egule if ever there was one.
The reinforcements had arrived from as far away as Vladivostok, a
long day’s drive to the south. Along with members of other Inspection
Tiger units came the boss himself, Vladimir Schetinin, a man known to
friend and foe alike as the General. Schetinin had acquired this nickname
due to his fondness for military regalia and dramatic officers’ hats that
made him appear much taller than he was. As the chief of Inspection
Tiger, he was the one person in Primorye with the authority to issue a
shooting order for an Amur tiger. Schetinin is of the same generation as
Ivan Dunkai and Dmitri Pikunov, and the fact that he survived Stalin’s
purges is a minor miracle. Fully a head shorter than Trush, he has a long
pewter gray beard and flowing hair that give him the look of an Orthodox
priest—an impression that evaporates the moment he opens his mouth.
He takes two tea bags in a four-ounce cup and he doesn’t mince words:
when a pair of earnest British journalists once asked him how he thought
the tigers could be saved, his answer, “AIDS,” caught them off guard.
“But don’t you care about people?” one of them asked.
“Not really,” he replied. “Especially not the Chinese.”
China’s powerful presence and close proximity are volatile issues in
Primorye where many residents feel as Schetinin does. Prior to the
reopening of the Chinese border following Gorbachev’s rapprochement
with Beijing in 1989, commercial tiger poaching was virtually unknown
in Russia. Since then, the export of Primorye’s natural resources—in all
their forms and shades of legality—has exploded while local Russians
have found themselves completely overmatched by the Chinese: their
hustle, their business acumen, and their insatiable appetite for everything
from ginseng and sea cucumbers to Amur tigers and Slavic prostitutes. In
the 1970s, after the Damansky Island clashes, a joke began circulating:
“Optimists study English; pessimists study Chinese; and realists learn to
use a Kalashnikov.”^2
Today, the imbalance between Russia and China is a near total reversal
of what it was a century ago when China was referred to as “the Sick Man
of the Far East.” Now the same is said of the Russians, and it is they who