The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

  In an effort to deflect the blame for this catastrophe, Mao chastised Khrushchev for recalling China’s Soviet advisors and for calling in the substantial debts China had incurred during the Korean War. In fact, China’s Communist Party was in the midst of a vicious power struggle, which Mao would win, but at enormous national cost. Many in the Kremlin, still recovering from thirty years of Stalin, saw a frighteningly familiar scenario developing with Mao’s own cult of personality, and this was one of several reasons the Soviets sought to distance themselves from their communist “little brother.” As relations deteriorated, the tension manifested itself along contested sections of their shared border, which, at the time, was 4,650 miles long. The scabs Mao chose to pick at were more than a century old, but they served his purpose well.

  The wounds Mao sought to reopen had been inflicted during the nineteenth century when the future superpowers were grinding against each other like so many tectonic plates. The world as we know it was forming then, along fault lines of race, culture, and geography. By mid-century, though, China was in trouble: embroiled in the Opium Wars with France and England, it was further hobbled by a protracted internal rebellion that had left Manchuria effectively defenseless. Imperial Russia had already taken advantage of this window of weakness on its Pacific frontier by annexing all disputed lands north of the Amur River in 1858. Two years later, Czar Alexander II went a step further and coerced the Chinese into signing the Treaty of Peking, thereby adding another slice of Outer Manchuria—what is now Primorye and southern Khabarovsk Territory—to the Russian empire. In the mid-1960s, it seemed as if Mao might try to get them back.

  While Chairman Mao was engineering his Great Leap Forward and vying for control of China’s Communist Party, he was also publicly criticizing the Treaty of Peking, even going so far as to demand reparations from Russia. By 1968 Sino-Soviet relations had sunk to a historic low, and one of the by-products was a new front in the Cold War. It yawned open in a surprising place: a small island in the middle of the Ussuri River, twenty miles due west of Yuri Trush’s hometown. The Russians call it Damansky Island and the Chinese call it Zhen Bao (Treasure Island); either way, this seasonally flooded smear of field and forest exhibits no obvious strategic value. Nonetheless, its ambiguous location met Mao’s criteria for a contentious and unifying reminder of past humiliations at the hands of a long-dead imperialist.

  By the winter of 1968, the island and adjacent riverbank had become the site of increasingly violent skirmishes—brawls, really—between Chinese and Soviet border guards. “Each Siberian would be confronted by a cluster of Chinese servicemen armed with boat hooks, pickets and sticks with spiked heads,” wrote Lieutenant General (Ret.)2 Vitaly Bubenin, who was declared a Hero of the Soviet Union for his bravery during the climax of these confrontations. “We didn’t have body armor back then. My men were wearing thick winter sheepskin jackets. The fights occurred on a daily basis and … we realized that we wouldn’t last long using our bare hands. We got ourselves some bear spears and maces with metal heads similar to those used by epic warriors.… The weapons become hugely popular with all the border guards stationed around the area.”

  Seen from a distance as they played out across the moonlit snow and through the leafless willows, these running battles would have borne a striking resemblance to the first confrontations between Cossacks and Manchus three hundred years earlier. Mao, it is now generally believed, was capitalizing on these historic rivalries in an effort to whip up some politically useful nationalistic fervor. However, he had chosen to do this with the world’s leading nuclear power: it was brinkmanship of a bold and frightening kind. On March 2, 1969, two weeks after Vladimir Markov reached draft age, the border guards’ strict no-shooting order was violated in the form of a carefully orchestrated ambush by the Chinese. In the ensuing gun battle, the first of its kind on a Russian border since the Second World War, thirty-one Russians were gunned down. Within days, thousands of Russian and Chinese troops, backed by artillery, were massed along the frozen Ussuri.

