When the Trans-Siberian express from Moscow pulls into Vladivostok after its 6,200-mile journey east to the Pacific, conductors call out to passengers scrambling off the train: ”Take your time, Ladies and Gentlemen, you have reached the end of the world.”
Visitors who arrive in Vladivostok by air or sea will have the same feeling. The city has been closed to outsiders for generations, not only to foreign travelers but to most Russians as well. With the coming of
perestroika, however, it is now beginning to open to foreign trade, culture and tourism.
Citizens of Vladivostok trace the opening of the city to a 1986 speech given here by Mikhail Gorbachev in which he asked Vladivostok to join the dynamic forces shaping the Pacific Rim. It took Gorbachev to begin to change the mind of this navy town, home of the Soviet Far East Fleet-and Boris Yeltsin`s charisma to fully open the city following his August 1990 visit. For generations the Soviet Navy had called the shots, and the navy looked askance at visitors.
Recently, Soviet tourists have flocked here, and plans are afoot to receive foreign visitors who are expected to arrive in ever larger numbers in 1991.
The University of Maryland sent a vanguard 40 U.S. students and faculty on a first-ever study tour to Vladivostok in July 1990, and U.S. Navy ships are to visit the port later in the year, according to local officials.
Some startup confusion
Vladivostok is working feverishly to prepare for foreign tourism. Its airport has been renovated; its old ferry port is being rebuilt by Italian workers; the city`s two barely adequate hotels are undergoing renovation and a new Intourist hotel is going up with Indian engineering help; guides are learning English-they now give their spiels in Russian and call on Far-Eastern State University students to translate these into English or Japanese.
Typical of the early stages of tourism, the guides are not entirely sure what foreigners might want to see or hear. When American visitors in March showed an interest in fishermen drilling through harbor ice and other locals hacking through the same ice to swim in the frigid sea, the guides were completely nonplussed.
The confusion became even more pronounced when the American group insisted on stopping the conventional tour to visit Vladivostok`s blue-green Victorian birthday cake of a railway station. To outsiders, this unusual building, with its orthodox church-like interior, heroic murals and gingerbread-house decorations represents much of the romance of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. To the guides, however, it seemed an embarrassment because, as one said, ”That station is old and ugly.”
Similarly, the late 19th-Century core of the city, undamaged by war, will be a considerable attraction to most visitors, but its older buildings received only perfunctory attention from the Soviet guides. Their focus was more on post-1917 monuments and buildings.
The newness of tourism in Vladivostok is reflected in three experiences. First, recent visitors found no postcards for sale at hotels, restaurants or museums. One bookstore was found to carry postcards of Lenin in heroic poses. Second, the visitors never saw a single word in a foreign language during the five days of their stay.
Third, you are unlikely to find restaurants serving food to international coffee-shop standards. At the showpiece North Korean restaurant, there was no rice, no kimchi and no beer. There was, however, a vast oversupply of cucumbers this summer-they were served at all meals.
Those observations are not related to daunt you but to let you know what early visitors will face.
Is it worthwhile to visit Vladivostok? The answer is a resounding yes. Consider that this city has one of the most striking natural settings in the world, one which rivals San Francisco, Hong Kong, Sydney or Nagasaki. It is built on a hilly peninsula which sticks out like a chubby finger into Peter the Great bay.
At the end of the peninsula, separated by a narrow, deep-water channel is the dark bulk of Russian Island, which protects shipping in Vladivostok`s port. The channel between the tip of the peninsula and Russian Island is called the Golden Horn after a similar body of water in Istanbul.
The views of near and distant hills, of the ships in port and those moving in and out, are spectacular. You can see the whole panorama from a promontory called Eagle`s Nest.
An autonomous outpost
Vladivostok`s geography was a key to its founding in 1860 when control of the surrounding area passed from China to Russia. Russia needed a port on the Pacific to anchor its new maritime possessions. Vladivostok was the perfect location for such a port and could be kept free of ice in winter.
At first it was populated largely by adventurers and frontier types. Because of the great distance from Moscow, the young city enjoyed a rare degree of autonomy. That overland distance was almost unimaginable in the late 19th-Century. In fact, it was faster to reach Vladivostok from St. Petersburg by train to Hamburg, steamer to New York, train to San Francisco, and another steamer across the Pacific!
The alternative was the Great Siberian Track, 6,200 miles from Moscow, much of it on the roughest roads and trails through a forbiding wilderness.
With the arrival of the Russian Navy, Vladivostok began to assume its present shape and importance. Late 19th and early 20th-Century buildings replaced the wooden structures around the port.
Fortunately, most of these graceful buildings survive, from various old hotels and commercial houses, to the amazing railroad station completed in 1916 when rail service to Moscow began. These give Vladivostok`s center the distinct feel of northern Europe, almost a miniature Leningrad from some perspectives, though not as grand.
More than vistas and buildings, Vladivostok is interesting because of its people. How unexpected to find a city of blond-haired Slavs one air hour west of Japan and just north of China. It`s as if these nearly 1,000,000 Caucasians have been conjured out of thin air, so incongruous do they seem in the heart of Northeast Asia.
And what a pleasant surprise to find these enforced Soviet hermits to be jolly, welcoming and eager for contact. It will immediately strike a visitor who has been to European Russia that people here smile a lot. They are friendly and show it in the streets. The well-known dourness and reserve of Moscow and Leningrad belong to another world, eight time zones away.
Kin of our pioneers
People in Vladivostok compare to European Russians as American Westerners do to those who live on the Eastern seaboard. The parallel is not perfect, but it comes close at several points. In both cases, 19th-Century pioneers and freebooters moved into land held by tribal peoples.
They battled great distances and unforgiving climate, crossing continents to isolated destinations at the ends of their respective worlds.
Both cultures celebrate their adventurers. Vladivostok`s founder, Count Muravev, is the prototype military officer operating on his own too far from his home base to be controlled.
The Russian East experienced the same shortage of women on its frontier as did the American West. As late as 1937, the Soviets were still trying to attract women to the Far East to fill the gender void. Adroit publicity that year brought out 70,000 female volunteers.
You will not lack for contact in this city if you wish it. Students are busily learning English and are eager to try their skills on foreigners. People really want to tell their stories.
A taxi driver, a man so large he could barely operate his car, tells his fare that he used to be a manager of a fish canning factory but left out of frustration with Party micro-management. He bought a taxi with his life`s savings and organized a cooperative of 70 owners of private cars to serve as part-time taxi drivers.
At Far-Eastern State University, a student asks an American visiting an English class if he does not find the Soviet Union under perestroika to be an absurd society.
Other frank questions and strong opinions pour from the students, and no one seems particularly alarmed. It could almost be an American university setting in the late 1960s.
Making a sale
A young artist, who exhibits at the municipal gallery, looks puzzled when asked if his work is for sale. Finally, he asks the visitor to set a fair price in dollars and agrees in advance to accept it.
Local artists, he says, have little experience selling their works. They are happy to see them exhibited. Once the price is set, the young man tells the foreigners to hold the dollars for him since he can`t accept foreign currency.
One day he will travel overseas and pick up the money owed him.
Foreign tourism in Vladivostok has already begun. Its full flowering awaits only completion of the appropriate infrastructure. At the moment, however, the city stands on a travel frontier of tourism. That means uncertain plumbing, mediocre meals and empty shops, but also excitement, unusual experiences, and above all human contact with people eager to meet the world after nearly a century of enforced isolation.
