What was it like to live at the end of the Cold War? While Francis Fukuyama mulled Kojève, Hegel, and the end of history, a KGB officer in Dresden was lamenting his leaders’ surrender and would later proclaim the fall of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” A Russian living in that country’s vast eastern territories experienced a dismantling of the state services, which, however imperfect, had guaranteed a basic standard of living—and a dismantling of law enforcement, creating opportunities for poaching. And to biologists in Russia and the United States, the end of the Cold War meant a chance to study a species that they knew next to nothing about, the Amur tiger.
Amur tigers once ranged from the Pacific Ocean all the way to Lake Baikal (which is why the name Siberian tiger lingers). But by 1991, as Jonathan Slaght chronicles in his new book, Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China, they were both mysterious and under existential threat. Rampant poaching and the kidnapping of cubs in the early twentieth century cut the Russian Amur tiger population to a mere 20 or 30. Lev Kaplanov, a passionate tiger biologist, sounded the alarm in 1941, and even as the world careened from world war to Cold War, the Soviet Union banned tiger hunting and cub trapping. There were still challenges—the zapovednik (wildlife reserve) system was forever being tampered with, and illegal poaching continued—but tiger populations managed a recovery: Starting from about 130 individuals in the 1960s, they rose to about 200 by the 1970s, and then to about 500 by the 1980s. But those numbers were the result of protection by a heavy-handed state. The fall of the Soviet Union meant that protection fell away too. Poachers prowled the forests again, claiming as many as 60 tigers a year. Rising incomes in China meant more disposable income to spend on tiger parts for illusory medical benefits.
Economic development harmed the tigers too. Foreign companies like Hyundai were hungry for Russian timber and, in the economic free-for-all that followed 1991, consumed large tracts of tiger habitat. Korean pine was in particularly high demand. The pine nuts feed the wild boar that, in turn, feed the tiger. New roads made poaching easier and rendered tigers vulnerable to car collision. Biologist Linda Kerley spearheaded a study that found that “roads decrease the survivorship and reproductive success of tigers.” Whatever else the Soviet state was, it had been better for tigers than what immediately followed. Under these circumstances, basic questions—How many tigers are there? What do they do? How much space do they need?—acquired urgency.
Slaght’s book follows the wild and delightful adventure that Russian and American biologists embarked on together to answer these questions and save the tigers from extinction. Slaght is a conservation biologist who brings a deep knowledge of Russian politics and culture to his tale. His first book, Owls of the Eastern Ice, was a splendid account of his time studying Blakiston’s fish owls in the Russian Far East, a blend of natural history and memoir in the tradition of George Schaller and Caitlin O’Connell. Where Owls was a personal narrative, Tigers is a sophisticated history told in the third person. But both books bring the Russian Far East and its creatures alive, and in both, there is a strong current of hope. Tigers is a book not just about animal conservation but about the bonds conservation can forge between humans.
In the 1970s, Maurice Hornocker, an employee of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was using radiotelemetry to study cougars and other big cats. Yevgeniy Matyushkin, a Russian scientist, read Hornocker’s work and promptly asked him to bring these methods to the Soviet Union, but for Hornocker, a U.S. government servant, this was not feasible. Hornocker also sought to study Amur tigers in China after the Sino-American rapprochement, but to no avail; habitat fragmentation and poaching had left the species virtually nonexistent in China. In due course, he retired, taking up a position at the University of Idaho and founding an institute for the study of carnivores.
There the matter might have rested. But in 1989, a group of Soviet researchers arrived in Idaho for a visit. They sat and talked wildlife with their American hosts by a firepit, Yuriy Puzachenko, one of the Russians, holding the Americans entranced with tales of “cats built like battering rams … solitary creatures adapted to mountain and pine: ice-fringed apparitions that burst from shadow to ambush their favorite food, wild boar, prey that can weigh as much as a grand piano and can have tusks like sharpened knives.” And little was known about them because, Puzachenko pointed out, the Soviet Union lacked the VHF radiotelemetry that allowed for tracking the cats.
