In Russia’s Far East, a Fledgling Las Vegas for Asia’s Gamblers
But despite ever closer relations between Moscow and Beijing, said Artyom Lukin, an international studies professor
at the Far East Federal University, “Russia has realized that free Chinese money is not coming.”
Chinese gamblers are arriving, however, if only because gambling is illegal in their own country, except in Macau on the southern coast near Hong Kong,
and because the forest northeast of Vladivostok offers the only accessible casino for the more than 100 million Chinese who live in provinces just across the border from Russia.
Financed largely by a Hong Kong company, Summit Ascent, it is also the single biggest Chinese investment in a region
that President Vladimir V. Putin has tried to turn into a showcase of Russia’s “pivot to the East.”
Ever since Nikita S. Khrushchev stopped off in the Russian Far East after a trip to California in 1959 and decreed
that Vladivostok had become “a second San Francisco,” the port city’s formidable assets — great natural beauty, location in Asia and a highly educated population — have stirred bold dreams.
Gambling has a long and often troubled history in Russia, where attitudes have been shaped by the Orthodox Church, which opposes casinos as the devil’s work,
and by the writings of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a gambling addict who explored the allure and perils of addiction in his novel “The Gambler.”
A champion of traditional Christian values, Mr. Putin banned casinos and slot machines in 2009, complaining
that too many Russians “lose their last penny and pensions through gambling.”
Having Chinese and other foreigners lose their money, however, is apparently not a problem.
