It is not rare for a civilisation to abruptly falter, give way and fold into a new one. This insight seems obvious in the territories of the former Soviet Union — a universe transformed into a memory overnight.

　　一种文明忽然垮塌、给新文明让路并被吸收，这并不罕见。在这片前苏联领土上尤其明显，一夜间，一片天地已成追忆。

　　It is more rare that one settlement transforms into another, that a city turned ruin continues to be inhabited, that the collapsing buildings and boulevards stained by a thousand footsteps, after the apocalypse, host new forms of human life, new memories.

　　更少见的是，一个居住区变成了另一个，一座曾是城市的废墟依旧有人居住，倒塌的建筑和踏痕累累的大道，历经大难，又迎来新的人类生活，新的回忆。

　　Harbin, in the far north-east of China, used to be a very Russian metropolis. Once called the Paris of the east — although it’s not the only contender for the title — it was a haven for political refugees, fascists, Bolsheviks, painters and poets. Now, all that is gone.

　　哈尔滨，在中国遥远的东北，过去这里是地道的俄式大都市，曾被称作东方巴黎，虽然它并非这一称号的唯一竞争者，它是政治避难者、法西斯分子、布尔什维克、画家和诗人的避难所。如今，一切随风而去。

　　Not quite all: traces of the old city do remain. Russian writing adorns the walls; St Petersburg-style pastel-coloured buildings line boulevards where they sell black bread and sausage; the nostalgic Russian song Moscow Nights plays everywhere.

　　也并不全是如此：这里还找得到老城的蛛丝马迹。墙上刻着俄文，色彩柔和的圣彼得堡式建筑分列大路两侧，人们在那里卖大列巴和红肠，到处在演奏充满乡愁的俄罗斯歌曲《莫斯科郊外的晚上》。

　　But these are just traces: this is now a thoroughly Chinese city of some nine million official residents (but most likely many more) — Han Chinese, Mongol and Manchu. Russians are visitors here, in the ashes of a great Russian city. They wander dejectedly through beer gardens, on their way to trade delegations, or maybe to nightclubs where they are paid to dance.

　　但仅仅是印记而已：现在这里全然是一座的中国城市，有大约900万常住人口，但很可能更多，有汉族、蒙古族和满族。俄罗斯人不过是游客，他们沉浸在在这座伟大俄式城市的灰烬之中。他们在露天啤酒店间沮丧地逛荡，或前往贸易代表处，或在酒吧里跳舞谋生。

　　How did Harbin happen? It was founded by Russian colonists in the late 19th century, heyday of the Russian Empire, on the banks of the Sungari River inside the territory of the Chinese Empire.

　　哈尔滨是如何诞生的呢?19世界末俄罗斯帝国全盛时，俄罗斯殖民者开始在中国境内的松花江沿岸建城。

　　A forbiddingly cold location, it was part of the homeland of the Manchurian ethnic group, the founders of the Q’ing dynasty. The whole area was legally off-limits to ethnic Chinese settlers until late in the 19th century, and remained a largely empty terrain of nomads and, occasionally, bandits and criminals.

　　这里是一个严寒刺骨的地方，属于创建清朝的满族人的故乡。直到19世纪末，整个地区在法律上都不许中国定居者进入，这里几乎没有人烟，少量游牧者，偶有强盗和罪犯出没。

　　The existence of Harbin, like that of cities such as Vladivostok or Novisibirsk, represented the penetration of the Russian culture into the heart of the north through technology: in Harbin, before anything else, there was a train station.

　　与海参崴和新西伯利亚等城市一样，哈尔滨的诞生代表着俄国文化通过技术渗透进中国北方的心脏：哈尔滨一无所是时，就有一座火车站。

　　In 1898 China had granted Russia the right to build a shortcut on the Trans-Siberian Railway across Manchuria, from Chita to Vladivostok.

　　1898年，中国允许俄罗斯修建跨西伯利亚铁路，从中国抄近道，连通俄罗斯的赤塔和海参崴。

　　The building of the railway brought engineers, and then refugees, White Russians, smugglers, tricksters and soldiers who shot at random out of the train window at the Asian men they saw trudging through the snow. These men and their ancestors would later be known in Russian as KVZhDisty — “people of the Chinese Eastern Railway”.

