The Tiger

by John Vaillant

By 1937, the purges were peaking nationwide, and no one was safe: peasants, teachers, scientists, indigenous people, Old Believers, Koreans, Chinese, Finns, Lithuanians, Party members—it didn’t seem to matter as long as the quota was met. The invented charge in Primorye was, typically, spying for Japan, but it could be almost anything. Torture was routine. At the height of the purges, roughly a thousand people were being murdered every day. In 1939, Russia went to war (on several fronts), and this obviated the need for purging—just send them to the front. By one estimate, 90 percent of draft-age Nanai and Udeghe males died in military service. The rest were forced onto collective farms, and millions more Russians of all ethnicities were banished to the gulag. Under Stalin, science was a prisoner, too—bound and gagged by a particularly rigid brand of Marxist ideology, which declared, in short, that in order for Mankind to realize His destiny as a superhuman, super-rational master of all, Mother Nature must be forced to bow and, in the process, be radically transformed. By the mid-1930s, most advocates of environmental protection had been silenced one way or another, and their ideas replaced by slogans like “We cannot expect charity from nature. We must tear it from her.”