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"You want tiger skins? Lynx? Musk-deer glands?" asked a burly Russian wildlife trader named Sergei. "I can get you four tigers within a day. In a week, 10 or maybe 15." Eric Sievers, an American working as an environmentalist in the former Soviet Union, pretended to be interested. He was posing as a buyer in the Russian coastal town of Plastun last month. The trophy he was really looking for was not a tiger skin, but poachers.
Later that morning Sergei met Sievers in the apartment of a local police officer posing as a middleman for the deal. In a back bedroom, Sergei unfurled a six-foot-long tiger skin with a single bullet hole over its heart. As Sievers and the policeman examined the pelt, Sergei offered to throw in 36 pounds of tiger bones as part of the $4,000 deal. Sievers, who was recruited by local prosecutors to help in the sting, demurred, explaining that he had to go back to his moneymen in Vladivostok. But at dusk the next day he hurried to Sergei's apartment, said he was leaving the Russian Far East and pressed him for some merchandise. Sergei handed him a price list$4,000 to $6,000 for a tiger, $1,000 for a bearskin, $150 to $200 for a bear gallbladder. The next day 20 cops and security (formerly KGB) agents moved in. They arrested Sergei and two helpers, winning the first skirmish against local poachers.
But one victory is a far cry from winning the war. Fifty Siberian tigers, between 15 and 25 percent of the total in the wild, were reportedly poached in Russia last year. (About 800 live in captivity.) Call it yet another unintended consequence of the breakup of the Soviet Union. Tigers were faring badly elsewhere in Asia, where populations of Bengal, Sumatran and other tigers had dropped from 50,000 in 1940 to fewer than 5,000 today. But under communism, the Siberian tiger flourished: closed borders and tight control over guns and contact with foreigners deterred traders, and conservation laws and a ban on hunting protected the felids. With the fall of the Soviet state, the Siberian wood&-the taiga-have become the outback version of Moscow's Arbat. "There's nothing to buy at the stores, so people head out to the taiga to shop" for ginseng and medicinal herbs, musk deer and pine nuts, says Vladimir Valichka, head of a local hunting group. "A person who kills a tiger can live off it for five to 10 years." Laws forbid poaching but are rarely enforced in a country with "more serious problems," says Andrei Lesnikov, a local prosecutor.
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Lena was one of the latest victims. Last summer she was radio-collared by a Russian-American team in the Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve outside Plastun; it was the first time an adult cat had ever been tagged. The goal was to track her, and other collared tigers, to learn what size territory and how much food a tiger needs. Instead, the team found Lena's collar last month under five inches of snow near a road-and her four whimpering cubs shivering nearby. They were the latest orphans left by the slaughter of the world's largest cats. Says captive-breeding expert Doug Armstrong of the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Neb., "We could be watching the extinction of a species in the wild."
Last month's sting exposed a network of tiger hunters, but even if the security agents are as successful against poaching as the KGB was against dissidents, the cats aren't out of the taiga yet. Korea's Hyundai Corp. has been logging extensively in tiger territory, and multinational corporations, as well as newly privatized Russian firms, are lining up to exploit the riches of the Russian Far East. Moreover, in the 1930s the species may have suffered a "genetic bottleneck"-a decline in numbers so precipitous that the population has fewer varieties of genes than it once did. This lack of genetic diversity leaves animals unable to adapt to new conditions or diseases. It also raises the risk of birth defects and infertility.
Will the tiger go the way of the dodo? In a controversial plan to take pressure off wild tigers, China has begun to breed tigers, with the grisly purpose of providing bones and pelts to Asians who covet their alleged aphrodisiac and medicinal properties. And this week Lena's surviving cubs (two died from a congenital defect) are scheduled to fly to the Omaha zoo, which has pioneered in vitro fertilization for big cats. Call them the most ironic of Russian emigres: "An authoritarian regime managed to preserve these animals," says Maurice Hornocker, codirector of the American-Russian research team. "And a democratic regime may destroy them." Unless the Russians realize that not even a free market means that everything is for sale.
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