　　修建铁路带来了工程师，接下来是难民、“白匪”、走私犯、骗子和士兵，这些当兵的随心所欲地从火车车窗里朝在雪中跋涉的亚洲人开枪。后来，这些人和他们的祖先在俄语里被称为“KVZhDisty”，“中东铁路人”。

　　At the same time, due to the disastrous mismanagement of the Q’ing dynasty — this was the last decade of the Chinese empire — the peasants of Shandong and Hebei provinces were driven out by famines and overpopulation, north across loose borders, in search of a frontier of their own.

　　同一时期，清朝治理不堪，在帝国的最后十年中，山东和河北的农民因饥荒和人口过剩，被迫穿过管理松弛的边境往北走，去寻找他们自己的边疆。

　　The Chinese settlement of Manchuria was very distinct from the Russian one, however. The latter was managed by politician and industrialist Count Witte — a testament to the strength of the state.

　　然而，满洲的中国居住点与俄国居住点的相距很远，后者由政客和实业家维特伯爵管理，这证明了其国家实力。

　　The Chinese migration, in contrast, was a population flood inspired by social dysfunction, attesting to the collapse of the Chinese state; these migrants came to Harbin as a port of last resort.

　　与此形成对比，社会紊乱让中国移民来到这里，他们是中国垮塌的证明，来哈尔滨的移民把这里当做最后的一根救命稻草。

　　A city flourished and grew in this most unlikely of refuges. For three decades, early 20th-century Harbin was among the most cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic cities of the Russian empire, without rival in the Far East.

　　城市繁荣起来，在这个最不可能的避难所发展壮大。在二十世纪初的三十多年中，哈尔滨是俄罗斯帝国治下最国际化的多民族城市，在远东地区无可匹敌。

　　It had grand boulevards named for Russian writers, onion-domed churches, large businesses… After the Revolution, Harbin became the home to a unique culture — that of the exiled White Russians, driven out by the Bolsheviks’ Red Army.

　　这里有以俄罗斯作家命名的大马路、洋葱顶教堂和大型商业区……十月革命后，哈尔滨成为一种独一无二的文化家园，这里是“白匪”的家，他们是被布尔什维克红军赶出来的。

　　It is perhaps a historical curiosity that the Russian Fascist Party, the first Russian ethnocentric fascist political organisation, was founded in Harbin, where they smashed synagogue windows and hassled Jews staying in the Moderne Hotel through the early 1930s.

　　这可能是历史上的奇谈，俄罗斯的法西斯政党在哈尔滨建立，俄罗斯第一个以种族为中心的法西斯政治组织。整个二十世纪三十年代初，他们敲碎犹太教堂的窗户，骚扰住在摩登呢酒店的犹太人。

　　Like Shanghai, Harbin, city of no passports, was a home for Russian Jewish culture — now preserved in a Jewish Culture Archive in the barely used Harbin Synagogue (which doubles as an architectural history museum) and in Heilongjiang University’s Sino-Israel Archive.

　　和上海一样，哈尔滨是无需护照的城市，这里是俄罗斯犹太文化的家园。这被保存在很少使用的哈尔滨犹太教堂的犹太文化档案馆和黑龙江大学中国以色列档案馆里。

　　Harbin’s poshest district, now called Daoli, was once populated by boulevardiers, churches and shops for Russian foods. Even to this day, Harbin is one of the only places in China where bread is an everyday food (even the local word for bread here is borrowed from Russian).

　　哈尔滨最漂亮的街区，如今叫道里区，这里曾经聚集着大量花花公子、教堂和俄式食品店。即使到了今天，哈尔滨仍是中国唯一以面包为主食的城市。这里对面包的称呼(“列巴”)都来自俄语。

　　A hundred years ago, in cosmopolitan Harbin, the Chinese lived in Daowai, a dangerous enclave that was periodically locked off from the remainder of the city, for instance during epidemics.

