It’s a landscape of forests, steppe, arctic tundra and subtropical mountains that few people will ever see.

A century ago, in one of its last acts before the Russian empire collapsed in the 1917 revolution, Tsar Nicholas II’s Imperial Senate approved a plan to close a large chunk of Siberian forest to the public.

The move was a desperate attempt to prevent the looming extinction of Siberian Sable, a weasel-like creature whose fur was so valued it was traded almost like a hard currency.