Out of Russia: No entry for capitalist-roaders

KHABAROVSK - This is where the world almost came to an end. It was 1969 and the armies of Moscow and Peking started shooting at each other on islets in the Amur and Ussuri Rivers. Before that they only ridiculed each other's Communism as margarine/radish/goulash or whatever other culinary insult took the fancy of their cook-book polemicists.

To see for myself how border tensions had eased I took a car the other day from Khabarovsk along the Amur River to the frontier with China. We did not get very far. The Russian side, near the village of Bychikha, is a closed military zone. Surrounding it is an an electrified fence and a strip of freshly raked and footprint- sensitive soil.

The entry point is manned by two soldiers with guns. A metal barrier blocks the road. From the wall of a concrete hut with floodlights scowls a freshly painted paragon of vigilance: a helmeted guard peering through binoculars at the road. His motto: 'The Borders of the Motherland are Sacred and Inviolable.'

The mood was more Checkpoint Charlie than the juncture of the world's fastest-growing economy, with the richest storehouse of natural resources. There must be some mistake, I told the guards. What of the new film by Stanislav Govorukhin, The Great Criminal Revolution, showing lorries laden with goods pouring back and forth across the border to China? The soldiers frowned. The only non-military vehicle they let through was a rusty lorry with 'bread' marked on the side. The driver had a special pass.

The scene had a touching air of valiant hopelessness. Here were people trying to do their job, no matter how foolish or impossible. It reminded me of the goose- stepping guards who used to protect Lenin's mausoleum in Red Square until President Yeltsin moved them to other duties. The guards changed on the hour in perfect time with the bells on Spassky Tower. Their clockwork precision was chilling but, with everything falling apart, also impressive.

The frontier between Russia and China is 4,212km long. Add China's border with former Soviet republics and you have another 3,400km. Sealing it is impossible. Not even Mao could do that. (In the 1960s thousands crossed into the Soviet Union from the deserts of Xinjiang after Peking accused Moscow of taking the capitalist road. The propaganda was a hit: many in China believed it and liked it. The exodus stopped when reports began to filter back that Moscow's ideological apostasy was not all it was cracked up to be.)

Now that both Russia and China really have taken the capitalist road, the trickle of people and goods into Russia has become a flood. And the backlash has begun. 'Chinese in the Far East: Guests or Masters?' asked a headline in Izvestia. Boris Mozhaev, a writer and a member of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's entourage on the Nobel Laureate's train journey across Russia, published a tirade entitled: 'Seizure: Foreign Plans for the Division of Siberia.' The source of their anxiety is an irresistible fact: the total population in Russia's vast far-eastern territory is only eight million; the neighbouring Chinese province of Heilongjiang has 36.4 million people.

Arithmetic has never been Russia's friend. When the 19th-century empire-builder Nikolai Muravyev-Amursky sailed down the Amur River, he stiffened his resolve with an icon of the Virgin and a military band playing God Save the Tsar. Deep into what Peking regarded as its own empire, Muravyev- Amursky declared: 'Here there shall be a town.' Thus did Khabarovsk come into existence - not from necessity but willpower.

The border post at Bychikha belongs to the same stubborn tradition. So does the regional governor, Viktor Ishaev. He scrapped visa-free entry from China and accuses Russian diplomats of treachery in border talks with Peking. China, he warns, has tricked Russia into giving up two islands, Big Ussurisky and Tarabarov, and is to send submarines down the Amur to snoop around Khabarovsk.

It sounds far-fetched, like Russia's entire venture in the far east. When the local administration purged Lenin's name from Khabarovsk's main street, they found a substitute hero. Lenin Street has given way to Muravyev-Amursky Street.