The Tiger

by John Vaillant

Because Primorye and southern Khabarovsk Territory were effectively sandwiched between China and the Pacific coast (which was deemed vulnerable to Japanese and American infiltration), security was particularly tight there. As a result, Markov was going from one forbidden zone to another; this was a place that he and many of his fellow draftees may not have even known existed. Despite nearly two decades of relative openness, this is apparently still the case, if for different reasons. 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. Beyond that is Siberia—a bad joke, and after that, well, who really cares? 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,* a one-way ticket like Markov’s was tantamount to banishment. His was the same route undertaken by hundreds of thousands of exiles dating back to Czarist times. 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...