The City of Vladivostok Is a Mixture of Promise and Neglect
RussiaProfile.Org, an online publication providing in-depth analysis of business, politics, current affairs and culture in Russia, has published a new Special Report on Russia’s cities and problems of urban development. Articles by both Russian and foreign contributors examine issues such as municipal government, urban planning, construction and ecology, as well as current developments in Grozny, Magnitogorsk, Vladivostok, Kazan and Sevastopol. The following article is part of this collection.
One hundred and fifty years ago this June, a Russian supply ship sailed up the Sea of Japan looking for a likely landing place. Its crew found a bay that formed an ideal natural harbor, and chose a spot with a view all the way to the entrance of the bay. They called the long, curving inlet the Golden Horn, after the harbor in Constantinople that it uncannily resembled. And they called the town they founded there Vladivostok—to Rule the East. Continuing the theme, they named the strait between the cape and a large island, which they called Russky, the Eastern Bosporus.
Perched on rolling hills overlooking the iron grey Sea of Japan at the end of a slender peninsula extending south from Russia’s Maritime Province (Primorye), this city is a mixture of promise and neglect. Outsiders look at the hills and the drizzly north pacific bay and see a city that could have been as beautiful as San Francisco—if only it had been built right. Locals climb their hills and look out to Japan, where their cars come from, and feel they have been forgotten by Moscow—even though the city skyline is dotted with huge, federally-funded building projects.
Despite Vladivostok’s youth, locals proudly say that it has crammed a lot of history into the last century and a half. Fittingly for a city founded by sailors, it oozes maritime and naval tradition. It was on the frontline during the war with the Japanese in 1905 and was occupied by interventionist and white forces during the Russian Civil War. As home to the Pacific Fleet it was a closed and very military city during the Cold War. Even today naval uniforms are ubiquitous, grey destroyers ride at anchor in the bay, and one of the city’s central icons is a World War II era submarine, lifted from the water and mounted next to the war memorial opposite the local ferry terminal.
But since the fall of the Soviet Union, Vladivostok and the whole of the Far East has been in decline. The Far Eastern Federal District, of which Primorye is a part, has the lowest Gross Regional Product (GRP) of all of Russia’s federal districts, and an outflow of people seeking work in the west has dangerously exacerbated the Russia-wide problem of a falling population (Rosstat’s figures do, however, show a doubling of GDP per head since 2005—presumably the result of massive federal investment). The population of the region has fallen from eight million in 1992 to just under 6.5 million today. And Vladivostok, the second largest city in the Far East after Khabarovsk, had fallen to 578,000 by 2010, down from a peak of 648,000 in 1992.
Wheels of fortune
With the decline of the Pacific Fleet and the disappearance of generous wages for working in such a remote place, Vladivostoktsi have had to survive on their wits. Something they’re good at, one local journalist opined, because “out here, we’ve always had to be active to survive.” And when borders—and the city—finally opened up in the late 1980s, entrepreneurial locals lost no time in setting up a trade that has become synonymous with the city—importing and selling second-hand Japanese cars.
High up on a mist-shrouded hill in the north part of the city is the Green Corner (Zelyoniy Ugol), a vast complex of open-air parking lots exposed to wind and rain (and when the wind changes, ash from a nearby coal-fired power station), where burly, semi-criminal looking salesmen hawk an armada of used Japanese vehicles—from SUVs and hatchbacks to heavy trucks and mechanical diggers.
This is the epicenter of the trade in imported cars, which in 2008 brought some half a million vehicles into the country. For comparison, in the same year Russia itself produced 1.7 million cars and commercial vehicles, according to statistics from the International Organization of Automotive Manufacturers (OICA). It is, quite simply, huge, and it is a crucial part of the local economy that employs fitters, repairmen, import clerks and ferry and railway men besides car salesmen.
So it was this place that produced the embryonic stirrings that led to the famous protest of December 14, 2008, when thousands gathered spontaneously in Vladivostok’s city center in response to proposed tightening of import controls to protect domestic producers stricken by the economic crisis. “Lots of our people, dealers, were there,” recalled Irina, a rare woman at Zelyoniy Ugol who has been selling Japanese cars ever since border controls eased in 1989. “I didn’t count, but more than a thousand people. I think even 10,000,” she said. The protest, which locals speak of simply as “December 14,” has passed into folklore—as has the authorities’ decision to fly in four plane loads of riot police from Moscow to quell follow up protests, presumably because they could not rely on local battalions.
