Exiles in China (was Re: moscow times........?)
bab...@my-deja.com
<kir...@university.edu> writes:
>Kent Betts wrote:
>>
>> Anyone know why the Moscow Times web page has been unavailable for a week?
>
>http://www.themoscowtimes.com/ has not been down and is currently
>up.
>
You may disregard my previous post. Incidentally there was an interesting
article about Harbin. I once met a Ukrainian (former) resident of that
city who came to the U.S. by way of Argentina after the war. There
were Ukrainian-language newspapers and a radio station which (much to the
chagrin of the Soviet authorities) would broadcast non-Commie Ukrainian
news to the Ukrainians on the other side of the border. It is tragesy that
that free and multicultural environment disappeared!
From the Moscow Times:
Friday, Mar. 30, 2001. Page VI
A Little Moscow in China
Harbin's Central Street resembled Moscow's Arbat in the town's heyday.
Founded by Russians building a railroad across the northern tip of China,
Harbin once boasted the largest population of Russians living abroad. But
after suffering the ravages of war, occupation and the Cultural Revolution,
only a handful of Russians now remain. On a recent trip to Harbin, Russell
Working searched for traces of Russian life.
In his youth, the old man recalled, when he hauled pails of milk to this
northern Chinese city, nearly everyone he met along the boulevards and
streets would be speaking Russian.
Central Street resembled Moscow's Arbat. There were Russian banks, shops,
restaurants and hotels, said Vladimir Zinchenko, now a 66-year-old farmer.
Twenty-two churches graced the skyline — including the onion-domed St.
Nikolai Cathedral, an architectural gem built of wood and free of nails, in
the old Russian style.
"It was like a little Moscow or Paris here," he said in his native Russian.
"We had an opera here. There were so many magazines and newspapers here, and
the cultural life was on a very high level. Unfortunately, all that was
destroyed."
Zinchenko is one of the few surviving Russians in a city that once had the
largest population of immigrants outside the Soviet Union. Built in 1898 by
Russians who were extending the Trans-Siberian railroad across northeastern
China to Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan, Harbin was home to perhaps 100,000
Russian citizens in the 1920s, their ranks swollen by refugees first from
tsarist oppression and later from the meltdown of their homeland under
Bolshevism.
They were a microcosm of the Russian empire. Ukrainian Catholics worshiped at
their own church, Jews built two synagogues and a rabbinical school and
Tatars established a mosque topped by domes and crescents. Old Believers, a
splinter Orthodox sect, chanted their ancient liturgies, and German-speaking
Mennonites from Russia's Volga River area, relocated to the Siberian city of
Blagoveshchensk, fled across the frozen Amur River from 1928 to 1929 and
settled in Harbin.
"It was a free zone," said Svetlana Rusnak, senior researcher at Vladivostok's
V.K. Arsenyev Primorye Local Studies Museum. "What was impossible in the
Russian empire was implemented in Harbin. For instance in Russia, Jews didn't
have the right to own land and had limitations on entering universities and
couldn't freely do business in the capital. But in Harbin there was nothing
like that. … It was a mosaic, a multiethnic society, united by Russian
culture."
But all this would vanish under three successive regimes hostile to the
Russians of Harbin: Japanese occupiers, the postwar Soviet army and China's
Communist government.
Harbin today is an industrial city of 2.5 million in Heilongjiang province on
the banks of the Sungari River. Its skyline is a jumble of aging smokestacks
and high-rises constructed over the last decade. Some of its neighborhoods
could be seen anywhere in China: single-story brick houses with crooked
chimneys, alleyways where street vendors produce bags of puffed rice, stores
overflowing with sweaters and back-scratchers. Yet throughout the city
center, graceful Russian buildings remain, some intact, others remodeled and
covered in that favorite Chinese surfacing, shower tiles, or sprouting a
glass tower out of what was once a two-story art deco building.
A 74-year-old maitre d' in the Huamei Western-Style Food Dining Hall on
Central Street recalls the Russian era. A farm boy in a nearby village, he
first visited Harbin when he was 15 and was dazzled by the city. His current
place of employment, founded by a Russian Jew, still includes rooms decorated
decades ago in a grand "Kremlin style," with columns, high ceilings and
chandeliers.
"I was very glad in the year 1942 to see Harbin," he said. "It was springtime,
and you could see foreign people all over. Maybe most of them were Russians.
They were very splendid, the men in their hats, the women in their dresses
and high heels."
While historic architecture such as the Modern Hotel still lines Central
Street, the most obvious signs of Russian Harbin are in its 18 remaining
churches. One of them is said to be the only operating Orthodox church in
China, but on a recent weekday it was closed, its courtyard heaped with coal
mixed with snow. The graceful St. Sophia has been converted to an
architectural museum, but it takes its educational mission lightly. The
English-language signs inside provide an essay on the need for remembering
the past but make no mention of the building's history as a church. The walls
are decorated with gaudy oil paintings of saints (real icons were painted on
wood, not canvas), and over the chancel hangs a copy of Leonardo da Vinci's
"The Last Supper."
..cut...
The first wave of Russian emigration from Harbin began with the Japanese
occupation in 1932-45. Zinchenko was born in Harbin during this period. Now
hospitalized with a heart condition and infections in his feet, he recalled
the time in a recent interview with foreign journalists. In the presence of a
minder from the Harbin city administration, Zinchenko spoke carefully, making
sure to praise the achievements of modern China and the generosity of Chinese
who had donated money to pay for his hospital bills.
During wartime, he said, it was illegal for Russians and Chinese to buy rice —
that was reserved for the Japanese occupiers — and they were forbidden from
listening to foreign radio. Japanese openly called both Chinese and Russians
"bastards," and Zinchenko's step-grandfather was jailed and never heard from
again. After the war, it turned out that the Japanese were using Chinese and
Russians as guinea pigs in germ warfare experiments.
