Black Dragon River

by Dominic Ziegler

  So on we sped northward, in a state of grace, through an utter wilderness, passing no other craft for mile after mile and mesmerized—I was not the only one—by the wild autumnal blazing country picked out in the low clear light, by the rich calm blue of the Amur, by the ceaseless swirlings and eddies of the currents on that vast body of water moving at four or five knots toward the sea, and by the wide, scything line of our own wake. At last, before us, as the sun was going down, was that huge loop as the river turned first west and then doubled back eastward on its final run to the sea, the bend that I had first glimpsed over the curvature of the earth from high up on a commercial flight. On the outside of the bend the Amgun River joined the main stream from the west, last of the Amur tributaries and, at 450 miles, an infant. Along the inside of this significant bend ran a high, wooded bluff with a tableland stretching behind it: Tyr, site of temples put up first by the Yuan dynasty, to mark the northernmost bounds of the Mongol empire, and then by the Ming admiral-eunuch Yishiha, to give thanks for the vastness of China’s realm. Here had been stone steles, some now in the museum in Vladivostok, in four languages, including, in Tibetan, the Buddhists’ Om mani padme hum, the jewel-in-the-lotus mantra of compassion. Abbé Duc, the mid-nineteenth-century French cleric who traveled throughout Tatary and Tibet, said, sympathetically, of this mantra: “The Lamas assert that the doctrine contained in these marvelous words is immense, and that the whole life of man insufficient to measure its depth and extent.”

  Late at night, after a full roaring day’s run, the hydrofoil limped into its pier, one of the last runs of the season, below the hulk of the old coal power station. I walked with fellow passengers up dark chilling streets of rustling birches and old clapboard houses. In the main square, lit by two forlorn bulbs, I hammered on the double doors of the town hotel, a square lump of ill-poured concrete.

  • • •

  The next day, hunched against a stiff chill wind, I walked down to the waterfront. Below the abandoned house that was once the imposing home of the admiral of the port stood a statue under birch trees. It was of Nikolaevsk’s founder, the Russian naval man Gennady Nevelskoi. It was he who, as a young officer and cartographer, proved Muraviev’s greatest ally. He surveyed this Far Eastern seaboard and marked down the first Russian settlements. To map meant to possess.

  It was Nevelskoi who reported that Sakhalin, whose northern end lay opposite the Amur’s mouth, was no pensinsula of the mainland, as the Russians had believed, but an island in its own right. Nevelskoi’s activities laid the groundwork for Muraviev’s wholesale annexation of the Amur. By then, both Nicholas I and his cautious foreign minister, Nesselrode, were dead. Their successors were more expansionist by inclination. Yet Muraviev and his allies understood that the perimeters of Russia’s new empire had to be developed quickly if they were ever to feel secure. Nikolaevsk, some miles upriver from the Amur’s mouth where the estuarine wetlands gave way to firmer soil, assumed importance. When the Amur annexation was formalized in treaties with China in 1858 and 1860, it seemed to be the cue for Nikolaevsk to flourish.

  The new town had boosters from the beginning too. They spoke in florid terms of Nikolaevsk’s Pacific destiny, and of its possibilities as an international emporium. People said that this burgeoning port on a suddenly significant river would grow to be the twin sister to San Francisco.

  American enterprise was bound up with Nikolaevsk from the start, and in this part of the world, the Americans had form. As early as 1819 New England whalers had come to Chukotka and the Kamchatka peninsula in order to find wood and water, as well as to look for winter shelter. In the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk, into which the Amur flows, they found many, many whales, and they began to winter at Petropavlovsk in the glorious sickle-shaped natural harbor of Avacha Bay rather than head southeast, as was usual, for the far distant Sandwich Islands, that is, Hawaii.

  Americans and Russians drew closer after 1853, when the Crimean War broke out and spread to the Pacific. An Anglo-French naval force blockaded Petropavlovsk. The town’s successful defense, by Muraviev himself, salvaged a rare scrap of Russian prestige from that disastrous conflict against Britain, France, and the Ottomans.

