Wild Russia Falls Prey to Civilization : Nature: Economic crunch has given profit the edge on preservation. Businesses and local governments are taking over land and resources. Poaching has increased.

Pyotr Seryogin blows four blasts on a battered hunting horn, then calls into the thick green forest: “Little ones! Little ones! Little ones!”

A family of five huge European bison answers, slowly emerging from the birch trees and lumbering through chest-high ferns toward the fence where Seryogin, 61, waits with pails of feed.

It looks like something out of a Russian fairy tale: the forest idyll, the beasts with long, curved horns, and their white-haired keeper.

But even in places like this, the protected heart of a nature reserve, the troubles of modern-day Russia are pressing in.

The bison, fenced in because of poaching and development, are suffering for lack of space, workers say. Other animals, allowed to roam outside the reserve, are being wiped out by poachers.

Reserve workers are underpaid and under-equipped. Some have been dismissed; others take time off to tend their own small farms.

Russia’s vast protected lands--88 nature reserves, two dozen national parks and various other wilderness designations--include virtually every kind of ecosystem and an abundance of wild species and natural wealth.

Like many things now, however, their management runs largely on autopilot while the country absorbs the shocks of the last few years and figures out who is in charge of what.

Prioksko-Terrasny, a 12,350-acre reserve two hours south of Moscow, has been assigned to six different ministries and departments in as many years. Its exasperated director, Yevgraf Litkens, has resorted to using a letterhead with just his name.

“We couldn’t change stationery fast enough,” Litkens said.

Natalia Danilina, director of the Nature Reserves Department, says the reserves are in no danger of being dissolved, but that the government is still learning how to respond to a variety of new threats.

From one angle, Russia’s industrial decline could be seen as an environmental boon, causing some polluting factories to close and sidetracking large development projects.

But from another, the economic crunch has given profit--or simple survival--the edge on preservation. Businesses and local governments are taking over land and resources. Poaching has increased.

“Local nature-protection organs are not always strong enough to oppose authorities interested in fast profits,” said Vasily Khramtsev, director of the Lazovsky Reserve in the Far East, where trees have been felled in the habitat for endangered Siberian tigers.

At a marine reserve near Vladivostok, an inspector said people were “literally emptying coastal waters” of salmon to sell the caviar.

Russia’s new rich are grabbing up protected woodland along roads and rivers for country houses.

“Many people are under the illusion that we have such vast resources and such a tremendous country that it’s inexhaustible,” Litkens said.

Under communism, the rules were clear. Across the Soviet Union, local party bosses used reserves and parks for their own private recreation, in the process protecting them from damage by others.

Now the system of party patronage is gone, and the new government has much less clout.

Aside from some flagrant violations--a pulp mill on the shores of Lake Baikal, for example--environmentalists say the Soviets generally took their parks and reserves seriously. Reserves were off-limits to the public.

“It’s a paradox: They made a mess, but they also protected a lot of territory,” said David Gordon of the Pacific Environment and Resources Center in Sausalito, Calif., which works on Russian forest preservation.

The Soviet system also controlled the land around wilderness areas, which now feel the loss of those buffers.

In other former Soviet republics, the challenges may be even greater because wilderness managers have lost the Kremlin’s financial support and the influence they had as part of a large parks system.

In recent months, Russia has tried some Western-style solutions.

One of the new Moscow banks finances programs to save endangered cranes and tigers, advertising its support for wildlife on television and billboards.

Environmental groups such as Greenpeace are taking polluters and developers to court, although with little success so far. Federal officials say the most effective way to deal with violators is still the old-fashioned way: winning over prosecutors and local administrators who can apply pressure.

Some communities and local governments are trying to attract big-spending tourists, hunters and fishermen.

Alexander Lisitsin, who guides groups of foreign hunters for a Moscow company named Greenfield, says money from hunting licenses can protect bear populations that are being devastated by poaching, and habitat now being cleared by loggers.

“There’s no money anymore to pay the bureaucrats, so who’s left to protect wildlife?” he said. “Everything’s commercial now.”

Even officials of some closed reserves talk of opening areas to the paying public. “Many see it as a necessary evil,” Gordon said. “Others are very upset by it.”

Park rangers earn the equivalent of only $25 to $30 a month, which could make them susceptible to bribes. At Prioksko-Terrasny, director Litkens tries to supplement employees’ incomes with livestock and supplies.

Seryogin, in his 15th year at the bison-breeding center, says survival is getting harder for both staff and animals.

“There used to be lots of deer and wild boars,” he said, but “this winter, there were no boars and only a few dozen deer.”

He blames poaching and road traffic outside the reserve, pollution from local factories, even the 1986 nuclear explosion at Chernobyl, in Ukraine.

“There’s something wrong with the climate,” Seryogin said. “I don’t know. There are hardly any birds anymore.”