To get an idea of day-to-day village life, one need look no further than Grigori Peshkov, the local gas merchant, a man who supplements his meager income by wading through thigh-deep snow in subzero temperatures to search for pinecones. The Chinese, whose voracious appetite for natural resources is keenly felt in this part of Russia, prize the wood of the Korean pine, and they consider the nuts a delicacy. Peshkov can get 30 rubles (about one dollar) for every pound of cones he finds buried beneath the snow. If he takes the time to remove the individual nuts, he might—if he’s lucky—make 100 rubles per pound. One could argue that this is an activity better suited to a pig or a squirrel, and one would be right, but, as a young Nanai woman from a neighboring village observed, “People don’t live in Sobolonye, they survive.”6
Sometimes, they don’t even manage to do that.
Under these circumstances, Markov’s humor became a precious commodity and, for many who knew him, he was a rare bright spot in an otherwise bleak situation. Incidental humor of the kind Markov specialized in tends to defy translation, having less to do with a punch line than it does with what one might call situational alchemy. It is one of the keys to surviving in Russia, where random insults and deprivations seem to occur more often than other places, and where the sum of these can break a person. Once, on a long bus trip through Primorye, a young man named Gena gestured to the bottle of vodka he had brought along and proclaimed, “It’s not vodka; it’s a time machine!” Humor plays a similar role: not only does it speed the journey, it softens the thousand small blows of daily Russian life. On a regular basis, Markov was able to defy the gravity of a given moment and transform yet another broken thing or stalled project into a brief interlude of absurdist escape. “Somehow his tongue worked like that,” recalled his young neighbor, Denis Burukhin. “No matter what the subject was, he always found the joke in it.”
Indeed, there was little else; the supply chain providing most basic goods had broken down so completely that remote villages like Sobolonye were turned into virtual islands. Making matters worse was the inflation rate, which, by 1993, was approaching 1,000 percent, rendering the ruble virtually worthless. In subsequent years, it settled down somewhat, but only in relative terms; throughout the mid-1990s, Russians were seeing annual price increases of 200 and 300 percent. Then, in 1997, the Russian ruble went into free fall, much as the deutsche mark had done prior to World War II. A ruble, which, a decade earlier, could have bought a pack of cigarettes, five ice cream cones, or a cafeteria lunch for two, was now worth about one one-hundredth of a U.S. cent and could not cover the price of a nail. On January 1, 1998, a month after Markov’s death, Russia’s currency was “revised” with the introduction of the so-called new ruble. While this radical measure stabilized the currency and brought the exchange rate back onto a recognizable scale, it wiped out whatever remained of most people’s savings. When one considers that this was the seventh time in a century such a revision had been made, it is easy to understand why so many Russians seem cynical and world-weary, and why they place so much faith in the potato crop.
For the residents of Sobolonye and their sister village, Yasenovie, these changes made little difference. Assuming you had something to put it in, finding gas could still be a days-long project; finding the money to pay for it could take even longer. Currency remained a part of their economy, but it was not the principal medium through which basic needs were met. That distinction fell to the forest—the off-grid benefactor of last resort that Markov’s friend Sasha Dvornik and many of its other dependents refer to as Taiga Matushka: Mother Taiga.
When Russians wax eloquent about their homeland, they will often invoke Mother Russia, but Mother Russia is not the nation, and She is certainly not the leadership; She is the Land. The deep Russian bond to the earth—specifically, the soil—transcends all other affiliations with the exception, perhaps, of family. Likewise, the forest and its creatures—plant and animal alike—have a significance that most of us in the West lost touch with generations ago. It is a connection—a dependence, really—that exists in stark contrast to the State’s willful, capricious, and alarmingly comprehensive destruction of the environment. Come May 15 or so, the vast majority of Russians—regardless of where they live or what they do—stop and interact with the land more intensely, and with more devotion and genuine understanding than most Westerners, who may perceive themselves as environmentally aware, could ever hope to. May is potato planting time in Russia, and just about everybody participates. It’s a tradition, it’s a ritual, and it’s how you make it through the winter in a country where winter seems to last forever and salaries are inadequate, when they are paid at all. Armenian Radio has addressed this issue, too:
Our listeners asked us:
“Is it possible to make ends meet on salary alone?”
We’re answering:
“We don’t know, we never tried.”