  After the war, St. Petersburg sought desperately to balance and if possible oppose British encroachment in these waters. And so it was open to American ideas for developing commerce. Amur proponents in Eastern Siberia were even more enthusiastic—with Muraviev, of course, at the head. In 1856, soon after the end of the Crimean War, a merchant from San Francisco called John Lewis Peyton made his way from St. Petersburg to Irkutsk with his fellow American, Perry McDonough Collins, whom the government had appointed, in a fit of whimsy, to be “United States Commercial Agent at the Amoor River.” When the two men attempted to persuade Muraviev of the Amur’s commercial potential, they were pushing against an open door. Collins was, as we have seen, also the first to propose a trans-Siberian railroad, linking Lake Baikal to the Amur. Peyton and Collins also proposed an American monopoly not only over Russian commerce in the Pacific, but over Sino-Russian trade on the Amur too. For Muraviev, that was a step too far—instead, he cofounded the Russian-owned Amur Company in 1858. But the Americans’ point that their country’s commerce would reinforce the Russian periphery certainly hit home. Nikolaevsk was declared an open port, and its glorious future beckoned.

  • • •

  On July 10, 1856, 2,600 miles and not a few adventures later, Collins and his Cossack band sighted the masts of American ships at anchor at Nikolaevsk, masts so infeasibly high that the Cossacks, raised in the heart of a continent, thought that they could only be church steeples. The party arrived at a historic moment, just as the steamer America threw out a signal calling Admiral Yevfimy Putiatin onboard. Putiatin was to be carried to Peking to sign the treaty in which a stricken empire would formally hand over the Amur lands to Russia. To Collins, it was only natural that Russia should have these lands. “The river,” he said, “was more necessary to Russia than to China. It was only preserved by the Chinese in a wild state, neither useful to themselves, to mankind, to civilization, or to progress.” (A century and a half later, the Amur wilderness that survives is all thanks to Russian neglect.)

  With enormous relief, Collins felt that, after two years away, he was as good as home. He had traveled the long way from San Francisco, two thirds around the globe. Now a “speedy passage in one of these winged messengers” anchored at the river’s mouth would take him back to San Francisco, borne on a Pacific Ocean “whose opposite waves washed the shores of my own country, and upon whose bosom I could float to my home.”

  Collins, ever exuberant, was impressed by the settled yet energetic life he found in Nikolaevsk, especially among the American merchants who had so quickly set up business there. The establishment belonging to Messrs. Boardman & Cushing is “comfortably arranged” and “very convenient for a hungry or dry soul,” with library and deep sofas. Messrs. Piece & Co. have thrown up a frame house with shingle roof (“the first in the country”), carried from the Sandwich Islands. Mr. Ludorf’s commodious log house with zinc roof holds “cargoes of Japanese, Chinese, German, English, and Yankee notions” that “cannot fail to suit the tastes as well as drain the pockets of his customers.”

  The new arrival was fired by the possibilities of the place. “China on one side, Japan and Sakhalin on the other . . . renders this no contemptible portion of the globe.” Whenever criticism arose over a cold and inhospitable region, Collins batted it away with parallels with the opening American frontier. As in the United States, all it would take was for the machine to move into Eden. Bread and meat were “quite as cheap in Siberia as they were upon the banks of the Wabash before Fitch built the first steamer on the Ohio. The rivers are flanked with fine forests, the banks yield iron and coal, gold, silver, and copper, while the waters and forests are abundantly stocked with fish, fowl, and game, only awaiting the advance of population and the introduction of steamboats and railroa
ds.”

  Yet even this irrepressible booster had to admit it: the site for Nikolaevsk left much to be desired. A vessel of any size had to lie out in midstream, and so cargoes had to be lightered in. The shores of the Amur at this point were swampy. Winter storms battered the open port. Within a very few years this began to weigh on Nikolaevsk’s morale, and writers reflected the change in mood. The Amur, once a broad, hopeful highway to the Pacific, turned out to be “a swamp no more than three feet deep” whose mouth dribbled into a liman of shifting sands. Navigation was tricky enough in summer months even for the shallowest of craft but was impossible for those seven months of the year when the Amur was bound by ice. Russian interest turned to Vladivostok farther south. Its port waters never froze, thanks in part to the human effluence pouring into the harbor. As for Muraviev himself, his star fell rapidly. Derided for grandiose schemes, he escaped to Paris, where he died, scalded in his bath, and was laid to rest in Père-Lachaise Cemetery.