　　一百年前，在哈尔滨这个大都会，中国人住在道外，那是一个危险的聚居区，不时会被封锁起来，比如传染病流行时。

　　By 1926, however, the city council came to be dominated by a majority of Chinese tradesmen. In truth, the Russians had lost compelling power when their homeland changed into a new nation. Harbin entered a period of violent contestation: Chinese warlord Zhang Xueliang took over the China Eastern Railway in 1929, which was followed by a Japanese invasion of Harbin in 1931.

　　然而到1926年，市议会被大批中国商人控制。事实上，当他们的祖国变成另一个国家时，俄国人在这里已经失去控制权。哈尔滨也进入了一个暴力争夺的时期：中国军阀张学良在1929年控制了中东铁路;1931年日本人入侵哈尔滨，他们又接手了。

　　The period of Japanese domination lasted until the Soviet Red Army came in 1945. These decades saw the daily life of the city become increasingly gruesome: when the Japanese took over, they started sweeping Russians and Russian Jews off the street to be used as human subjects in the infamous Unit 731, a covert army chemical and biological weapons research facility which undertook brutal experiments on living victims. Most families forbade their children from being outside after 5pm.

　　日据持续到1945年苏联红军到来。那几十年，城市生活越来越可怕：日本人占领后，开始清除俄国人和俄国犹太人，把他们当做臭名昭著的731部队的试验品。731部队是一个秘密的军事生化武器研究所，对人活体进行残忍的试验。很多人家都不准孩子们下午5点后出门。

　　The 1949 victory of the Chinese Communists began in Harbin. This was logical enough: this city of outcasts, the poor, and the criminal would always have a special resonance for the party.

　　1949年，中国共产党在哈尔滨获得胜利。这合乎逻辑，这里到处是流浪汉和穷人。

　　But this victory also marked the end of Harbin as home for those who couldn’t fit in in Soviet Russia, both because it was Communist, and because it was decidedly Chinese.

　　但胜利也意味着，那些在苏联待不下去的人，没法再把哈尔滨当家了，不仅因为这里奉行共产主义，也因为它属于中国。

　　Decades rolled by, and the last Russians desperately sought to emigrate to Australia, Israel or wherever would take them. The USSR itself turned against Stalin, while in Harbin lovers sat on benches in riverside Stalin Park.

　　几十年过去了，最后一波俄国人想方设法移民去澳大利亚、以色列和其他愿意接纳他们的地方。当情侣们坐在城里河畔的斯大林公园谈情说爱时，苏联已经开始反对斯大林了。

　　The lost Harbin Russians… The last two passed away in the 1980s: one in a hospital for the mentally ill; the other, a Jewish lady who had lived by herself for decades, even as the streets echoed with the hoarse, bloody shouts of the Cultural Revolution, died alone in her bed, under which were stuffed archival fragments and decaying photographs.

　　失去哈尔滨的俄国人……八十年代，最后两位去世了，一个死在医院，患有精神病，另一位是犹太人，独自生活数十年后，独自在床上死去，那时街头仍回荡着声嘶力竭和血腥的文革口号，床底下全是撕碎的档案和腐坏的照片。

　　At the same time in the 1980s a new order came to China, one which welcomed western (and Russian) culture once it had been converted into commodity form.

　　八十年代，中国走上正轨，欢迎西方和俄罗斯文化，只要那些都变成商品。

　　With it came a Harbin with no Russians, but plentiful matryoshka dolls, bottles of vodka and fur hats, as well as grand apartment buildings painted in the hues of St Petersburg and statues of Russian poets.

　　随着而来的是没有俄国人的哈尔滨，却有很多套娃、伏特加、皮帽子、画着圣彼得堡风情图案的大公寓和俄国诗人雕塑。

　　But it was only when the Soviet Union dissolved that the Russians themselves started trickling back, this time as businessmen looking for new markets, as prostitutes, and as the parents of children whose diseases couldn’t be treated in Russian hospitals except at a prohibitive price.

　　当苏联解体时，俄国人才慢慢回流。这一回，他们是寻找新市场的商人、妓女以及求医的父母，他们的孩子得病了，可在俄罗斯的治疗费用贵得惊人。

　　A visitor to Harbin will see Russians in fashion advertisements and Russians in hotel bars, Russian writing on the walls and Russian songs played by saxophonists in the street. This world, however, is a Chinese one: the billboards in the suburbs may feature blonde Russian women, but “Harbin welcomes you” is written in Mandarin.

