Sonoma cat lovers ‘deported’ from Russia

It was almost 11 p.m. when two Russian policemen knocked on the door of the guest house where four American women were staying, and said, “You must come with us.”

“We had no idea what was going on,” said Darla Hillard, a director of the Sonoma-based Snow Leopard Conservancy. The women were worn out from a seven-hour hike up the flanks of a sacred mountain in northeastern Russia, and looking forward to attending a shamanistic ceremony the next day, to communicate with the signature big cat of the Asian mountains. “We might have known that we were going to be close to the border, but this all happened really quickly – we had to scramble to get our visa and just go.”

The four were escorted to the nearby police station in the village of Mondy, in the Buryatia region of Russia, near the Mongolian border. There, two other men – local policemen this time – began to ask questions. “They said that we were missing a document that we needed,” said Hillard. So instead of a much-needed good night’s sleep, they faced four hours of interrogation in a language they did not understand, for a crime they didn’t know they had committed.

The women were in Russia to cultivate relationships with local indigenous groups to help protect the snow leopard. Though Hillard has traveled many times to Asia since 1978 when she met the organization’s founder, Rodney Jackson, it was only the second such field trip for Betsy Mueller, the organization’s newly hired program manager. Both women live in Sonoma, where the Snow Leopard Conservancy has been based for 15 years.

The other two women included Native American scientist Apela Colorado and Beth Duncan, both of whom work with the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network. They had all come to Buryatia specifically to attend the snow leopard ceremony to be held the following day, part of a budding Sacred Sites – Sacred Species program with “indigenous cultural practitioners” living in snow leopard country.

All of that was difficult to communicate to their interrogators.

Fortunately another member of their party, Nargiza Ryskulova, served as translator, and over time their crime became one of, simply, paperwork: They had not applied for the right permissions to overnight in Mobry, a village just a couple miles from the Russian border with Mongolia.

But it also seemed that someone they had met in the past couple days must have called the Mondy police station and suggested they look into these American women. They never found out who had called the police, and still have no idea.

“The two young fellows who were interviewing us,” said Hillard, “we could tell they didn’t want to be there either. At one point they gave us some tea – they were very respectful.” Though the two local policemen seemed a trifle embarrassed by all the hassle they were putting their “prisoners” through, they persisted nonetheless to question each of the women separately.

“So there we were, being charged with not having the right permits to spend the night in Mondy, spending the night in the Mondy jail,” said Mueller.

It was especially ironic, added Hillard, because there were maybe a thousand Russians in the nearby campground – it’s a popular place for mountain climbers and family campers, and it was the 70th anniversary of Russia’s defeat of Germany to end the Eastern Front of World War II, and the first weekend of nice spring weather.

After they signed off on papers which they could not read – “We had no idea what we were initializing, and we still didn’t know what the consequences would be,” said Mueller – they were finally released from the Mobry police station at 4 a.m. Though the police told them they must leave the village, they managed to attend the shamanistic ceremony, catching a ride to the site from Norbu Lama, one of their local contacts whom Hillard had met at a regional gathering in 2013.

Mueller described it as a “beautiful ceremony.”

“It was very smoky,” she added. “Because they believe there’s a connection with the spirits through smoke, through fire.” Several monks blew through conch-shell horns, there was some rhythmic drumming and incantation, chanting of the sort you might find in a Buddhist monastery. Norbu led the ceremony in full red-hat Buddhist regalia, and when it was over another shaman, Slava Cheultev from the Altai region where the snow leopard is also found, followed with his own private dance and prayer.

When the ceremony ended, so did their peaceful time.

“You need to leave this village! Now! You need to leave!” insisted the two Buryatian policemen, who were waiting to meet the women when they left the ceremony. The four left hurriedly, paid their 2,000-ruble fine at a nearby bank, and flew back to the United States.

A couple days after they returned to the States, they were shocked to find their story had made the Siberian Times, under the headline “Four American women detained in Siberia then ‘deported’ from Russia.” The article implied they had been “detained by a border guard detachment,” and noted with sly officiousness, “Their detention and deportation comes at a tense time in relations between the Russia and the US. However, no accusation of espionage was made against the women.”

Both Hillard and Mueller scoffed at the innuendo, and look forward to returning to the region again. “Our mission is to involve local communities to help them become guardians of their cats,” said Hillard, “to be involved in a meaningful way in conservation planning.”

A night in a Russian police station is a small price to pay to further that goal.