Part 3 of 5 : Chitá – Vladivostok

AUTHORS
Fernanda Insua | Alpinismonline Staff
Carlos Eduardo Gonzalez | Alpinismonline Staff
Production date : July 2019

COVER PHOTO : VLADIVOSTOK
At the other end of Russia, next to the Sea of ​​Japan, the great city of eastern Russia rises, sheltering the other terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway, more than 9,000 kilometres from Moscow.

A journey on the longest and most famous train in the world

The Rossiya. A train with more than a hundred years of history, where different cultures mix along its more than nine thousand kilometers of route. The Trans-Siberian is not just a tourist route. For decades it has been the only means of communication in a country with six time zones, a bridge between Europe and the Pacific. We take you on a dream trip. Let’s go to the Rossiya!

What Baikal left behind…

…it was wonderful. Now we are leaving this pearl of Siberia behind and heading firmly towards our final destination over the Pacific, more than 9,000 kilometres from Moscow.

We will cross the Amur basin and mainly, in this installment, we will immerse ourselves in the time capsule and travel through a Rossiya of the late 20th century, when another environment gave it a quite different character to the current one.

The history of the Trans-Siberian Railway can be divided into two parts. One, during the entire period of the Soviet Union, where the railway was practically the only means of communication between European Russia and its distant Asian territories reaching the Pacific. Then, from the first years of the 21st century, a new element began to be exploited: tourism. Today, tourism can coexist with this great means of communication. Let us then turn to the history of the Rossiya.

Chitá

The «Rossiya» departs from the central station in Chita, built at the beginning of the 20th century, accompanying the birth of the Trans-Siberian Railway. We are now heading for the Pacific, travelling through perhaps the wildest and most unpopulated territory of Eastern Siberia, but with no less history.

And if we are talking about history, that is what we are going to do now. Let us imagine from this moment on, a time machine, which will take us thirty years back, during the last gasps of the Soviet Union. We will travel along these same rails, these same stations, with another vision, telling you what the train was like back then and immersing ourselves in the past history of the Rossiya from its beginnings. So let us dive in and go in search of The last shadows of the Rossiya.

Karymskaya

It was founded in 1935 along the banks of the Ingoda River. The city is on the Trans-Siberian and Trans-Manchurian lines (via Tarskaya). The train stop is 25 minutes.

The best time to visit is from June to August, when the weather is pleasant and there is hardly any precipitation. The average high temperature in Karymskaya is 27°C in July and -12°C in January.

Zabaikalsk

It is an urban settlement and the administrative center of Zabaykalsky District of Zabaykalsky Krai, located on the Sino-Russian border directly opposite the Chinese border city of Manzhouli. It has a population of approximately 10,000.

It was founded in 1904 as a station (Razyezd 86, i.e. «Passing Loop No. 86») on the Chinese Eastern Railway. Since 1924, a detachment of the border guard has been stationed there. In the aftermath of the Sino-Soviet conflict (1929), the station was renamed Otpor.

Until the mid-1930s, Razyezd 86/Otpor was of little importance as a station, as all border formalities were handled at Matsiyevskaya station (further into Russia) and Manzhouli railway station on the Chinese side of the border. The station was expanded in the mid-1930s, as the USSR had sold the railway on the Chinese side to Manchukuo and converted it from the 1,520 mm gauge of the Russian Railways to the 1,435 mm of China; Otpor thus became the last station to be served by Russian gauge. The station became quite important in 1945, as one of the bases for the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, which also saw the railway line on the Chinese side temporarily converted to Russian gauge. The station’s importance continued as the main railway connection between the USSR and Communist China. At China’s request, in 1958 the Soviets changed the name of «Otpor» to neutral Zabaykalsk (i.e., «a city in Transbaikalia» or «a city beyond Lake Baikal.

The Otpor Incident: The incident that later became known as the Otpor Incident occurred in 1938, when the many Jews fleeing Nazi Germany were stranded in Otpor (Zabaykalsk), demanding entry into Manchukuo. On the orders of Hideki Tojo, Major General Kiichiro Higuchi of the Harbin Branch of the Kwantung Army, assisted by Norihiro Yasue and supported by Yosuke Matsuoka in Japan, allowed the Jewish refugees to enter Manchukuo and move to Shanghai or Japan, despite Japan’s alliance with Germany at the time.