　　哈尔滨游客会在时装广告和酒吧里看到俄罗斯人，墙上写着俄文，街头的萨克斯吹奏着俄国歌曲。这个世界却是中式的：郊区的广告牌上有亮眼的俄罗斯金发美女，可上面却用汉语写着“哈尔滨欢迎你”。

　　The Russian history of this place now exists only as a recuperated, commodified component of the city’s “urban branding,” alongside the park for endangered tigers and the ice sculpture festival.

　　这里的俄罗斯印记不过是“打造城市品牌”时被复原的商品化成分，还有濒危虎动物园和冰雕节。

　　The Russian culture which created Harbin is still very much on display, but absent of a significant Russian population, an everyday life has disappeared, and the only traces of “Russian-ness” are objects which can be purchased — foods, souvenirs, clothes.

　　人民经常展示创造了哈尔滨的俄罗斯文化，但由于没有大量俄罗斯人，俄式生活已经消失，残存的俄式记忆就是一些商品，包括食物、纪念品和服饰。

　　The symbol of this commodification is “Russian Village” — a fake Russian settlement in the Sun Island pleasure park, replete with ersatz versions of Russian architecture.

　　商品化的象征就是“俄罗斯小镇”，太阳岛上的一个虚构的俄罗斯定居点，修建了很多俄式建筑。

　　It's a sort of ethnographic theme park like the one in Jia Zhang Ke’s film The World (2004), in which major world destinations are reconstructed in China. In this village, Harbin natives can pay to get their picture with a “real Russian”, in the heart of a former Russian town. But this contact is empty. What is Russia? What was Russia? The residents of Harbin will never know.

　　这有点类似贾樟柯电影《世界》中的民族主题公园，重建了许多世界著名景点。在这个小镇里，在曾经俄罗斯城镇的中心，哈尔滨本地人可以花钱与“真的俄罗斯人”合影。但这一切显得空洞。何为俄罗斯，何为苏联，哈尔滨居民都不大清楚。

 　　It is not rare for a civilisation to abruptly falter, give way and fold into a new one. This insight seems obvious in the territories of the former Soviet Union — a universe transformed into a memory overnight.

　　一种文明忽然垮塌、给新文明让路并被吸收，这并不罕见。在这片前苏联领土上尤其明显，一夜间，一片天地已成追忆。

　　It is more rare that one settlement transforms into another, that a city turned ruin continues to be inhabited, that the collapsing buildings and boulevards stained by a thousand footsteps, after the apocalypse, host new forms of human life, new memories.

　　更少见的是，一个居住区变成了另一个，一座曾是城市的废墟依旧有人居住，倒塌的建筑和踏痕累累的大道，历经大难，又迎来新的人类生活，新的回忆。

　　Harbin, in the far north-east of China, used to be a very Russian metropolis. Once called the Paris of the east — although it’s not the only contender for the title — it was a haven for political refugees, fascists, Bolsheviks, painters and poets. Now, all that is gone.

　　哈尔滨，在中国遥远的东北，过去这里是地道的俄式大都市，曾被称作东方巴黎，虽然它并非这一称号的唯一竞争者，它是政治避难者、法西斯分子、布尔什维克、画家和诗人的避难所。如今，一切随风而去。

　　Not quite all: traces of the old city do remain. Russian writing adorns the walls; St Petersburg-style pastel-coloured buildings line boulevards where they sell black bread and sausage; the nostalgic Russian song Moscow Nights plays everywhere.

　　也并不全是如此：这里还找得到老城的蛛丝马迹。墙上刻着俄文，色彩柔和的圣彼得堡式建筑分列大路两侧，人们在那里卖大列巴和红肠，到处在演奏充满乡愁的俄罗斯歌曲《莫斯科郊外的晚上》。

　　But these are just traces: this is now a thoroughly Chinese city of some nine million official residents (but most likely many more) — Han Chinese, Mongol and Manchu. Russians are visitors here, in the ashes of a great Russian city. They wander dejectedly through beer gardens, on their way to trade delegations, or maybe to nightclubs where they are paid to dance.

