Хабаровск (Khabarovsk): The Tidiest City in Russia

Khabarovsk recently received accolades for being the tidiest city in Russia, and it’s true that the city is unique in Russia for being almost entirely devoid of beer bottles and empty chip bags lining the curbs or tossed into the grass. In fact, it is a beautiful city, at least as beautiful as the relatively new Far-Eastern-communist cities get. The main road is the usual Russian hodgepodge of art-nouveau imported from Western Europe at the pleasure of the Tsar, smushed in with turn of the century red brick buildings with decorative masonry in a style unique to the period in Russia. And then, of course there are the typical low-rise blockhouses with their rusting porches and grey-on-grey concrete and mortar facades. Perhaps not so common was the fairly high number of experimental-constructivist buildings. While still extremely ugly, these mammoths break up the monotony with their mid-century socialist-optimism represented in the odd lines, radical curves, overhung shoulders and concave waistlines of their sturdy steel anatomies. I left the southerly Vladivostok in shorts and arrived in Khabarovsk to find the leaves changing with Autumn. The smell of the season hung over the city. The decaying of last spring mixing with the cold air coming in from the northwest made less a smell than a general sensation that transported me back to Thanksgivings in childhood. It is funny how the sun in the afternoon, the season, the smells, the wind can all swell your emotions and send your mind home, even here 6,800 miles away. We had spent the night on the train in the budget wagon, “platzcart.” My friends Maika and Sewon (American and Korean) were a bit anxious for their first trip on Russian trains, especially as their trust in me as navigator and guide had been shaken when we missed our first train. The problem is that the trains in the East are all scheduled on Moscow time, meaning the departure time will read 1:00 p.m. but really mean 8:00 p.m. Vladivostok time. Thanks to my poor math we had to pay to switch to a later train. Our tickets weren’t together so I went to my bed and feel asleep. The next morning I woke with the train still moving and became acquainted with my neighbors: an older Russian lady and two Uzbek guys. The Uzbek guys were unwrapping a big fish from a bundle of newspaper and one of them asked me for a knife to cut it up with. I gave it to him and he cut the fish up into segments, handing me one with a cup of beer.

I had bananas so I offered one to the Uzbek who spurned it, telling me that it was “not real food.” I was eating plain black bread and he asked me if I wanted some “preserves,” which I took to mean fruit jelly. Instead, he pulled out a fat can of beef and bent my knife trying to open it. The beef was suspended in solid fat. I tried to pick it out but it was an impossible task. I cut my finger taking the knife out of the sleeve. The Uzbek guy grabbed a role of toilet paper from his bunk and sat me down to make a bandage. We arrived in Khabarovsk, the Uzbeks gave me hearty handshakes goodbye and one of them handed me the fish head wrapped in newspaper as a token of our new friendship. I carried the fish head around for an hour or two but it ended up in the trash because I couldn’t find any stray cats. We were staying with a Russian couple, Lesya and Yura, who lived in a nice one room flat near the center of the city. They had a hairless sphinx cat named Tiffany who jumped around the room like a naked rat with dangly tits. Sewon was scared of her but I really liked the cat because she was sociable and would stand on my shoulder like a parrot, scrunching up her face like a normal cat, just with no hair! We took in the city by foot, eating street food and browsing the outdoor souvenir shops selling trinkets that had “Moscow” written on them. Down along Amur river the wind was whipping us and I was glad that I brought my winter jacket. From the boardwalk we could see a line of smokestacks and cooling towers exhaling black smoke over the river. That night we spent with our hosts and Maika got tremendously drunk on cheap vodka. He and I ended getting into a semi-playful slapping fight that then morphed into a rant and had both of us pissed off. The next morning he didn’t remember any of it but apologized nonetheless. Sunday and the sky was a pure blue canvas. We spent the hours before our train left in the Lenin square watching little kids roller-skate and talking about the political paradigms of steppe cultures. Typical conversation with Maika.

Our hosts accompanied us to the train station and helped us find the Moscow to Vladivostok train. I was sitting apart from the other two again but quickly became acquainted with my neighbors: an old Russian couple (Sasha and Natasha) and a Kyrgyz man (Misha) in his 50’s. The trio had been together on the train for 5 days already and made me feel very welcomed into their little community. The Russians were interested to hear all about America and to tell their kids that they had met and talked with a real American right there on the train. The Kyrgyz guy was silent at first, but started to open up when I started talking about American politics and economics. He was tremendously knowledgeable about all of it, spouting out figures along with personal predictions about American public finances and the upcoming election. The conversation moved to politics and religion, as it always will when in good company. Here the Kyrgyz informed me that he was a communist. This didn’t surprise me much as his intelligence and education was easy to surmise. He had studied in Kiev and had become a member of the party, which was really no easy feat. Before long Misha was rummaging through his bags and showing off the U.S. Marine Corps uniform he had gotten from a relative who works at the U.S. base near Bishkek. Then he pulled out two bottles of Kyrgyz cognac, a few bags of homemade raisins and apricots, and some toasted apricot pits that I had never tried before. We had shot after shot of cognac and made numerous toasts to our meeting, new friendship, future health, and friendship of nations.