At first glance, Vladivostok, Russia’s maritime stronghold and main trading hub on the Pacific, seems hardly Russian at all.
A staple food is sea scallops. Streets climb steep hills that open onto sweeping views of curved blue bays, dotted by ships and lighthouses, rather than Orthodox churches. Cars are almost universally right-hand drive, ferried from nearby Japan. Stores sell Korean noodles and gum.
Yet a closer look shows that Vladivostok is deeply Russian, sharing one of the nation’s defining features: Even here, 4,000 miles from Moscow, at the far end of the world’s largest country, attention is focused on the seat of power in the Kremlin. Moscow sets the city’s preoccupations, its tone, its culture, even its appearance.
Two of Vladivostok’s former mayors, who had been serving time in penal colonies for corruption, are now fighting in the war in Ukraine to escape their sentences. They serve with thousands of other locals, many of them of Ukrainian descent.
Mobile internet gets throttled now and then because of fear of Ukrainian drone attacks, just as it does across the country. A government building dominates the central square, and at night some of its windows are lit up to form a V shape, a propaganda symbol of the war.
“Everyone here feels the presence of Moscow,” said Gleb A. Akulich, a local historian and art curator with the Zarya Contemporary Art Center. “Everyone here has a feeling of external control, no one feels autonomous.” Though it is an eight-hour flight away, he said in an interview, Moscow “doesn’t sleep, it follows everything here.”
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s isolation from Europe, the city was poised to benefit from a pivot toward Asia. Some signs of that ambition remain. More ships from China now enter its port than before the war and the resulting Western sanctions against Russia. The trans-Siberian railway that ends here is choked with containers.
But Vladivostok has not become Russia’s San Francisco or Hong Kong. Gray Soviet apartment blocks and abandoned industrial hulks still dominate its slopes. It remains an isolated hub of modest size — about 600,000 residents, below its Soviet-era peak — at the edge of Russia’s vast and sparsely populated Far East.
In Imperial, Soviet and modern times, the Kremlin has had grand visions for Vladivostok as Russia’s window to Asia and the Pacific, much as Peter the Great carved a “window to Europe” in creating St. Petersburg. Established in the 19th century as a naval base and trading hub, Vladivostok lies close to China, Japan and Korea.
But the goal of making Vladivostok a major cultural and economic center of gravity in its own right “didn’t work out before and probably won’t work out in the future — our country is too centripetal, too Moscow-centric,” said Vasily Avchenko, a local writer, while looking at Vladivostok’s central Golden Horn bay. “That’s probably what holds it together, which is a plus, but it also has its downsides.”
He noted that Fesco, Russia’s logistics giant that operates the local port, has headquarters in Moscow, not Vladivostok, and pays taxes there.
Vladivostok’s biggest projects of the past two decades — three giant bridges and a vast new university campus on what used to be a closed military island — all reflect Moscow’s ambitions, not local ones. The major projects now underway are a branch of the Tretyakov Gallery, which is in Moscow, and satellites of the Mariinsky Theater and the state Institute of Performing Arts, both in St. Petersburg.
For locals, a main metric of success is leaving to study or work elsewhere, said Mr. Akulich, the historian. Billboards advertise development projects in Moscow, seven time zones away.
For visitors from neighboring countries, Vladivostok feels less like Asia’s gateway than like Moscow’s outpost. As in European Russia, many taxi drivers are migrant workers from Central Asia. Street musicians sing the same pop songs heard on Moscow’s Arbat.
Tay Kim, 23, who came to Russia to help her father shoot a documentary about Koreans living in the country, said she felt like she was “traveling in Europe” while in Vladivostok. The city seemed so placid, she added, that she and her film crew “couldn’t believe Russia was fighting a war against another country.”
Denis Kokorin, a local urban activist, dreams about a subway being built in the city one day — he even drew his own map of the future network — to help it grow into the vision of “Russia’s eastern capital.” But he recognizes his dreams are far-fetched.
Moscow, never eager to devolve power, has always had a strong hand in Vladivostok’s development, at times urging people from far afield to move there, and investing heavily to make it the anchor of Russia’s Far East.
In the late 1950s, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev visited the city on his way back from the United States. He was so impressed by what he had seen in San Francisco that he vowed to turn Vladivostok into a better version of that American port. Vladivostok — like San Francisco, at the tip of a peninsula — expanded toward the north. New tramlines, theaters, cinemas and a funicular were built.
But Khrushchev’s aims conflicted with tight security as headquarters of the Pacific Fleet. Vladivostok was closed to foreigners, and even Soviet citizens had to get permission to enter, keeping it isolated until the 1990s.
Nonetheless, Vera Y. Glazkova, who moved to Vladivostok in 1976 and now runs its leading art gallery, remembers it as “a city steeped in maritime romance.”
“And of course it stands as a bastion of the nation in the distant Far East,” she said in an interview.
After the Soviet collapse of the early 1990s, Russia plunged headlong into business with the West. It was a painful transition, especially for Vladivostok, whose natural strength would have been commerce with Asia, particularly China.
“Our country once turned its face fully toward Europe, striving earnestly to build a bond with them,” Ms. Glazkova said. “But here we cannot feel the same way because beside us lies a vast country with a great multitude of people, while we are far fewer in number.”
Vladivostok opened up, only to sink into poverty and disorder. People survived by working as shuttle traders bringing cheap goods from China, or by importing used Japanese cars. Crime was rife, earning Vladivostok a reputation as a rowdy “wild east.” The city’s population fell.
In the late 2000s, emboldened by its booming, oil-fueled economy, Moscow tried again to turn Vladivostok into a major hub on the Pacific. A new airport and bridges were built; hundreds of miles of roads were improved. Despite chronic delays and cost overruns, two luxury hotels, an opera house and the biggest aquarium in Russia went up.
The more than $20 billion Kremlin spent revitalizing the city only reinforced Moscow’s dominant economic, cultural and political role.
According to Mikhail Vinogradov, a Russian political scientist, “the unitary mind-set of the elites hasn’t gone anywhere.” Decisions about Vladivostok’s future are not made in Vladivostok.
Among Russia’s leaders, there is a real desire to improve the city, he said, alongside “doubts about whether it is economically viable here, given the lack of a big local market and also the competition with China.”
Every year now, attention turns to the city for a few days when it hosts an annual economic forum focused on Russia’s trade with Asia. President Vladimir V. Putin comes for a few hours.
Aeroflot flies hundreds of government and corporate official from Moscow. Battling jet lag, they stand in long lines for coffee on the vast new university campus, amid buildings that echo the ambitious contemporary architecture of Seoul. At night, they flock to bars in the former Chinese quarter.
And then they leave until the next year.
Ivan Nechepurenko covers Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the countries of the Caucasus, and Central Asia.
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