No field biologist could resist such a pitch. Howard Quigley, one of Hornocker’s graduate students, suggested cooperation and reported the conversation to his supervisor. The Soviet Union was now open to joint ventures with the United States. Thus was the Siberian Tiger Project born. An initial reconnaissance trip led the scientists to pick Sikhote-Alin—a vast, mountainous nature reserve—as the field site. Hornocker found funding for a year and hired as the American lead Dale Miquelle, whose job description was to “inject himself fully into the tiger’s environment, feel the changes in the weather, struggle up the mountain slopes, and feel everything a tiger did.”
The premise of the cooperation was simple. The Americans would bring their expertise in tracking technology, the Russians their field knowledge. That knowledge did not come solely from scientists. When initial attempts to trap tigers using dogs as bait failed, it was a wandering park ranger, Viktor, who explained that healthy tigers were indifferent to dogs and suggested where snares might best be laid. Trapping a tiger proved hard, but eventually, a yearling named Olga was caught, collared, and released. Her collar provided the team with her locations, creating a picture of where she went, what she did, and how she lived.
Other successes followed. And something curious happened. As they worked together, poring over VHF data or figuring out why darts were misfiring, the Americans and the Russians found themselves drawing close. Miquelle, whose initial three years in Russia bloomed to 30, became tight friends with Yevgeniy (Zhenya) Smirnov, his Russian counterpart. Slaght’s book abounds with the human moments of which work and international relations are made: celebratory vodka when the team catches three tigers in a day; Smirnov and Miquelle mourning a poached tiger, before rescuing her orphaned cubs; Mariya Ivanova, a Russian woman, looking after Miquelle as a mother might (Miquelle named a tiger after her). In one such moment, a Russian farmer recognizes Olga:
The farmer raised his rifle out of habit … then … he stopped. He knew this tiger, he realized. He saw Olga as an individual. Dale and Zhenya had spent many nights at the farm while out tracking her, telling him tales of Olga—the places she went and the things she did. Olga shared these forests with the farmer, walked the coastline as he did, and skirted his field, where she left his cattle to graze in peace. They were neighbors. And this was what he’d wanted to tell Dale, that he understood this.
To Miquelle, the moment was stunning because it showed that humans and tigers could live together. But it also showed that a tiger could bring a Russian and an American together, despite all the propaganda and suspicion of the Cold War. “We are all the better for having been soaked in the camaraderie of that collective,” notes Miquelle. That camaraderie was a gift the tigers gave to people.
To save tigers, one has to know where they are and what they require. Data point by data point, a picture began to emerge. In 1996, the first tiger census since 1985 was carried out: a Herculean task, funded by USAID and Exxon Mobil (trying to compensate for the Alaska oil spill of 1989), in which different counting methodologies and agendas had to be wrangled into a cohesive performance. The results found between 415 and 476 tigers.
Tigers in protected areas did better than tigers in unprotected areas. That was unsurprising. More interesting was that what seemed like a vast reserve to a human trudging through snow was not sufficiently large to protect a tiger. Tigers were roaming beyond the boundaries of the reserves, where protection for them lapsed. Miquelle, who was on loan to USAID (his successor as Siberian Tiger Project field lead was John Goodrich), worked with the Russian Academy of Science to recommend expanding protected areas. The Sikhote-Alin reserve got an additional 800 square kilometers. Three new reserves were established. This still did not cover the tigers’ full range, but it was a step in the right direction. The government set up an anti-poaching team, Inspection Tiger, which helped stem the losses to poaching. Forests got protection too. Officials, scientists, nongovernmental organization workers, and locals were uniting to conserve tigers. The tigers now had a chance. By 2005, their numbers seemed stable.
There were two other indicators of success. The first was that lessons learnt from tiger conservation in Russia went global. Kerley and a Russian partner, Galina Salkina, pioneered the use of dogs to locate tiger scat and match it to known individuals, a technique that Kerley would bring to the study of tigers in Cambodia. Bart Schleyer, who was crucial to the capture efforts in Sikhote-Alin, took his craft to Bangladesh and Thailand. China too had seen Amur tiger populations fall (a better fate than that of the South China tiger, which went extinct). In 1975, a survey found 161 tigers in Heilongjiang. In 1998 and ’99, the Chinese conducted surveys again—this time with the Russian-American team north of the border. There were a possible four to six tigers in Jilin and another five to seven in Heilongjiang. Prey species and habitat had been destroyed.
