The last of theHarbintsy talks with James Palmer

Mara Moustafine was born in Harbin in 1954, before her mixed Russian-Jewish-Tartar family emigrated to Australia in 1959. They were among the last of the Harbintsy, those Russians who, after fleeing the Russian Civil War, ended up forming a new community in Harbin. Her award-winning memoir, Secrets and Spies, traces her efforts to trace the history of her family over eighty years and three countries.

What childhood memories do you have of China?

It’s difficult to tell which are your own memories, and which are from stories that you heard. I was only four and a bit when we left, after all. My most vivid images are the countryside and the river. When we came to Australia, though, there was a huge Chinese influence in my life; we brought so much Chinoiseries – carved chests, lamps, and so on – and my parents both worked as translators, so we brought lots and lots of books, an entire collection of Chinese calligraphy, brushes, and so on.

Why did your parents pick Australia?

We left quite late. When Sino-Soviet relations were in full bloom, people were invited back by Khruschev to till the so-called ‘virgin lands’ that were opening up in Siberia, and it was made quite difficult to go elsewhere. My father said ‘No way I’m taking this child to the Soviet Union’ – we were getting hints via letters that things were bad, like people saying ‘You should come when Mara has finished university’ – when I was only two! So we picked Australia instead.

Harbin was an extraordinary town because it had so many minorities from the former Tsarist empire – Jews, Poles, Tartars, Ukrainians, you name it, were encouraged to come. St. Petersburg positively encouraged Jews, in particular, to go, and they were eager to because within Russia they were confined by anti-Semitic laws, and limited to settle in certain areas. So it was a frontier town, and people were bound together by shared Russian roots, but also within a mélange of different nationalities. It was culturally very rich and quite tolerant. My Jewish maternal grandfather came from a family in Belarus that only spoke Yiddish – a real shtetl culture – and though he travelled all over the world, he came back to Harbin. It was a place where people could become modern, a cosmopolitan city.

What survives of the Harbintsy today?

The physical appearance, of course. For me, it’s the cupolas, which even the new apartments have. Over the last fifteen years, there have been strong efforts to preserve the Russian heritage of the city, too. The church of St. Sophia has been restored as a museum, and so have the two synagogues and the mosque, and the Jewish cemetery. There are still children of mixed marriages there, though the few survivors of the original community I interviewed for my book have sadly died since then. But many Russians still feel a strong bond to Harbin, partially because of that attachment to a pre-revolutionary Russian culture preserved in formaldehyde, but also because it has the gravestones of their families.

Secrets and Spies is published by Random House.