More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Sparsely inhabited, seldom visited, and poorly understood, the “far side” of Russia is not so much a frontier as a margin for error.
Primorye’s bizarre assemblage of flora and fauna leaves one with the impression that Noah’s ark had only recently made landfall, and that, rather than dispersing to their proper places around the globe, many of its passengers had simply decided to stay, including some we never knew existed.
This Boreal Jungle (for lack of a better term) is unique on earth, and it nurtures the greatest biodiversity of any place in Russia, the largest country in the world. It is over this surreal menagerie that the Amur tiger reigns supreme.
one could just as easily say: this is what you get when you pair the agility and appetites of a cat with the mass of an industrial refrigerator.
there is no creature in the taiga that is off limits to the tiger; it alone can mete out death at will.
There is a sense among many of Russia’s nouveau riche that they are above the law, and many of them are: what has emerged since the collapse of the Soviet Union is a kind of ersatz aristocracy, one that enjoys its noblesse sans oblige.
this is what makes Trush such an unusual presence in this brutal milieu: he is a man who relishes the role of the authoritarian heavy, and he has carefully honed himself into a dangerous weapon that he is more than ready to unleash. And yet this capability is tempered by deep veins of mercy and compassion; life is hard in the taiga for man and beast alike, and Trush understands this. When he finds bear cubs orphaned by poachers (eight at last count), he nurses them in his apartment. Somehow, he is able—even in the heat of the moment—to keep both sides of the story in mind, and both sides of
...more
“In situations like this, my rule is from the Bible,” Trush explains: “ ‘First, there was the word and then a deed.’ It is always better to warn a person first; if he does not understand that warning, take action. That’s the principle that I follow. Not for everyone, though.” Trush is a practicing Christian in a largely secular society and, in this sense, patience, compassion, and forgiveness could be seen as revolutionary acts against a system that has, for generations, demonstrated a minimum of these qualities.
it is safe to say Khomenko was desperate. One look at his rhombus of a house was proof enough.
Fate can be a bitch, but, as Zaitsev, Dvornik, and Onofrecuk had discovered, it can also be a tiger.
Snow has a muffling effect on all sounds, but in the case of a tiger, especially one making an effort to avoid detection, this effect is absolute. Meanwhile, Trush and Lazurenko announced themselves with every step; despite their best efforts, they might as well have been on radar. Their disadvantage was striking; it was as if the tiger had removed itself from the same plane of physical consequence to which they remained bound. This was not an animal they followed, but a contradiction, a silence that was at once incarnate and invisible.
VLADIMIR MARKOV HAD A HISTORY WITH TIGERS, AND IT TOOK THE form not of a linear continuum but of a steadily tightening spiral.
When a literate young Muscovite, bound for a prestigious American music school, was asked about Primorye in July of 2008, he said he hadn’t heard of it. “Maybe it’s near Iran,” he guessed. To the more straightforward question, “Are there tigers in Russia?” he answered, “I think only in the circus.” For many Russian urbanites, “Russia” stops at the Urals, if not sooner.
In the minds of most Russians, the Far East lies over the edge of the known world and is, itself, a form of oblivion. For any European Russian, whether ordinary worker or privileged member of the nomenklatura,1 a one-way ticket like Markov’s was tantamount to banishment.
The journey from Kaliningrad to Khabarovsk, the regional capital of the Far East, takes one a quarter of the way around the world. To get there in 1969 would have meant two to three weeks on the Trans-Siberian, the tracks unspooling into the future with agonizing slowness like a real-time progression of Eurasian conquest and collapse.
Though it was hailed as a positive development in the West, few Westerners fully grasp the toll perestroika took and continues to take on the country. Among Russians, it has since earned the ignominious nickname “Kata stroika.”
When Russians wax eloquent about their homeland, they will often invoke Mother Russia, but Mother Russia is not the nation, and She is certainly not the leadership; She is the Land. The deep Russian bond to the earth—specifically, the soil—transcends all other affiliations
May is potato planting time in Russia, and just about everybody participates. It’s a tradition, it’s a ritual, and it’s how you make it through the winter in a country where winter seems to last forever and salaries are inadequate, when they are paid at all. Armenian Radio has addressed this issue, too: Our listeners asked us: “Is it possible to make ends meet on salary alone?” We’re answering: “We don’t know, we never tried.”
“The most terrifying and important test for a human being is to be in absolute isolation,” he explained. “A human being is a very social creature, and ninety percent of what he does is done only because other people are watching. Alone, with no witnesses, he starts to learn about himself—who is he really?
Many people reach a point where they realize that the shape their life has taken does not square with the ambitions they once had for it. In Russia, there are entire generations for whom this is the case.
