In Russia’s Far East, a Fledgling Las Vegas for Asia’s Gamblers<br />But despite ever closer relations between Moscow and Beijing, said Artyom Lukin, an international studies professor<br />at the Far East Federal University, “Russia has realized that free Chinese money is not coming.”<br />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,<br />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.<br />Financed largely by a Hong Kong company, Summit Ascent, it is also the single biggest Chinese investment in a region<br />that President Vladimir V. Putin has tried to turn into a showcase of Russia’s “pivot to the East.”<br />Ever since Nikita S. Khrushchev stopped off in the Russian Far East after a trip to California in 1959 and decreed<br />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.<br />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,<br />and by the writings of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a gambling addict who explored the allure and perils of addiction in his novel “The Gambler.”<br />A champion of traditional Christian values, Mr. Putin banned casinos and slot machines in 2009, complaining<br />that too many Russians “lose their last penny and pensions through gambling.”<br />Having Chinese and other foreigners lose their money, however, is apparently not a problem.
