Millionka Quarter
Millionka Quarter in Vladivostok
Millionka originated from a small village on the shore of the Amur Bay in the Semyonovsky Bucket (modern Sports Harbor), which turned into Chinese quarters. In the pre-revolutionary period and the first years of Soviet power, these were the most populated quarters of Vladivostok. There were many Chinese shops, small shops, restaurants, canteens and eateries, hairdressing baths, workshops, theaters. The center of life was Semyonovskaya Street. In its lower part was located one of the city bazaars. There was a trade in goods, fresh fish and seafood delivered from boats and chalands in the bucket.
What did you not know about Millionka quarter
By the way: initially Millionka was called only one yard, uniting houses along the street. Kolkhoz (Semenovskaya) 3, Border 12 and the Chinese Theatre. The name was later extended to an entire quarter. By the end of the 20s, Millionka was called the area from Pekingskaya Street (modern Admiral Fokina) in the south to the street. The last (modern Utkinskaya) in the north and from the Amur Gulf to the Aleutsk.
At the beginning of the XX century, the city administration planned to evict all Chinese outside the city limits and demolish their fanzas and wooden houses. Due to the active opposition of the Chinese population, this project was not fully implemented: only a small part of the Chinese population was resettled, and the authorities managed to build stone houses.
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>>>History of the Millionka quarter
The houses belonged to the rich Chinese and were built chaotically, without special planning of the quarter. One of the stone houses on Semyonovskaya Street due to the large number of residents was called “Million yard”, or “Million”. This name soon passed to the entire district.
“Near the spacious bright apartments of the Chinese nobility coexist gloomy, cramped, cramped rooms full of bark. At night, tired people interspersed with children sleep literally on each other on the bunks and on the floor. And only in the daytime, when the poor go to work, their pitiful quarters acquire a relatively decomposed appearance. Rawness, dirt, suffocating smells are indispensable companions of the dwellings of the Chinese poor ....
The newspaper "Red Banner" in 1925 described the raid of the police on the dens of Millionka: "At 12 o'clock in the night on Semyonovskaya Street it seemed dull, gloomy. At the vaulted gates leading into the chaos of the courtyards, small groups of Chinese were vaguely outlined. The laryngeal cries cut through the frosty silence briefly and sonorously. “Snitchers,” one of the policemen remarked to me, and we rushed. We ran to a house as chaotic as a maze. He hid in his depths an innumerable number of dens. We had to catch the Chinese off guard and find physical evidence of the criminal work of their masters. The warning of our appearance went from one snitch to another through the gates that hung over the narrow little bridges, thrown at the height of several floors from one wing to another, and quieted down in the unlit corridors. Snitchers day and night stick around the corners of the street near the dens, watching closely the appearance of the police ... On the streets of the city you can meet dirty ragged men and women, annoyingly and meekly "shooting" alms. These are not ordinary beggars, they are morphineers. We've been to these dens, too. We enter the room. This is a dirty nativity, in which both the Russians and the Chinese lie in the dirty boardwalks. Some of them are completely naked with terrible sores on their bodies. The air is saturated with the smell of morphine and cocaine, but there is no trace of the drug. On Semenovskaya and Dzerzhinsky there are morphinist shelter apartments. Only well-known people have the right to enter. Here is another house in Peking, where both Russian and Chinese women prostitutes find shelter. Seemingly a peaceful day, at night the house becomes a den of vice.
In 1938, by a special decision of the CPSU Central Committee, Millionka was liquidated by employees of the Primorsky Regional Directorate of the NKVD. The Chinese population was completely evicted during the "Chinese operations" in 1937-1938.
Today, Millionka is a cult, we can say bohemian district of Vladivostok, which has preserved its historical appearance. It's prestigious to have an office here. There are popular cafes and restaurants here. Tours are conducted here, during which the myths and legends of this amazing corner of Vladivostok are told to tourists.
By the way, in 2010 Vladivostok artists of the art community "33+1" created 10 concrete reliefs in human growth in the city center "Inhabitants of Millionka". Among the embodied images: “Chinese water-carrier”, “Painter”, “Japanese city”, “Natasha and the interventionist”, “Poet Slavik Kryzhanovsky”, “King of a Millionaire”, “Trench with Kolchak’s gold” and others. The images are based on historical photos of old Vladivostok made in 1919-20 by American Merill Haskell.