　　但仅仅是印记而已：现在这里全然是一座的中国城市，有大约900万常住人口，但很可能更多，有汉族、蒙古族和满族。俄罗斯人不过是游客，他们沉浸在在这座伟大俄式城市的灰烬之中。他们在露天啤酒店间沮丧地逛荡，或前往贸易代表处，或在酒吧里跳舞谋生。

　　How did Harbin happen? It was founded by Russian colonists in the late 19th century, heyday of the Russian Empire, on the banks of the Sungari River inside the territory of the Chinese Empire.

　　哈尔滨是如何诞生的呢?19世界末俄罗斯帝国全盛时，俄罗斯殖民者开始在中国境内的松花江沿岸建城。

　　A forbiddingly cold location, it was part of the homeland of the Manchurian ethnic group, the founders of the Q’ing dynasty. The whole area was legally off-limits to ethnic Chinese settlers until late in the 19th century, and remained a largely empty terrain of nomads and, occasionally, bandits and criminals.

　　这里是一个严寒刺骨的地方，属于创建清朝的满族人的故乡。直到19世纪末，整个地区在法律上都不许中国定居者进入，这里几乎没有人烟，少量游牧者，偶有强盗和罪犯出没。

　　The existence of Harbin, like that of cities such as Vladivostok or Novisibirsk, represented the penetration of the Russian culture into the heart of the north through technology: in Harbin, before anything else, there was a train station.

　　与海参崴和新西伯利亚等城市一样，哈尔滨的诞生代表着俄国文化通过技术渗透进中国北方的心脏：哈尔滨一无所是时，就有一座火车站。

　　In 1898 China had granted Russia the right to build a shortcut on the Trans-Siberian Railway across Manchuria, from Chita to Vladivostok.

　　1898年，中国允许俄罗斯修建跨西伯利亚铁路，从中国抄近道，连通俄罗斯的赤塔和海参崴。

　　The building of the railway brought engineers, and then refugees, White Russians, smugglers, tricksters and soldiers who shot at random out of the train window at the Asian men they saw trudging through the snow. These men and their ancestors would later be known in Russian as KVZhDisty — “people of the Chinese Eastern Railway”.

　　修建铁路带来了工程师，接下来是难民、“白匪”、走私犯、骗子和士兵，这些当兵的随心所欲地从火车车窗里朝在雪中跋涉的亚洲人开枪。后来，这些人和他们的祖先在俄语里被称为“KVZhDisty”，“中东铁路人”。

　　At the same time, due to the disastrous mismanagement of the Q’ing dynasty — this was the last decade of the Chinese empire — the peasants of Shandong and Hebei provinces were driven out by famines and overpopulation, north across loose borders, in search of a frontier of their own.

　　同一时期，清朝治理不堪，在帝国的最后十年中，山东和河北的农民因饥荒和人口过剩，被迫穿过管理松弛的边境往北走，去寻找他们自己的边疆。

　　The Chinese settlement of Manchuria was very distinct from the Russian one, however. The latter was managed by politician and industrialist Count Witte — a testament to the strength of the state.

　　然而，满洲的中国居住点与俄国居住点的相距很远，后者由政客和实业家维特伯爵管理，这证明了其国家实力。

　　The Chinese migration, in contrast, was a population flood inspired by social dysfunction, attesting to the collapse of the Chinese state; these migrants came to Harbin as a port of last resort.

　　与此形成对比，社会紊乱让中国移民来到这里，他们是中国垮塌的证明，来哈尔滨的移民把这里当做最后的一根救命稻草。

　　A city flourished and grew in this most unlikely of refuges. For three decades, early 20th-century Harbin was among the most cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic cities of the Russian empire, without rival in the Far East.

　　城市繁荣起来，在这个最不可能的避难所发展壮大。在二十世纪初的三十多年中，哈尔滨是俄罗斯帝国治下最国际化的多民族城市，在远东地区无可匹敌。

　　It had grand boulevards named for Russian writers, onion-domed churches, large businesses… After the Revolution, Harbin became the home to a unique culture — that of the exiled White Russians, driven out by the Bolsheviks’ Red Army.