Before the Revolution, the czar was often referred to as the “Little Father” (the “Big Father,” of course, being God). This notion of a supreme (human) being who unifies, protects, and guides the country is a theme that dates back to Ivan the Terrible, the first “Czar of all Russia,” a savage and canny expansionist who set the tone for the next five centuries of Russian rule. Today, the tradition is alive and well: Vladimir Putin has been described as a “Good Czar” and a “Strong Man for Russia,” just as “Iron Joe” Stalin was in the 1930s. This is considered a good thing, especially if you believe your country—as many Russians do—to be a glorious but underappreciated stepchild of the First World surrounded by enemies. It is one of the principal reasons Putin enjoys such wide popularity, even in the neglected hinterlands of Primorye, and why Stalin is still admired by millions of Russians. The Russian State, in other words, is masculine and paternalistic. But the State, in addition to being secretive, xenophobic, and heavily armed, is also fallible, shortsighted, and prone to betrayal. In fact, over the past century, broken faith has become something of a national characteristic. It is no coincidence that, in Russia, the divorce rate is one of the highest in the world, and single mothers (both literal and practical) are nearly as common as children. Fathers get drunk, have affairs, take off, die young, or simply give up—for all kinds of reasons. When this happens, and there is no extended family to rely on, there are only a couple of options left, besides an orphanage: struggle on with the mother, or brave a risky existence on the street. The taiga offers a combination of the two.
After the logging company closed down and the State abandoned them, the working people of the Bikin valley fell into the tough but bountiful arms of Mother Taiga, but they did so in a way that was technically illegal and often dangerous. More often than not, homemade vodka and homemade bullets went hand in hand. A corollary to this brand of betrayal and abandonment is an intensified, overdetermined relationship between mothers and their children, particularly between mothers and only (surviving) sons (Joseph Stalin being but one example). The same held true for Mother Taiga and her desperate boys.
By 1997, Sobolonye had become a profoundly unhealthy place to be: morale in the village plummeted and alcoholism, already a kind of cultural norm, became rampant. Things began to break and burn, and people began to die—in all kinds of ways. Today, three of the huntress Baba Liuda’s five children lie in the village graveyard. “I can’t call it life anymore,” she said. “It’s just an existence.”
Under these circumstances, time, as most of us know it, begins to blur into irrelevance. Replacing it in Sobolonye was a far more approximate chronology that could be called subsistence time: when you’re broke and disconnected and living in the woods, the steady pronouncements of clocks and calendars no longer carry the same weight. Maybe, if you’re lucky, the arrival of a meager pension check will give some structure to the month, but if some or all of this money is invested in vodka, it will only serve to blur time further. As a result, subsistence time includes periods of suspended animation combined with seasonal opportunities determined by the n
atural cycles of fish, game, bees, and pinecones. These, in turn, may be punctuated by potato planting and the occasional stint on a logging or road building crew. It’s a kind of ancient schedule that is all but unrecognizable to many of us, despite the fact that millions of people live this way all over the world.
Markov did his best to dodge the depression and inertia that stalked so many of his neighbors, and one way he did this was by spending more and more time in the taiga. “He was a good man,” recalled his neighbor Irina Peshkova. “He knew everything in the forest—everything. He could find any root. He even saved some bear cubs once.”
“He was always running around doing something,” said Denis Burukhin. “One cannot afford to be lazy in the forest: you need firewood; you need water. You have to be checking your traps and your nets, hunting for meat—you have to be hustling all the time.”
Perhaps recognizing the need for some kind of objective order and discipline, Markov kept an alarm clock in his cabin. But the longer one spends in the elemental and self-directed world of the taiga, the harder it can be to put up with the demands of a domestic routine. By the time Trush ran into him and confiscated his gun, Markov’s preference had clearly shifted away from village life. During a brief visit home, a Nanai hunter named Vasily Dunkai summed up the tayozhnik’s dilemma: “The taiga is my home,” he said. “When I come back to my house, I feel like a guest. That’s how most hunters feel. I’ve been home for a week now, and I am sick and tired of it.”
Vasily Solkin, a fifty-year-old filmmaker, magazine editor, and leopard specialist, is also an experienced hunter and a friend of Dunkai’s. Like him, he has spent months on his own in the taiga. Originally trained as a war journalist and propagandist with the Pacific Fleet, Solkin resigned from the Party in the late 1980s and became a dissident folksinger. He is a restless whip of a man with long hair and a full beard who comes to work at the Far Eastern Institute of Geography, outside Vladivostok, wearing jeans, vest, and cowboy boots. Solkin’s unique combination of education and experience has enabled him to articulate the tayozhnik mind-set better than most, and he was sympathetic to Markov’s situation. “The most terrifying and important test for a human being is to be in absolute isolation,” he explained. “A human being is a very social creature, and ninety percent of what he does is done only because other people are watching. Alone, with no witnesses, he starts to learn about himself—who is he really? Sometimes, this brings staggering discoveries. Because nobody’s watching, you can easily become an animal: it is not necessary to shave, or to wash, or to keep your winter quarters clean—you can live in shit and no one will see. You can shoot tigers, or choose not to shoot. You can run in fear and nobody will know. You have to have something—some force, which allows and helps you to survive without witnesses. Markov had it.
