deceptively simple idea: don’t just preserve the species, preserve the
entire system in which the species occurs, and do so by sealing it off from
human interference and allowing nature to do its work. It is, essentially, a
federal policy of enforced non-management directly contradicting the
communist notion that nature is an outmoded machine in need of a total
overhaul. Paradoxically, the idea not only survived but, in some cases,
flourished under the Soviets: by the late 1970s, nearly 80 percent of the
zapovednik sites originally recommended by the Russian Geographical
Society’s permanent conservation commission in 1917 had been
protected (though many have been reduced in size over the years).
In Kaplanov’s day, the Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik covered about seven
thousand square miles* of pristine temperate forest—the heart of
Primorye. That there were tigers in there at all became evident only when
guards and scientists noticed their tracks while trying to assess more
commercially relevant populations of sable and deer. It was here that
Abramov, Salmin, and Kaplanov conceived and conducted the first
systematic tiger census ever undertaken anywhere. Kaplanov, a skilled
hunter and the youngest and strongest of the three, did the legwork.
During the winters of 1939 and 1940, he logged close to a thousand miles
crisscrossing the Sikhote-Alin range as he tracked tigers through
blizzards and paralyzing cold, sleeping rough, and feeding himself from
tiger kills. His findings were alarming: along with two forest guards who
helped him with tracking, estimates, and interviews with hunters across
Primorye, Kaplanov concluded that no more than thirty Amur tigers
remained in Russian Manchuria. In the Bikin valley, he found no tigers at
all. With barely a dozen breeding females left in Russia, the subspecies
now known as Panthera tigris altaica was a handful of bullets and a few
hard winters away from extinction.
Despite the fact that local opinion and state ideology were weighted
heavily against tigers at the time, these men understood that tigers were
an integral part of the taiga picture, regardless of whether Marxists saw a
role for them in the transformation of society. Given the mood of the
time, this was an almost treasonous line of thinking, and it is what makes