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memoirs: subjective interpretations of events that may not have occurred exactly as described. It is by no means unique to Russia, but the most egregious examples of this freewheeling approach to reportage are to be found in the State’s representation of itself, a tendency that transcends regime and political philosophy.

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    But we are what we are, and we might remember
    Not to hate any person, for all are viciousROBINSON JEFFERS,
    “Original Sin”1
    YURI TRUSH AND VLADIMIR MARKOV WERE BORN WITHIN A YEAR OF each other, both in European Russia, but they were drawn into this exotic sylvan netherworld by very different paths. That they would represent opposing points on the spectrum of possibility was as much a reflection of personality as it was an adaptation to opportunity. Trush, like Markov, was a relative latecomer to the Far East. He was born in 1950, and raised in a village outside the city of Nizhny Novgorod, about halfway between Moscow and the Ural Mountains. His maternal grandfather was a decorated major general who died in battle at the outset of the Second World War. His father, Anatoly, a senior lieutenant, survived the siege of Leningrad, which lasted two and a half years. Father and son hunted in the pine forests surrounding his village, and Yuri saw some things there that left deep impressions.
    In the early 1960s, when Trush was about fourteen, he remembers going to the local tavern with his father. There were other hunters there, friends of his father, and they were discussing boar hunting. One man—half drunk—spoke loudly of the pregnant sow he’d shot out of season. It is a generally accepted rule among hunters that you don’t shoot pregnant animals, and a silence fell over the room. Then the voices rose again and overwhelmed the bragging man, who was taken outside and beaten severely.
    In his early twenties, Trush had another formative experience, this time on the steppes of western Kazakhstan. His job at a gold mine there had ended, and he was briefly unemployed. An able hunter, Trush turned to his gun for sustenance. He answered a call to join in a market hunt for saiga, a bizarre-looking antelope with translucent corkscrew horns and a trunklike snout that looks like a throwback to the Pleistocene. In the 1970s, saiga roamed the steppes of Central Asia in herds of thousands. The plan was to kill the animals en masse and sell the meat and skin to the European market and the horns to China where they are believed by many to boost male potency. This was a government-sanctioned operation, and it took place at night. About a dozen armed men in trucks headed out shortly after dusk; they had powerful lights with them, and when a herd was located they turned them on. The animals froze in their tracks, mesmerized, and the men opened fire at uncountable pairs of glowing eyes. Dozens of antelope were killed on the spot, but many more escaped, mortally wounded. “We would go back out in daylight to collect the injured ones, but we couldn’t get them all,” Trush recalled. “You weren’t able to see it at night, but it was obvious during the day how much the animals suffered. It was a sea of blood.” He stuck with it for a few weeks, and then quit in disgust. Animals, he feels, should have a sporting chance; the field should be level between hunter and prey. “I can still see the blood, the heat and their suffering,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t last long there: it was too barbaric. And that’s why I’m so ruthless with the hunters now who hunt at night with the help of jack lights. I don’t consider that hunting; I think it is a massacre.”
    Trush’s affinity for the land and its creatures stuck with him throughout the years he spent underground maintaining mine shaft elevators in Kazakhstan. During his off time he volunteered as a fishing inspector and this was where he discovered his true calling. “There would be situations with these poachers,” he explained. “Sometimes fights