  And so those ships stopped calling that at first had come to Nikolaevsk with cargoes of Cuban cigars, lacquerware from Japan, pineapples from Hawaii, and pâté de foie gras and cognac from France. It became fashionable to denigrate a place that had not long before enjoyed the iron destiny of becoming Russia’s San Francisco or Shanghai. Polite society in Nikolaevsk that had revolved around salons and dances descended into sullenness. In the summer of 1890, Anton Chekhov arrived by steamer, on his way to Sakhalin. He had temporarily escaped his fame as a playwright in metropolitan Russia in order to examine the condition of prisoners on that most feared island of czarist exile (he was, after all, both a writer of conscience and a medical doctor). Of Nikolaevsk, the best that Chekhov had to say was that a juggler had just arrived, and that one skilled Japanese there pulled teeth not with his pliers but with his fingers. Nikolaevsk’s setting was once majestic. Now, the houses stood abandoned, dark windows “staring like the eye-sockets of a skull. The inhabitants pursue a somnolent, drunken existence . . . They subsist by supplying fish to Sakhalin, stealing gold, exploiting non-Russians and selling deer antlers, from which the Chinese make stimulating medicines.”

  • • •

  But the fish: there were always the fish. The ancient kaluga lived on the liman bottom; and at the end of each summer tens of millions of salmon swam upriver to spawn—so many, the Nivkh said, you could cross the estuary mouth on their backs. For the next decades, fish sustained Nikolaevsk, making the merchants rich and providing seasonal employment for itinerant Russians, Koreans, and Chinese as porters and salters in the fish-packing plants. Come the civil war, however, not even the fish could save Nikolaevsk. In 1920, the town descended into hell.

  Until that point, the civil war ravaging the rest of Russia had largely passed Nikolaevsk by. It was defended by a garrison of White Russians, and a 350-strong detachment of Japan’s expeditionary force, ostensibly to protect the town’s 380 Japanese civilians. But far to the West the White Russians under Admiral Alexander Kolchak had collapsed—Kolchak himself was pushed under the ice in Irkutsk, below the Znamensky Monastery. In the Russian Far East it left a vacuum, which Bolshevik partisans sought to fill.

  Nikolaevsk’s calm was shattered with news of the approach of a young partisan. Yakov Ivanovich Triapitsyn, as a contemporary resident of Nikolaevsk put it, “appeared on the scene like a meteor, burned and destroyed everything, spilled oceans of blood, and then disappeared.” Triapitsyn and his partisans had been working their way downriver, “liberating” Amur villages as they went and drawing the disaffected, especially the natives, into a gathering band. He seems from the outset to have had as his goal liberating Nikolaevsk and taking its merchants’ and banks’ stores of gold. He needed to work fast, before the coming spring freed the Amur of ice.

  Hearing of the partisans’ approach, the Japanese consul, Toramatsu Ishida (strikingly, a former Russian Orthodox seminarian), telegraphed his concern to Tokyo. The concern only grew when Triapitsyn’s partisans ambushed and mowed down small Russo-Japanese detachments sent out to stop them. There was nothing the garrison could do, since ice on the river and in the Tartar Strait precluded reinforcements. Besides, Triapitsyn soon cut the telegraph line.

  He also began to bombard Nikolaevsk with captured field artillery. At that point the Japanese commanding officer, Major Masanori Ishikawa, chose, against Russian advice, to negotiate. The agreement made way for the partisans to occupy the town, while the Japanese kept their arms, for honor’s sake. The following day, Triapitsyn entered Nikolaevsk. The celebrations and the slaughter began, the first victims being the 100 Russian officers. When, two weeks later, Triapitsyn insisted that the Japanese should now surrender their weapons, Ishikawa launched a surprise assault on the partisan headquarters. It was a disaster. Triapitsyn counterattacked, killing all but 136 of the Japanese population. Survivors made a break for a neutral Chinese gunboat frozen out in the river, but were picked off one by one. The streets were scattered with women’s bayoneted corpses. Children were thrown alive into a burial pit and, snow-covered, could be seen creeping back to the surface.

