Black Dragon River

by Dominic Ziegler

  On the strand below the village, the liman that stretched as far as the low, distant line of Sakhalin was a corrugated sheet of gray over which spume was flying. Along the beach, dead salmon slopped against the shore. Above the strand, frail aluminum boats lay in the grass, washed up by earlier storms. Another boat, on a mooring a stone’s throw from the shore, was bucking in the chop, shipping water over the bow. We could just make out the smudge of Juliana’s village on the far bank, perhaps five miles away. The brothers would have been mad to attempt the crossing in the local tinpot boats—and I was grateful.

  So we trudged back to town, Juliana ever cheerful: past where the bears had been, and past the concrete apron, buckshot hail now at our backs. Now that my Sakhalin exit was cut off, we stopped off at the hydrofoil pier. I had in mind a ticket for the next day’s boat upriver back to Khabarovsk. A shake of the head from the woman at the pier. No boats. Not tomorrow, not the day after. Not till next May. The ice was coming down the river early this year. The service had ended.

  Flying out of Nikolaevsk was the only option. Yet by nightfall, a full winter storm was soughing through the telephone wires. I retreated into the hotel, its main doors padded against the rising winter cold. The only other residents were also storm refugees: among them, down the long corridor, three air crew in military flying suits hunkered in their room with a case of vodka. They had landed their MiG helicopter at the airport and were waiting for better weather to return to Khabarovsk. They invited me in to make an impression on the vodka.

  We drank toasts, the first proposed to the English visitor by the commanding officer, a tall thin man with a dark mustache, proper in his manners: Rostislav would have appeared natural in the nineteenth-century uniform of those officers who surrounded Muraviev. The talk was reticent at first. The crew were formal and guarded about what they called their “mission.” But the warmth seeped in with the vodka. They had to show me what they had filmed on their mobile phones: a flight over a spectacular coastline of crags and wild islands along the Sea of Okhotsk. Their “mission,” it turned out, was an annual marking of Russian territory, an elemental tour reaffirming, to the Russian air force at least, Russian control. As the vodka vanished, so did the reticence. Of the two fair-headed crew, the taller, Nikifor, assured me that the English: well, they were always welcome in the Russian Far East. But as for the Americans, the Japanese, or the Chinese: Nikifor would defend the Fatherland against all enemies who dared trample on sacred Russian soil. The smaller of the two, Yevgeny, played the comic, with a sense of pathos. He had, he said, never wanted to fly. He never wanted to go to war. As a child, he said, all he wanted was to go on the stage. What had gone wrong?

  In the storm, our acquaintance blossomed into passionate affirmations of undying friendship. It entailed a considerable exchange of personal goods. In vain I reasoned with Nikifor that the jeweled chronometer he insisted on giving me in exchange for my Chinese watch was worth much, much more. “What,” he declaimed emphatically, “is more valuable than friendship? I will look at my wrist and I will always remember you.” Nikifor and Yevgeny pressed on me air force badges, a camera, a compass: the exchange ended only when I was able to show my bag to be empty now of the few, worthless goods—a pocket knife, a cheap flashlight—that I could offer up in exchange.

  The storm raged the next day, and the next, and the one after that. Friendship and vodka called upon reserves that I was running short of, and the crew now slept all day surrounded by dozens and dozens of empty bottles that rolled out into the corridor. I took to wandering about the town. At sunrise, that portion of the townsfolk who were up were drunk: a determined, staggering inebriety. As the mornings drew on, however, the town sobered up. Or, rather, the temperate folk appeared as the few businesses opened. A young man sold honey out of the back of his van, from hives he put out in the forest each summer. Each day I bid good morning to a hunched, bundled woman at a table in a vacant lot. She offered a single pomegranate for sale at a price that would buy a room in my hotel. Each day the woman and the pomegranate were there. On the fifth, both were gone, but the table remained.