At the moment, though, business is good. The market has bounced back since the economic crisis, and ironically, the latest threat to the business—a new rule due to come into force on September 23 requiring all cars sold in Russia to carry a European style 17-digit Vehicle Identification Number (VIN), which Japanese cars simply don’t have—has caused a spike in sales, as customers rush to beat the deadline. “If it comes into force it will be the end of the business, of course,” Irina said. “But in Russian we have a saying: ‘nothing is as permanent as the temporary.’ No one knows if there will be a last minute change or they will reconsider. Our Japanese suppliers are pestering us about it everyday.”
Like many in Vladivostok, Irina is unapologetic about the supposed damage her trade does to the domestic auto industry. “Look, you’ve got a TV at home? Where’s it made? Right, in Japan, because Japan makes the best stuff,” she insisted. “We have customers as far away as Yekaterinburg. And it’s not just cars—as far as the Urals, 90 percent of technology is Japanese.” Before the crisis, it is estimated that Vladivostok’s car dealers were selling 250,000 cars a year, and 200,000 of them were going to other parts of Russia.
This sentiment is almost universal: speak to anyone in Vladivostok, and they are as evangelical about the quality of Japanese cars as they are disdainful of attempts to make them buy locally. And they put their money where their mouths are—apart from the occasional lovingly preserved Volga, every car in Vladivostok is right hand drive. Speaking off the record, one federally employed official agreed, saying that no matter what the authorities tried to do to boost domestic production, demand for the superior quality and decent prices of Japanese cars would keep the import business alive. He, too, drives a Japanese car.
But regardless of what happens in September, Ruslan, another salesman who has been working on a neighboring lot for three years, fears “Zelyony Ugol is finished, anyway.” The city has plans to clear the hilltop of car lots and build a residential suburb there.
That’s got a lot of people worried. There are no official figures describing how many people are reliant on the “peregon” (car transfer) business. Representatives of the local chapter of TIGR, a public campaign group that has allied with the opposition Communist Party, Other Russia and Yabloko to defend the industry, estimate anything between 100,000 and 150,000 people—about a quarter of Vladivostok’s population—“are able to live normally because of the car business.” The Second Secretary of the regional branch of the Communist Party Pavel Ashikhmin said it was obvious why he would side with petit-bourgeois businessmen: “this trade employs vast numbers of ordinary people,” he said.
In an apparent bid to make amends for wreaking havoc on the import industry, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian auto firm Sollers to open a factory in the city. The plant is already up and running, churning out Korean SUVs under license, but with limited enthusiasm from the locals. “Have you ever seen a Korean car? They’re made of plastic and bits fall off all the time,” said the local who asked to remain anonymous because he is employed by the federal agencies.
To make things more complicated, there’s a strong lobby of suppliers in Japan who are “absolutely livid” at the Russian government’s threat to cut imports, said Yevgeny Sokolov, who has been in the used car business for about seven years.
Built in a day
But for all the griping about federal neglect, Vladivostok is actually very firmly on the Kremlin’s radar. In fact, Moscow has serious plans for this place. As the host of the 2012 summit of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum (APEC), the city is at the center of a massive federally funded—and largely Kremlin directed—building program, the centerpiece of which will be a new federal university on the idyllic Russky Island, a former military base south of the city. Three monumental bridges (one to the island, one across the harbor, and a third to shorten the distance to the airport), a series of luxury and middle range hotels, the city’s first proper sewage treatment system (until now all of the city’s waste has gone straight into the sea—it’s best not to swim too close to the urban areas, a local ecologist said, but other residents don’t seem too bothered), a new airport and a highway to it, will all make the city habitable for the dozens of prime ministers, presidents and other dignitaries meant to descend on the place for those two weeks.
The statistics are nothing short of impressive. According to the official figures, the budget for the project has been upped from an original 260.8 billion rubles ($ 8.7 billion) to 553.4 billion rubles (about $ 18 billion) including 201.9 billion rubles ($ 6.73 billion) from the federal budget.
