The Tiger

by John Vaillant

Schetinin is a Cossack; his ancestors served in the Amur division of the Cossack army, which was instrumental in the annexation of Primorye. In return for their service and loyalty to the czars, the Cossacks enjoyed a special status among Russians and were rewarded with land and a large measure of autonomy, but all this changed under communism. After the Revolution, their independence, fighting skill, and tribal solidarity were seen as threats to the Soviet State, and Stalin added them to his long list of enemies. 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. Located on the Amur River between China and Khabarovsk Territory, it is hard to imagine a place further removed from the Holy Land.