Defending Russian Nature

In Western Russia, a shrouded figure

hurtles through a boggy glade, flapping a white cotton cloak. Behind her run two fawn-colored chicks, Siberian cranes, among the most endangered birds on Earth. Ten weeks old and over three feet tall, the chicks chase the ghostly shape’s billowing costume – the color and size of an adult crane – with imprinted tenacity. She flaps; they flap. She hops and jerks through the sucky swamp; they hop and jerk. She leaps a fallen log and splashes down; they too leap the log.

But they do not splash. Instead the two young cranes fly. They glide beneath dark oaks, beside white birches, above yellow water lilies. Where the glade ends, they flop to the ground. They hustle back to their flight instructor, Tatiana Zhuchkova, who is mired in mud, sweaty with exertion, bloodied by mosquitoes, and proud as any parent. Tatiana raised these chicks from eggs. She taught them to eat mushed-up fish, and then wild strawberries and water striders. If Tatiana’s chicks and a few more from this nature reserve can survive in the wilds of western and central Siberia, where they will be released at summer’s end, they may significantly increase the number of Siberian cranes remaining in those areas, now perhaps fewer than a dozen birds. (The species’ only substantial population, 3,000 birds in east Siberia, depends on vulnerable wetlands in China.)

While they prepare for relocation, these chicks live with Tatiana in the remote Oksky nature reserve, founded in 1935 to restore endangered species. Following summers as a student volunteer, Tatiana recently won a coveted job as a researcher, work that pays a few hundred dollars a year. The low salary does not worry Tatiana. She calls herself a “patriot,” an “enthusiast” – not a new-Russian money-chasing capitalist. “After a few summers working with cranes,” Tatiana says, “I can’t imagine life now without them.”

Like scores of idealistic Russian naturalists before her, Tatiana has come to the right place: her country’s system of scientific nature reserves, the largest in the world. Most people beyond Russia’s borders have no idea that the nation devotes more land than any other to what the World Conservation Union calls “strict nature reserves,” areas dedicated mainly to science and usually closed except to researchers. Russia’s 100 reserves cover some 83 million acres, an expanse equal to America’s national park system, but with stricter protections.

Through a century marked by ecocide – toxic releases, poisoned lands, nuclear accidents – Russian naturalists have battled, often against a totalitarian government, to save refuges like the one where Tatiana now works. The defense of Russia’s reserves represents one of the most heroic but hidden stories of nature conservation in the 20th century.

Russia’s tradition of creating national reserves to protect natural resources began with forestlands set aside by Czar Peter the Great in the early 1700s. But by 1890, Russian naturalists began to preach a new conservation gospel. Aware that the United States had started to designate national parks to serve people – to offer the public a “pleasuring ground,” according to the Yellowstone Act of 1872 – Russians advocated creating reserves to preserve nature instead. Keeping expanses of land unspoiled, they insisted, amounted to a commandment, a zapoved.

As Professor Grigory A. Kozhevnikov, an entomologist at Moscow State University and one of the founders of Russia’s conservation movement, declared in 1908, within these reserves, to be called zapovedniki, “nature must be left alone.” Would humankind get no benefit? Yes, he declared: “We may observe the result.” In each reserve, beginning with Russia’s first in 1916, one could enter as a scientist or as a student of nature – perhaps even (in a slight contradiction) work as a breeder to restore endangered species or as a ranger to protect them from poachers. But to most people, the zapovednik decreed: Into these wild lands thou shalt not go.

In 1919, the second year of the Soviet regime, Vladimir Lenin – a lover of hiking and camping who understood that hunters were driving some wildlife toward extinction – proposed drafting the legislation that led to a system of multiple nature reserves. Through three decades they grew to cover 31 million acres: technically inviolate, but ever threatened by Soviet strivers for economic growth. In 1951, Joseph Stalin, bent on a “Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature,” slashed the reserve system to below 4 million acres. After a decade of fighting, Russian naturalists managed to restore them back to 15 million – before Nikita Khrushchev slashed them again. Less-repressive leaders eventually replaced the slashers, and the protected acreage had grown once more by the time Vsevolod Stepanitsky took charge of the system in 1991.