  I ducked into buildings for warmth. The tiny general store hung bright fishing lures in the window to catch passing youngsters. Inside, a poster advertised a photographic retouching service. It displayed a before-and-after portrait in black-and-white of a sixty-year-old Homo sovieticus, his work shirt open at the neck and wild eyebrows flying above. He had been transformed for his widow into a full-color memory of respectability: clipped, and in suit and tie. Only his gloom could not be altered. After the general store, I slipped into the Illusion Modern—a survivor from Triapitsyn’s devastation—now showing children’s cartoons to an empty theater.

  The sixth day dawned to clear, innocent skies, as if the storm had been a figment. Rostislav, the officer, Nikifor, and Yevgeny were up early, alert and astonishingly sober. On the hotel steps we bid a fond farewell. The men wanted to fly me back in their MiG, but their officer was less keen. I bumped off to the airport, its terminal built like a small townhouse through whose doorway a fair portion of Nikolaevsk’s population were fighting for entry. Soon after, we were walking across to our ancient Soviet plane, and there, to the right, were my friends removing the engine covers to their gleaming helicopter. Eventually, our Antonov bumbled down the runway, climbed slowly, and for the next two hours crawled above the silver thread of the Amur as it wound its way back to Khabarovsk. We landed. Outside the plane were Nikifor and Yevgeny. They were stiff and mock-formal. Now they were saluting me. I held up my arm and pointed to my watch. Yevgeny winked. The two men turned about and marched away.

  EPILOGUE

  In a crumbling block in Khabarovsk, toward the end of a journey that had taken me looping four thousand miles through the heart of Asia to the Pacific mouth of the Amur, I had met a local veteran of a forgotten conflict. Mikhail Vasilievich Bulichev, in his sixties, sat smoking in a gray woolen sweater that the moths had got into. In early 1969 he was serving in the border defense force. Mikhail was of a generation whose fathers had fought in the Second World War. Young men like him had been brought up on stories of patriotism, sacrifice, and the horrors of war. They all grew up wondering, Mikhail said, whether they, too, would ever be called upon to defend the borders of the motherland and, if so, whether from somewhere within they would find their fathers’ courage. By March that year Mikhail, for one, had the answers.

  By 1969, the old Sino-Soviet friendship had soured entirely. In China, the turmoil of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution was at its height. Trade and cultural exchange between China and Russia had ceased. Chinese populations near the Amur inclined to be friendly with Russia were ordered by their leaders inland. Army divisions and nuclear missiles replaced them. Suddenly, the Amur was the most heavily armed border in the world. Chinese radio stations and loudspeakers pumped anti-Russian bile across the river.

  The propaganda gnawed at old grudges. Among them was Damansky Island on the Ussuri River. Little more than a sandbar, with low scrub for vegetation, Damansky was held by Russia, which said that the Chinese border began on the Ussuri’s far shore. The Chinese countered that the channel’s midpoint marked the border, and therefore Damansky Island was predominantly on the Chinese side of it. In truth, the river had shifted over the years, as it had done for millennia in the monsoon floods.

  The trouble at Damansky began when crowds of angry young Chinese men dressed as civilians crossed the ice to the island, brandishing Mao’s “Little Red Book” and shouting anti-Russian slogans. Mikhail and fellow conscripts were ordered to the island. Arm in arm they pushed the Chinese mob back. It turned into something of a weekly ritual. But punches soon flew, and then both sides took to clubs, and then clubs with chains attached to them. At times the soldiers broke their rifle butts beating the Chinese back. But no shots were fired.

  That all changed on the morning of March 2. During the night three hundred Chinese troops in white camouflage had cross
ed over to Damansky Island and dug themselves in. On news of that Lieutenant Ivan Ivanovich Strelnikov was ordered to the island with thirty men in two transports. Strelnikov arrived in the first truck with eighteen men. A Chinese officer stood with a line of soldiers behind him. Strelnikov informed the officer he was on Russian ground and ordered him to leave. The Chinese officer then shouted a command, the men behind him parted, and from behind came a curtain of heavy shooting. In the firefight all the Russians were killed but one, who played dead. The second transport had stalled, and that saved its occupants’ lives.

