MEANWHILE A Cosmopolitan's Life in Polyglot Shanghai
Philip Bowring International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, March 21, 2001
SHANGHAI "Kost died, did you hear?" "Who?" "Kost. Kostrometinoff." "Who?" There is scarcely one among the thousands of expatriates crowding into this once again youthful city who has heard of Sergei Ivanovich Kostrometinoff, or Kost.
.
The Chinese who remember him are not the sort you will meet in the office towers of Pudong, the new city across the Huangpu river, or in the trendy restaurants of Puxi, once the International Settlement and French Concession, where some buildings but few people of Kost's era survive. At best his Chinese friends would be in impoverished retirement. Others may yet be in prison.
.
Kost has so vanished from this city and the media consciousness that the news of his death in Australia in 1999 at the age of 90 has only just reached this writer, via Sydney, Moscow and London. His death went unrecorded by the publications on whose behalf he suffered so much. So this is a belated tribute to one who represented the internationalism of Shanghai in an earlier era.
.
One day in 1982, a white-haired but sprightly European man looking a little like Pope John Paul II appeared at the Shanghai office of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.
.
This was in the dark days when China was just beginning to reopen. It was long after that imperial bank had been evicted from the grandest of the classical buildings along Shanghai's Bund and long before HSBC, as it is now called, moved into a high-rise in Pudong. Foreign residents of Shanghai then numbered in tens, not thousands, and the Hongkong Bank's representative office comprised one Briton, Tim Cotton.
.
The old man was Kost, just released from 15 years' imprisonment, much of it spent in solitary confinement.
.
Born in the northeastern city of Harbin to a Russian father and English mother, Kost was fluent in these languages and Chinese, and had passable Japanese. He worked for British American Tobacco before the 1932 Japanese occupation of Manchuria forced him to Shanghai, where he joined the American-owned Shanghai Power Company. After the revolution he became a free-lance journalist and adviser to foreign companies.
.
Kost was arrested in 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Held without charge and incommunicado, he literally disappeared. Even his daughter did not know what happened to him.
.
Unlike Anthony Grey, a British correspondent for Reuters arrested the following year, Kost had no protection. Mr. Grey, who became a cause célèbre, was released after a year. Kost was a Russian without a passport whose knowledge of China made him doubly suspect. He was a free-lancer for the South China Morning Post and Far Eastern Economic Review, Hong Kong publications with no international clout. (Both were partly owned by the Hongkong Bank, which explained his visit there).
.
Kost was tried eight years after his arrest. The evidence was his "counter-revolutionary" articles, though they were factual and unopinionated. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison. His daughter Irene was also imprisoned, for four years, before being deported to the Soviet Union to join her mother, who died in 1980. Irene remained there, becoming a Chinese newsreader for Radio Moscow.
.
Kost was released in 1982, aged 73. He eked out a living in Shanghai as a translator until Tim Cotton and the then editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, Derek Davies, helped him to be resettled in Australia, at a Sydney home for elderly Russians from China. There he passed his last 13 years, a modest hero who talked without bitterness about his past.
.
Kost knew Shanghai at its apogee as a treaty port in the early 1930s, when it was at the cutting edge of modernity and was home to even more foreigners than now. He would have been delighted by today's Shanghai, with its passion for the world's tallest and newest.
.
Reborn Shanghai is also conscious of its past, protecting some architectural monuments to its former glory. Kost, the dyed-in-Shanghai, multiethnic, multilingual foreigner, should be remembered as a participant in and a victim of this city's 20th-century history - and of the perils of free-lance journalism.
.

For Related Topics See:
Opinion & Editorial

< < Back to Start of Article
  E-mail To A Friend Print Article Text Larger Text Small Single Column Mutli Column