The construction is certainly long overdue. Vladivostok may be the capital of the Far East (rivaled only by Khabarovsk, 600 kilometers further north on the Amur River), but it is a small city in almost every sense. It lacks the infrastructure of a major international hub, its steep, 19th century streets are easily congested, and traffic jams are a regular complaint. According to staff at the Phoenix Fund, a conservation charity, an international conference on conservation of the Siberian tiger scheduled for September this year had to be moved to St Petersburg because the Vladivostok authorities did not feel they had the appropriate facilities. The best hotels are crumbling Soviet-era concrete blocks. And there is a distinct lack of impressive buildings that populate many Russian cities.
“We’re not a town of workers,” said one local, looking out at the harbor from the shade of the memorial submarine mounted on the dockside. “Sailors, fishermen, traders. Even gangsters, yes. But not builders. That’s why we haven’t built any of this before.” He waved at the gargantuan pillars that will hold up the huge new bridge across the Golden Horn—a project that has been dreamt of, promised and planned by successive governments since tsarist times.
Whatever the truth of that, by the time delegates arrive in 2012, they should be looking at a different city. But APEC lasts only two weeks, and speaking to those involved in the project it quickly becomes clear that it is only the excuse for a vast, federally-directed investment project whose ultimate aim is the regeneration of Russia’s entire Far East. The main idea is not simply to finish the work that no one got round to doing before, explained a source in the Ministry for Regional Development. “The goal is at least to stop, and at best to reverse, the outflow of population from the Far East,” said Alexander Ognevsky, the press secretary for the federal projects. “If we can give people a normal, decent quality of life, they won’t want to leave so much.” Hence the water treatment system, roads and a university.
Official plans show some 80 “objects” going up not only in Vladivostok, but all over the Far East. The summit is meant as a marketing opportunity. “See that?” said Ognevsky, gesturing over the Golden Horn from the city center. “That’s going to be a Hyatt hotel. So when all these presidents and prime ministers come, they will see that global brands have already chosen to come to Vladivostok.” The hope is that investment will come tumbling in. And, perched as it is on the Pacific Rim, Vladivostok is to be Russia’s gateway not only to China, Japan and the Koreas, but Vietnam, Australasia, South America and the Western United States.
But being on the receiving end of such federal largesse has not necessarily bought the locals’ confidence. “To be honest, there was a lot of skepticism about the building programs,” said Anastasia, a 28-year-old environmental scientist in the city. The project has been revised several times, the number of “objects” in the plans adjusted, and the budget has more than doubled, leading many locals to believe that most of the money has been embezzled—though no one could say exactly who had stolen what. When things actually started to appear, there was a general sense of surprise, she said. But some locals still make a hobby of ticking off the proposed projects that don’t materialize.
Too many people to quote complained that jobs have not been generated for locals, and that the contracting companies were often outsiders. Ognevsky, however, claimed the bulk of the workforce was drawn from the Far East, if not Vladivostok in particular, and that only 20 percent who were specialists or engineers had been brought in to do the jobs that the locals couldn’t. Then there were complaints that “they’ve made a very inefficient use of the local workforce and local companies. They’re using cement from France, for example,” said Ashikhmin of the Communist Party. “Are you telling us we can’t produce cement?” And local oppositionists complain that the plans have been forced through without regard for the impact on the local population. “There’s been no thought about the character of the city,” said Alexander Samsonov, a computer programmer who is an activist in TIGR. “For example, lots of local architects protested against the plans for a new hotel, and suggested an alternative—it violates the appearance of the place, and it is going to damage nearby homes. But they just went ahead and did it.”
To cap it off, a local, Sergei Bereznyuk of the Phoenix Fund, warned that the Sakhalin—Khabarovsk–Vladivostok gas pipeline, another part of the project, threatens to further fragment the habitat of the remaining 400 to 500 Siberian tigers, exacerbating the problems of an already tiny gene pool.
This discontent does seem to have an impact. TIGR, the communists and other opposition parties managed to bring 3,000 people onto the streets during a nationwide “day of wrath” on March 20 (the largest turnout anywhere in the country) — evidence of a deep sense of skepticism. But the graft, inefficiency and high handedness of the federal authorities are all peripheral to the main question: will the plan work? Can Vladivostok live up to its name and the grandiose pretentions of an Eastern Constantinople sitting on the Eastern Bosporus? “There are a lot of expectations,” said a student at the Far Eastern University, which is set to inherit the Russky Island campus after the 2012 conference is over. “Fingers crossed.”
By Roland Oliphant
Russia Profile