Mogocha

It is the administrative center of Mogochinsky District in Zabaykalsky Krai, located at the confluence of the Mogocha and Amazar rivers, 709 kilometers northeast of Chita. It has 13,000 inhabitants.

The name Mogocha is derived from the river on which it is located, which is named after the Evenki word mongochi. The meaning of this word is ambiguous; it can be translated as golden valley, but also as belonging to the Mongo tribe.

It was founded in 1910 with the construction of the local section of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Railway traffic began in 1914. In addition to its status as a supply point for the railway, it became a base for gold mining in the surrounding area from the 1920s and 1930s. Town status was granted in 1950.

From 1947 to 1953, Mogocha was home to the Klyuchevlag forced labour camp. The camp held up to 3,000 prisoners at a time, mainly used for forced labour in the mining of molybdenum and gold in villages southwest of the town.

During the deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations in the 1950s, a large airbase was created near Mogocha, which was home to several helicopter regiments until the 1990s. Mogocha’s remoteness combined with the harsh climatic conditions gave rise to the Soviet military slang expression that «God created Sochi, and Satan created Mogocha.»

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the subsequent economic crisis, Mogocha lost around a third of its population, which is common for cities in the Russian Far East. It has a harsh winter, with temperatures as low as -60C.

Skovorodino

A city in the Amur Oblast, administrative centre of the eponymous district. It is located on the Bolshoi Never River. It has a population of just over 10,000.

Skovorodino was founded in 1908 under the name Zmeiny during the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The town was renamed Never-I, after the river. In 1911 it was renamed Rukhlovo, receiving town status in 1927. In 1938 Rukhlovo was renamed Skovorodino in honour of A.N. Skovorodin, the chairman of the local Soviet, who was killed in 1920 during the Russian Civil War.

In 2004-2005, an oil pipeline was built from Taishet north of Lake Baikal to Sovorodin. Part of the oil is transported by rail from Skovorodin to the Nakhodka oil terminal on the Pacific Ocean, while the rest is transported by another pipeline to the Chinese city of Daqing.

The last shadows of Rossiya
(A story from another time)

Vladimir Ustimovich and Tatiana Petukhova enjoy a first-class time on their trip to Vladivostok. Business success competes with political progress as a route to a prosperous life.

On a sunny afternoon, Chita station is bustling with travellers, swindlers and street vendors from various surrounding villages in an atmosphere of effervescence in the midst of Soviet decline.

Vladimir and Tatiana drop their suitcases on the platform, taking in the scene. They approach carriage number 5 of the train that has just arrived from a nearly four-day journey from Moscow. It will still take some time before it continues on its way.

At the door of the carriage, the ticket inspector on duty, dressed in her blue-grey uniform, checks the soldiers’ passports and each ticket carefully. With her dyed blond hair, she doesn’t miss a single detail, looking disdainfully at each passenger with her broad, ill-tempered bureaucratic face, takes Vladimir and Tatiana’s tickets and with a gesture, without saying a word, tells them to board. Above, the ticket inspector checks the tickets again and gestures to the third cabin.

The train finally jolts out of the station on time. It is 2.25pm ​​and nearly two days separate it from its final destination. Now Valentina Aleksandrona Chernova, in a cramped compartment several cars ahead, settles in to fulfil her almost perceptible mission as the train boss. The gold-toothed woman is a 25-year veteran of Russian railways. She oversees the work of the 26 female Rossiya conductors from the late 1980s, and makes sure the train runs on time. And it never does. No one wants to face her.

A common denominator that we can observe in the late 1980s is finding people caught in the transition between two diametrically opposed worlds. Hard times await the nation. And Rossiya is the living symbol of the nation. On its rails wander all kinds of centuries-old stories that originated there, lost in time, at the beginning of the 20th century.

At the end of the 19th century, the development of Siberia was hampered by poor transport links within the region as well as with the rest of the country. Apart from the Siberian Route, there were no good roads suitable for wheeled transport. For about five months of the year, rivers were the main means of transport. During the cold half of the year, freight and passengers travelled by horse-drawn sleigh over the winter roads, many of which were the same rivers, but covered with ice.