  On March 15, three days before the United States began its four-year bombing campaign against Cambodia, there was a major battle at Damansky/Zhen Bao in which hundreds of Russian and Chinese soldiers died. Both nations, sobered by the potential for a full-blown war, withdrew to their respective sides. Mao ordered extensive tunnel networks to be dug on the Ussuri’s left bank, allegedly in preparation for a nuclear attack by Russia. Moscow, too, prepared for the worst, calling for a major troop buildup along the Ussuri and Amur rivers. Five thousand miles away, in Kaliningrad, Vladimir Markov received his draft notice. By the end of 1969, twenty-nine divisions of the Soviet army (nearly half a million soldiers) were massed along the border, and Private Markov was among them. For a seaman’s son from Baltic Russia, it would have been hard to imagine a more remote posting, or a less auspicious one.

  Soviet Russia’s secrecy and paranoia are legendary to the point of caricature, but they were also real: information of all kinds was so strictly controlled that ordinary Russians were uninformed, or intentionally misinformed, about politically sensitive areas. The Far East contained many such zones, including important mines, gulags, and military bases. Because Primorye and southern Khabarovsk Territory were effectively sandwiched between China and the Pacific coast (which was deemed vulnerable to Japanese and American infiltration), security was particularly tight there. As a result, Markov was going from one forbidden zone to another; this was a place that he and many of his fellow draftees may not have even known existed. Despite nearly two decades of relative openness, this is apparently still the case, if for different reasons. When a literate young Muscovite, bound for a prestigious American music school, was asked about Primorye in July of 2008, he said he hadn’t heard of it. “Maybe it’s near Iran,” he guessed.3 To the more straightforward question, “Are there tigers in Russia?” he answered, “I think only in the circus.” For many Russian urbanites, “Russia” stops at the Urals, if not sooner. Beyond that is Siberia—a bad joke, and after that, well, who really cares?

  In the minds of most Russians, the Far East lies over the edge of the known world and is, itself, a form of oblivion. For any European Russian, whether ordinary worker or privileged member of the nomenklatura,* a one-way ticket like Markov’s was tantamount to banishment. His was the same route undertaken by hundreds of thousands of exiles dating back to Czarist times. Some of the country’s most notorious prisons and labor camps were located there, including the dreaded and, for many years, unmentionable Sakhalin Island, a frigid and lonely sub-planet from which many never returned.

  Regardless of what he knew beforehand, Markov’s nonstop train ride from the thickly settled shadowlands of the Iron Curtain to the vast and empty wilderness hugging Asia’s Pacific coast would have been radical and disorienting, not to mention interminable. The journey from Kaliningrad to Khabarovsk, the regional capital of the Far East, takes one a quarter of the way around the world. To get there in 1969 would have meant two to three weeks on the Trans-Siberian, the tracks unspooling into the future with agonizing slowness like a real-time progression of Eurasian conquest and collapse. Khabarovsk is situated at a strategic bend in the Amur River, less than ten miles from its confluence with the Ussuri and the Chinese frontier. One hundred and fifty miles to the south, just over the Primorye border, lies the Bikin valley and the site of Sobolonye, a village that did not exist when Markov first arrived in the region.

  The magnitude of such a move for a provincial like Markov cannot be underestimated. Beyond the language, nothing would have been the same, and many of his new acquaintances would have been outcasts of one kind or another. There was no tradition of serfdom in the Far East and, historically, the region has been a haven for a multiethnic rabble of bandits, deserters, poachers, fur trappers, and persecuted Old Believers (a conservative branch of Orthodox Christians), all of whom favored voluntary banishment over a wide range of unappealing alternatives. Add to this the exile population—both Russian and Chinese
, and the Cossack soldiers sent by the czar to settle and guard this new frontier—and the results become uniquely volatile, more crucible than melting pot.

  Today, the Bikin valley is seen by many outsiders as a place as dangerous for its human inhabitants as it is for its animals. It is dotted with small, isolated villages, many of which operate off the grid and outside the law. To a pair of foreign journalists, a friend of Markov’s once exclaimed, “You came here alone?4 Aren’t you afraid? Usually, outsiders only come in big delegations.”

  Evidence suggests that Markov found this environment more liberating than frightening and, in Soviet Russia, liberty was a rare thing. In any case, Markov adapted and, ultimately, adopted this frontier as his home, and it may have been thanks to the army. According to friends and neighbors, Markov was trained in reconnaissance, and these skills—wilderness survival, orienteering, stealth, and the handling of arms—would serve him well in ways he never anticipated. Denis Burukhin, a young trapper from Sobolonye who knew Markov as Uncle Vova (a diminutive form of Vladimir), would later recall how Markov taught him to navigate the dense and trackless forest along the Bikin.