　　这里有以俄罗斯作家命名的大马路、洋葱顶教堂和大型商业区……十月革命后，哈尔滨成为一种独一无二的文化家园，这里是“白匪”的家，他们是被布尔什维克红军赶出来的。

　　It is perhaps a historical curiosity that the Russian Fascist Party, the first Russian ethnocentric fascist political organisation, was founded in Harbin, where they smashed synagogue windows and hassled Jews staying in the Moderne Hotel through the early 1930s.

　　这可能是历史上的奇谈，俄罗斯的法西斯政党在哈尔滨建立，俄罗斯第一个以种族为中心的法西斯政治组织。整个二十世纪三十年代初，他们敲碎犹太教堂的窗户，骚扰住在摩登呢酒店的犹太人。

　　Like Shanghai, Harbin, city of no passports, was a home for Russian Jewish culture — now preserved in a Jewish Culture Archive in the barely used Harbin Synagogue (which doubles as an architectural history museum) and in Heilongjiang University’s Sino-Israel Archive.

　　和上海一样，哈尔滨是无需护照的城市，这里是俄罗斯犹太文化的家园。这被保存在很少使用的哈尔滨犹太教堂的犹太文化档案馆和黑龙江大学中国以色列档案馆里。

　　Harbin’s poshest district, now called Daoli, was once populated by boulevardiers, churches and shops for Russian foods. Even to this day, Harbin is one of the only places in China where bread is an everyday food (even the local word for bread here is borrowed from Russian).

　　哈尔滨最漂亮的街区，如今叫道里区，这里曾经聚集着大量花花公子、教堂和俄式食品店。即使到了今天，哈尔滨仍是中国唯一以面包为主食的城市。这里对面包的称呼(“列巴”)都来自俄语。

　　A hundred years ago, in cosmopolitan Harbin, the Chinese lived in Daowai, a dangerous enclave that was periodically locked off from the remainder of the city, for instance during epidemics.

　　一百年前，在哈尔滨这个大都会，中国人住在道外，那是一个危险的聚居区，不时会被封锁起来，比如传染病流行时。

　　By 1926, however, the city council came to be dominated by a majority of Chinese tradesmen. In truth, the Russians had lost compelling power when their homeland changed into a new nation. Harbin entered a period of violent contestation: Chinese warlord Zhang Xueliang took over the China Eastern Railway in 1929, which was followed by a Japanese invasion of Harbin in 1931.

　　然而到1926年，市议会被大批中国商人控制。事实上，当他们的祖国变成另一个国家时，俄国人在这里已经失去控制权。哈尔滨也进入了一个暴力争夺的时期：中国军阀张学良在1929年控制了中东铁路;1931年日本人入侵哈尔滨，他们又接手了。

　　The period of Japanese domination lasted until the Soviet Red Army came in 1945. These decades saw the daily life of the city become increasingly gruesome: when the Japanese took over, they started sweeping Russians and Russian Jews off the street to be used as human subjects in the infamous Unit 731, a covert army chemical and biological weapons research facility which undertook brutal experiments on living victims. Most families forbade their children from being outside after 5pm.

　　日据持续到1945年苏联红军到来。那几十年，城市生活越来越可怕：日本人占领后，开始清除俄国人和俄国犹太人，把他们当做臭名昭著的731部队的试验品。731部队是一个秘密的军事生化武器研究所，对人活体进行残忍的试验。很多人家都不准孩子们下午5点后出门。

　　The 1949 victory of the Chinese Communists began in Harbin. This was logical enough: this city of outcasts, the poor, and the criminal would always have a special resonance for the party.

　　1949年，中国共产党在哈尔滨获得胜利。这合乎逻辑，这里到处是流浪汉和穷人。

　　But this victory also marked the end of Harbin as home for those who couldn’t fit in in Soviet Russia, both because it was Communist, and because it was decidedly Chinese.

　　但胜利也意味着，那些在苏联待不下去的人，没法再把哈尔滨当家了，不仅因为这里奉行共产主义，也因为它属于中国。

　　Decades rolled by, and the last Russians desperately sought to emigrate to Australia, Israel or wherever would take them. The USSR itself turned against Stalin, while in Harbin lovers sat on benches in riverside Stalin Park.