The first railway projects in Siberia emerged after the completion of the St. Petersburg-Moscow railway line in 1851. One of the first was the Irkutsk-Chita project, proposed by American businessman Perry Collins and supported by Minister of Transport Constantine Possiet with a view to connecting Moscow to the Amur River and, consequently, to the Pacific Ocean.

The governor of Siberia, Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky, was eager to advance the colonization of the Russian Far East, but his plans could not be realized as long as the settlers had to import grain and other foodstuffs from China and Korea. It was on Muravyov’s initiative that surveys were carried out for a railway in the Khabarovsk region. The main route was opened after thirteen years of work, on July 21, 1904, with a length of 9,288 km.

The importance of trains in Russia in the early 1990s is impressive. They transport 70% of the total freight that circulates in the Soviet Union. This explains the enormous development that we can observe.

There is no transcontinental highway in these times, so it is almost impossible to travel by car from Moscow to Vladivostok, except in winter, when the roads are icy and then can be navigated more conveniently.

The railways of the 1990s remained a centralised and disciplined organisation, while all other state-owned companies were on the road to privatisation or disappearance.

The Trans-Siberian Railway is the heart of the system that holds the vast country together, just as Tsar Alexander III had envisioned it in 1891 when he decreed the start of its construction. The railway made it possible to discover the treasure trove of Siberia’s natural resources (wood, gold and coal, among others) and accelerated the colonization of the vast territory between the Urals and the Pacific. By 1914, some five million settlers, mainly peasants, had already emigrated from European Russia to Siberia aboard the railway.

During the first night that Tatiana and Vladimir spend on the Rossiya, they discover how persistent the old Soviet attitudes are: in the carriage, the king is not the passenger but the conductor. At nightfall, when both passengers are preparing to sleep, an unbearable sound coming from the conductor’s compartment makes it clear what her intentions are. Smoking a cigarette, she puts a movie on the VCR at full volume, which prevents the rest of the passengers from resting, much less those in the nearest compartments. Only when Vladimir loses patience and goes out to demand silence, he is greeted with a look of contempt from the conductor, who against her will, finally agrees to end the ordeal.

In May 1891, when Grand Duke Nicholas (who would become the last Tsar) visited Vladivostok to launch work on the Trans-Siberian Railway, the railway lines extended eastwards to the city of Tyumen in the Ural Mountains.

Siberia was connected to European Russia by the Trakt, an unpaved road in such poor condition that it could easily take travelers a year to reach St. Petersburg, the then capital, from the Pacific coast. Isolated Cossack outposts guarded the long borders with China. Japan was a growing threat.

Tsar Alexander III, Nicholas’s father, knew he had to keep his vast empire together, and the railroad was the only solution.

It wound its way through the most inhospitable territory in Asia, and represented an admirable feat of construction during which an army of labourers, convicts, soldiers and skilled foreign workers laid some 650 kilometres of railway line a year.

In 1904, the first train travelled non-stop from Moscow to Vladivostok, partly crossing Chinese territory. In 1916, a bridge over the Amur River at Khabarovsk made it possible to travel across the entire Russian territory, from one end of the empire to the other.

Never have the railways played a more important role than during the Second World War, when hundreds of factories were dismantled in European Russia and put on railway cars for shipment to the Urals. Workers reassembled more than fifty plants in the defences of Novosibirsk, then a sleepy town of a few thousand inhabitants on the banks of the Ob River, which as a result became a major industrial centre. Today it is Russia’s third largest city, after Moscow and St Petersburg, with more than one and a half million inhabitants, the largest city in Siberia.

That year, southern Siberia was in the midst of a heat wave with temperatures of 30 degrees. Desperate, Tatiana and Vladimir headed to one of the open windows in the corridor, suffering from a lethargy caused by the heat, looking out over the hilly taiga covered with birch and fir trees. From time to time the train passed a dilapidated sawmill with logs scattered around it.

Arriving at one of the stations, street vendors strode alongside the carriages offering beer, smoked fish, sausages, boiled potatoes and bread.

After the Transbaikal region, we reach the Russian Far East, where we are now. The terrain here becomes more rugged, wilder and even more densely populated with birch and pine trees. On reaching the higher elevations, we pass meadows carpeted with yellow, purple and red wildflowers. In the valleys of the Ingoda and Shilka rivers, hundreds of villagers can be seen on the sloping fields. It is the eternal posture of ploughing, weeding the fields.

