by Sobolonye standards—there was no way to leverage himself out of his
situation.
Many people reach a point where they realize that the shape their life
has taken does not square with the ambitions they once had for it. In
Russia, there are entire generations for whom this is the case. Since 1989,
though, a whole new frontier of opportunity has opened up, much of it on
the black market. Oil, timber, humans, and tigers all have their niche
here, and the line between politicians and mafia, and between legitimate
business and crime, has blurred almost beyond recognition. This is the
Wild East, and business is booming. You can see the affluence enjoyed
by these “New Russians” parading down Aleutskaya and Svetlanskaya
streets along Vladivostok’s Golden Horn: leggy women in spike-heeled
boots, barely visible beneath sumptuous, ankle-length coats of sable and
mink, their carefully made-up faces hidden in voluminous cowls; the men
in sharp European suits, speeding by in fleets of right-hand-drive Toyota
Land Cruisers fresh off the boat from Japan.
Markov didn’t witness this explosion of wealth firsthand, but he
certainly heard about it and saw it on television, and he already knew
what it felt like to drive a fine car. There are a lot of people in Primorye
who cook with wood and draw water from community wells who wonder
how they might get a piece of this new and glamorous pie. Some of them
believe the answer lies in making what, in urban terms, might be called a
big score. In the forest, there is really only one thing that qualifies, and
that is a tiger. After a game warden named Yevgeny Voropaev was
ordered to shoot an aggressive tiger on the outskirts of Vladivostok, he
was approached by a Russian gang member. “He made an offer to me,”
Voropaev said. “Fifty thousand American dollars for the whole tiger—
meat and skin and all.”
He let that number sink in.
“Fifty thousand dollars if I got it to the border.”
Markov had heard these stories, too, and, while they may have been
part fact and part urban myth, it was well known that the Chinese had
strange appetites, and some of them had lots of money. They also had
ready access to the Bikin, which flows directly to the Chinese frontier.
ron
(Ron)
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