhaps easier to be upbeat.
Birobidzhan has an unofficial rabbi, and Roman gave me backstreet directions to his prayer house. It was a log cabin from another century, in a lane of puddles. Boris Kofman, “Dov,” was in his early seventies, a tiny though broad-chested man with a cane and a twisting walk, as if from polio. He had brimful reserves of eccentric delight at things, uttered through a great smiling mound of yellow teeth. Dov had come to Birobidzhan with his parents from Belarus, in 1948—“just when things were getting difficult here for Jews. In those days you could hear Yiddish like you hear Russian today. But we had no schools for Yiddish, and my parents never used it with us. . . . Perhaps they believed in Lenin, and that all Russia should be as one, speaking a single language.”
I signaled regret, but Dov waved it away. “No, no. I consider it not good to speak Yiddish. Yiddish is not our language. After all, we took it from the Germans!”
I was puzzled. Did that mean he shared the Lenin view?
“All of us believed in the Communist idea in those days—especially me. But everyday life isn’t like in the books or what you see in the movies—the socialist movies. For fifteen whole years I was troubled by Communism. I needed to find an answer to things—an answer in religion. When I first held the Talmud in my hands, I couldn’t understand a word. Then I placed the Hebrew side by side with the Russian translation. I started with the numerals. Then I would put my finger on a Hebrew word and search for it in the Russian. Slowly the Hebrew language opened up to me, and I thought: It’s so beautiful. It’s like people just conversing with each other . . . such honesty. People were speaking to me through their souls. They wouldn’t deceive me.”
As we talked, Dov’s wife, Dora, a retired economist, shuffled about lighting candles, dusting the ledges and never saying a word. Men and women, elderly for the most part, wandered in and out at their ease, not all believers. So, I asked, was Birobidzhan a promised land?
“Impossible! Jews must be proud. There are Jews here who don’t know their history—forgot it long ago. I can’t admit that this is Jerusalem on the Amur. Only politicians talk like that. There is only one Jerusalem! I prefer Israel to Russia. I’ve never tried to hide that.”
So why would he not go to Israel? After all, his son is there, in the army. Dov grinned.
“We have this joke. We say wouldn’t it be good if an airplane landed on our lane on the sabbath and took everyone from the synagogue off to Israel? But no, even when everyone has gone, Dora and I will remain. We will be happy here. Man has to be someone! If he’s nothing, that’s terrible.”
• • •
I leave Birobidzhan for Khabarovsk, two hundred miles farther east. By
the standards of the Russian Far East, that is no very great distance, and I journey not by train but by a new road, the obsession of the president, Vladimir Putin, himself. In 2005, a century after the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway, a highway was built that at last tied the Russian Far East to the motherland. The road is nothing fancy: just two lanes, but those lanes are tarmacked, and remarkably smooth. For years nothing better than a gravel road, rutted and potholed, had run from Chita to Vladivostok; gulag labor after the war had carved it from the forests. In winter the road was passable. In summer, the melting of the permafrost set the road buckling and bending, and parts of it turned into a sea of mud that swallowed small cars. To make the journey in any season was to submit an ordinary sedan to an intense regime of premature aging. Even well-made Japanese cars, if they did not shred tires or wear through wheel bearings, developed dashboard rattles that still infuriate owners years later. Now Federal Route Number 58, also known as the Amur Highway, sweeps across the empty spaces, broadly tracking the great curves of the river, unseen but strangely sensed, a few dozen miles to the south.
The authorities have freighted the new road with significance. Soon after its completion, President Vladimir Putin left Moscow in order to charge down it, from Chita to Blagoveshchensk. His stops were reported by a fawning media as if way stations on an imperial tour. But there was also something of the alpha dog in his strutting progress, cocking a leg to mark his stops. A century and a half after Muraviev had sailed grandly down the Amur claiming new lands, Russia’s godfather still felt the need to mark the territory. The Russian Geographical Society made the parallel explicit. In the society’s branch in Irkutsk, I had met Katerina Pavlova, a geographer. She and three other society members had just returned from an eight-day road trip to mark the bicentennial of Muraviev’s birth. Their trip was to mirror the great man’s descent of the Amur. But since the river was out of bounds, the journey was made on Route 58. To me, the journey lacked the grandeur of the original; it all seemed a rather glamourless dash. Each day the crew in their sedan pressed on along the route; at night, they pitched camp by their cars on the roadside verge. What, I asked, was the point? Science was the point, Katerina Pavlova replied, with just a hint of testiness. They had taken temperature readings along the way. And they counted the cars that passed.
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