The Russian Far East: ice fishing, a Soviet-era Hebrew Disneyland and a cosmopolitan city
- From Khabarovsk to Birobidzhan to Vladivostok, reminders of Tsarist and Soviet rule give way to growing sophistication
- The region, which was off-limits to foreigners for much of the 20th century, offers a warm reception
The flight, via Vladivostok, has been comfortable and punctual, and as a weak early morning sun hovers over icy fields, we begin our descent into Khabarovsk.
The city, in Russia’s far east, was founded in 1858 as a military outpost and, according to Lonely Planet, is the “world’s coldest city of over half a million people”. The Amur River here forms the border with China and, this being the depths of winter, is frozen, huge blocks of ice floating downstream making strange groaning sounds as they do so.
Hardy Russians have cut holes in the ice and are sitting on blocks of the cold stuff as they fish. I walk gingerly towards an old fellow wrapped in furs who pulls out small fish from the frigid water. I want to watch for longer, to see if my new friend manages to pull out a giant sturgeon, but it is too impossibly cold to hang around, and the cracking noises coming from beneath my feet seem to be building towards a crescendo.
The Dormition cathedral stands high above the river, a skinny vertical structure covered in blue tiles that replaced the one destroyed by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in the 1930s. More impressive is the massive Transfiguration cathedral, the third tallest church in Russia, which was opened in 2004. Its four Ukrainian-style gilded domes were located on a hill chosen by Alexy II, then Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia (the bishop of Moscow), from a helicopter. The climb through Heroes Square, which commemorates the dead of the Great Patriotic war (the second world war as fought by the Soviets from 1941), and up the stairs of the cathedral might have warmed me if the temperature hadn’t dropped to minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit).