Not long ago, I rode with Director Stepanitsky one misty morning on horseback through a small forest reserve near the Ukrainian border. Astride his steed, with his brush mustache and broad smile, he reminded me of the young Teddy Roosevelt. While at a Moscow State Pedagogical Institute in the 1970s, he had led a brigade of students who traveled to nature reserves to combat poaching. One of his patrols discovered evidence of duck poaching by a deputy minister of finance for the Soviet Union. (Their youthful idealism had its cost: Since the founding of the first brigades in 1960, several students on patrol have been shot dead.) Later he worked in reserves, helped found a national conservation group, and in 1989 began assisting one of Russia’s newly elected, pro-environment legislators. At age 32, he became head of all Russia’s nature reserves.

Almost immediately, the Soviet Union collapsed. Russia’s economy plunged. As inflation soared and funding sank, the zapovedniki were left with about 10 percent of their previous annual budget. Drawing on his experience as a student and researcher, Director Stepanitsky decided to bet on his system’s idealists and use all the meager funds for salaries: $300 a year for a good ranger, $460 for a youngish head of scientific research, $870 for a top director. On these near-poverty wages, his bet was this: When you need food, you will plant potatoes. When you need a cabin, you will find an ax. And if you need uniforms or radios or computers, you will learn how to speak the language of the World Wide Fund for Nature. More than a decade later, his wager remains on the table.

Crossing Russia with photographers Igor Shpilenok and Laura Williams, I set out to see what is protected (and threatened) in the country’s zapovedniki – and whether these vast reserves can survive a gamble that pits lofty ideals against deepening poverty.

After our days with Tatiana and her cranes, we headed east. In the southern Urals we paused at a reserve that protects wildflower-strewn meadows and linden-rich forests. In the steppes of Central Asia, in Khakassky Zapovednik, we slept near shallow lakes whose grassy shorelines protect silver-plumed demoiselle cranes.

Just north of Mongolia, we met up with Tamara Makashova, the longtime head ranger of Sayano-Shushensky Zapovednik, a reserve larger than Rhode Island. Aboard a rusting patrol ship, we motored the headwaters of one of Russia’s grandest rivers, the Yenisey, here starting its 2,500-mile run to the Arctic Ocean. Above us loomed slaty canyons cut by the roaring river, though now the Yenisey lies quiet. Transformed in the 1970s by the construction downstream of Russia’s most powerful hydroelectric dam, the once-churning cataracts have bloated into a reservoir.

The reservoir, Tamara explained, has brought threats that could never have traveled a cataract-filled gorge: boatloads of hunters. Just beyond the southern boundary of the reserve lies Russia’s Republic of Tuva, a sere land of yaks and camels tended by seminomadic herders. Favorite Tuvan dishes feature heavy-antlered Siberian elk and also Siberian ibex, among the largest of mountain goats and vital prey for endangered snow leopards.

Tamara has worked since the reserve’s creation in 1976 to protect its newly vulnerable wilderness, but despite her best efforts, Tuvan poachers still slip in. Not far from a camp for conducting snow-leopard research, four of her young rangers disappeared a few years ago while riding on antipoaching patrol; their saddles were found buried.

Respect for Tuvan traditions other than hunting has led the reserve to make compromises. It still permits pilgrimages to a spring where Tuvans pitch tents, honor Buddha, and conduct a multiweek healing ritual in the high reaches of the reserve.

A more controversial compromise followed the financial pressures created when the Russian government cut support in 1991. Tamara and her rangers began losing all transportation but horses. To keep boats running, rangers caught fish in the river and traded them with factories for spare parts. Then a government agency proposed that the reserve organize hunting trips to attract cash from foreigners.

