WORLD

Reminders of Russian Legacy Linger in Harbin

Russell Working / For The St. Petersburg Times Now an architectural museum, the St. Sophia Russian Orthodox Church is a visible reminder of Harbin's Russian heritage.

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, and 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 without 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 a handful of 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 railroad across northeastern China to Vla divostok on the Sea of Japan, Har bin 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 in 1928-29 and settled in Harbin.

"It was a free zone," said Svetlana Rusnak, senior researcher at Vladivostok's V.K. Arseniev 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 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.

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."

The first wave of Russian emigration away from Harbin began with the Japanese occupation in 1932-45. Zin chen ko 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 migrs as "the White gang" and encouraged the Chinese to loot warehouses of food and show disrespect for Harbin's Russians.

"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 they 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 Khru shchev 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 backing of the Chinese government, the Soviet Union pressured Harbin's Russians in an attempt to force them out of China, Zinchenko said. The Soviet embassy would call Chinese employers and urge them to fire Russian technicians, and 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.

Thus, 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 émigrés, 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?'"

In March 1969, Chinese troops invaded Russia, swarming across the frozen Ussuri River to seize Damansky Island. Highways through Harbin were filled with military trucks heading east, and Chinese officials rounded up the remaining Russians and forced them to watch propaganda films about China's victorious army, Zinchenko said. But when Russian border guards repulsed the attack, the officials stopped trumpeting the matter and left Harbin's Russians alone.

Nowadays Zinchenko knows of only seven other 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 did a spot on 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.

But 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.'"

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