Almost touching the border with China, the Trans-Siberian railway now plunges back into the time capsule and we return to the present. Behind us, a little less than thirty years ago, were the stories of Vladimir and Tatiana. What has become of them? What has been the fate of all those characters who once wandered through the dark corridors with the creaking of the wheels on the rails during an almost eternal journey of more than nine thousand kilometers?

Today the Rossiya is travelling on other routes, and with a different appearance, without a doubt. In search of the blue waters of the Sea of ​​Japan, it is once again caressing, as it did then, the controversial “border” with its southern neighbour, which shares a good stretch of the spirit of the Trans-Siberian railway, sharing two new stories, with Mongolia as an interlocutor and the Manchurian railway almost dealing with the neighbouring and controversial North Korea. But well, those two other stories and it will be time to enjoy them.

The Rossiya is now entering Vladivostok. The eternal journey has not been so eternal, and after six and a half days it has come to an end. It seems as if we have not crossed the depths of a country, but have been transported directly to another world, perhaps enhanced by the distance. But when we get off the train and come into contact with the big city we can realise that it is all the same.

We are in Russia, even though it may seem incredible. Only then do we realize the immensity of this nation and understand that all this journey has not been in vain. We have learned from it and now we look at Russia with different eyes, without a doubt.

Belogorsk

Located on the Tom River, a tributary of the Zeya, 108 km northeast of Blagoveshchensk, it has a population of around 70,000 inhabitants.

In 1860 the town of Alexandrovskoye was founded by settlers from European Russia. In 1893 they built the village of Bochkarevka near this first one. With the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway station in 1913 the towns continued to grow until in 1923 they were united and formed Alexandrovsk. Three years later they would achieve the status of a city. In 1931 it was renamed Krasnopartizansk until 1936 when it was renamed Kuybyshevka Vostochnaya until in 1957 it was changed to its present name.

Belogorsk serves as the administrative center of Belogorsky District, although it is not a part of it. Administratively, it is incorporated together with another locality as the urban okrug of Belogorsk with the status of the other districts.

Birobidzhan

It is the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. This Oblast has an area of ​​36,244 km² and a population of over 200,000 inhabitants, of which only 1.2% are Jews, the rest are mainly Russians (almost 90%) and Ukrainians. The economy is based on mining (gold, tin, iron and graphite), timber, limited agriculture and light manufacturing (mainly textiles, and food processing).

The city is situated on the banks of the Bira and Bidjan rivers, close to the border with the People’s Republic of China and is an important stop on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Visitors can expect a surprisingly green city, although there is a lot of industry.

The 2003 documentary L’Chayim, Comrade Stalin! is about Stalin’s creation of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast and the settlement of thousands of Jews, with footage of the history of the creation of the Jewish homeland and the contemporary city and interviews with Jewish residents.

The Jewish Autonomous Oblast was founded in 1928 as the «Jewish National District.» It was the result of Lenin’s national policy, whereby each national group within the Soviet Union would be given a territory in which it would have cultural autonomy within a socialist framework. In this sense, it was also a response to two supposed threats to the Soviet state: Judaism, which ran counter to Marxist atheism; and Zionism, which ran counter to the Soviet view of nationalism. The idea was to create a new «Soviet Zion,» where a proletarian Jewish culture could emerge. The official language would be Yiddish, rather than Hebrew, and new socialist arts and literature would eventually replace Judaism as an expression of culture.

Stalin’s theory of the national question held that a group could only be a nation if it had a homeland, and since there was no Jewish homeland, Jews were not a nation and had no rights as such. Communists of Jewish origin argued that the way to resolve this ideological dilemma was to create a Jewish homeland, hence the motivation for forming a Jewish autonomous oblast. Politically speaking, it was considered desirable to create a Jewish homeland within the USSR as an alternative to Zionism and to the theory propounded by socialist Zionists such as Dov Ber Borochov, who claimed that the «Jewish question» could be resolved by creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

In this way, Birobidzhan was important for propaganda purposes against Zionism, which was a doctrine that rivaled Marxism among leftist Jews. The impact of the propaganda was so effective that thousands of Jews emigrated to Birobidzhan even from outside the Soviet Union, including some who were already established in the kibbutzim of Palestine.