  For two weeks a nasty little war on the ice ensued, and Damansky frequently changed hands. At first, the Russian border units fought with machine guns and grenades. The Chinese gave no quarter. Mikhail says the Chinese killed any wounded Russians they found, bayoneting them and gouging out the dead men’s eyes. Russians brought in artillery and then T-62 tanks; one remained stuck on the ice in front of Damansky, the object for days of a vicious tug-of-war. Eventually the Chinese dragged it over to their side and made what propaganda they could out of it. In the end, the Russians brought overwhelming force to bear, driving the Chinese off Damansky on March 15 and proving to Mikhail, at least, that when it came to it, he had his father’s courage.

  A victory, in other words. But in peace the story gets curious. For in Russia, no newspaper or radio station reported the incident. No medals were issued. Conscripts were told to forget about it all. Officers had to swear not to talk about the conflict. For thirty years silence ruled. Youngsters grew up in the Russian Far East never having heard of the Damansky Incident. Only quietly, out of sight, did veterans of the conflict make contact with one another, and with the families of the many who died. On March 15 they began to gather in private, for a quiet remembrance.

  Today, things have changed. Mikhail Vasilievich and a handful of former comrades come together each March 15 on Khabarovsk’s Glory Square, march down Lenin Street to the Black Tulip monument for Russia’s war dead. But for Mikhail, it does not bring matters to a close. “When I meet young soldiers,” he says, “it hurts me that they do not know about Damansky. I can only guess why the government doesn’t want to publicize the war. China is big and powerful. Nobody wants to antagonize the relationship. But we were defending our borders. Why won’t the government speak about that?” Feelings are still bitter, Mikhail says. Four decades is still too soon to make contact with Chinese veterans on the other side, old soldiers making their peace. After all, China claims victory, and their proof is the captured tank. Mikhail Vasilievich knows it to be a lie. Yet in 2006 Vladimir Putin, with great fanfare, announced the resolution of all Russia’s border disputes with China along the Amur and Ussuri. And he handed Damansky Island to China, leaving Mikhail Vasilievich and his fellow veterans still lost. What were they fighting for?

  • • •

  Long after I left Mikhail Vasilievich, the same question kept going around my head. I found no clear answer, but I did think I understood better how a long shared history had conditioned the way these two countries behave toward each other—and toward the outside world. Yes, that history is shot through with mutual animosity—the border struggles between Cossacks and early Qing, the brute Russian racism at the time of the Boxer Rebellion, the vicious border war at Damansky between (the world was alarmed to note) two nuclear-tipped powers. But there was also accommodation. Do not mistake the “strategic friendship” of which Russia and China boast today for real warmth; there is plenty of mutual distrust behind the curtains. Still, for his first destination abroad as China’s new ruler, the president and Communist Party head, Xi Jinping, all smiles, chose Moscow.

  What is it that, whatever the periodic separations, draws the two empires to each other eventually? Partly, a sense of each being at the center of its world, one ruled not by laws or the collective choice of free citizens, but by a shared sense, however cynically applied, that rulers govern by moral precept, and that the state shapes its subjects, not the other way around. But that is not the whole answer, it seems to me. China is conditioned to act toward Russia in ways that are different from how it comports itself toward other European nations.

  Much is made these days of China’s rise, and of how China’s belief in a return to historical greatness is nourished on a diet of historical victimhood and grievance. It is why China’s disputes over island specks with Japan in the East China Sea and with Vietnam, the Philippines, and others in the South China Sea are so dangerous. China once lay at the heart of things; the imperial court was the sun around which lesser Asian kingdoms turned. But that was before the Western ravages along the Chinese seaboard, of which Britain’s seizure of Hong Kong in 1842 was the start; while at the end of the nineteenth century came China’s defeat by Japan. It put an end to Chinese centrality. A Pax Americana in the western Pacific today perpetuates the humiliation, as Chinese leaders see it, especially since it keeps Taiwan from their grip. Soon, they believe, China will have both the wealth and the power to restore Chinese primacy, reshaping the Asian order to put China again at the heart of things.

