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Primorye, which is also known as the Maritime Territory, is about the size of Washington state. Tucked into the southeast corner of Russia by the Sea of Japan, it is a thickly forested and mountainous region that combines the backwoods claustrophobia of Appalachia with the frontier roughness of the Yukon.
Unlike wolf or bear claws, which are designed primarily for traction and digging, a cat’s claw is needle-sharp at the end, and bladed along a portion of its inside length. With the exception of a snake’s fang, it is about as close to a surgical tool as one can find in nature.
“Now I felt afraid of nothing,” wrote Arseniev in his perennial classic, Dersu the Trapper, “neither tigers nor brigands, nor deep snow or floods. Dersu was with me.”
After the war, Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad. It became the base for the Soviet Baltic Fleet and, like Vladivostok, its Pacific counterpart, the city was declared off limits to outsiders. This occurred at the same time that George Orwell’s 1984 was introducing Western readers to a terrifying new reality, one that resembled the nascent Kaliningrad more closely than Orwell could have imagined. As Kaliningrad crawled to its feet out of the rubble and ash of Königsberg, it did so in the Stalinist image of urban development and social control. Replacing medieval towers, parapets, and gargoyles
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Lenin may have envisioned it, but Stalin mastered it: the ability to disorient and disconnect individuals and large populations, not just from their physical surroundings and core communities but, ultimately, from themselves.
Some of the country’s most notorious prisons and labor camps were located there, including the dreaded and, for many years, unmentionable Sakhalin Island, a frigid and lonely sub-planet from which many never returned.
Today, the Bikin valley is seen by many outsiders as a place as dangerous for its human inhabitants as it is for its animals. It is dotted with small, isolated villages, many of which operate off the grid and outside the law.
For a certain kind of person, Sobolonye offered a life that was hard to improve on: decent housing, predictable employment, ready access to a river full of fish, and, for those who knew what to look for, a forest full of nuts, berries, mushrooms, medicinal roots, and wild game. In the summer, you could even grow watermelons.
Lenin may have preached Marx, but his methods were decidedly Machiavellian: “It is precisely now and only now,” he wrote, in a top secret memorandum to the Politburo during a severe famine in 1922, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the utmost savagery and merciless energy … so as to secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles.… We must teach these [clergy] a lesson right now, so that they will not
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“It becomes like a drug,” he said, “you have to have it. So, it’s a strange feeling when you come back [to civilization] because, in the taiga, the most important things are your bullets. But as soon as you get to the main road and see the bus coming, you understand that those bullets don’t mean anything in this other life. All of a sudden, you need money—strange paper, which you couldn’t even use to start a fire, and your bullets aren’t going to help you. This transition can be very difficult.”
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.
The Canadian poet Eric Miller summed up the mind-set driving these binges better than just about anyone: A cornucopia! Bliss of killing without ever seeming to subtract from the tasty sum of infinity!
Enthusiasm for what came to be known as the Hunting Hypothesis took a quantum leap in the 1960s and 1970s when Robert Ardrey, a playwright and screenwriter with a background in anthropology, published a series of influential books culminating in a bestseller called The Hunting Hypothesis (1976). In them, Ardrey popularized this volatile idea that had been circulating among social scientists for nearly a century: that of man-as-killer-ape. Ardrey, influenced in part by his own traumatic experiences reporting on the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, summed it up this way: “If among all the members of
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Describing the return of a successful hunting party in the Kalahari Desert, the ethnographer Lorna Marshall summed up the gatherer’s age-old dilemma: “We heard the sound of voices in the encampment, rising in volume and pitch like the hum of excited bees. Some people ran toward the hunters … some danced up and down, children squealed and ran about … I venture to say no women have been greeted this way when they returned with vegetables.”
Everything resembles the truth, everything can happen to a man. NIKOLAI GOGOL, Dead Souls
Time, for the tiger, especially the male, is more like time is for the shark: a largely solitary experience of hunting and digesting followed by more hunting, until he dies.
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.”
“For a [cavalry] charge there are no troops that could equal them.… And who that has heard a Slav song, crooning, pathetic, weird, sung by a Cossack at night in the middle of a plain silent as death, can forget it?”
Around 1895, an elderly survivor of this game was interviewed by a Russian researcher and travel writer named Dmitri Shreider whose book, an early profile of the region entitled Our Ussuri, was “approved by the Czar’s censors” in 1897. The following excerpt makes Gogol look like a documentarist.
other humans was total immersion into the animal world. As trained scientists, both men took a disciplined and energetic interest in their new circumstances, which Martin recounted in great detail in his memoir, The Sheltering Desert (1957). In it, he describes how they were forced to adapt to an elemental existence, which centered on a trinity of basic needs: safety, food, and water.
as the months turned into years, “Animals began to play an increasing part in them and the distinction between human beings and animals became blurred.” Martin’s subconscious—his interior umwelt—was gradually recalibrating itself to match his new, if atavistic, reality.
Seen from this point of view, Southern Africa was not so much the Cradle of Humankind as it was the crucible. If the savanna was as Brain and others believe, it would have been a kind of ultimate proving ground for slow, weak, thin-skinned but increasingly quick-witted creatures like ourselves.
It is striking, too, that, unlike so many other species—cats, for example—we are the only branch of our family (Hominidae) who survived the journey. In this sense, we are evolutionary orphans—a broken family of one, and it puts us in strange company: we share our genetic solitude with the platypus, the gharial, and the coelacanth.
Nowadays, in many parts of the world—not just Sobolonye—it is possible to starve while watching television.
if a person goes through a tough ordeal in his life, he either breaks down or becomes stronger than he used to be. In my case, it was the latter. After this incident, I became stronger—not physically, of course, but spiritually. Maybe it will sound funny, but, possibly, some strength from this tiger was transferred to me.”
“What went wrong in the Russian Far East?” wondered John Stephan in his comprehensive history of the region. “Why did it not develop like British Columbia or Hokkaido? How did such a rich land and littoral, settled by such talented and hardworking people, and bordering on such dynamic economies, present a spectacle redolent of a Third World basket case?”
The notion that it was animals who taught us to read may seem counterintuitive, but listening to skilled hunters analyze tiger sign is not that different from listening to literature majors deconstruct a short story. Both are sorting through minutiae, down to the specific placement and inflection of individual elements, in order to determine motive, subtext, and narrative arc.
There were grains of truth in all of these claims, but underlying them was a lack of collective morale, distrust of authority, and an ingrained passivity that is one of the enduring legacies of State-enforced disempowerment.
Trush was put back together with a “herring,” a name derived from the cans from which these improvised staples were often made. The method is simple, if unsanitary: with a knife, slice a short strip of steel out of a handy can; after pinching the wound together, bend the strip in half, place it over the wound, and clamp it down. Repeat as necessary. Trush was never seen by a doctor. They sterilized the wound with vodka. He kept his herrings in for a week and pried them off himself.
Today, Sobolonye has the feel of a time capsule in which the most damaging effects of perestroika have been preserved. What is so haunting is the fact that this time capsule contains people, and it is clear from the faces and the material poverty that many of them remain trapped in 1995, which could have been Appalachia in 1935, a time when life in the resource-dependent hill country was particularly desperate and bleak.