　　几十年过去了，最后一波俄国人想方设法移民去澳大利亚、以色列和其他愿意接纳他们的地方。当情侣们坐在城里河畔的斯大林公园谈情说爱时，苏联已经开始反对斯大林了。

　　The lost Harbin Russians… The last two passed away in the 1980s: one in a hospital for the mentally ill; the other, a Jewish lady who had lived by herself for decades, even as the streets echoed with the hoarse, bloody shouts of the Cultural Revolution, died alone in her bed, under which were stuffed archival fragments and decaying photographs.

　　失去哈尔滨的俄国人……八十年代，最后两位去世了，一个死在医院，患有精神病，另一位是犹太人，独自生活数十年后，独自在床上死去，那时街头仍回荡着声嘶力竭和血腥的文革口号，床底下全是撕碎的档案和腐坏的照片。

　　At the same time in the 1980s a new order came to China, one which welcomed western (and Russian) culture once it had been converted into commodity form.

　　八十年代，中国走上正轨，欢迎西方和俄罗斯文化，只要那些都变成商品。

　　With it came a Harbin with no Russians, but plentiful matryoshka dolls, bottles of vodka and fur hats, as well as grand apartment buildings painted in the hues of St Petersburg and statues of Russian poets.

　　随着而来的是没有俄国人的哈尔滨，却有很多套娃、伏特加、皮帽子、画着圣彼得堡风情图案的大公寓和俄国诗人雕塑。

　　But it was only when the Soviet Union dissolved that the Russians themselves started trickling back, this time as businessmen looking for new markets, as prostitutes, and as the parents of children whose diseases couldn’t be treated in Russian hospitals except at a prohibitive price.

　　当苏联解体时，俄国人才慢慢回流。这一回，他们是寻找新市场的商人、妓女以及求医的父母，他们的孩子得病了，可在俄罗斯的治疗费用贵得惊人。

　　A visitor to Harbin will see Russians in fashion advertisements and Russians in hotel bars, Russian writing on the walls and Russian songs played by saxophonists in the street. This world, however, is a Chinese one: the billboards in the suburbs may feature blonde Russian women, but “Harbin welcomes you” is written in Mandarin.

　　哈尔滨游客会在时装广告和酒吧里看到俄罗斯人，墙上写着俄文，街头的萨克斯吹奏着俄国歌曲。这个世界却是中式的：郊区的广告牌上有亮眼的俄罗斯金发美女，可上面却用汉语写着“哈尔滨欢迎你”。

　　The Russian history of this place now exists only as a recuperated, commodified component of the city’s “urban branding,” alongside the park for endangered tigers and the ice sculpture festival.

　　这里的俄罗斯印记不过是“打造城市品牌”时被复原的商品化成分，还有濒危虎动物园和冰雕节。

　　The Russian culture which created Harbin is still very much on display, but absent of a significant Russian population, an everyday life has disappeared, and the only traces of “Russian-ness” are objects which can be purchased — foods, souvenirs, clothes.

　　人民经常展示创造了哈尔滨的俄罗斯文化，但由于没有大量俄罗斯人，俄式生活已经消失，残存的俄式记忆就是一些商品，包括食物、纪念品和服饰。

　　The symbol of this commodification is “Russian Village” — a fake Russian settlement in the Sun Island pleasure park, replete with ersatz versions of Russian architecture.

　　商品化的象征就是“俄罗斯小镇”，太阳岛上的一个虚构的俄罗斯定居点，修建了很多俄式建筑。

　　It's a sort of ethnographic theme park like the one in Jia Zhang Ke’s film The World (2004), in which major world destinations are reconstructed in China. In this village, Harbin natives can pay to get their picture with a “real Russian”, in the heart of a former Russian town. But this contact is empty. What is Russia? What was Russia? The residents of Harbin will never know.

　　这有点类似贾樟柯电影《世界》中的民族主题公园，重建了许多世界著名景点。在这个小镇里，在曾经俄罗斯城镇的中心，哈尔滨本地人可以花钱与“真的俄罗斯人”合影。但这一切显得空洞。何为俄罗斯，何为苏联，哈尔滨居民都不大清楚。