MOSCOW — On a recent cloudless morning, a group of people from Urumqi, in northwestern China, emerged bleary-eyed from the dimly lit mausoleum on Red Square. For the European tourists who wait out the long line that snakes along the red brick walls of the Kremlin, Vladimir Lenin’s embalmed body is a curiosity. For the Chinese visitors, however, he’s much more. “Coming here, exactly 100 years later, is extremely important for the older generation,” said the group’s 32-year-old tour leader, Wang Lin. “For the youngsters, not so much,” he told me as he shepherded away tourists of various ages.

Even before this year, Russia was already growing in popularity as a destination for Chinese tourists: Last year saw a record 1.3 million Chinese visitors spending almost $3 billion a year, according to the Russian tour agency World Without Borders, which caters exclusively to people from China. Chinese tour groups have become a regular fixture on Moscow’s resplendent, chandeliered metro, which was a showcase for the Soviet Union, as have the Chinese tourists regularly thronged around Moscow’s various Lenin statues taking selfies.

But 2017 has seen a surge in Chinese tourists who want to mark the centennial anniversary of the communist revolution that swept the Bolsheviks into power and changed the course of not just Russia but China, too. For the first six months of this year, the number of visitors from China was up by 36 percent compared with the same period last year, according to the Russian Federal Agency for Tourism.

The agency attributed the increase to “red tourism,” an initiative by the Chinese government to encourage travel to places of importance in communist lore, both inside and outside of China, that has been encouraged and promoted by President Xi Jinping himself. Red tourism is being “actively expanded by the Chinese government so that its people don’t forget the value of communist ideology,” said Vladimir Petrovsky, a scholar of Far Eastern studies with the government-linked Russian Academy of Sciences.

But these happy selfie-taking visitors touring sites related to the events of 1917 have made for a strange contrast with the ambivalence of their hosts. On the one hand, Russia has sought to welcome Chinese tourists — and their money — with open arms; on the other, the country remains unsure on how to grapple with the events these tourists are here to commemorate.

In Soviet days, the anniversary of the October Revolution was a much-anticipated annual event that saw huge parades held on Red Square. Today, however, the Russia of President Vladimir Putin is less inclined to celebrate a time when revolutionary zeal swept through the streets and overthrew those in power. (If that wasn’t awkward enough, the Russian Orthodox Church, a powerful institution in today’s Russia, in 2000 canonized the country’s last tsar, Nicholas II; the events of 1917 ultimately led to his death by firing squad.) Despite the uncertainty, the Kremlin is also loath to condemn the 1917 revolution, which led to the creation of a superpower that kept the United States on its toes for decades.

At present, there is no official line on the revolution — unusual for a country where history is often used and, at times, creatively retold for nationalistic purposes. The Kremlin appears to have settled on a strategy of acknowledging the centennial but on the smallest of scales: Late last year, Putin officially tasked the Ministry of Culture with helping academics prepare to mark the centennial, and they have dutifully obliged, organizing small art exhibits and concerts. State-sponsored media outlets have taken on some memorial projects; Tass news agency, for instance, has created an interactive site detailing the events leading up to the revolution. But the pomp and nationalistic grandeur on display at events like Moscow’s annual military parade, which celebrates the country’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, are nowhere to be found.

Russia’s courting of Chinese tourists comes at a time when both countries have been seeking a closer diplomatic relationship. When Xi visited Russia in July — for his third meeting with Putin this year — he described relations between the two nations as being at their “best time in history.” The two leaders were pictured toasting champagne, and by the time Xi left, their countries had inked $10 billion worth of deals.

“Red tourism … is discreet propaganda — it’s an instrument of soft power,” Petrovsky said.

“Red tourism … is discreet propaganda — it’s an instrument of soft power,” Petrovsky said. And if the geopolitics look good, the financials for cash-strapped Russia look even better. “Russians, especially the young, are not nostalgic for their revolutionary past,” he said. “And they’re not going to spend money on it.”

