Recently we discussed with a friend why we loved hunting, and came to the conclusion that it satisfied our various needs at different stages of life. In other words, as a hunter grows up, the value of individual elements of hunting life and experience changes.
In adulthood, we understand that the main thing that hunting gives is a significant expansion of the circle of communication, and it means an expansion of the world view. Then all the other areas of our activity delight us with new interesting acquaintances. Naturally, the most of my acquaintances are people of Russian culture. However, people with an oriental mentality appeared in my inner circle from the very first year of the institute. My closest friend for many years is the Korean Zhora Tsoi. His whole family has become almost a family for me. Then life brought me repeatedly together with Koreans, and each time I felt intuitively some unusual attraction of those people. I can explain it by their dedication, efficiency, constant benevolence, willingness to help people at any moment when it is difficult for them, willingness to accept people with their shortcomings and easily forgive moral flaws. It is very similar to our traditional Christian morality. We should love our neighbor as ourselves in the ideal world. We also think that mercy is higher than justice. Over the time, I managed to get to know many Koreans more closely, studied their traditions and culture, and realized how the Eastern worldview differed from ours, and from the European one. We assume that there are separate sides of good and evil. It applies not only to people, but to everything in the world. We can think of one person as good and another as bad. In the same way, we easily label "bad" and "good" on anything. The oriental people are sure that no one and nothing can be only good or only bad. There is a light and dark beginning in everything and in everyone, and you need try to turn the light side to the world around you, and the dark side should be turned to yourself as an object for constant improvement. This philosophy makes Koreans not only pleasant to communicate with, but also very successful people. There are quite a lot of people with the surname Kim both in Korea and in Russia. This is the most common Korean surname.
The mass migration of Koreans to our Primorye began officially in 1864, shortly after serfdom was abolished in Russia. Korean migrant peasants simplified the food supply of the Far Eastern state services and the army greatly. Until that time, a significant part of the food to the Far East and Primorye was delivered from the European part of Russia by wagons.
Speaking about our Koreans, it is impossible not to mention the events of 1937. Japan annexed Korea shortly before that, and raised the issue of the return of Koreans to their ancestral lands before the USSR government. In this connection, the "Father of Nations" decided to relocate Koreans from the Far East to Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Forced resettlement has become another difficult test for Russian Koreans.
Alexey Kim's ancestors arrived in Russia in 1905. His mother was born in Aralsk. She got the higher education in Sverdlovsk (today it is Yekaterinburg), after graduating from the Ural Polytechnic Institute, she met her future husband there. In 1965, after the birth of Alexei, the family moved to Chirchik (Uzbekistan). After graduating from high school, Alexey moved to Moscow. Now he is the president of a large company.
His passion for hunting woke up in adulthood, after thirty. There were people in his inner circle who were sick of hunting , and from whom he caught that disease. At first it was the usual collective hunts for ungulates - wild boars and moose. Soon he began to engage regularly in bullet shooting at the sporting club "Moscow", where he met serious hunters: Nikolai Ivanovich Kondratov, Igor Kozlov and Vladimir Mozgov. That acquaintance played a decisive role in the attachment to accurate shooting. In 2008, Alexey Kim participated in a warming tournament held by the Moscow Safari Hunting Club. He was the team member together with V. Mozgov and V. Labusov. That tournament was essentially a sniper shooting competition. People, who gathered there, were passionate about that art. Alexey liked its atmosphere and he took part in it many times. Alexey put a lot of effort into creating the Federation of High-precision Shooting of Russia together with high-precision shooters who also took part in warm-up tournaments, the legal registration of which was completed in 2014.
Another Kim, Victor, played a big role in the life of hunter Alexey Kim, who attracted him to engage in mountain trophy hunting and join the Club of Mountain Hunters. After that, hunting became even more interesting, it acquired another additional incentive –to collect trophies of mountain animals. Its members do not seek to get animals with record trophies. Their species diversity is important for them. The Club's members cooperate with biologists constantly, they supply them with tissue samples of harvested animals for genetic research.
Now Alexey Kim has twelve types of mountain goats and eight different mountain sheep. The significant part of those trophies was hunted in different regions of Russia. In general, hunting in your own country has a number of advantages in comparison with the foreign ones. But the insufficiently developed infrastructure of the hunting business and transport in remote areas require additional time and effort. However, the harder the trophy is given, the more valuable it becomes for the hunter. It seemed to me that Alexey remembered with special love the Kamchatka and Magadan hunts, which were invariably accompanied by fogs and rains, and often long searches for wild animals.
Few words about efforts. Mountain hunts require a lot of physical effort from the hunter like no others. Therefore, you need to prepare seriously for hunting in the mountains. You have to have good shooting skills and an understanding of the peculiarities of mountain shooting in addition to physical conditions. Hunting traditions require a hunter to shoot only at distances of reliable destruction, when he is hunting mountain ungulates, but this opportunity does not happen often. The mountain hunters have to shoot at both 600 and 800 meters. You need to have a large-caliber weapon and cartridges with heavy bullets to win at such distances. At the same time, a rangefinder and a ballistic calculator are needed. It is clear that no equipment can compensate for the shortcomings of shooting and hunting skills, which becomes a decisive factor in long-range shooting. Even the most expensive calculator cannot tell you what wind speed you need to enter. A portable weather station can measure its speed only at the location of the shooter. The hunter himself has to determine the wind speed in other parts of the trajectory and determine its average speed for the calculator. In addition, the hunter needs to suppress the inevitable excitement when shooting a rare animal at a distance.
Alexey's interests as a mountain hunter extend to the whole world, where hunting for mountain ungulates is allowed. At the end of February, he successfully hunted in Iran for about a week. His trophies were the Persian desert ibex and the Kerman sheep. He was impressions not only by successful hunting, but also from the abundance of animals.
In the near future, He is going to hunt in the Magadan region (September) and Nepal (October).
We could not but talk about hunting weapons when communicating with Alexey. It happened that his "weapons park" began with the Blasera R93. The first hunts pleased him with the reliable operation of the rifle. As a result, Alexey bought several rifles of its modifications, including the original model with a ball trigger system from Andy Atzl. Alexey, like all shooters engaged in sniping, monitors constantly all new tactical rifles. His comrades in the hobby of precision shooting acquire regularly emerging novelties. Alexey updates gradually the arsenal. Most recently he acquired an Austrian novelty from a young company Ritter & Sport SX-1. This weapon has a modular design that makes it easy to install any barrel from the set without special tools.308 Win, .300 Win Mag, .338 Lapua Mag. But it is necessary to replace the shutter larvae and the magazine shaft. The rifle has a relatively small mass (slightly exceeding 5 kg) even with the largest caliber. It can have a folding shutter as an option.
At the end of our conversation, Alexey expressed regret that the media did not tell enough about interesting hunts in Russia. Our hunting infrastructure is still poorly developed. That's why our hunters are rushing to "warm countries". It is not a sin to take an example from the USA, where many hunters get their trophies "at home", and return the significant funds to the budget of their state.