  There is an almost litanical quality to the way Chinese rhetoric rehearses the territorial grievances over Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and the Diaoyu Islands, which Japan calls the Senkakus. Yet the far larger lands that Muraviev grabbed north of the Amur in 1858, the lands that were once known as Outer Manchuria or Outer Tartary, are rarely mentioned, if at all. Russia appears to have been forgiven and the lands forgotten. And that, I believe, is because of the regulating if largely subconscious memory of China’s first diplomatic relations with Russia, the first relations with any European state, when the two powers pirouetted on the steppe that fateful August in 1689 and signed, as equals, the Treaty of Nerchinsk. Because of Nerchinsk, China regulates its relations differently with Russia than with any other state.

  And what of the future? Russia no longer boasts of a Pacific destiny (it is now for China to claim one). For the salvation of the Russian Far East, some look to the great reserves of gas that lie off Sakhalin Island, or to the fish in the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea, the world’s richest stocks, or to the gold and timber in mountains north of the Amur. But to amurtsy, that is only a grim reminder of how the Pacific dream has lost its spiritual, improving dimension—of how the Russian state, as usual, views the east chiefly as a place of plunder.

  It is an irony. Russia has as its national symbol a two-headed eagle. The bird is supposed to represent how Russia looks both east and west. But it more often appears to embody the constant struggle for Russia’s soul. On one side are those, now in the beleaguered minority, who long for their country to drink in more of the open, liberal values represented by Europe and the West and to reject Vladimir Putin’s absolutist rule. On the other are those who, by contrast, see Russia’s spiritual roots lying in the East; all that is good in Russia comes from a reaction against Europe.

  Such notions are central to how Vladimir Putin portrays his mendocratic rule as he and his cronies plunder their land. The strongman has himself photographed astride a charger, as if in emulation of Genghis Khan. The modern czar is explicit: destiny lies in the East, while the West is bent on Russia’s destruction. It is a bleak rule, like that of that earlier paranoid, Nicholas I. Under that stifling czar, Russia was hungry for a burst of adventurism, and satisfied it in the seizure of the Amur. Under Putin, the adventurism came with his annexation of Crimea and strangling of eastern Ukraine. Russians quickly regretted the first adventure, and may discover the calamity of the second. As for the people of the Russian Far East, some are already thinking through the consequences. If Russia can tear up agreements and treaties to grab Crimea, what kind of an example does that set for an increasingly assertive China that might one day awake to feel longings for its former lands beyond the Amur?

  As it is, people in the Russian Far East have been left by the state to fend for themselves. They already feel too close for comfort to the nuclear dystopia of Kim Jong Un’s North Korea,
and since the young dictator shot his uncle in 2013, the regime has shown signs of feeding on itself. And though just to the south lies Asia’s economic miracle, Russians are not part of it, if you do not count the timber, drugs, and caviar gangs, and the mafia bringing Vladivostok girls to the brothels of Macau. Young educated Russians, if they are not drifting west to Moscow or St. Petersburg, are heading south to join the miracle, learning Chinese in Beijing or Shanghai. Perhaps they will bring a degree of prosperity back north of the Amur. More likely they will stay in China. I have met Russian classical musicians leading fulfilled lives in China’s northeast. Many Russian women seek a man in China. Chinese men make good husbands, they say: harder working than Russians in the Far East, and they drink far, far less.

  But as its people trickle out, they say part of the Russian Far East remains in them. And in me, too, as I leave: the gruff warmth of the sibirskii, the stolid independence, the wooden houses sinking into the ground, the slate-heavy rushing skies of the first big storm of winter—and beneath the skies, that big broad stream running for just a few days more.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My regret is not having the chance properly to thank very many of the people in Mongolia, Russia, and China who showed me such warmth and hospitality along the way. To those who live in this book, I am deeply grateful. Some names have been changed.

  This book would also have been infinitely poorer without the help and generosity, at critical points along the journey, of old friends and new. They include: in Mongolia, Ariunaa Tserenpil, Byamba Sakhya, Chimed-Ochir Bazarsad, and Galbadrakh Davaa. In Russia, they are Sarana Ayurova, Evgeny Larin, Victor Larin, Lilia Larina, and Olga Anatolyevna Moisseeva and her colleagues at Dalgeo Tours in Khabarovsk, especially Olga Egorova, Grigory Eliseev, and Elena. In China, they are Qi Jiajia and Zhou Yu.