This year, tourism officials expect that around 6,000 Chinese visitors — up 1,000 from last year — will visit Ulyanovsk, a tidy riverfront city on the Volga about 450 miles east of Moscow, where Lenin was born. (The number of Russian tourists — usually around 400,000 — is also expected to increase in the centenary year but not by as much in terms of a percentage jump.) Ulyanovsk’s streets have been decorated for the occasion: Quotes from Karl Marx have been written in Chinese and Russian on the asphalt. Restaurants have prepped with Chinese-language menus. And near the two-story, cream-colored house where Lenin was born, the Venets hotel boasts of staff with knowledge of basic Mandarin. Similar to the home where Josef Stalin was born, in Georgia, a large memorial structure has been built around Lenin’s childhood home, and visitors are encouraged to take pictures of the small wood-paneled room where his mother gave birth. On a recent visit, many Chinese visitors came to pay their respects dressed up in Soviet-era costume, wearing the iconic red neck scarves that are familiar to generations of Soviet schoolchildren as the uniform of Lenin’s youth pioneers group.

Ulyanovsk (formerly known as Simbirsk but which changed its name upon Lenin’s death in 1924, in honor of his pre-revolutionary name, Ulyanov) has ambitions to establish direct flights next year to Shaoshan, the birthplace of Mao Zedong, the founder of modern-day communist China. That deal, agreed on last year, comes under more general plans to bring more Chinese tourists to the so-called “red route,” which follows Lenin’s footsteps from Ulyanovsk to Kazan, where he went to university, to St. Petersburg, the site of the revolution, and then Moscow, where the new Soviet government was set up and which became Lenin’s final resting place.

“For the Chinese, Lenin holds a sort of saintly status,” said Yulia Skoromolova, the director of the state-run regional tourism agency in Ulyanovsk. “They put flowers on the statue of Lenin’s mother. Russians don’t do that,” she said, referring to the city’s cast metal statue of Lenin as a young boy, standing in his mother’s protective embrace.

But even for Skoromolova, who has dedicated most of her career to memorializing Lenin, the anniversary is a complicated one. “Russians relate differently to the revolution. People both gained and lost during this period,” she said in the gardens near the complex, where children jump about in fountains under the gaze of an immense head of Lenin. “Another revolution would be the worst thing ever. It could turn into a civil war. Of course no one wants that.”

Image credit: OLGA MALTSEVA/AFP/Getty Images

Like this article? Read an unlimited amount of articles, plus access to our entire 46-year printed archive, the FP App, and the FP Insights Tool when you subscribe to FP Premium for 20% off!

MOSCOW — For years, the American far-right has received tacit approval and support from Russia. But Nazis have proved a step too far.

Russian media outlets — never ones to let a good American crisis go to waste — quickly began voicing outrage over the race-fueled unrest taking place in the United States of recent weeks, which saw one woman killed at a white nationalist rally, followed by widespread anger after President Donald Trump appeared to defend those who attended the march. State-run television talk shows on the Sunday prime-time slot this past weekend zoomed in on America’s race problem. The popular News of the Week program showed a map of the United States with the 11 former Confederate states highlighted; they were quickly colored red to show that Trump had won them in the election. There were lengthy explanations on the differences between neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

But the Nazi symbolism of the marches in Charlottesville, Virginia, and over the weekend— the swastikas and the iron crosses — became a particular target for Russian ire. “In Russia, we’ve had so many illusions about Trump,” said Veronika Krasheninnikova, a prominent member of the country’s civic chamber, an advisory board that answers to President Vladimir Putin. “Now it’s clear that he acts with the ideology of hatred, violence, and aggression. The masks can finally come off.”

Russian media have long reacted with glee to the many occasions that American actions fail to live up to American rhetoric, and, in some ways, this time is not so different. The racially motivated unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, for instance, in 2014 was splashed across the state television channels of American foes, including Iran and Russia, as proof of the country’s new status as a “failed state.”

Nor is it surprising that Russia is reveling in America’s shortcomings at this particular moment. U.S.-Russian ties are at their worst since the Cold War days. In reaction to the latest round of sanctions, the U.S. Embassy here is currently reducing its personnel by 755, following orders by Putin, who said they must leave by Sept. 1. Two U.S. diplomatic properties are also being closed. On Monday, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow said it was suspending issuing nonimmigrant visas to Russians for one week. “Russia’s decision to reduce the United States’ diplomatic presence here calls into question Russia’s seriousness about pursuing better relations,” the embassy said in a statement.