Despite all this, Harbin remained essentially a Russian city through the end
of the war, said Rusnak, the Vladivostok historian. But the position of
Russians began to deteriorate, ironically, with the postwar arrival of Soviet
troops who occupied Manchuria under the Yalta agreement.
When the Red Army rolled into Harbin in 1945, expatriates turned out to cheer
them and offer bouquets. They soon discovered, however, that these were not
disciplined combat troops, but units of former criminals who had been drafted
to create an occupation army in Asia. Anarchy broke out in Heilongjiang.
Calling themselves liberators, the soldiers sneered at Harbin's ïmigrïs as
"the White gang" and encouraged the Chinese to loot warehouses of food and
show disrespect for Harbin's Russians.
Zinchenko is one of the few Russians remaining in Harbin.
"They basically had no moral restraint," Zinchenko said. "My neighbor had
Chinese workers repairing the railroad, and the soldiers killed them all.
They even killed each other when they got drunk. They raped women and
children. My mother had to dress as an old babushka when she went out. They
also killed all our cows and left us with nothing to live on."
Eventually the troops were replaced by regular army units, and the chaos
subsided. The newer soldiers grew fond of Harbin's Russians, and when they
returned to Russia in 1946, some of them hung banners out their windows of
their departing trains that doubtless could have earned them a prison term in
Stalin's Soviet Union. The banners read, "Long live emigrant life!"
With the arrival of Chinese Communist forces, many Chinese celebrated the
liberation of their country from foreigners. Russians began flooding from
Harbin to Australia, Canada, the United States and other countries. Many of
them had already fled the ravages of the Russian Revolution, and they were
unwilling to live under a Communist government.
After the death of Stalin, the Soviet Union itself recruited thousands of
Harbiners. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev began a policy of cultivating the
"virgin lands" of Kazakhstan in 1953, and he sent trains to Harbin to
transport settlers to the grasslands of Central Asia, Rusnak said.
"They would load up in train cars voluntarily, because they were patriots,"
she said. "They were mainly city people, and would be taken to the open
steppes. They would come with high heel shoes and nylons and boxes full of
books and records. All of that would be left out in the pouring rain."
With the support of the Chinese government, the Soviet Union pressured
Harbin's Russians to leave China, Zinchenko said. The Soviet embassy would
call Chinese employers and urge them to fire Russian technicians. Many
Russians lost their jobs and headed back to Russia.
The Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 was the nadir of the Russian experience in
Harbin. During the period, Mao Zedong shut down schools and encouraged mobs
of students — known as Red Guards — to travel the country, attacking anything
seen as bourgeois. Students tortured respected teachers, abused elderly
citizens, humiliated old revolutionaries and battled former friends in bloody
confrontations. Mobs destroyed thousands of temples and works of art. Even
today, the topic remains sensitive. China's leadership essentially repudiated
the Cultural Revolution after Mao's death by trying the "Gang of Four" —
including Mao's wife — who supported it. But to open the subject to even a
limited, Khrushchev-like re-examination would be to undermine the party
itself.
As Zinchenko tried to discuss the period, a Chinese minder cut off the
interview. "It's not convenient to discuss the Cultural Revolution," he said.
The conversation moved on to the achievements of modern China.
But the reporters later returned alone under the pretext of giving Russian
books to Zinchenko. "Now we can talk freely," he said, and he continued his
narrative.
Red Guards hopped trains throughout China, and they swarmed to Harbin,
chanting slogans, beating up ïmigrïs and throwing bricks and rocks through
the windows of Russian houses, Vladimir recalled. Russians kept their
shutters closed all the time. Mobs threw so many rocks onto the roof of
Vladimir's home, it buckled on two occasions, and he had to have it replaced.
Often, when he was out making his rounds selling milk, a stone hurled by an
unseen assailant would clobber Vladimir on the head.
The Russians were not alone in their persecution as China descended into mob
rule. Many Maoist restrictions bordered on ludicrous. Such bourgeois
decorations as statues, flowers, and even goldfish in aquariums were banned,
Zinchenko recalled. Once a barber denied him a haircut until he recited
Maoist slogans and bowed to a poster of the party chairman. But the most
fateful moment — the spiritual death knell for the remaining Russians of
Harbin — came when the Red Guards tore down St. Nikolai Cathedral.
"All the Russians gathered to watch," Zinchenko said. "Everyone was crying.
Grandmothers and grandfathers were weeping in the streets, but what could you
do? And when the Russians were standing there, the Chinese mocked us, saying,
'Is it a good thing or a bad thing that they are destroying it?'"
..cut...
Nowadays, Zinchenko knows of only seven full-blooded Russians in Harbin, all
of them elderly women in their 80s or 90s. He refused to introduce them to
reporters visiting from Russia. They would be too afraid to talk, he said.
Despite a hard life, Zinchenko expresses little bitterness. Indeed, when he
became ill recently, many Chinese sent money to pay for his hospitalization
after a television station filmed him. The Russian consulate in Shenyang made
a donation and it provided him with his first Russian passport. He has never
seen his parents' homeland, but now that he can legally visit, he is too ill
to travel.
While Zinchenko receives kinder treatment these days, officials remain uneasy
with Harbin's Russian roots. During a recent ceremony to celebrate the city's
centennial, bureaucrats invited Zinchenko to attend. Then they gave him a
warning.
"They told me, 'You can go to the restaurants and you can sit in on the
events, but you should not give any political statements. And you should not
tell people about the Russian history that was going on here.'"
Babai
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