Only after it was all over did I learn of their plan to seize me on board the Chungshan when I was to take it to go back to the Military Academy at Whampoa from Canton. They would then send me as a prisoner to Russia via Vladivostok, thereby removing the major obstacle to their scheme of using the National Revolution as a medium for setting up a "dictatorship of the proletariat."

Brezhnev shared my enthusiasm. Impulsively, after a late lunch, he invited me to accompany him on a tour of Vladivostok. We climbed into the back seat of a long black limousine and headed toward the city, thirteen miles away. The local commissar, a large, dark-complexioned man wearing a thick wool coat, sat in the jump seat in front of Brezhnev, and the interpreter, Victor Sukhodrev, sat in front of me. Our conversation was natural and uninhibited. How many people lived in Vladivostok? What was the main industry? And was it always this cold? Twenty minutes later, we drove down a steep hill, entered the city and swung around the main square. A small crowd was there, and even though it was dusk, they recognized the car and applauded. The city itself reminded me of San Francisco, and I wished that I'd had more time to explore the place. But it was starting to get dark and we headed back toward Okeanskaya.

Commenting acidly on the loss of Vladivostok 115 years later (and on President Ford’s summit with Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev in that city), Deng Xiaoping told me that the different names given to the city by the Chinese and the Russians reflected their respective purposes: the Chinese name translated roughly as “Sea Slug,” while the Russian name meant “Rule of the East.” “I don’t think it has any other meaning except what it means at face value,” he added.

Li Zhanshu, the third-ranking member of the Communist Party of China, visited Moscow last week after attending an economic forum in the eastern Russian city of Vladivostok, where he met with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

The Chinese government has kept quiet about it, but Radio France International reported in March 2023 that China’s Ministry of Natural Resources had issued new guidelines for maps, requiring the addition of old Chinese names alongside Russian geographical names in eight places along the Russian-Chinese border, including Vladivostok, which should now be referred to as Haishenwai. As if bowing to Beijing, Moscow has said it will open the port of Vladivostok to Chinese transit trade for the first time in 163 years.

Vladivostok

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