Vladivostok

• 1. Introduction

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  Vladivostok sits at the edge of a continent, pressed against the Sea of Japan, closer to Anchorage, Alaska than to Moscow. Its name means 'Lord of the East' or 'Ruler of the East' in Russian, drawn from the Slavic word for 'to rule' and the Russian word for 'east.' That name was given not to a city but to a bay, in 1859, by the Governor-General of the Far East Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky. Less than a year later, a military unit arrived by transport ship to plant a post on the shore of Golden Horn Bay. From that single outpost, a city of over 600,000 people would grow.

  What makes Vladivostok unusual is the tension at its core: a Russian city built in a geography that is unmistakably Asian, a port that for decades was sealed from the outside world, a place known historically as 'Europe in the Far East.' It has been occupied by foreign armies, home to one of the largest Chinese urban enclaves in history, closed to foreigners for forty years, and finally reopened on New Year's Day 1992. The questions worth carrying into this documentary are these: how does a city become a world unto itself at the far edge of an empire, and what does it look like when that world is finally opened up?

• 2. Lord of the East

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  On June 20 of the Julian calendar in 1860, the transport ship Mandzhur of the Siberian Military Flotilla, commanded by Lieutenant-Commander Alexei Karlovich Shefner, delivered a military unit to Golden Horn Bay. The post was named Vladivostok. The city's founding was made possible by two treaties: the Treaty of Aigun and the Convention of Peking, through which Russia annexed the territory of what is now Vladivostok from Qing China. This annexation is also known as the Amur Annexation.

  The name itself had a parallel in the Russian Empire's habit of naming frontier fortresses with the same grammatical mold. Vladikavkaz, meaning 'Ruler of the Caucasus,' was founded and named in 1784, more than seventy years before Vladivostok received its cognate title. Long before any of these Russian names, Chinese maps from the Yuan dynasty, which ran from 1271 to 1368, referred to the place as Yongmingcheng, meaning 'city of eternal light.' Since the Qing dynasty the area had also carried the Mandarin name Haishenwai, named for the historical abundance of sea cucumbers in its waters. In China today, maps are legally required to bracket the Russian transliteration with the historical Chinese name.

  The first civilian to settle was a merchant named Yakov Lazarevich Semyonov, who arrived with his family on the 31st of October 1861. He purchased land the following March and was later elected the first head of the post in 1870. The post did not officially receive city status until 1880.

• 3. A City of Many Faces

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  By 1914, Vladivostok had passed 100,000 inhabitants, and ethnic Russians made up less than half of that population. Large Asian communities had taken root alongside European, Korean, and American ones. The old Chinese quarter, called Millionka, at its peak housed up to 50,000 Chinese residents. It had its own theaters, shops, and a full shadow economy of opium dens and smugglers' hideouts. Chinese merchants controlled the retail sector of the city more thoroughly than Russian ones did.

  Koreans arrived in large numbers after Japan annexed Korea in 1910. By 1915 around 10,000 Koreans lived in the city, concentrated in an enclave called Sinhanch'on. That neighborhood became a center of the Korean independence movement and hosted the first Korean provisional government, the Korean Independence Army Government. Korean haenyeo divers from Jeju Island also worked in Vladivostok's waters during this period.

  Joseph Stalin ended all of this. Between 1936 and 1938, on his orders, both Millionka and Sinhanch'on were liquidated and their residents deported. The demographic erasure was near-total. By the time of the 2010 census, more than 92 percent of Vladivostok's residents declared Russian ethnicity. Koreans and Chinese together accounted for roughly 1 percent. The city's census in that year counted representatives of over seventy nationalities and ethnic groups, but the historical depth of its Asian communities had been stripped away in just two years under Stalin.

• 4. War, Revolution, and Occupation

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  From May 1918, Vladivostok fell under the control of the White Army-allied Czechoslovak Legion, who declared it an Allied protectorate. The city became the staging point for a multi-national Siberian intervention that included forces from Japan, the United States, and China. China sent troops specifically to protect the local Chinese community, following appeals from Chinese merchants.

  All Allied forces except the Japanese withdrew by the end of 1920. To avoid provoking a direct war with Japan, the Soviet leadership established the Far Eastern Republic on the 6th of April 1920, a Soviet-backed buffer state between Soviet Russia and Japan. In October 1922, Red Army troops under the command of Ieronim Uborevich occupied Vladivostok, driving out the last White Army formations. In November, the Far Eastern Republic was dissolved into Soviet Russia. The Japanese were the last foreign troops to leave.