But where the Russians saw a “wasteland,” Miquelle saw adequate habitat and political will from which to build back up. Back in 1968–9, the Soviets and Chinese had been waging war, while the Americans looked on; now, they were walking almost the same spot in search of tigers. Surely, if they could do that, they could work together to restore tiger populations. Miquelle’s optimism proved well placed. Protected habitat in China grew. Slowly, tiger numbers climbed. Between 2013 and 2018, camera traps found 55 individuals using China’s northeast.
The other indicator of success was the tigers’ recolonization of former territory. The cubs Miquelle and Smirnov first rescued flew to America, where they took up residence in a zoo. But could an orphaned tiger be rehabilitated and returned to the wild? In 2012, a young tiger named Zolushka was found by hunters. She wound up at a rehabilitation center funded by Russian and foreign conservation organizations, cared for by Katya Blidchenko, who had had experience with rehabilitating wolves. Zolushka learnt to hunt prey while her caretaker watched. The plan was to release her into the Pri-Amur—once part of the tiger’s range but now bereft of the cats. Tigers roam to find new territory, but the Pri-Amur was foreboding:
A tiger’s first step into this vast and largely inhospitable place was a courageous one—few tigers mustered the resolve to take it. In addition to braving the vulnerability of the floodplain, they also had to somehow cross the Amur River itself, deep and muddy, in some places nearly five kilometers across. Tigers could not see the peaks of the Bureinskiy Mountains that rose on the far side of this expanse, beacons of a better future with promise of shaded slopes of pine and robust sounders of wild boar, animals that had not smelled a tiger for generations. If tigers had their own mythology, the Pri-Amur would be a place of legend, a lost city of gold.
Zolushka was released near these mountains and off she went. More orphans followed. Most proved successful at being wild tigers. Zolushka, eventually, was photographed with cubs of her own. The lost city was lost no more.
Success comes with the seeds of its own destruction. The Siberian Tiger Project won fans among locals, but at a national level, tiger conservation became Putinified: The cats came to be seen as nationalistic symbols rather than cats. Why, Russian officials grouched, were foreigners doing tiger conservation? The Severtsov Institute began its own tiger program, inviting Vladimir Putin to collar a captured tiger. (Putin’s tiger, it emerged to much gleeful mockery, was a zoo animal.) Nationalism spelled an end to the days when a bunch of scientists were in it just for the tigers. With foreign organizations now suspect, there was no room for the Siberian Tiger Project to participate in the 2015 tiger census. (One Russian who worked for the project, Sasha Rybin, was asked to join the census but to take temporary leave from his employer. Rybin refused.) By 2022, Putin’s war on Ukraine rendered working in Russia fruitless. So Miquelle and his Russian wife left for Montana. They left a blueprint for tiger conservation behind. But the gift the tigers had given—that joy in a shared project for Russians and Americans—had been spurned.
Slaght quotes a Russian proverb: “Hope dies last.” These days, Russians telling stories by a fireside in Idaho or an American spending 30 years in Russia seem like tales of a mythic past. And yet, in the saga of the Amur tigers, hope flickers alive at the unlikeliest moments. One of the most memorable stories in this book is that of a tiger named Kristina. Desperate for prey, Kristina killed a horse in Orlovka. She was captured and outfitted with a GPS collar, then released near Terney, where she killed deer. It appeared she was dead: The collar signals suggested she had not moved in hours. A team went out to find the corpse, only to find that she had been sleeping, the collar not reporting on slight movements. Another mortality scare followed—but she was still alive, still moving. “Christ in stripes,” went the wry description; here was a tiger perpetually resurrected. Hence the name Kristina.
Kristina wandered far. A man tried to poach her. He paid with lost fingers, but Kristina was wounded. She retreated into the forest. The team tracked her for a bit; she moved with her old fluidity, but hunting seemed harder for her. Her collar eventually stopped giving a signal. It was about time for its battery to fail, and Kristina’s last location had been encouragingly far from human proximity. It was fair to imagine that she still lived “deep in aromatic forests filled with plump, naïve prey.” Hope was never quite dead when it came to Kristina. And in that, perhaps, her example has something to offer humans too. “Amur tigers,” writes Slaght, “move freely across the Sino-Russian frontier; governments, NGOs, and civil society should follow suit, taking their lead from the tigers.”
