Jim wrote to me a few months ago a go trying to find information about some people he had worked with on the lake Baikal in the 90's.
I went through some archives but couldn't help him unfortunately - probably because a lot of current historical data from the Baikal region and the Far East was lost or simply never recorded during the post-Soviet turmoil.
He also mentioned meeting the head of the Russian Academy of Sciences and his daughter to go to the Altai mountains and try to find some argali sheep.
I'm a slow thinker so I only realized a couple of weeks ago that the head of the Academy at the time was Gury Marchuk, who used to work with my grandfather in the Computing Center right here in my little hometown for many years before moving to Moscow, and his kids had stayed (and still live) here; geographically, they had to start here near Novosibirsk if they wanted to get to the Altai mountains. The daughter that he mentioned was in fact Gury's daughter-in-law - a bright, eccentric woman who used to drive an UAZ-469 truck. Women drivers were pretty rare back then (let alone women truck drivers), so of course it was she who drove them to the Altai, because the road at the time wasn't quite as nice as it is now to put it mildly and required a hardy vehicle. Gury's other son, Alexander, used to be my boss for many years - he headed the research institution where I've worked all my life, until stepping down after disagreeing with Putin's new policies regarding the Academy in 2018.
I was a snotty schoolkid when Jim visited here, but it's a weird coincidence nonetheless.
