Xu Caiqin's prose: Rainy Vladivostok

It was rainy and rainy, and when I came to Vladivostok, many scenes disturbed many moods.

Border crossings, border checkpoints

On the afternoon of 18 July, they arrived in Suifenhe City. Mr. Yuan was entrusted by Brother Zhang to receive us in a Russian restaurant in Suifenhe. Mr. Yuan was originally a border guard, and now he is the CEO of a tourism company, and his business is booming. The spirit of a soldier and the natural elegance of a scholar do not look like a businessman. One night, chatting and drinking. The next day, Mr. Yuan took us out of the Harbin Suifenhe Highway Port, and he told us that the Russian border inspection was very slow and that it would take a long time to wait. Taking advantage of the gap between border checks, we approached the Sino-Russian boundary monument to take pictures. In front is a huge archway engraved with the golden characters "People's Republic of China". The heart that loves the motherland has always been uneasy. One foot stepped on the land of the motherland and stepped into the land of another country, and his legs were strangely heavy. There was a thought in my head, bubbling "gurgling" - this boundary monument should not be erected here, because there are still 400,000 square kilometers of land, erected in the heart of the motherland.

After the Chinese border control process, at 8:30 Beijing time (10:30 Russian time), we got on a high-rise bus and walked in a serpentine way, the road was in disrepair, it had just rained, and the water was full of puddles. It is only about 3 or 4 kilometers from the Chinese border checkpoint to the Russian border checkpoint, but the car walks for about two hours. The car in the back waited for the car in front, and it was the time for the Russians to have lunch and take a lunch break. I can't get out of the car, the car is stuffy, and my heart is stuffy. A blonde, white-skinned Russian woman sitting in front of her suddenly turned around and kindly handed me a piece of candy, which I took and didn't eat, quietly throwing it into the glove bag next to me. I think it's always good to be more vigilant when you're out and about.

Finally, I waited for the Russian side to check the border. All people and objects in the car must get off the bus and be inspected. It is not an exaggeration to say that the border checkpoints at the Russian side can be described as "dilapidated." In the early 90s, in order to promote Sino-Russian friendship, China's Suifenhe City Jian'an Company invested manpower, material and financial resources to help the Russian side build a border inspection station. More than twenty years have passed, and it seems that there has been no renovation. It is difficult to close the gate of entry and exit naturally, and the machine that checks the goods will be good and bad, and when it is broken, all the packed luggage must be disassembled and checked. The whole border inspection process makes you feel like you are in an old grocery yard and garbage dump. In order to get through the border as quickly as possible, we had to queue up in the pile of broken snakeskin bags, and we had to worry about guarding against the steel pipes and steel bars wrapped in greasy old newspapers with sharp corners on both sides, and we could be cut if we were not careful. In the dirty glass windows on both sides, two lifeless border guards sat slowly, looking at the passports one by one, and slowly comparing the names on the passports on the computer. I'm calculating the time it takes for them to check their passports, and it's about ten minutes for a passport. The doors of the two toilets on the left opened and closed, and men and women kept coming and going, and the stench and flies kept harassing them. In a hurry, I can only wait, I hope that the two old hairy side police in the glass window will act quickly, so that we can escape through the customs. Finally, the snakeskin bags, steel bars, and Russian men and women passed through the narrow passage.

I stood in front of the female border guard at the window and handed over my passport. She took it and opened it, still slowly, looking up at me lazily, then tinkering with the computer for a while, staring at me again, waiting for her red seal to be gone. At this moment, a male policeman came in from outside, and they were babbling and speaking Russian, and after a delay of several minutes, they finally knocked the seal on. You have to wait until all the people in the car have checked before you can get on the bus. At the same time, the driver drove the empty car through the round door hole and finished the inspection. The rain was still pouring down, and we had already set foot on Russian soil, and the Russian men and women had stuffed bags of snakeskin bags and bundles of steel pipes and steel bars into the bus, and we got on the bus to begin the rest of the journey. I would venture to speculate that the road to Vladivostok should have not been repaired for more than 20 years, but I did not expect that Russia's National Gate Avenue turned out to be a muddy road. We arrived at a passenger station in Russia after a bumpy ride on the road for more than an hour. The minibus that picked us up was parked, and the Russian driver was eating. We waited with our bags, this old passenger station, there was no waiting area and no rest seats. I could only stand under the eaves of the small food stall, helplessly exchanging tired feet. Finally, a big belly poop old man came out of the small door of the small restaurant, opened the car door and let us get into the car. I muttered fiercely: I'm not going to come to this place anymore. The companions grinned and said, "I have to pass through here to come back." I deflated and shut up.

