President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has been waging war for nearly four years on the western edge of his vast country to preserve what he sees as a vital part of the “Russian world,” citizens of Ukraine who speak Russian and have blood ties to Russia.
More than 3,000 miles to the east, however, Russia has already lost a centuries-old foreign outpost of its language and culture — a remote patch of northern China entombed in ice and snow.
Set up by the Chinese government, nominally to protect the folk traditions and identity of China’s tiny Russian minority, the “ethnic Russian township” of Enhe has lots of birch trees, thick snow, Siberia-style log cabins, Cyrillic script and vodka.
All it does not have is actual Russians.
The closest it gets are people like the township chief, Li Peng, a distant descendant of the Russians who, starting in the 17th century, once dominated the borderlands between Russia and what is now the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia.
After generations of intermarriage with Chinese, Mongolians and other locals, Enhe’s “ethnic Russians” have lost touch with the language, traditions and Orthodox Christian faith of their forefathers.
“In a few years, we will be just like every other place,” the village head said. A member of the Communist Party, he described the steady disappearance of a separate Russian identity as the happy result of the Chinese state’s policy toward ethnic minorities. That policy is aimed at fusing the country’s diverse ethnic group into a single indivisible China united in obedience to President Xi Jinping.
Mr. Xi told Inner Mongolian officials in Beijing in 2022 that China’s ethnic groups — including 55 officially designated minorities — must “stick together like pomegranate seeds.” That order that has drastically shrunk the space for all languages other than Mandarin Chinese and cultures other than that of the Han Chinese, who make up more than 90 percent of the population. It has led to harsh crackdowns in places with large and sometimes restive ethnic minorities like Xinjiang and Tibet. Officials have also increased pressure in Inner Mongolia, where some ethnic Mongolians have protested restrictions on teaching their language.
Even in Enhe, where the assimilation campaign has evidently been highly successful, the authorities were nervous. When a New York Times reporter and a photographer visited, officials from the region’s foreign affairs office followed their every step and interrupted interviews in an unusually intrusive way.
Just a few miles from the Argun River marking the border with Russia, Enhe today has only 2,895 people. More than 40 percent are officially registered as ethnic Russians, but few speak anything other than Chinese, according to officials.
Russian culture in Enhe survives largely as a folkloric caricature designed to draw Chinese tourists. It has been kept on life support in a local museum featuring samovars, Russian nesting dolls, Stalin plaques, a wooden sauna and wax models of Russians wearing antiquated traditional dress.
A big wooden table has been piled with a display of Russian cuisine — bread, sausages and barbecued meat on skewers, all made of plastic.
A guide showed off an old vinyl music album with Cyrillic writing, describing it as the work of a “famous Russian musician.” It was a Soviet bootleg of an Elton John album.
Mr. Li, the township chief, understands only a few words of Russian and speaks Chinese at home with his wife, another ethnically mixed descendant of early Russian settlers, and his son. He said they celebrate Orthodox Easter, but “only as a cultural holiday” that “has nothing to do with religion.”
Zhou Yong, a cow herder who was shoveling coal to heat his home with on a recent afternoon, said that he was registered as an ethnic Russian but spoke only Chinese. Asked whether he had heard of “Pujing,” as Mr. Putin is called in Chinese, he hesitated before saying he had “heard of someone with that name in the media.” (An official brusquely intervened, saying that questions about Mr. Putin violated “reporting rules.”)
Enhe’s primary school does not teach Russian, the kind of omission that Mr. Putin has denounced as an intolerable violation of ethnic Russians’ rights in countries like Ukraine and the Baltic States. Restrictions on the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia are also regularly denounced by Moscow.
In Enhe, the Orthodox Church has vanished. An Orthodox Christian cross that used to adorn the top of a golden dome on a shuttered wooden building in the center of the village has been torn down. Local officials deny it was ever there, despite the cross being clearly visible in old pictures.
The nearest church is an hour’s drive away in the city of Ergun, where St. Innocent of Irkutsk was recently renovated as a tourist site. It has no regular services. Closed on a recent Sunday, the church is flanked by “Unity Square,” a park filled with propaganda boards emblazoned with statements by Mr. Xi calling for ethnic unity. In the middle of the park stands a big concrete pomegranate, decorated with an inscription by Mr. Xi.
A long red banner on the church fence demands the “Sinicization of religion,” a reference to a policy announced by Mr. Xi in 2016 to strengthen party control of religious life.
Numbering only around 16,000, ethnic Russians live scattered along China’s 2,615-mile long border with Russia. Enhe is the only place that has been designated as an area set aside for ethnic Russians.
Russians first started arriving there in large numbers in the 19th century after the discovery of gold deposits. Russians managed gold mines as well as the construction and operation of a railway line while Chinese laborers, nearly all single men, poured in for work on Russian-led ventures. Many married Russian women.
More Russians arrived after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, with anti-communist “white Russians” settling on the Chinese side of the border in the belief that communism would soon collapse in Russia and they would be able to return home.
Like China’s other minorities, ethnic Russians suffered during the Cultural Revolution, a period of political turmoil from 1966 until 1976. Previously close ties between Moscow and Beijing ruptured, leading to armed conflict in 1969 along the border. Ethnic Russians were denounced by Mao Zedong’s fanatical Red Guards, who destroyed their churches. Many fled to Russia or beyond.
That episode has now been erased from official history as Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin embrace each other in what they call a “friendship without limits.”
“I don’t know that part of history too well,” said Zou Yu, a writer and expert on local culture and history in Ergun. “Maybe certain things happened back then but everything is now excellent,” he added.
In December, when temperatures plunge below minus 22 Fahrenheit, Enhe is a ghost town, with only officials and some cattle and sheep herders left. In the summer, though, there are a few authentic Russian-speaking ethnic Russians, mostly old people who then leave during the winter, according to Mr. Li, the township chief.
During that season, Enhe attracts tens of thousands of Chinese tourists seduced by the prospect of getting a taste of Russia and Europe without having to worry about visas. Ersatz Russian-style buildings dot the streets, along with big painted Easter eggs and incongruously non-Russian elements like a Dutch windmill.
Chinese visitors, Mr. Li said, “like the foreign flavor.”
Mr. Zou, the culture expert, said that the erosion of Russian language and lifestyle in the region was a result of mixed marriages, which have mostly involved ethnic Russian women and Han Chinese men.
“If a woman marries a chicken, she follows the chicken, if she marries a dog, she follows the dog,” he said, using a Chinese idiom reflecting the traditional view that women must bend to their husbands.
Andrew Higgins is the East and Central Europe bureau chief for The Times based in Warsaw, on temporary assignment in Shanghai.
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