It bears some resemblance to what wolves do when they get into a sheep pen: they slaughter simply because they can and, in the case of humans, until a profit can no longer be turned. For the sea otter, this moment occurred between 1790 and 1830; for the American bison, it happened between 1850 and 1880; for the Atlantic cod, it lasted for centuries, ending only in 1990. These mass slaughters have their analogue in the financial markets to which they are often tied, and they end the same way every time. The Canadian poet Eric Miller summed up the mind-set driving these binges better than just
...more
Early humans, pre-fire, may well have been Paleolithic Wizards of Oz—masters of illusion and psyops who eventually, amazingly, willed their “impersonations” of superiority into fact. If only during daylight hours.
Vladimir Schetinin, the former head of Inspection Tiger, and an expert on Amur tiger attacks, has accumulated a number of stories like this over the past thirty years. “There are at least eight cases that my teams and I investigated,” he said in March of 2007, “and we all arrived at the same conclusion: if a hunter fired a shot at a tiger, that tiger would track him down, even if it took him two or three months. It is obvious that tigers will sit and wait specifically for the hunter who has fired shots at them.”
An Amur tiger’s sense of superiority and dominance over his realm is absolute: because of his position in the forest hierarchy, the only force a male will typically submit to is a stronger tiger or, occasionally, a large brown bear. Nothing else ranks in the taiga, and this is why, if threatened or attacked, these animals have been known to climb trees to swat at helicopters and run headlong into gunfire.
This was the winter tiger: not the svelte, languorous creature of long grass and jungle pools, but the heavy-limbed sovereign of mountains, snow, and moonlight, resplendent and huge in his cool blue solitude.
In the Bikin valley, it is generally believed that if a tiger has decided to attack you, you will not be able to see it. With the exception of the polar bear, which also hunts by stealth, there is no other land mammal this big whose survival depends on its ability to disappear.
The way Mikhail Dunkai saw it, accepting meat from a tiger is like accepting a favor from the Communist Party, or the mafia: once obligated, it can be very hard to extract oneself.
During this period, a single pride of fifteen lions killed approximately 1,500 people before George Rushby, a legendary British elephanthunter-turned-game-warden, exterminated the pride, one by one. It took him a year. “If a man-eater continues to kill and eat people for any length of time,” wrote Rushby in his memoir, No More the Tusker, “it develops an almost supernatural cunning. This often makes the hunting down and killing of such a lion a lengthy and difficult task.”
As long as they are carnivorous and/or humanoid, the monster’s form matters little. Whether it is Tyrannosaurus rex, saber toothed tiger, grizzly bear, werewolf, bogeyman, vampire, Wendigo, Rangda, Grendel, Moby-Dick, Joseph Stalin, the Devil, or any other manifestation of the Beast, all are objects of dark fascination, in large part because of their capacity to consciously, willfully destroy us.
A hand-to-mouth existence is, for most people who have the time and inclination to read books like this, nothing more than a quaint and vivid turn of phrase. But for many in the Bikin valley, it is a factual description of their reality. Denis Burukhin summed it up bitterly: “In Sobolonye, you go into the taiga for a week, come back, eat what you’ve got, and then it’s back into the taiga. What kind of life is that? It’s no life at all.”
Under communism, there was room, albeit strictly controlled, for aspiration, and there was a State guarantee of basic security in terms of education, employment, housing, and food. But most of these assurances disintegrated after perestroika. Replacing them, along with crime, alcoholism, and despondency, were satellite dishes offering multiple channels that allowed you to see just how far behind you really were. Nowadays, in many parts of the world—not just Sobolonye—it is possible to starve while watching television.
Sokolov paused, trying to find words to describe a sensation that is essentially indescribable. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas could have helped him here: on the African savanna, she explains in The Tribe of Tiger, when thunder rolls, lions will roar back. What other creature, besides the lion, the tiger, and the whale, can answer Creation in its own language?
In the 1970s, after the Damansky Island clashes, a joke began circulating: “Optimists study English; pessimists study Chinese; and realists learn to use a Kalashnikov.”
To end a person’s life is one thing; to eradicate him from the face of the earth is another. The latter is far more difficult to do, and yet the tiger had done it, had transported this young man beyond death to a kind of carnal oblivion.
The one certainty in tiger tracks is: follow them long enough and you will eventually arrive at a tiger, unless the tiger arrives at you first.
The impact of an attacking tiger can be compared to that of a piano falling on you from a second-story window. But unlike the piano, the tiger is designed to do this, and the impact is only the beginning.
the tiger’s roar exists in the same sonic realm as a natural catastrophe; it is one of those sounds that give meaning and substance to “the fear of God.”
Today, Sobolonye has the feel of a time capsule in which the most damaging effects of perestroika have been preserved.
Sasha Snow is the British filmmaker who brought this story to a wider audience in the form of the multiple award-winning drama-documentary Conflict Tiger. His vision, generosity, friendship, and enthusiasm emboldened me to go to Russia, and have nourished me ever since.
For those wanting a rich and readable one-stop source on everything tiger, I would heartily recommend The World of the Tiger by Richard Perry (sadly, out of print).