  During his military service, Markov also became a paratrooper, maybe because he was strong and well coordinated, and maybe because—at five and a half feet tall (the same height as Stalin)—he had something to prove. If fate had taken one more twist, Markov and Trush could have been jumping out of planes together. Both men were in the army in 1969 and Trush was a paratrooper, too. Because he was eleven months older, he had already been assigned to a battalion in Turkmenistan, but after the Damansky clashes in the spring of 1969, his battalion was mobilized to Primorye. Only at the last minute were they recalled.

  In the end, Markov never had to test his skills in battle, despite the fact that both Russia and China remained on a war footing for years after the Damansky incident.* The stakes were high enough that the Chinese and Russian premiers, Zhou Enlai and Alexei Kosygin, saw fit to meet personally in order to resolve the festering border issue. Although the meeting was considered successful, Moscow continued its Far Eastern troop buildup into the early 1970s.† By the time Markov was discharged from the army in 1971, his father was dead; ten years later, he lost his sister. Markov never returned to Kaliningrad (perhaps it was simply too far) and, according to his wife, Tamara Borisova, none of his surviving family ever visited Sobolonye. Had they taken the opportunity to do so, they probably wouldn’t have recognized the die-hard tayozhnik as their own.

  * Nomenklatura, literally “list of names,” refers to the ruling elite of communist society who held key positions in all spheres of Soviet endeavor. The privileges they enjoyed and the proportion of the population they represented bore striking resemblances to those of the nobility under the czar.

  * According to R. Craig Nation, the Far Eastern theater of operations during this period [1970s and ’80s] came to “absorb no less than one-third of Soviet military assets.”5

  † Damansky/Zhen Bao was formally ceded to China by Boris Yeltsin in 1991.

  6

  The tiger answered, “Your son has been boasting. If he is the stronger, let him kill me; if I am the stronger, I will kill him. Tell him my command!”

  “The Brave Gilyak and the Grateful Tiger,”

  COLLECTED BY L. Y. STERNBERG, c. 19001

  IT HAD BEEN ANDREI ONOFRECUK, A SHORT MAN WITH NICOTINE-varnished fingernails and a stove-in nose, who had first discovered Markov on Thursday, one day prior to Inspection Tiger’s arrival. Onofrecuk was a regular at the cabin, and the two men had agreed to meet there to do some ice fishing. But Onofrecuk had gotten drunk and was late—by about a day. After hitching a ride to the turnoff, he had gone the last half mile on foot, arriving close to noon. The first thing he noticed was blood by the entrance road. “I didn’t quite understand at first what was what,” he recalled. “Maybe Markov shot some animal and didn’t clean up after himself. I was surprised. Usually, he is really careful about that kind of thing. The hunt is not legal after all, and you know there might be rangers coming. So then I started walking, thinking: what the hell is going on? Then I saw his hat. It was as if I’d been clubbed over the head. I stopped thinking clearly. I had a bad feeling, but I still couldn’t understand what was happening. Then I saw the tiger tracks.

  “So, I’m thinking: maybe he’s just hurt. Maybe I could help him. I walked some more, past pieces of his clothes. I saw the dog’s paw sticking out of the snow. I went a bit further, but the tiger didn’t let me any closer. I couldn’t see Markiz—neither him nor her. [In Russian, tigers are often referred to in the feminine, like ships.] But I heard her growling. I couldn’t figure out which direction it was coming from, but I knew then that she’d got him. Right there, that fucking carrion eater’s got her meat-head down, growling over him. So I stood for a little while, and then I slowly turned around. I was thinking, the main thing was not to start running because then she would run after me—eat me.”

  Onofrecuk was unarmed. He made his way back to the cabin and started a fire in the cold stove. He was in shock. “My head became empty,” he recalled. “Like a vacuum. You know, it was hard to understand—he was my friend, after all. So many years out there together.”

