this tiger down. Ultimately, it was Schetinin’s call, and his official
mandate was to protect the environment, specifically tigers. The last
thing he wanted was to oversee the unnecessary shooting of another tiger,
especially at a time when decades of hard work to restore a relict
population was being undone before his eyes.
In addition to the logistical nightmare and cost of trying to find one
possibly transient tiger among perhaps half a dozen or more living in the
frozen wilderness around Sobolonye, there may have been another reason
for Schetinin’s hesitation, and this concerned his personal history with
the State. Schetinin’s sympathy for tigers—one could say his
identification with them—goes deeper than that of most government
employees, and this is because for years he ran the risk of being
exterminated himself. Schetinin is a Cossack; his ancestors served in the
Amur division of the Cossack army, which was instrumental in the
annexation of Primorye.
In return for their service and loyalty to the czars, the Cossacks
enjoyed a special status among Russians and were rewarded with land and
a large measure of autonomy, but all this changed under communism.
After the Revolution, their independence, fighting skill, and tribal
solidarity were seen as threats to the Soviet State, and Stalin added them
to his long list of enemies. In 1934, Schetinin’s paternal grandfather was
conscripted to dig a clandestine tunnel under the Amur River, and his
family never saw him again. Schetinin’s father was next: in 1938, at the
peak of the Great Terror, he was relieved of his duties as a village
postmaster and charged with “harmful activities related to untimely mail
deliveries.” For this he was shot. The rest of the family was banished to a
concentration camp in the Jewish Autonomous Region, a little known
creation of Stalin’s intended to serve, oxymoronically, as a Soviet Zion
for Russian Jews. It still exists today. Located on the Amur River
between China and Khabarovsk Territory, it is hard to imagine a place
further removed from the Holy Land. The regional flag depicts not a
Magen David but a strangely familiar rainbow band on a plain white
background; the regional coat of arms features, of all things, a tiger. At
its peak, only about seventeen thousand Jews actually lived there and,
ron
(Ron)
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