In the forests of northeast Asia home to fish owls, brown bears, musk deer, moose, wolves, raccoon dogs, leopards and tigers, and by the end of Cold War, only a few hundred tigers stepped quietly through the snow of the Amur Rive basin. Soon, the Soviet Union fell, bringing catastrophe, without the careful oversight of a central authority, poaching and logging took a fast, astonishing toll on an already vulnerable species Amur Tiger. Slaght in his book Tigers Between Empires, dealing with the isolated population inhabiting the Amur  basin in Siberia, parts of the river separate inland China from Russia’s eastern shores.

Russia that once dominated the eastern bloc, now under Vladimir Putin. The shockwaves of this transition ripped out 4,000 miles from Moscow to Terney, the dirt-poor village amid US-Russian efforts to conserve Amur Tigers.

Dale Miquelle, the biologist who went to Terney in 1992 as the primary pair of American hiking boots on the ground for the US funded Siberian Tiger Project.  His problems ranged from escalation in poaching when the rule of law collapsed to a marginalisation by Russian nationalists. 

Professional Conservationist, Slaght, in Tigers Between Empires, describes Lev Kapalnov, the forefather of Amur Tiger conservation, who was murdered by poachers in 1943. A female tiger called Olga is emblematic of the Siberian Tiger Project, captured and fitted with a radio collar in 1992, producing 13 cubs in six litters before poachers killed her in 2005.

A lucrative trade in body parts  for gruesome traditional medicines fuels poaching. Gunshot injuries are on reason they become man eaters, making them less able to catch their usual prey.

Amur tigers are hanging on in their wildlands, and thanks to Miquelle and colleagues  the population estimated at 500 in 2023, double its mid-century nadir.

Tigers Between Empires: The Journey to Save the Siberian Tiger form Extinction by Jonathan C Slaght, Allen Lane £30/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux $33, 512 pages.