‘The Fish Rots From the Head’: How a Salmon Crisis Stoked Russian Protests - The New York Times

‘The Fish Rots From the Head’: How a Salmon Crisis Stoked Russian Protests - The New York Times

by Anton Troianovski

Photographs by Sergey Ponomarev

• Aug. 15, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
  
  OZERPAKH, Russia — 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.”