May 2002

In the mid-1980s I made occasional trips to Harbin in Manchuria to report on the Orthodox White Russians who lived there, the remnant of a community that had fled from the new Soviet Union after the revolution. There were once so many of them that parts of Harbin resembled a Russian city. But the upheavals of the Japanese occupation and the Cultural Revolution, emigration, and death had reduced the community to a few dozen by the time I arrived.