Another important goal of the Birobidjan project was to increase the number of human settlements in the Soviet Far East, especially along the vulnerable border with China. In 1928 there were virtually no settlements in the area, while Jews had deep roots in the western part of the Soviet Union, in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia itself (the former Settlement Area). Indeed, there were initially proposals to create a Jewish Soviet Republic in Crimea or parts of Ukraine, but these did not come to fruition for fear of rejection among the gentiles in those areas.

The geography and climate of Birobidjan were extreme, and the new settlers would have to rebuild their lives from scratch. Some historians have claimed that Stalin was also motivated by his anti-Semitism in selecting Birobidjan, in order to keep the Jews as far away from the country’s power centers as possible.

Despite the difficulties, a small migratory flow of Jews began to arrive in the region. By the 1930s, the Jewish National District was promoted to the status of an autonomous region and massive propaganda was already underway to incite more Jewish settlers to settle there. Some of these advertisements included the typical elements of Soviet propaganda of the time, which consisted of posters and Yiddish novels describing the social utopia there. Other methods were quite bizarre. For example, leaflets promoting Birobidjan were distributed and dropped from an airplane over a Jewish neighborhood in Minsk, in the Byelorussian SSR. On another occasion, a government-produced Yiddish film called Seekers of Happiness told the story of a family of American Jews who had fled the Great Depression to settle in Birobidjan.

As the Jewish population grew, so did the impact of Yiddish culture in the region. A Yiddish newspaper was established, a theater company was formed, and streets in the new city were built and named after prominent Yiddish authors such as Sholom Aleichem and YL Peretz.

The Birobidjan experiment came to a halt in the mid-1930s during a campaign of expulsions under Vyacheslav Molotov. Jewish leaders were arrested and executed. Yiddish schools were closed. According to a 1939 census, the Jewish population in the region numbered 17,695, which was 16% of the total.

After World War II, the idea of ​​creating a potential home for Jewish refugees in Birobidjan was revived. By then the Jewish population in the region had grown to nearly a third of the total. But such efforts ended with the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. In the years that followed, the idea of ​​an autonomous Jewish community in that oblast was completely forgotten. The 1959 census, six years after Stalin’s death and eleven years after the founding of the State of Israel, reveals that the Jewish population comprised no more than 14,269 individuals.

With the collapse of the USSR and new emigration policies, most of the remaining Jewish population in the country left for Germany and Israel. In 1991, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast was transferred from the jurisdiction of Khabarovsk Krai to federal jurisdiction, but by this time most Jews had left the area and accounted for less than 2% of the population. Despite this, the Yiddish language has been taught again in schools, there is also a Yiddish newspaper and a Yiddish radio station still operates.

Khabarovsk

It is the capital and largest city of Khabarovsk Krai. It is located 25 km from the border with China, between the Amur and Ussuri rivers, and is the second largest city in the Russian Far East after Vladivostok.

It was founded in 1858 as a military outpost by the governor of Eastern Siberia, Nikolai Muravyov-Amursky, during his campaign on the Amur against the Manchus. However, it was named after the 17th-century explorer Yerofei Khabarov. It later served as the headquarters of the Far Eastern Military Command and was not closed to foreigners during the Soviet era, which favoured its current multiculturalism with Korean, Japanese and Chinese communities. It is a highly industrialised city and three-quarters of the population is engaged in the industrial sector.

The lands near the confluence of the Ussuri and Amur rivers, where Khabarovsk now stands, were previously inhabited by Tungus peoples, possibly related to the Jurchen in the past and/or the Hezhen in the present. Chinese expeditions reached this area in the early 15th century, when the fleets of a Ming eunuch, Yishiha, landed there, coming from Jilin City on their way to the Russian territory of Tyr.

In 1894, the Department of the Russian Geographical Society was established in the city, which initiated the creation of libraries, theatres and museums in the city. Since then, the cultural life of Khabarovsk has flourished. Much of the local indigenous history has been well preserved in the Regional Lore Museum and the Natural History Museum and in places near the Nanaian village of Sikhachi-Alyan, where pictograms from over 3,000 years ago can be found. The Khabarovsk Art Museum displays a rare collection of ancient Russian icons.