Rangers now serve as hunting guides, but only on their days off and only on land outside the reserve. In one recent year, the rangers led hunters from Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, and the United States on trips that took 10 bears, 15 elk, and 24 ibex. The net income to the reserve from hunting reportedly exceeded $21,000 – about as much as the Russian government’s annual contribution. Now Tamara must explain to Tuvans why rangers, hired to keep local people from hunting inside the reserve, today lead foreigners to hunt outside it. “We’re not proud of it,” says Tamara. “We wish that we did not have to be this way.”

East from the banks of the Yenisey, another 800 miles carried us past braided rivers and birch forests to Lake Baikal, the world’s oldest, deepest, most voluminous freshwater lake. Around its shoreline, three nature reserves – including Russia’s oldest, Barguzinsky Zapovednik – combine with three national parks to defend an area six times the size of Grand Canyon National Park in the United States. Up from Baikal’s shore, mountains rise sharply for a vertical mile, towering as high as the canyon rim above the Colorado River. From the shoreline, another mile-deep rift descends, stretching almost 400 miles long and holding one-fifth the fresh water of all the world’s lakes. And beneath Baikal’s lake floor lie at least four vertical miles of silt, deposited by hundreds of tributaries during 16 million years. While other lakes filled with sediment and disappeared, Baikal survived, growing wider and deeper where Asia splits at tectonic seams, permitting the evolution of hundreds of endemic species.

The area’s vast reserves protect animals both rare (Barguzin sable, Baikal seal) and abundant (brown bear, forest reindeer). They also provide home range for Baikal’s most revered field ecologist, Semyon Ustinov. Now in his mid-60s, Semyon took his first research job more than 40 years ago, in the mountains of the Barguzinsky reserve, created in 1916 above Baikal’s eastern shore. That work took him only a few dozen miles from the village where he grew up, in a family of Old Believers, a devout Christian sect banished to Siberia in the 1700s.

Just after Semyon arrived, he and his coworkers faced the first Soviet plan to disrupt the natural systems of Baikal. To generate more electricity at a downstream dam, Soviet engineers proposed deepening Baikal’s outlet by 75 feet, dropping the surface of the entire lake. They planned to do so by detonating 30 kilotons of explosives, unleashing more power than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. At unknowable political risk, Semyon and his colleagues in 1958 opposed the blasting. Joining other scientists and citizens in unprecedented activism, they won the first of many battles for Baikal.

As I trailed Semyon into the mountains of Baikalo-Lensky Zapovednik, we followed tracks of reindeer and bear. Weeks before our arrival, a scientist had crawled back out of this bear country with his face gouged to the bone, so researchers lost permission to hike except alongside rifle-carrying rangers. But, as Baikalo-Lensky’s longtime science director, Semyon could make an exception: I could walk with him. He carried no weapons. Visitors, he said, “go only with the protection of God when they go with me.”

That seemed a bit modest. In his mid-60s, Semyon’s muscles remained hard, his wiles quick, his build ursine. At the end of his powerful arms, each hand seemed massive as the head of a splitting maul. As Russian author Valentin Rasputin once wrote, Semyon is a “Siberian on whom nature did not economize.”

As we walked in Baikal’s high country, Semyon recalled one of the reserves’ gifts, to him and others: individual freedom. When he began his career at Barguzinsky he had expected an assignment. Instead the director offered a choice. Would Semyon like to study sables, the animal the reserve was created to save? Or birds? Or ungulates and their predators? Semyon chose the latter: moose, musk deer, bear, and more.

Hiking without tent or sleeping bag, wrapping himself in a wool coat and lying beside a fire on nights that sometimes fell to 45 degrees below zero, Semyon stayed out months at a time. On his returns, he wrote up his findings. They appeared in professional journals, in popular newspapers and books, and in the Chronicle of Nature, a compilation of research kept in each zapovednik – creating an invaluable natural history of northern Eurasia. Siberian nature apparently did well by not economizing on Semyon Ustinov. It invested for maximum return.