The much-scrutinized personal rapport between Trump and Putin, which started out reasonably well, has proved unable to maintain, even with the promise of improved relations between the two countries. When Trump begrudgingly signed a bill imposing new sanctions against Russia at the beginning of the month, it felt like something of a final straw. Since then, Trump has been mocked by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Twitter and was called “weak” and a “loser” on state media outlets.

So when the shadow of fascism reared its head in America, Russia was quick to react.

Late last week, one day after the prominent neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer re-registered its domain in Russia after its U.S. provider, GoDaddy, booted it off, the Russian government took it down, saying it “propagates neo-Nazi ideology.” The Russian Embassy in Washington was triumphant. “Russia did within hours what [the United States] tolerated [for] years,” its spokesman, Nick Lakhonin, tweeted, adding that Nazism was “still legal” in the country. The Russian Embassy in South Africa, seemingly apropos of nothing, tweeted on Sunday a historical document on Soviet victory over Nazism in World War II.

Yet Russia’s outrage about American neo-Nazis is more than just opportunism. “First and foremost, anything ugly about the U.S. is eagerly used by Russian officialdom,” said Maria Lipman, a political analyst in Moscow and editor in chief of George Washington University’s Counterpoint journal. “But it’s also noble — and justified — anger over the use of Nazi symbols. Victory of the USSR over Nazi Germany is a matter of pride for an overwhelming majority of Russians.”

Russia shares a complicated history with the Third Reich. The Soviet Union’s World War II triumph over Adolf Hitler is celebrated across Russia each year with pomp and circumstance, and the victory itself has become a defining feature of modern Russia, which still has not recovered demographically from the loss of around 27 million people during the war — far more than any other belligerent. (Less attention is given, however, to the country’s infamous signing of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which saw Soviet and German powers carve up Eastern Europe, including Ukraine. It was abandoned after Hitler invaded Soviet territory, and today the controversial pact is downplayed in contemporary Russian schoolbooks.)

Nazi symbols, such as those seen in Charlottesville, hit a genuine nerve in Russia. But that gut reaction has less to do with racist or xenophobic ideology than the specific salutes and swastikas American neo-Nazis have displayed at their marches. A host of far-right groups across Europe have received financial and political backing from Moscow, and Russia itself is home to many neo-Nazi-style, pro-Slavic, race-based hate groups. But these organizations tend to avoid making explicit references to Nazism or fascism. Three years ago, Putin officially made it a crime to rehabilitate Nazism or propagate Holocaust denial, though liberal activists at the time called it a new means to curb freedom of speech.

Russian public disgust for Nazis has even played a role in the war in Ukraine. The Russian state propaganda machine often frames the current conflict in Ukraine — where Moscow-backed troops are fighting Ukrainians in the east — as a fight against fascist forces. Pro-Ukrainian activists, for instance, often pay homage to Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist who fought both Soviet and Nazi forces; Russia calls Bandera a Nazi sympathizer. The propaganda may be clumsy, but the fears it plays off of — and the basis for those fears in Bandera supporters’ actions, such as Hitler salutes at some pro-Ukrainian rallies and the selling of Nazi paraphernalia at Kiev marketplaces — are real enough.

RT, the prominent English-language news outlet funded by the Kremlin, compared the Charlottesville rally to those held in Ukraine in recent years. “Same Nazi symbols, torchlight parades — different coverage,” RT wrote, saying Western media were hypocritical to call the Americans “neo-Nazis” but not the hooded men in Ukraine carrying torches.

Donald Trump, it seems, can cultivate better relations with Russia or wink at neo-Nazis — but not both.

Photo credit: Chet Strange/Getty Images

Like this article? Read an unlimited amount of articles, plus access to our entire 46-year printed archive, the FP App, and the FP Insights Tool when you subscribe to FP Premium for 20% off!