The road, though one pit after another. Fortunately, the land outside the window is an endless green grass, and the bad mood is all abandoned in the fertile and vast water and grass along the way.

1860, someone else's access to the sea

To find the geographical location of Vladivostok, you have to open the world map, and it may be difficult to find it at once, and when you see Vladivostok, you will find Vladivostok in parentheses next to it. It is located at the junction of China, Russia and North Korea, and is an important port of Russia on the Pacific coast. Whether it is Sino-Russian economic border trade or in a strategic sense, it is in an important position. Although, judging from the structure of Sino-Russian border trade, Russia is dependent on the export of natural resources and is economically very dependent on Northeast China; although the Siberia-Northeast China-Vladivostok corridor is a mutually beneficial relationship, Russia has access to the sea, while China does not. We arrived at the mouth of Vladivostok in the drizzle and haze, and the white Sea of Japan opened far into the Pacific Ocean, facing North Korea, South Korea, and Japan. Once, our ancestors fished here, sunrise and sunset, production and life, but it was lost in the former 1860s, and how many times the controversy returned, and finally became someone else's outlet to the sea.

In 1860, I saw this huge number on the dock of Vladivostok, and the Russians engraved this string of numbers on the ground to remind the world that they got Vladivostok in 1860, and as for what means to get it, it was their own glory and the shame of others. Up to now, every day at 10 a.m., they have fired a "victory" salute from the warship. It just so happened that this was the time for us to catch up. As a conscientious Chinese, it is impossible to remain indifferent to that "boom" sound. This also reminds the world that before 1860, Vladivostok was Chinese. The controversy on this issue is meaningless, whether from the perspective of Sino-Russian friendship or reality, but the fact that history happened will not be erased in the memory of mankind.

Cheka, All-Russian Committee for the Suppression of Counter-Rebellion

Two days of the three-day trip to Vladivostok were wasted on customs exit and entry, and there was only one day to really take a serious look at this maritime city. And this day gave me an understanding of the real Russia and confirmed some of my views on the former Soviet Union. I have seen some reports on the situation in the former Soviet Union in various media in the past, although it is very different from what we were taught by teachers when we were young, but after all, it is the education of children that is deeply rooted, after all, the media reports say one thing. About Lenin, about Stalin, these two great leaders who watched us grow up hanging on the walls of schools and homes are not at all what we revere in the hearts of Russians. In Lenin Square, the Museum of the Stalin's Submarine and the train station, the Russian tour guide Alyssa told us in blunt Chinese: "We don't like Lenin, Stalin, we like the Tsar." Although I had heard that the Russian people hated Lenin and Stalin, it was the first time I had heard such a bold expression from a Russian, and I was surprised to ask her, "Why?" She said: "Because Lenin and Stalin were murderers and made a mess of the Russian economy." And the tsar made our country strong and the economy very well. In the hall of the train station, Alyssa pointed to a huge portrait of the Tsar and said: "The Tsar's family was killed by Lenin, including four daughters and a 14-year-old son, and after killing, they were mutilated, mutilated, and disfigured, which is really cruel." When the tour guide said this, his face showed contempt. I think Alyssa's words should represent the voice of most ordinary Russians.

Along the way, she talked to me about Russian cars and about Putin. She said that Russia is basically Nissan used cars, which are cheap and durable. The majority of ordinary people cannot afford cars of Russian domestic production, moreover, they are expensive, of poor quality, and are often repaired. In order to stimulate the consumption of cars in his country, Putin has raised import tariffs, and now he can't even afford second-hand cars. This can roughly reflect the current state of the economy in Russia and the current state of life of ordinary people. I asked her, "What do you think about Putin's divorce?" and she said excitedly: "We hate and don't like Putin's approach very much." She said: "Because after World War II, coupled with several major purges and massacres in the country, the ratio of men and women in the country is seriously imbalanced, and single women account for 49%, so Putin, as the leader of the country, gets along with other women, divorces his wife, and puts more pressure on women in the country to marry." "It seems that Russian women also hate men who cheat and divorce.

