Barguzinsky

The Barguzinsky zapovednik is the oldest protected area in Russia. Tsar Nicholas II established it in December 1916 on the north-eastern shore of Lake Baikal, in what is now the republic of Buryatia, and his motive was a very specific one: to save the Barguzin sable, whose dark pelt was the most valuable of the seventeen known varieties and whose trade had for centuries been one of the principal items in the Russian budget. Intensive hunting, together with population growth, fires and the building of the railway, had brought it to the brink of extinction.

The zapovednik answers to a conception quite different from that of the North American national park. While the United States was in those same months creating its National Park Service to administer places of recreation, Russian conservationists such as Grigory Kozhevnikov argued the opposite: to protect the country's natural wealth from its own inhabitants. "Nothing should be taken away, nothing added, nothing improved", he wrote. A zapovednik is a strict reserve, with access restricted to research.

The strategy worked: the sable did not die out, and with it were saved the Baikal seal, the brown bear and the forest reindeer of the same region. Today the reserve holds a taiga fauna of 39 mammal species, among them the northern pika, the Siberian chipmunk, the marmot, the wolverine, Pallas's cat, the musk deer and the Siberian red deer. In 1986 it became part of the Lake Baikal Region Biosphere Reserve under the MAB programme, alongside Baikalsky, and in 2000 the two were recognised as independent biosphere reserves. Since 1996 it has formed part of the natural property Lake Baikal, inscribed on the World Heritage List.