Newness, progress, hopefulness are characteristics of civil Wladivostok. It has the aspect of a growing city in the American Far West. Few things are finished and all are going ahead. The sidewalks are mostly narrow, and composed of rough planks, with a tendency to tip up or down, but here and there is a fine piece of granite flagging 10 feet wide. The hotels have more of the shady character of “saloons” or barrooms than of anything reputable or established. Handsome houses of brick and stone shoulder wooden shanties. Fashionable carriages or sleighs bounce over ungraded streets. The antediluvian ox-cart with its Korean driver bumps and creaks through the streets alongside of the troika, with its three galloping horses in showy harness, and its occupants in the latest and daintiest of Parisian costumes.
But the all-pervading flavor of militarism overpowers the suggestion of the American Far West. The first buildings on the barren coast are military hospitals and barracks, and barracks thicken as the city is approached. The female element is in a remarkable minority. The dull roll of artillery and commissariat wagons, the tramp, morning and night, of brown battalions, and the continual throb of drum and blare of trumpet and bugle, recall one to the fact that this is the capital of Russia’s vast, growing, aspiring, Pacific Empire.
Theatricals, concerts, and balls fill up the winter season. Except on the few days on which snow falls, the skies are cloudless, the temperature is not seriously below zero, and the dryness of the air is very invigorating. In winters, happily somewhat exceptional, in which there is no snowfall, and the strong winds create dust-storms, the climate is less agreeable. Spring is abrupt and pleasant, and autumn is a fine season, but summer is hot, damp, and misty.
A fine Greek cathedral, with many domes and lofty gilded crosses, which gleam mysteriously in the sunset when the gloom of twilight has wrapped all else, a prominent Lutheran church, and a Chinese joss-house, provide for the religious needs of the population. The Governor of the Maritime Province, several of the leading, and many of the lower officials are of German origin from the Baltic provinces, Lutherans, and possibly imbued with a few liberal ideas. But among the kindly, cultured, and agreeable people whose acquaintance I made in Wladivostok one peculiarity impressed me forcibly—the absolute stagnation of thought, or the expression of it, on politics and all matters connected with them, the administration of government, religion, the orthodox church, dissent, home and foreign policy, etc. It is true that certain subjects, and these among the most interesting, are carefully eliminated from conversation, and that to introduce any one of them might subject the offender to social ostracism.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] The Russian soldier does a great amount of day labor. Far from disporting himself in brilliant uniform before the admiring eyes of boys and “servant girls,” he digs, builds, carpenters, makes shoes and harness, and does a good civil day’s work in addition to his military duties, and is paid for this as “piecework” on a fixed scale, his daily earnings being duly entered in a book. When he has served his time these are handed over to him, and a steady, industrious man makes enough to set himself up in a small business or on a farm. Vodka and schnaps are the Russian soldier’s great enemies.
CHAPTER XIX
KOREAN SETTLERS IN SIBERIA
The chief object of my visit to Russian Manchuria was to settle for myself by personal investigation the vexed question of the condition of those Koreans who have found shelter under the Russian flag, a number estimated in Seoul at 20,000. It was there persistently said that Russia was banishing them in large numbers, and that several thousands of them had already recrossed the Tu-men, and were in such poverty that the King of Korea had sent agents to the north who were to settle them on lands in Ham-gyöng Do.
But in Wladivostok the servant-interpreter difficulty was absolutely insurmountable. No efforts on the part of my friends could obtain what did not exist, and I was on the verge of giving up what proved a very interesting journey, when the Director of the Siberian Telegraph Lines very kindly liberated the senior official in his department, who had not had a holiday for many years, to go with me. Mr. Heidemann, a German from the Baltic provinces, spoke German, Russian, and English with nearly equal ease, and as a Russian official was able to make things smoother than they might otherwise have been in a very rough part of Primorsk. He was tall, good-looking, and verging on middle age, very gentlemanly, never failed in any courtesy, understood how to manage moujiks, and was a capable and willing interpreter; but he was official, reticent, and uninterested, and gave me the impression of being frozen into his uniform!
Fortified as to my project by the cordial approval of the Governor, the courtesy of the Telegraph Department, and the singular splendor of the weather, I left Wladivostok by a red sunrise in a small steamer, which accomplished the 60 miles to Possiet Bay in seven hours, landing us in a deep inlet of clear water and white sand, soon to be closed by ice, at the foot of low and absolutely barren hills fringing off into sandy knolls, where Koreans with their ox-carts awaited the steamer. A well spread tea-table at the house of the Russian postmaster was very welcome. Such a strong-looking family I had seldom seen, but afterwards I found that size and strength are characteristic of the Russian settlers in Primorsk.