NEW YORK (August 25, 2017) – A new translation of a Russian natural history classic provides a snapshot of Amur tiger habitat in the Russian Far East a hundred years ago. In Across the Ussuri Kray (Indiana University Press, 2016), famed Russian explorer and ethnographer Vladimir Arsenyev catalogued the people and animals he encountered during a grueling six-month expedition to the forests of the Sikhote-Alin Mountains in 1906.  This book was partial source material for Akira Kurosawa’s 1975 Academy Award-winning film “Dersu Uzala.”

 Across the Ussuri Kray’s treatment is notable because it was translated by Jonathan Slaght, the Russia and Northeast Asia Coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

WCS has been working in the Russian Far East since 1993 to ensure the survival of the same iconic wildlife species Arsenyev described, including Amur tigers, Amur leopards, and Blakiston’s fish owls. WCS works with local partners in Russia to conserve the integrity and functionality of the Russian Far East ecosystem as a landscape, while balancing the economic and social needs of local rural communities. 

Slaght, a conservation biologist, has spent twenty years working in the same forests Arsenyev explored. He added hundreds of footnotes to the book comparing the region and its wildlife then and now.

“Some places are the same, such as forests with healthy populations of tigers and bears. But other places are very different now: a river where Arsenyev saw thousands upon thousands of migrating salmon is today so polluted and overfished that there are barely any of these fish left there,” said Slaght.

“Interestingly, a number of the conservation issues observed in the region a hundred years ago are concerns confronted by the WCS Russia Program today,” Slaght continued. “For example, Arsenyev described seeing drift fences, or long wooden barriers with wire loops strategically placed at barrier openings to snare game. This method is still used by poachers to catch Siberian musk deer for their commercially-valuable musk glands.”

Little-known outside of Russia, Arsenyev was a tremendously important champion of the wildlife and wild places of the Russian Far East. “Arsenyev is as much a part of Primorye’s soul today as tigers, the Korean pine, and the Sikhote-Alin Mountains,” said Ivan Yegorchev, an Arsenyev scholar at the Society for the Study of the Far East who contributed a Foreword for this new translation. “I am thrilled that Western readers now have a chance to understand the impact this man had on preserving the natural and cultural histories of the region.”

Across the Ussuri Kray is an unabridged, uncensored, detailed account of Arsenyev’s 1902 and 1906 expeditions. Augmented by several hundred annotations, two maps, and nearly forty photographs, it is available August 29, 2016, at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s Books, and elsewhere.