recorded history,” Russian citizens in the late 1930s were now being
arrested and executed on a quota system.^15 It was an absolutely terrifying
time: Russia was Wonderland, Stalin was the Queen of Hearts, and
anyone could be Alice.
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.^16
We must tear it from her.” In 1926, Vladimir Zazubrin, the first head of
the Union of Siberian Writers, delivered a lecture in which he
proclaimed,
Let the fragile green breast of Siberia be dressed in the cement
armour of cities, armed with the stone muzzles of factory chimneys,
and girded with iron belts of railroads.^17 Let the taiga be burned and
felled, let the steppes be trampled.... Only in cement and iron can the
fraternal union of all peoples, the iron brotherhood of all mankind, be
forged.*