VLADIVOSTOK, Russia -- The most remarkable thing about Vladivostok is how thoroughly Russian it is. It's 4,000 miles from Moscow, but only 600 miles from Tokyo and just a couple of hours' drive from both China and North Korea. Still, you'd be hard-pressed to find many signs of Asian-ness amid the concrete block apartment buildings, Soviet war memorials, and overwhelmingly white faces. My translator, a freelance tour guide, said her charges are often disappointed by how "un-Asian" Vladivostok looks.
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Russia's firm control over this remote outpost has to be counted as a great achievement, first by the Russian Empire, which founded Vladivostok in 1859 and made it the terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and then by the Soviets, who made the city a naval base, closed it off to foreigners, and gave it the distinctive look it has today: concrete high-rises perched on the lush, steep hills that overlook the Pacific Ocean.
But today, Vladivostok's identity as a Russian city is undergoing a transformation. The city represents Russia's purported desire to open up to Asia -- Vladimir Putin has dubbed Vladivostok the "Gateway to the Pacific." And Moscow has promised to back up that rhetoric, choosing Vladivostok to host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in 2012 and undertaking several ambitious new infrastructure projects, like business-class hotels and new bridges and roads, to help the city prepare for the event.
But in front of that "gateway" are some metaphorical barbed wire and guard dogs, as Moscow tries to figure out how to maintain its control over this strategic part of Russia in the face of a declining population and a rising China.
The European part of Russia can feel pretty far away. When Vladivostok's businesspeople and bureaucrats show up to work at 9 a.m., their colleagues in Moscow are sound asleep -- it's 2 a.m. there -- which makes it difficult to conduct business with the capital. Recently, President Dmitry Medvedev proposed a reduction in the number of time zones from 11 to three or four.
The government has tried other schemes to beef up ties between the Russian Far East and the rest of the country. One, designed to shore up the Russian population here, encourages ethnic Russians living in former Soviet republics, particularly in Central Asia, to move to strategically important but depopulated areas, most of which are in the Far East.
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