Well, fortune may be found in Russia, and fame and beauty and truth, and all that. And not just for the young or the mobbed-up or the connected. It could be the best country in the world—richer, roomier, grander than our own. Russia has fine prospects, big possibilities, wonderful potential—everything you could wish for in a future. Also, everything you could dread in a past. The Russians now have the freedom to escape that past and the means to use the freedom. Will they blow it? Probably. The Russians are, as their history has proven too well, human. Humans can blow anything if they put their minds to it. And there, at the end of my journey, was Vladivostok as an example of things blown. The great metropolis of Russian Asia occupies a tiara of hills overlooking the Sea of Japan. The headlands embrace one of the finest deepwater ports in the Far East. It is a magnificent site for a city—too bad there’s not one there. Vladivostok is St. Petersburg without the monuments, palaces, and art. It is Moscow without the money, crowds, and fun. Vladivostok looks like, in the words of Russian writer Gleb Uspensky, “what could have happened to San Francisco if the Bolsheviks ever got there.” Fortunately, they were stopped in Berkeley. Vladivostok should be among the Pacific Rim’s foremost marketplaces for food, fuel, and raw materials, but Soviet military paranoia kept the docks closed to foreign trade until 1990. Now the town is notable only for Chinese border smuggling, Mafia activity, trash on the beach (Vladi dump stok), and a Japanese restaurant with the second-worst- imaginable name: Nagasaki. About half the Russian navy sits in the harbor, out of money to go anywhere. The people who do have money, the New Russians, are building themselves lumpy condominium towers. The only architectural grace notes are balcony railings made from rows of vodka bottles set in mortar. I had been in Russia for a month, and my ideas about reform had been refined and simplified. By this time, I wanted to enact just one basic and fundamental reform—the one my dissident acquaintances, Donna and Carlos, had attempted in Cuba. I wanted to leave. And here is a change that has taken place in Russia that is unequivocally good. I was free to go.
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