The Russian imperial administration encouraged the extermination of large predators because it considered their existence incompatible with the very purpose of Russia’s imperial mission
A taxidermised tiger on display at the National Museum of Georgia. Photo shared by @OPolianichev on Twitter With the conquest of the Caucasus and Central Asia, the Russian Empire set foot into a natural world that differed much from that of mainland Russia. Leopards and tigers, among others, inhabited a wide area that included the evergreen rainforests of Georgia and Azerbaijan.
If the vision of the Caucasus as ‘Russia’s India’ haunted the minds of economists and agriculturists, naturalists were quick to trace commonalities with India with respect to its animal diversity. Exotic fauna only highlighted the region’s alleged ‘tropicality’.
A lot has been written about big game hunting in the colonial world. Tsarist Asia was no exception. Killing exotic animals for sport was a favourite, if rare, form of leisure for the Russian militaries.
The very presence of leopards in the Caucasus struck the imperial newcomers.
The Russian army had a long history of engagement with leopards and quite a bloody one. The leopard (almost extinct), tiger and cheetah (both extinct) at the National Museum of Georgia are a vivid testimony of the environmental change that Russian imperialism brought along.
In 1848, one officer stationed in Georgia described how, to avoid boredom caused by the destructive effect of the hot climate which was turning him into a “lazy Asiatic”, he went hunting leopards even though “as a European” he did not believe they really lived there.
Another officer stationed in Erivan (today Yerevan, Armenia’s capital) in 1850 was so bored by the lack of civilised entertainment that the “only pleasure” for him was to hunt tigers and hyenas. In the South Caucasus and Central Asia, the local population did not normally hunt leopards and tigers.
The Russian imperial administration, on the contrary, encouraged their extermination because it considered their existence incompatible with the very purpose of Russia’s imperial mission there — the imposition of order and civilisation.
Russian sources noticed a dramatic change that happened after the arrival of the Russian militaries: exotic predators began to disappear. In the 1860s, every soldier in Turkestan who killed a tiger received 15 rubles as a reward. The amount of the rewards increased over time.
In the first decade of the 20th century, the ideas of nature conservation gained currency among learned societies and the authorities. The drive to safeguard endangered species before it was too late led to the establishment of nature reserves throughout the Caucasus.
But even then, the government deemed leopards and tigers as animals “subject to extermination.” As a result of these policies and practices, leopards have almost become extinct in the Caucasus in the wild. Tigers and cheetahs became extinct long ago.
The task of the Caucasus Museum, established in 1867 and currently known as the National Museum of Georgia, was to showcase the diversity and exoticism of the natural world (as well as local peoples and their distinctively ‘Oriental’ culture) of the Caucasus and Turkmenistan.
Now it attests to the recklessness of empire.
This article is based on a Twitter thread put out by the author on January 13, 2023. It has been reproduced here with the author’s permission
Oleksandr Polianichev is a historian of Tsarist Russia in the Caucasus and the wider world
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth
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