OZERPAKH, Russia – A row of staked hundreds of feet long legs from the endless estuary of the Amur River on the Russian Pacific coast, resembling the naked sting of a giant fish.
It is a piece of commercial fishing infrastructure that reminds the people who still live here that the richness of nature – in this case millions of comb and pink salmon – belongs to the well-connected couple.
“It’s just like having to destroy this wealth, graciously,” says Galina Sladkovskaya, 65, waiting in vain for a fish to bite at a levee about 20 miles upstream. ‘They just need money and nothing else. They have no human soul. ”
Along the Amur, one of the great waterways of Asia, Russians feel cheated, lied to and ignored. The wild salmon fishery they once used is gone, they say, because Moscow granted large concessions to companies that swept enormous nets across the mouth of the river.
The anger of the people over their depleted fish stocks is so widespread that it has been a driving force behind the protests against the Kremlin that have been shaking from the Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk, on the Amur, since early July.
“This was a gesture from people desperate to be heard,” Daniil Yermilov, a Khabarovsk political adviser, said of the protests. “People wanted to live the way they used to live so they could catch fish again.”
The story of the disappearing salmon of the Amur also sheds more light on why the popular support of President Vladimir V. Putin has fallen near the lowest point of its 20-year rule.
Mr Putin’s Russians’ turn is less about abstract notions of freedom and geopolitics than the concrete instances of poverty and injustice they see in their daily lives – and the feeling that the country’s elite still know about their cravings. and has no worries.
On a dirt road recently near the mouth of Amur, a green truck splashed through before Leonid, a fisherman, whistled it all the way. Two boys, his sons, hustled out of their hiding place in the reed, and dragged a sack of glistening salmon.
“We are being forced to become poachers,” he said, cursing and refusing to give his last name because he was in the process of breaking the law. “What does Putin think?”
Residents say there is almost no way to catch legally enough food from what is left of small fish, amid increasingly stringent regulations regarding recreation and Indian fisheries.
The boards tied to the roof of Leonid’s aging blue hatchback were meant to provide an alibi – he was just collecting from wooden plots. His back window carried the slogan of the Khabarovsk region’s summer political alarm clock: “I am / we are Sergei Furgal.”
Sergei I. Furgal, a former screw metal trader, ran for governor of the sprawling Khabarovsk region in 2018 and struck the interior, an ally of the Kremlin, in a rare oversight. He gained popularity with populist movements uncommon in Russia’s top-down government system: he cut his salary, improved school lunches and often held listening tours, kicked the band and posted copy to Instagram.
By then, the fishing crisis of Amur was already brewing. Federal authorities had granted expansive salmon fishing rights to companies that installed enormous, stationary nets in the estuary and at the mouth of the river.
In the fall, legions of migrating salmon used it to make hundreds of miles upstream to Khabarovsk, filling apartment refrigerators with smoked fish and cheap salmon roe – a staple of New Year’s Eve that Russians call red caviar – sold by the kilogram.
The catch dropped to 64,000 metric tons in 2016, but then dropped to 21,500 tons in 2018, says the World Wildlife Federation. And a few salmon made it to Khabarovsk as the spawning grounds on the tributaries of the Amur.
“People here at the moment cannot catch enough to put on the table, while commercial fishermen may make huge profits,” Mr Furgal said shortly after taking office. “We will try to change this state of affairs.”
He called for new limits on commercial fishing, some of which were implemented but the salmon remained scarce. Then, at the beginning of last month, a SWAT team from Moscow pulled Mr Furgal out of his black SUV and strapped him on the eight-hour flight back to the capital.
He was accused of murderous killings some 15 years ago, but Khabarovsk residents saw a naked Kremlin trying to make a maverick governor more loyal to his constituencies than to Mr Putin. Two days later, they took to the streets in the tens of thousands in the biggest protests the regions of Russia have seen since the fall of the Soviet Union.
The protests, now in their second month, are fueled by regional pride, economic frustration and fatigue with Mr Putin. But her animating emotion, showing dozens of interviews throughout the region, was a sense of injustice, as encapsulated by the fish crisis: Salmon had been a part of life here for generations, and now Moscow had taken it away and offered nothing in return.
“Putin thinks only of war and about his pockets,” said Andrei Peters, 53, a small businessman in the poor village of Takhta on the lower Amur. “Nobody thinks about the people.”
In the struggling fishing village of a few hundred people with no regular internet or road connection to the outside world, someone had printed black-and-white Furgal posters on regular sheets of paper and affixed them to wooden poles. With their now ex-mayor behind bars, residents said they were afraid they would lose the one person in power who heard their concerns.
Indeed, the few officials in the region who agreed to interview requests in the wake of Mr Furgal’s arrest dismissed their fishy anger from their constituents or removed the blame away from the Kremlin. In the indigenous community of Sikachi-Alyan, an hour’s drive outside Khabarovsk, village chief Nina Druzhinina declared that “America is to blame for all our sins.”
“The CIA has deployed its services everywhere, and its spy network is probably highly developed,” Druzhinina said. Commercial fishermen were able to exploit the Amur River, she said, because of the U.S.-inspired legal code to Soviet Russia.
In the regional parliament, the speaker, Irina Zikunova, said that many residents of Khabarovsk “are led by impulse, are led by emotions, are guided by feelings” instead of by facts. They rejected the notion – heard almost universally in interviews with residents along the Amur – that officials in Moscow had formed the fisheries regime for the benefit of well-connected businessmen.
“In fact, it’s a complex problem,” she said.
One of Amur’s most important fishing magnates, Aleksandr Pozdnyakov, is being driven around Khabarovsk in a black Mercedes Maybach. He acknowledged in an interview in his tastefully dark office that Amur’s fisheries are in crisis. But he said the problem was overfished by locals who would rather “pay nothing and do nothing while catching as much as they want.”
Mr. Furgal, the Khabarovsk governor who was arrested last month, made things worse, he said, speaking “as he does everything for the people” and telling the public that they are entitled to the salmon in the Amur.
“I will tell you one thing,” said Mr. Pozdnyakov of the tens of thousands protesting in support of Mr. Furgal, “I am sure that practically 99 percent of the people who go out are slackers who do not want to do anything. “
Experts say it is true to the idea that stumbling blocks by local residents are part of the problem. Olga Cheblukova, who coordinates the Amur River studies at the World Wildlife Fund, said researchers from the environmental group have seen hundreds of dead salmon scattered near their ghost fields, cutting their uterus open and removing their rot.
The fundamental issue, she said, is poor federal oversight that did not detect a natural decline in the wild salmon population to large catches in 2016. In the years that followed, regulators issued fishing quotas that exceeded the actual migrating population, causing runs of salmon to be virtually destroyed before they managed to reproduce.
In the fall of 2018, WWF researchers counted an average of about 0.1 chum salmon per 1,000 square feet of river on their ghost ground, compared to a standard of about 50.
For Khabarovsk residents, that failure to govern means more expensive fish – a parable for the whole of Russia, where official mismanagement and corruption often translate into bad roads, dirty hospitals and polluted deserts.
The protests in Khabarovsk show how easily public anger over these failures can now be sown – as it did for Evgeny Kamyshev, 32, a protest that blamed the Kremlin for the poor salmon.
‘The fish rolls out of its head,’ he said.
Oleg Matsnev contributed research from Moscow.
