The Tiger
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Read between September 8 - October 17, 2022
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Confucius was passing by Mount Tai when he saw a distraught woman weeping by a grave. Resting his hands on the wooden bar at the front of his carriage, he listened to her wailing. Then, he sent a student to speak the following words: “A great misfortune must have befallen you, that you cry so bitterly.” She answered, “Indeed it is so. My husband and his father have both been killed by tigers, and now my son, too, has fallen prey to them.” Confucius asked, “Why do you remain here?” She answered, “No callous government rules here.” Confucius said, “Remember that, my students. Callous government ...more
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On Yeltsin’s watch, the ignorance of many, combined with the cleverness of a few, allowed for the biggest, fastest, and most egregiously unjust reallocation of wealth and resources in the history of the world. It was klepto-capitalism on a monumental scale, but it wasn’t the first time. The Bolsheviks had done something similar under Lenin.
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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 ...more
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The Russian State, in other words, is masculine and paternalistic. But the State, in addition to being secretive, xenophobic, and heavily armed, is also fallible, shortsighted, and prone to betrayal. In fact, over the past century, broken faith has become something of a national characteristic. It is no coincidence that, in Russia, the divorce rate is one of the highest in the world, and single mothers (both literal and practical) are nearly as common as children. Fathers get drunk, have affairs, take off, die young, or simply give up—for all kinds of reasons.
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Colonel Geoffrey Nightingale, who, prior to his sudden death while attempting to spear a panther from horseback, shot more than three hundred tigers in India’s former Hyderabad
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At the height of the purges, roughly a thousand people were being murdered every day.
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Men carry their superiority inside; animals outside. Russian Proverb
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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.
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The brandname Viagra is derived from vyaaghra, the Sanskrit word for tiger.
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In 1934, Schetinin’s paternal grandfather was conscripted to dig a clandestine tunnel under the Amur River, and his family never saw him again. Schetinin’s father was next: in 1938, at the peak of the Great Terror, he was relieved of his duties as a village postmaster and charged with “harmful activities related to untimely mail deliveries.” For this he was shot. The rest of the family was banished to a concentration camp in the Jewish Autonomous Region, a little known creation of Stalin’s intended to serve, oxymoronically, as a Soviet Zion for Russian Jews. It still exists today.
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A tiger’s jaws can exert roughly a thousand pounds of pressure per square inch, but it takes less than a hundred pounds to crush a windpipe, and only five pounds to block the carotid artery, which causes unconsciousness almost instantly. In other words, a tiger’s fangs don’t need to puncture the skin in order to immobilize prey; no blood need be let.
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once the tiger understood that he was being hunted, his response would not be to flee deeper into the taiga, it would be to confront his pursuers and liquidate them. 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.
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The scenario was identical: the open field; the alert, armed man; the tiger who is seen only when he chooses to be seen, erupting, apparently, from the earth itself—from nowhere at all—leaving no time and no possibility of escape. Trush was going to die exactly as Markov and Pochepnya had. This was no folktale; nonetheless, only something heroic, shamanic, magical could alter the outcome. Trush’s semiautomatic loaded with proven tiger killers was not enough. Trush was a praying man, and only God could save him now. But in that clearing, there was only Yuri Pionka and Vladimir Shibnev. If ...more
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“Hope dies last.”