Mile 5000 in our overland travels brought us to Khingan nature reserve, founded in 1963 and devoted to protecting elegant red-crowned cranes – the largest of the world’s flying birds and rarer even than the Siberian chicks we saw long ago with Tatiana – in wetlands at the verge of China. We reached the reserve’s headquarters at dawn, a bad time. Rimma Andronova, head of Khingan’s crane reintroduction station, had not slept for two nights.

In a clinic lit by one bare bulb, we found her cradling a red-crowned crane, two feet tall but only a few weeks old. It was born with a deformed leg. A surgeon from a nearby hospital repaired the leg with a titanium pin. The crane, its feathers colored mostly fawn with a hint of lamb, peeped weakly when we entered. Rimma, her porcelain visage carved gray by exhaustion, wanted us to leave. “My shift is over,” she said, “when the chick is healed.”

To insulate both patient and nurse from prying visitors, Rimma’s husband, the reserve’s director, concocted a tour. He drove us miles and rowed us farther. Across an oxbow lake off the Amur River, the border with China, he parked us in a cabin for the night.

The next morning, Rimma arrived at our cabin, her face ashen. Though the little crane’s leg had been healing, the chick seemed overwhelmed by stress and pain. The reserve could not pay for enough anesthetic. The chick had died in her arms at dawn.

Hoping to lift her spirits, her husband led us along the sunny lakeside to a reintroduction station for young red-crowned and white-naped cranes. They clustered round Rimma. They ate from her hand. As one danced with her, leaping and flapping, her pallor shifted toward glow. Here, on a Far Eastern flyway for cranes of many species, the healthy chicks she had raised were being readied to fly off with wild birds.

Khingan’s crane center worked on a theory different from what we saw with Tatiana’s chicks, Rimma explained. Because Rimma finds that few of her chicks imprint on humans, she does not don a crane-like costume. She and her husband theorize that seeing a few humans when young may help breeding cranes to tolerate mild human incursion into nesting habitat. (While we sat talking, tolerant eight-week-old cranes kept taking my pens and untying my shoelaces.) In any event, every year, Rimma sees her adolescent cranes follow the call of the wild and leave to breed. Satellite tracking gives confirmation: Khingan’s young have flown off with other cranes to China, Korea, and Japan.

But Rimma’s theory admits exceptions, and one stood over her as she sat talking. A two-year-old white-naped crane, he looked ready to peck my eyes out. She stroked his neck, which bent, serpentine, toward her. Rimma warned that he might attack me or even her husband. This crane, she explained, “loves me.”

He should, I thought. He chose well. So did the younger cranes that flapped after Tatiana as she trained them, and the moose that browsed in snow near Semyon as he took notes for his land’s incomparable Chronicle of Nature. By the time I met Rimma and the crane who loved her, I felt I had been tracking a transcontinental romance. Russia’s reserves have evidently survived an ecocidal century as a triumph of human yearning to know and love the natural world. Along with rich flora and fauna, the reserves harbor rare humanity – as their director knew when, at age 32, he bet that his entire system could be saved by his people.

But he never bet that those idealists could last forever – sleeping in overcoats, trading fish for boat parts, and (in yet another reserve breeding center) taking hay from their family cows to feed starving bison. The system cannot go forward, he said in our last conversation, “based on enthusiasm alone. We don’t know how long it will last.”

Enthusiasm also cannot, at times, replace petty cash. Rimma’s all-night nursing cannot help when a shortage of anesthetic kills one of the world’s rarest birds while it agonizes in her arms. Tamara’s poaching patrols cannot answer local resentment that her rangers lead foreign sport-hunters to compete with hungry Tuvans.

The system’s director kept telling me that money is not the root of all good. In the last minute of our last interview, Director Stepanitsky insisted again: “It’s not necessarily money that gives people the enthusiasm to keep working.” I nodded. But in the 5000 miles that followed, I met some incurable enthusiasts – nature lovers in a romance as big as a continent – who may someday put a bit more help to very good use. RL