  When Soviet power took hold, the city the Red Army inherited was in sharp decline. Retreating Japanese forces had stripped the city of material valuables. Banks held no money. Factories had been looted. The population had fallen to 106,000. Between 1923 and 1925, the government ran a three-year restoration program, during which the commercial port was revived and became the most profitable in the country. Vladivostok bypassed the 'war communism' phase that most of Soviet Russia endured and was inducted directly into the New Economic Policy.

• 5. The Closed City

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  In the 1930s and 1940s, Vladivostok served a grim function: it was a transit point for prisoners and cargo heading to the Sevvostlag, the labor camp network operated by the Soviet super-trust Dalstroy. A notorious transit camp sat inside the city itself. A separate forced labour camp called Vladlag was located in the Vtoraya Rechka railway station area in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

  On the 11th of August 1951, a decree of the Soviet Council of Ministers introduced a special regime in Vladivostok, which took effect on the 1st of January 1952. The city was closed to all foreigners. Plans were drawn up to expel not just foreign consulates but also the merchant and fishing fleets, and to relocate all regional authorities to the city now known as Ussuriysk. None of these plans were carried out.

  Nikita Khrushchev visited in 1954 to decide whether the city should be secured permanently as a closed naval base. He found the urban infrastructure in what was described as a deplorable state. He returned in 1959, and the result was a decree on the 18th of January 1960 for the accelerated development of the city. During the 1960s a new tram line was built, a trolleybus network was launched, and construction expanded into the outskirts. In 1974, Gerald Ford met with Leonid Brezhnev in Vladivostok, making Ford the first sitting United States president to visit the city. The formal end of the closed-city era came on the 20th of September 1991, when Boris Yeltsin signed decree No. 123 opening Vladivostok to foreign visitors, effective the 1st of January 1992.

• 6. Port at the End of the Railway

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  The Trans-Siberian Railway, finished in 1905, was built for a single purpose: to connect European Russia to Vladivostok. Part of the route, the Chinese Eastern Line, crossed into China and passed through Harbin in Manchuria. Vladivostok sits at the terminus of that line and today is the main starting point of the Eurasian Land Bridge.

  During World War II, Vladivostok handled imported lend-lease cargo at a volume almost four times greater than Murmansk and almost five times greater than Arkhangelsk. The city was never attacked, but its port sustained the Soviet war effort at scale.

  Fishing accounts for almost four-fifths of Vladivostok's commercial production today. The import of Japanese cars also became a major economic pillar: dealers in the city sell around 250,000 cars a year, with 200,000 of those shipped to other parts of Russia. At one point, every third worker in Primorsky Krai had some connection to the car import business. In 2009, the car manufacturing company Sollers moved a factory from Moscow to Vladivostok on order from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, employing around 700 local workers. In 2018, cargo turnover at the port amounted to 21.2 million tons.

• 7. Culture at the Fringe

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  Yul Brynner was born in 1920 at 15 Aleutskaya Street in Vladivostok and died in 1985. In September 2012, a granite statue of the actor was inaugurated in Yul Brynner Park, directly in front of his birthplace. Ilya Lagutenko, the singer who founded the Russian rock band Mumiy Troll, was also born in Vladivostok, in 1968. The band frequently performs in the city. In September 1996, the city hosted the 'VladiROCKstok' International Music Festival, organized by two young American expatriates and attended by nearly 10,000 people, drawing acts from St. Petersburg and Seattle.

  The Primorsky Opera and Ballet Theater opened in 2013 and was transformed on the 1st of January 2016 into a branch of the Mariinsky Theater. The Vladimir K. Arseniev Museum of Far East History, opened in 1890, holds among its collection the famous 15th-century Yongning Temple Steles from the lower Amur. Three of Vladivostok's schools are included in the top 500 schools of the Russian Federation.

  In 2012, Vladivostok hosted the 24th APEC summit on Russky Island. Two enormous cable-stayed bridges were built for the event: the Zolotoy Rog Bridge over Golden Horn Bay and the Russky Island Bridge, which is the longest cable-stayed bridge in the world. In 2017, around three million tourists visited the city, including 640,000 foreigners, more than 90 percent of them from China, South Korea, and Japan. The annual Eastern Economic Forum continues to draw heads of government and business leaders to Russky Island each year.