August 17, 2020 — A row of stakes hundreds of feet long pokes out of the endless estuary of the Amur River on Russia’s Pacific coast, resembling the naked spine of a giant fish.
It is a piece of commercial fishing infrastructure reminding the people who still live here that nature’s wealth — in this case, millions of chum and pink salmon — belongs to the well-connected few.
“It’s as though they must exterminate these riches, mercilessly,” says Galina Sladkovskaya, 65, waiting in vain for a fish to bite at a levee about 20 miles upstream. “They only need money and nothing else. They don’t have a human soul.”
Along the Amur, one of Asia’s great waterways, Russians feel cheated, lied to and ignored. The wild salmon fishery that they once took for granted is gone, they say, because Moscow granted large concessions to enterprises that strung enormous nets across the river’s mouth.