to the station there may be no platform and the retractable steps might be
frozen shut, forcing you to simply heave your luggage into the darkness
and jump out after it.
Because so much of life here is governed by a kind of whimsical
rigidity—a combination of leftover Soviet bureaucracy and free market
chaos—even simple interactions with officialdom can leave you feeling
as if you have wandered into an insane asylum. To this day, the Russian
Far East is a place where neither political correctness nor eco-speak have
penetrated, and patriotism is vigorous and impassioned. Vladivostok is
about as far as one can be from the Eastern Front and still be in Russia,
but huge monuments to the heroic fallen command the squares, along
with an intermittently eternal flame. To get an idea how large the Second
World War’s legacy of sacrifice and heroism still looms in the popular
mind, one need only stand on Svetlanskaya, one of the two principal
shopping streets framing the harbor where the Pacific Fleet is berthed.
Here, on an early-twenty-first-century Sunday, more than sixty years
after the Red Army took Berlin, two grandsons of that generation—pink-
cheeked family men out for lunch with their wives and young children—
will invoke the legacy of that time with a ferocity few Westerners could
muster. After reasserting Russia’s indispensable role in the defeat of the
Nazis, and brushing aside the contributions of the Allies, one of these
young men will go on to say, “If you stand with us, we will protect you
with all our Russian soul.^4 But if you are against us [a finger is jabbing
now], we will fight you with all our Russian soul. We will fight you to the
end!”
The speaker looks at his mate, and their eyes lock in solidarity; then
they laugh, embrace, and knock their heads together so hard you can hear
the crack of bone on bone.
In Primorye, the seasons collide with equal intensity: winter can bring
blizzards and paralyzing cold, and summer will retaliate with typhoons
and monsoon rains; three quarters of the region’s rainfall occurs during
the summer. This tendency toward extremes allows for unlikely
juxtapositions and may explain why there is no satisfactory name for the