The Russian Far East After Landscape: A Photoessay

The great empires of the Orient, Africa, and America run up against wide-open smooth spaces that penetrate them and maintain gaps between their components …: the oriental State is in direct confrontation with a nomad war machine.… Western States are much more sheltered in their striated space and consequently have much more latitude in holding their components together.

—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980/87

I wondered about the meaning of Deleuze and Guattari’s words while on my way to the Russian Far East in 1994, traveling by train from Harbin, capital of the northeastern Chinese province of Heilongjiang, to Suifenhe, a border town booming in the “one country, two systems” conditions. From there, it takes only a half hour by special train to reach Pogranichnaia at the Russian border. The contrast was overwhelming. Beyond landscaped China, with its orderly villages, well-kept fields, and populous towns and cities, lay only wide-open spaces. Here was Deleuze and Guattari’s “oriental State,” manifestly “holding [its] components together,” while Russia seemed to have reached an advanced

Village and fields in Heilongjiang Province, northeast China.

stage of unshelteredness; after the garden came wasteland—a wasteland sparsely populated by European Russians. A lone watchtower stood between the two countries on one of the “hills of Manchuria” (to borrow the famous song title from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5). What was it defending, the West from the East or the other way around? It was impossible to tell from the train. Had post-Soviet Russia reverted to a “nomad war machine” threatening the “striated space[s]” of a modernizing China?

It turned out that the “threat” was felt from the other side, as I discovered several days later while reading a Vladivostok newspaper report on “Operation Foreigner.” The authorities of Maritime Province (Primorskii krai) were

Watchtower on the Sino-Russian border between Suifenhe and Pogranichnaia.

taking such measures as tightening passport controls and curtailing border trade against illegal immigration from the People’s Republic, which was suspected of covertly colonizing those “immemorial Russian [iskonno russkie]” territories. In other words, the operation was aimed at containing the “yellow peril.” (The literal meaning of “Vladivostok” is, after all, “to dominate, or rule over, the East.”) But did the Chinese garden really threaten such European patches in the wilderness and wasteland? The Chinese, to be sure, had their own names for many ofthose places: Haishenwan for Vladivostok, Boli for Khabarovsk, and even Gongqincheng for Komsomolsk. When I left Maritime Province, I was still confused.

The real purpose of my journey had been to find the sources of a fictitious topography mapped in a now-forgotten Soviet bestseller of the late 1940s, a novel celebrating the heroic construction of an oil pipeline somewhere “far from Moscow” during World War II (or, as it is called in Russia, the Great Patriotic War). The “real” site was the region of the Lower Amur and Sakhalin Island, a place called “the end of the world” in the novel that had brought me here.¹

The settlement of Lazarev: (1) center of town, on the Tatar Strait, facing Sakhalin; (2) Soviet Street, with the Nevelsky Strait in the distance.

I embarked in July 1994 on my first trip downstream of the River Amur, boarding a hydroplane at Khabarovsk that was bound for Nikolaevsk, a two-day journey away. At 6:30 a.m. we set off with a full load of passengers and heaps of half-rotten cabbages, provisions for the coming winter. Some of the people traveling with me had Asian faces. Were they the truly “immemorial” inhabitants of the region, descendants of nomads who had once lived by hunting and fishing?

In 1920, Prince Nikolai S. Trubetzkoy’s “Eurasianist” indictment of Western capitalism, Evropa i chelovechestvo (Europe and Mankind), had been published in Sofia. Reacting against Europe and championing an authentic native culture, Trubetzkoy had envisioned Russia...