Seven decades of Communist misrule left the romantic image of this Victorian port city intact, but not much else.
The opulent Versailles Hotel was gutted by fire three years ago and left to rot. Dilapidated streetcars clatter up potentially picturesque hillsides to reveal endless rows of concrete-block apartment complexes.
On the former Lenin Street, recently renamed Svetlanskaya Street after the ship that brought the first settlers to Vladivostok in 1867, streetcars pass imposing mansions crafted from stone and brick by turn-of-the-century British, French and German merchants. Lacking paint for decades, their wrought-iron balustrades are rusting away.
Vladivostok`s cargo facilities, key in a city whose 700,000 residents depend on the sea, have decayed as shipping shifted to more modern ports nearby. The ships of the once-feared Russian Pacific Fleet, which at the height of the Cold War ranged from this northern Pacific port to the Indian Ocean, rarely leave coastal waters because they can`t afford fuel.
A stone marker next to the rail station`s turreted platform tells why commercially savvy Europeans made their way a century ago to this farthest corner of the Russian empire, sometimes called the San Francisco of the Far East:
”Here the Great Trans-Siberian Railroad ends. The distance from Moscow is 9,288 kilometers.” That`s nearly 6,000 miles.
Today the station`s dank corridors tell weary travelers they`ve reached the end of the line.
After three decades of official isolation, Vladivostok finally was opened to foreigners this year, among the last cities in Russia to have its restrictions lifted. U.S. Ambassador Robert Strauss will be on hand next month when an American consulate, the first since Red Army troops conquered the city in 1922, reopens.
City officials say the opening comes too late. Vladivostok now is a city without a mission.
For decades, much of its industry and the livelihoods of most of its people were geared to supporting the Pacific Fleet. Now the Russian navy is undergoing massive cutbacks.
In the past two years, the fleet has scrapped 70 of its 312 warships, including 40 submarines, half of them nuclear. The naval command recently opened a training school for displaced officers, including courses in organizing a business, personnel management and marketing.
For a while, the navy negotiated to sell some smaller fighting ships to entrepreneurs who wanted to start short-haul cargo shipping businesses. That program was put on hold three months ago because the navy couldn`t determine what the vessels were worth.
City fathers and local enterprise leaders seem stumped by how to revive a commercial culture that has lain dormant more than seven decades.
Ideas, not projects, abound. ”Vladivostok should become a financial, cultural and tourist center of the Far East,” said Sergey O. Frank, vice president of finance for Far Eastern Shipping Co., a state-owned company in the midst of going private.
The company, whose worldwide commodity shipping business made it one of the former Soviet Union`s more successful state-owned companies, recently signed a contract with a Japanese company to remodel the Versailles Hotel. Its worldly freighter captains have led the way in starting joint ventures to promote tourism. It helped start the area`s first private insurance company.
But these are mere drops in the bucket compared with the city`s biggest growth industry: organized crime. In the past year, rival gangs made up of former sports heroes and Moscow gangsters have been fighting a violent battle for control of the lucrative used-car trade, according to Anatoly Ilyukhov, a local reporter for Novosti Press.
The trade, though declining because of a deteriorating economy, is built on the fact that Russian seamen can buy used Japanese cars for $400 to $600 and bring them home in their half-empty vessels to sell at four to five times that much. Seventy percent of the cars on Vladivostok`s streets are Japanese. A gang war has erupted over who will control shipping cars to Moscow and points west. Last month, a local gangster was shot and killed in the parking lot of the Hotel Vladivostok, the city`s main Intourist hotel.
Local planners are skeptical.
”Russians shouldn`t overestimate their abilities in business,” said Gennady A. Katkov, director of the Institute for Business Cooperation with Countries of the Asian Pacific Region. ”Why would foreign tourists want to visit this place when they can stay closer to home and get much better service?”
