during the purges, it became a catch-all for a wide variety of
undesirables, including Cossacks. While still a boy, Schetinin was
branded a “son of an enemy of the State,” a designation that would
determine the course of his life. From his one surviving grandfather he
received this stern advice: “Never tell anyone that you are a Kazak.
Forget that word.”
“When I was about six, I clued in that we were in exile,” Schetinin
explained in his cramped apartment near the harbor in Vladivostok.
“There was a concentration camp nearby and most of the prisoners there
were teachers. Our homeroom teacher had been in jail there for fifteen
years, and he was released because there was a shortage of teachers.
When I was finishing grade ten, he called us in one by one. He said, ‘Tell
me your sins.’ I respected him so I told him that I was a Cossack and a
son of an enemy of the State. He said, ‘You can only study agriculture.
Forget about everything else.’ ”
As advised, Schetinin went up the Amur to study agriculture in the
nearby river town of Blagoveshchensk (“Glad Tidings”) and in this there
was a savage irony: Blagoveshchensk is the site of one of the Cossacks’
most notorious massacres of Chinese civilians. While Schetinin was
studying there, his father was “rehabilitated,” a process by which a
blackballed Soviet citizen could be exonerated of his crimes and restored
to good standing—dead or alive. By way of compensation for the murder
of his father, Schetinin now receives 92 rubles (about $3) a month, plus a
housing subsidy. Not surprisingly, he never joined the Communist Party.
Nor was he cut out for farming (few Cossacks were). Today, the notion of
captivity still appalls him. “I can’t stand the sight of animals in cages,”
Schetinin said. “I have never been to see the circus or the zoo.”
Instead, he maneuvered himself toward the study of wild animal herds,
and in 1964 became the first field ecologist in a recently created national
park near Blagoveshchensk. From there, he moved to Vladivostok and
into animal protection, discovering tigers in the late 1970s. Schetinin’s
overarching goal was to protect these animals, but after Pochepnya’s
death there was no doubt in his mind about what needed to be done with
this tiger.
ron
(Ron)
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