Beyond Siberia

IN FINE August weather, Vladivostok's grimy beach and rickety fairground are thronged. Children queue for reindeer rides. Tourists promenade in what was once a tsarist fort, then a closed Soviet city, but now feels freer than Moscow, seven time-zones to the west. Sergei Darkin, governor of the Primorsky region, and his close ally Vladimir Nikolaev, Vladivostok's young mayor, seem to be doing a better job than the corrupt ex-communist bureaucrats who run much of Russia.

Yes, but. Mr Nikolaev was elected only after his main rival was wounded in a grenade attack, then disqualified from last year's election. “They said I eat children for breakfast,” says the mayor of allegations about his criminal past. When your correspondent says that no, he himself has never been in jail, the mayor, who served time for violent crime, retorts that he “did not live in Russia and have to defend [his] business in the 1980s and 1990s.”