  He sat in Markov’s cabin, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, one after the other, for a long time. It took him three tries before he could summon the nerve to leave the cabin to go for help. Onofrecuk was ten years younger than Markov and saw him as something of a mentor. While he was fond of reading, he was not ambitious and he lacked the skill and patience required for beekeeping or fur trapping. He was, primarily, a meat hunter and fisherman—often under the supervision of Markov—and he lived day to day. They shared the cabin and fought like brothers, but they always made up. Markov had been his best friend.

  Nonetheless, that night, it fell to their mutual friend, Danila Zaitsev, to tell Tamara Borisova what had happened to her husband in the forest. Markov had not been home in nearly a month and Borisova was eager to see him. “The scariest thing was telling his wife,” recalled Onofrecuk. “I was afraid to go to her house by myself, so I asked Zaitsev to come with me. But I couldn’t go in. I stayed on the road. ‘Go,’ I told him. ‘Tell her.’ Because the image of him there—it was like I’d just seen him.”

  Danila Zaitsev—skewed nose, furrowed brow, penetrating eye—is a tough and steady man, and he went in to face Borisova alone. He tried to be as gentle as he could, but who knows how to say such things? “I wanted to choose the words carefully,” Zaitsev explained. “I told her that a tiger had attacked him and, at first, she didn’t understand. She thought he had survived.”

  So Zaitsev tried again while Onofrecuk stood listening on the dark and frozen road. He knew when Zaitsev told her by the screaming.

  Borisova seemed to go out of her mind then: she was a maelstrom, grieving mad. She insisted on seeing her husband, demanding him in ways that were hard for his friends to deny. Wisely, they refused to allow it. They had sequestered Markov’s remains at the home of an old man named Kuzmich, a carpenter who lived alone at the edge of the village. Onofrecuk and Zaitsev gathered some planks of Korean pine for a coffin, and Kuzmich built it—full size. But Markov could not be buried right away because Borisova had ordered a new suit for him. That there was virtually nothing to put in it was beside the point. Borisova’s world was tilting badly and she needed some order; she needed her husband to be buried in a suit. Her friends obliged her, but the round-trip to Luchegorsk, the nearest shopping town, would take a day. In the meantime, Markov’s friends went to the village cemetery to prepare the grave.

  The cemetery is laid out on a forested knoll about half a mile south of the village, where it is overseen by a massive, dead Korean pine. The cemetery is small, not only because Sobolonye is so new, but because the people hired to work for the company and thereby allowed to live in the village were generally too young to die. Nonetheless, some of them have and so there is a high proportion of small children and young people represent
ed there—some by Orthodox crosses of crudely welded steel, others by crosses of brightly painted wood, a few by formal gravestones. If the family can afford it, an enameled photograph of the deceased will be mounted on the grave. Today, the graveyard is the only place one can view a likeness of Vladimir Markov.

  Compact and solidly built, Markov had high cheekbones, melancholy-looking eyes, and an athlete’s chin. Both Onofrecuk and his wife, Irina, noted a certain “Gypsy” quality about him. Tamara Borisova put it a bit differently, saying, “He was a Russian, but there was something Armenian or Georgian about his face.” Its effect was not wasted on her: Markov was handsome, with olive skin; dark, wavy hair; and blue-green eyes. Short as he was, he was still exceptionally strong: before Sobolonye’s disco burned down, Markov used to help out there, and Borisova recalls him carrying 100-liter beer kegs (about 25 gallons) with ease (full, these weigh about 250 pounds).

  After the army, Markov had gone to a technical school for logging and, from there, to work in the woods in southern Primorye, not far from a town named for the explorer Arseniev. Around 1980, when Markov was in his late twenties, he moved up to Sobolonye, which offered both better prospects and an opportunity to put some distance between himself and a failed marriage. Sobolonye had been carved out of the forest a few years earlier by the Middle Bikin National Forest Enterprise, a state-owned logging company that had been set up to log the old-growth poplar, oak, and pine throughout the Bikin valley. Primorye contains some of the biggest and most varied timber anywhere east of the Urals and, at the time, the middle and upper Bikin were largely unexploited.