#14
Big dreams, no cash: Russian city wants to bring the
Great Divide closer to home
By ALEXEI VLADYKIN
June 22, 2002
PERVOURALSK, Russia (AP) -- Every morning, Yevgeny Baluyev drives a herd of cows from Europe into Asia. Every evening, he brings them back, nudging them past a marble obelisk marking the continental divide.
The herdsman earns about $40 a month and has never thought about the marketing opportunities offered by that obelisk in a thick forest of firs. But Arkady Chernetsky has. He's the mayor of Yekaterinburg, 25 miles to the east, and he is proposing to move the Europe-Asia border closer to his city to cash in on tourists.
Chernetsky sees a need for "new approaches to creating the image of the border between Europe and Asia."
"Not to be able to present and sell this would be a waste."
Yevgeny Tulisov, a public relations man for the city, imagines a giant arch, like the one in St. Louis, which he saw on TV.
Founded in the 18th century and named for Peter the Great's wife, Catherine, today's city of 1.5 million suffers from organized crime that is driving away foreign investors. Its infrastructure is in crisis and its industries are weakened.
Its image is worsened by being the place where the Bolsheviks shot Nicholas II, the last czar, and his family to death in 1918.
Just one option remains, say the city's leaders: build a massive tourism complex. It does not even have a blueprint yet, nor the money to finance one, but it does have a name: Yekaterinburg -- Gateway to Asia.
Geography textbooks say the border between the continents begins in the northern Ural Mountains and follows the 60th meridian. On this meridian, in 1837, the first border obelisk was erected.
Travelers in czarist times recorded how Russian prisoners on forced marches to labor camps would stop and kiss the monument, bidding farewell to Europe and their prior life.
The communists renamed the city Sverdlovsk, after a prominent Bolshevik leader. Here, a politician named Boris Yeltsin rose to power, and when the Soviet Union collapsed and he became president, he hoped to bring French President Jacques Chirac and the then German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, to see the obelisk. New granite slabs were added for the occasion, but the two European leaders never came.
Still, there are visitors aplenty -- especially newlyweds who come to be photographed at the obelisk. They consider it good luck that their first journey in married life should be between the continents.
Veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan moved in for a time, put up a barrier and charged admission, herdsman Baluyev recalled.
"They used the money to buy vodka. They sang songs and drank until morning. ... Once, in the winter, one of them was so drunk he crashed his car. There's the cross," he said, pointing to a makeshift monument on a hill.
In April, authorities evicted the veterans.
Although the 60th meridian defines the border, the hilly topography makes it impossible to say whether it is precisely where the tectonic plates of the continents collide. This is just the wiggle room the Yekaterinburg authorities need to promote their dream.
"It's not necessary to artificially create territorial and geographical divisions. You have to be able to exploit symbols with commercial profit," said Tulisov, a director of the public relations firm Ural Capital, who thought of the St. Louis-style archway.
One other snag: the city of Pervouralsk is much closer to the obelisk -- just three miles away. Might it not object to having the monument snatched away?
Sergei Deminov, mayor of the city of 200,000, seems unperturbed. He's more concerned about Pervouralsk's shoddy roads and the dust from its factories. Besides, he says he's sure Yekaterinburg's ambitions are bound to fail.
"Let them put up a whole fence of border markers," he said.
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