Some hard-line Marxists sincerely believed that plants and animals
unable to prove their usefulness to mankind should simply be
exterminated. In the face of such hostile dogma, the tiger didn’t stand a
chance. Falling squarely into the category of “harmful fauna,” it had
become a kind of fur-bearing Enemy of the State. Those stripes might as
well have been bull’s-eyes. There was no formal edict or bounty, but
anyone was free to shoot tigers on sight (they were highly prized by army
and navy officers stationed in Primorye), and there was a ready market
across the border. Given this, and given the death toll among people who
so much as looked sideways at the regime, it is incredible that anyone
dared advocate for tigers at all. Nonetheless, Lev Kaplanov’s landmark
study, “The Tiger in the Sikhote-Alin,” was completed in 1941, and in it
he recommended an immediate five-year moratorium on tiger hunting.†
That same year, Kaplanov’s colleague Yuri Salmin would go a step
further: in a national magazine, he made an urgent plea for a total ban on
tiger hunting in the Russian Far East. This was the first time in recorded
history that anyone, anywhere, had made a public call for restraint with
regard to the killing of these animals.
World War II, and the fact that it removed so many armed and able-
bodied men from the forest, was a critical factor in turning the tide for
the Amur tiger, but it took a heavy toll on the tiger’s champions. Only
Abramov survived; a longtime apparatchik, he was able to mediate the
deadly tensions between progressive science and Party membership. Yuri
Salmin, however, was sent to the front, and he never returned. In 1943, at
the age of thirty-three, Lev Kaplanov was murdered by poachers in
southern Primorye where he had recently been promoted to director of the
small but important Lazovski Zapovednik. His body wasn’t found for two
weeks and, because it lay deep in the forest, it had to be carried out by
hand. In order to do this, a litter was fashioned from cherry boughs; it
was May so the trees were in flower, and the men who carried him
recalled the blossoms on the branches around his body. Since then,
Kaplanov has become a kind of local martyr to the cause of the Amur
tiger.