“Once you have passed the solitude test,” continued Solkin, “you have absolute confidence in yourself, and there is nothing that can break you afterward. Any changes, including changes in the political system, are not going to affect you as much because you know that you can do it yourself. Karl Marx said that ‘Freedom is a recognized necessity.’* I learned this in university, but I didn’t understand what it meant until I’d spent some time in the taiga. If you understand it, you will survive in the taiga. If you think that freedom is anarchy, you will not survive.
“It becomes like a drug,” he said, “you have to have it. So, it’s a strange feeling when you come back [to civilization] because, in the taiga, the most important things are your bullets. But as soon as you get to the main road and see the bus coming, you understand that those bullets don’t mean anything in this other life. All of a sudden, you need money—strange paper, which you couldn’t even use to start a fire, and your bullets aren’t going to help you. This transition can be very difficult.”
On a shelf in Solkin’s office are several cat skulls, including one belonging to a tiger. It is only when you study it closely that you see the bullet holes, and it is clear from their placement that the tiger was shot head-on at close range. “Poachers can be brave, too,” said Solkin.
Outside of Primorye’s nature preserves, the Bikin valley is one of the wildest places left in the territory and Markov had come to know it well. In previous years, he had hunted and kept bees further upriver in Ulma, a tiny settlement accessible only by boat or snowmobile. Between his local explorations and seasonal migrations, Markov had gained a comprehensive knowledge of the region and its loosely scattered inhabitants. His charm worked to his advantage here, too: he befriended a reclusive hunter named Ivan Dunkai (Vasily Dunkai’s father) who gave him permission to hunt in his territory. This is when Markov’s gyre began to tighten.
In the taiga, to this day, there are small but well-developed industries and markets for many kinds of forest products ranging from honey and nuts to mushrooms and medicinal roots. In Primorye, the collection of ginseng, laminaria (a species of edible kelp), and trepang (sea cucumber) were, along with fur trapping and gold mining, among the region’s founding industries and still remain profitable. Until the 1970s, opium poppies were cultivated openly in some villages and they are still grown, though, as with more recent marijuana plantations, greater efforts are now made to conceal them.
Before Markov acquired his portable barracks, his friend Danila Zaitsev had used it as a remote plant for processing fir needle oil, a multipurpose folk remedy rumored to be effective on everything from coughs to rheumatism. After perestroika, the niche market for fir oil collapsed, and the project was abandoned. With Zaitsev’s help, Markov moved the caravan into the sunny clearing where it now stood, ringed by tiger tracks. In addition to being his new hunting base, he and Zaitsev ran a honey operation from there, consisting of about forty hives. On the side, they brewed medovukha, a honey-based drink comparable to mead. Apparently, Markov had a gift. “He liked bees,” recalled his son, Alexei, who shares his father’s stature, eyes, and cheekbones, “and they liked him. He would go to the hives without his shirt. He wasn’t afraid.” So at ease was Markov that the bees would cluster about his half-naked body, stinging him only occasionally.
It was from these hunting grounds that Markov started poaching game in earnest. His guns, of course, were unregistered, his bullets homemade. He was desperately poor. When he managed to bag a deer or a boar, he would often barter the meat for essentials like sugar, tobacco, gunpowder, and tea. (This, incidentally, is exactly how Dersu Uzala was making his living when Arseniev first encountered him in 1906.) It was the taiga, and the creatures it contains, that kept him and his family alive. But by 1997, this hand-to-mouth existence was taking its toll. A heavy smoker, Markov was approaching fifty in a country where the average life expectancy for men was only fifty-eight. For his demographic, it was even lower than that. When Yuri Trush encountered him the previous year, he recalled being struck by the unhealthiness he saw in Markov’s eyes: they were badly bloodshot and had a yellow cast to them. Trush couldn’t tell if this was the result of a recent drinking binge, or something more serious, but Markov had other problems as well: ever since taking a bad fall on his hunting skis several years earlier, he had acquired a permanent limp. No longer able to cover the ground or carry the weight he once could, something had to change, but without money—a lot of it 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. For someone as broke and isolated as Markov, even a fraction of this kind of money would represent a spectacular payoff, but it was a payoff that would come with a unique set of complications and liabilities—kind of like selling a briefcaseful of stolen cocaine.