Unlike Vladivostok, the city was never closed to foreigners and retains its historic international flavour. For twelve years it was the capital of the Soviet Far East, from 1926 to 1938, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union it experienced a sharp increase in the Asian presence. An estimated one million Chinese travel to and through Khabarovsk and foreign investment from Japanese and Korean corporations has grown in recent years.

The city of Khabarovsk was also the site of the war crimes trials, in which twelve former members of the Japanese Kwantung Army were tried for the manufacture and use of biological weapons during World War II.

Rossiya crossing the Amur River

The Rossiya crossing the Amur River (Credits: Cornel Sibianul)

Vyazemskaya

Vyazemsky is the administrative center of Vyazemsky District in Khabarovsk Krai, located 130 km southwest of Khabarovsk, near the Ussuri River and the border with China. It has a population of 15,000.

It was founded in 1895 as a settlement during the construction of the railway between Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, which later became the easternmost section of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The settlement and station were initially named Vyazemskaya after the section’s chief engineer, Orest Vyazemsky.

It was granted urban settlement status in 1938, and city status in 1951. The city’s economy depends on the production of wood, food and building materials, as well as traffic on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Ruzhino

Ruzhino railway station is located in Lesozavodsk. It is situated on the Ussuri River (a tributary of the Amur), 10 km from the Sino-Russian border and about 300 km north of Vladivostok.

The first settlement was founded in 1924 in connection with a sawmill and was originally called Dalles, from the Russian word dalny for «distant» (referring to the Russian Far East) and les for «forest». In 1932, Dalles was merged with the nearby village of Novostroyka, given the status of an urban-type settlement and renamed Lesozavodsk. It has been a town since 1938.

Ussuriysk

Located in the fertile valley of the Razdolnaya River, 98 km north of Vladivostok and about 60 km from the Sino-Russian border and the Pacific Ocean.

Ussuriysk is the third largest city in Primorsky Krai. Its population is over 160,000.

The modern town was founded in 1866 as the village of Nikolskoe, which was granted city status and the name Nikolsk in 1898. In 1926 it was renamed Nikolsk-Ussuriiski to distinguish itself from Nikolsk in Vologda Oblast.

From 1935 to 1957 the city was called Voroshilov in honour of Kliment Voroshilov. After the death of Joseph Stalin and the coming to power of Nikita Khrushchev, the city was renamed in 1957 to its present name.

On the economic side, the city’s industry is represented by twenty-eight enterprises, including twelve from the food industry, two from the light industry, six from the metal industry, and four from the construction industry. Ussuriysk has always specialized in the production of consumer goods. That is why at present it is in a more favorable situation compared to other large cities of Primorye, where war industry enterprises prevailed. The largest light industry enterprises are Primorsky Sakhar (providing sugar to the Russian Far East, producing 160,000 tons per year), Dalsoya (producing vegetable oil, margarine, and soap), Ussuriysky Balsam (24 types of liquor and vodka products, and balms made from a mixture of dozens of herbs). Another economic feature of Ussuriysk is its wholesale trade. There are about thirty specialized and multipurpose trading bases, many of which had developed contacts with foreign partners before the foreign economic policy was liberalized in Russia.

Other noteworthy enterprises in the city include the Grado firm, which produces up to 600,000 pairs of shoes annually, and the locomotive repair plant. Ussuriysk’s annual industrial output accounts for 8% of the krai’s output. In addition, the city is the junction point for all major highways and railways in the krai.

On the central square there is a monument to the Red Guards and partisans, who died in the battles of Ussuriysk in June 1918. A monument to Vladimir Lenin is located on the Railway Station Square.

The Church of the Intercession at 80 Chicherina Street was built in 1914. It is the only religious building in the krai that has remained without any reconstruction since 1917 and is used for its original purpose.

Vladivostok

A picture is worth a thousand words, isn’t it? Well, what else can I say then? The best we can tell you about Vladivostok, the end of our journey that started 9260 kilometers ago, we’ll leave it for you to enjoy and listen to.

Thanks Alex Drone for all the contributions throughout this Dossier. We are going to Vladivostok…

Vladivostok … by Alex Drone …

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