  In Nikolaevsk, Triapitsyn celebrated. During the day, his three favorite phrases were “Shoot him!” “Skunks!” and “To the Amur with him!” By night, in requisitioned houses, he and his lover, Nina Lebedva-Kiyashko—in her twenties, with thick makeup and a waddling gait—learned to waltz.

  When the news got out of the Japanese fate at Nikolaevsk, across the Russian Far East the Japanese revenge began, and a relief force moved on Nikolaevsk. For Triapitsyn, it was the cue for his last orgy. He put to death the remaining Japanese, slaughtered four thousand of Nikolaevsk’s men, women, and children, and put the town to the torch. Some folk hid in the two cinemas, the Illusion Modern and the Progress. But only a handful of buildings, those made of imported Nagasaki brick, remained standing. When the relief force arrived, the town was ashes and the river was clogged with corpses. The Soviet government later executed Triapitsyn and Nina, for the killing of four Communists. The fate of Nikolaevsk went wholly unremarked in the judicial proceedings.

  In the town, official commemoration or condemnation marking the destruction is nowhere to be seen.

  • • •

  I went in search of the town’s more recent story. It spoke mainly of decline. The place felt empty, as if the townsfolk were away at the fair. Old clapboard houses, thrown up soon after Nikolaevsk’s disaster, still served; though once handsome, many had turned to slums, their roof ridges broken-backed. Early one morning I was admiring the old fretwork around the door of one of the bigger log houses by the harbor. A mother with a child on her hip appeared at the door. She waved me over. Inside was the feel of a squat, and around a table in the steamy kitchen the residents—the mother’s lover in a string vest, her teenage daughter in underpants and T-shirt, and a shaven-headed man in his thirties wearing only shorts—were bleary drunk. The lover leaned over to a deep freeze and fumbled for a large tub of salmon roe, bright orange and wholly illegal. We sat downing shots of vodka out of tin cups and eating salmon caviar with a shared spoon, the frozen eggs popping in the warmth of our mouths. The child played in the corner, her back to the room, telling a happy narrative to a stuffed dog and bear. The man in shorts, every time he downed his shot, leaned across to the teenager and squeezed a breast, emitting the sound of a klaxon. It evinced no reaction.

  Lives here ran easily into the sand. I thought of my next move. Here Juliana, the Nivkh teacher, helped me. She pressed me to come to her Nivkh village, on the Amur’s far bank by the estuary mouth, where her family fished the liman. Her brothers could pick us up by boat. I could stay with her family and see a different Russia—perhaps, she said with a smile, not Russia at all. And then, she said, the brothers would take me across the liman to Sakhalin. For I hoped to journey down the island and then skip by ferry across the waters, back to Japan, my home.

  To telephone her brothers, we walked to the home of her great-aunt, who lived in a tiny flat near the town cent
er. The great-aunt sat surrounded by baskets she had made, rich in embellishment, out of birch bark that she had gone into the forests in the autumn to collect. She wrote delicately illustrated children’s stories in the Nivkh language, a language-isolate, unrelated to any other on earth. (In trying to place the Nivkh, ethnographers and linguists posit connections with peoples who eventually arrived in Polynesia.) Flicking through one of her books, I asked her how many Nivkh children spoke or read the language. None that she knew of at the moment, she replied, in a cheerful tone that would not admit surrender.

  “So how many Nivkhs altogether speak the language?”

  “Let me see now . . .” She counted on her fingers. “Well, there’s Valentina, Galina, Natushka, and Lyudmila—oh, and I’m forgetting Eva.”

  The following morning, I hiked with Juliana out of Nikolaevsk, taking the track following the shore to the Amur mouth some miles to the east. There, on the strand, her brothers would be waiting for us with their boat. It was I who had suggested the hike, but the omens were not good. Clouds scudded low over the river, and a hard cold wind was building in our faces. We passed the spot, a concrete apron, from which Triapitsyn bombarded the town, and then we were alone. An hour later, a black bear and her cub were scavenging on the shore ahead of us for salmon. We waited until they vanished back into the birch forest. A good hour after that, we were walking among the abandoned buildings—the banya, the schoolroom with a crumbling statue in front of it of a strapping Soviet girl grappling with a sturgeon—that once spoke of a village with a settled life, now abandoned.