There is not much to see in Vladivostok, except for some old Russian houses, which feel like everything is shabby. It's more interesting to talk to Alyssa, we talked about a Russian movie "Cheka", and she made a very frightening move. Although I haven't seen it, I have a general understanding of the content of the movie, which is a story filmed in 199O that reflects the brutal and bloody massacre of dissidents in the former Soviet Union under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin. The Cheka, or transliteration of the "All-Russian Committee for the Suppression of Counter-Terrorism", was an organ of dictatorship that relied directly on violence and was not subject to any legal restrictions, and Lenin gave the Cheka the power to execute without trial. The Cheka created the horrific massacres in human history. The first massacre in the history of the former Soviet Union was in 1917 against the so-called bourgeois counter-revolutionary Red Terror, in which some millions of people were shot and killed by the Cheka between 1917 and 1922, not only the opposition, but also ordinary people from all walks of life. Another horrific massacre was the "Great Political Purge" of 1937.

Alyssa told me that in 2009, when Russia was building a federal road in Vladivostok in preparation for the 2012 APEC summit, excavations uncovered a large amount of debris buried underground. I asked her, are there any Chinese? She nodded mysteriously. Later, the bodies of some 480 people, all of whom had been shot, including two children, were exhumed at the site of the special execution ground of the former NKVD of the former USSR in Vladivostok (old) Castle. At this, Alyssa shrugged her shoulders. Many families were arrested and forced to dig pits. And these pits are the very graves where they are buried. When they dug the pit with their heads down, the firing squad quickly raised their guns and shot them in the pit.

In the fall of 1937, the Primorsky Bureau of the NKVD of the USSR launched the "China Operation" to suppress the Chinese. Most of the Chinese, without knowing Russian, were inexplicably accused of "Japanese spies", and about 6,000 Chinese were killed.

Of course, this history was not told to me by Alyssa, I only found out until I was a mother. According to the declassified historical archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union, nearly 3.8 million people were mutilated and shot by the Cheka between 1930 and 1953.

In the past, people often had a ridiculous way of thinking, and they always naively fixed right and wrong in a pattern, such as Wang Puppet No. 76, the Military Command Secret Bureau, and the Japanese Special High School, all of which were murderous devil caves and white terror organs. One might think of the bloody massacres in ancient human history as an animal attack on human nature that has not fully evolved. For example, in the mid-thirteenth century, the Mongol army launched the Battle of Baghdad, which destroyed the vast empire of the Abbasids, slaughtering nearly a million civilians. For example, in the Battle of Changping in ancient Chinese history, the Qin army slaughtered 400,000 prisoners of war with superior killing brute force. However, the events of several recent massacres show that the killings do not seem to have anything to do with human evolution and civilization.

In 1965 and 1966, the 930 Massacre in Indonesia, in which millions of people, including many Chinese and civilians, were bloodily slaughtered with bloody heads to gain political power and satisfy the interests of the abusers, and in 1994, the Rwandan massacre in Africa was rooted in the conflict between different races and cultures, and more than 3 million lives were slaughtered. There are also the Nazi massacres in Germany, the idealistic massacres of the Khmer Rouge, the Nanjing Massacre in Japan, and so on. They are in a period of high civilization of mankind, Germany is the first to raise the banner of industrialization, Cambodia has a long history of civilization and inheritance of Buddhist culture of compassion, and Japan is a country of etiquette deeply immersed in Chinese culture. Therefore, killing has nothing to do with civilization, only with distorted human nature, with bestiality in the depths of the soul. But we feel that the most hateful and tragic thing is the Cheka massacre in the former Soviet Union, they play the role of the leader who leads the toiling masses of the world to achieve happy communism, and on the other hand, they are the executioners who raise the butcher's knife to kill the toiling masses, and they deeply deceive the sincere feelings of our generation - all the love and admiration for the great leader.

Standing on the Eagle's Nest Mountain, the commanding heights of Vladivostok, I could see all of this maritime city, except for the high-rise bridge across the sea, everything is a little old, but it is also full of cars and people. Those pedestrians who come and go in a hurry may still have panic about the past and worry about tomorrow in their hearts, but they are all trying to live today's life well. The rain had stopped, the wind was still strong, and the clouds were hiding in the fog on the horizon, and they could not see the changes in the Pacific Ocean in the distance. I think that everything in the world will pray in silence, and the world will always be at peace, and there will be no killing of human beings.

Some people say, Vladivostok, Vladivostok, Vladivostok forever, but I somehow don't think so, who knows, this forever, how far away? Perhaps, in the near future!