Sakhalin

• 1. Introduction

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  Sakhalin is a Russian island that sits at the edge of two worlds, separated from the Asian mainland by just 6.5 km at its narrowest point, yet positioned close enough to Japan's Hokkaido to feel the pull of two competing empires. At 72,492 square kilometres, it is the largest island in Russia. And yet most people in the West have never heard its name.

  How does an island this large become a footnote? Perhaps because its history is written in contested ink. China, Russia, and Japan have all claimed it at different times over the past millennium. Wars have divided it along parallel lines. A penal colony once defined it for the outside world. And in 1945, the Soviet Union seized it in the final days of a global war, reshaping the lives of roughly 400,000 people overnight.

  Sakhalin's story asks a particular kind of question: what happens to the people who live on land that powerful nations keep renegotiating? The indigenous Ainu, Oroks, and Nivkhs have their own answer. So do the Sakhalin Koreans who remain today. The island's name itself comes from the Manchu word Sahaliyan, meaning "black," referring to the Amur River. Even the language of geography here belongs to an empire that no longer exists.

  This documentary follows Sakhalin from its Neolithic settlements through a millennium of tribute systems, penal colonies, military occupations, and an oil boom that now drives most of the island's economy.

• 2. A Land of Many Names

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  The Manchus called it Sahaliyan ula angga hada: Island at the Mouth of the Black River. That phrase contains an entire cosmology. Sahaliyan means "black" in Manchu, ula means "river," and together they form the proper Manchu name of the Amur. The island borrowed its current name from the river it guards.

  The Qing dynasty had its own name for Sakhalin: Kuyedao, meaning "the island of Ainu." That name traces back even further, to kuyi, the term that Nivkh and Nanai neighbors used for the Sakhalin Ainu. When the Ainu migrated toward the mainland, Chinese records noted a strong presence of people called Kui, or Kuwu, or Kuye, depending on the transcription, alongside the Gilemi or Jilimi peoples who were the Nivkh and other Amur groups.

  Japanese cartographers of the Matsumae clan called the island Kita-Ezo, meaning Northern Ezo, Ezo being the old Japanese name for the islands north of Honshu. The name Karafuto, the traditional Japanese designation, remains linguistically debated. Competing explanations include a borrowing of the Mongolian karahoton, meaning "distant fortress," a modification tied to the presence of Chinese traders, and even a derivation from dialect words meaning "prawns" or "many herring." One theory proposes an Ainu phrase meaning "the island created by God at the estuary."

  European travelers in the late 18th century, including Lapérouse and Langsdorff, recorded the island under yet another name: Tschoka. This appears to derive from an obsolete Sakhalin Ainu endonym, possibly based on the word cookay, meaning "we" in their language. In the Sakhalin Ainu language itself, the island was called Yankemosir, meaning "land of the mainland." By the time Jean-François de La Pérouse charted most of the Strait of Tartary in 1787, islanders near what is now the Nevelskoy Strait told him the island's name was "Tchoka," and that name appeared on some European maps thereafter.

• 3. Tribute, Silk, and Dynasty

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  On the 30th of November 1264, the Mongols attacked the Ainu of Sakhalin. The conflict had a backstory: after the Mongols conquered the Jin dynasty in 1234, they faced raids from the Nivkh and Udege peoples. In response, they established an administration post at Nurgan, present-day Tyr, Russia, at the junction of the Amur and Amgun rivers in 1263. The Nivkh, for their part, saw their surrender to the Mongols as a military alliance against the Ainu, who had been invading their lands every year.

  The Ainu resisted. But by 1308 they had been subdued, and they began paying tribute to the Mongol Yuan dynasty at posts in Wuliehe, Nanghar, and Boluohe. This arrangement set a template that would repeat across Chinese dynasties for centuries.

  The Ming dynasty, which ruled from 1368 to 1644, placed Sakhalin under what it called the "system for subjugated peoples." From 1409 to 1411 the Ming established an outpost called the Nurgan Regional Military Commission near the ruins of Tyr on the Siberian mainland. In 1413, the Ming eunuch Admiral Yishiha may have reached Sakhalin during his expeditions to the lower Amur, where he granted Ming titles to a local chieftain. The Ming recruited headmen for administrative posts with titles such as commander, assistant commander, and "official charged with subjugation." In 1431, an assistant commander named Alige brought marten pelts as tribute to the Wuliehe post. In 1437, four other assistant commanders made similar missions. The Ming Veritable Records note that these positions were hereditary, passed down the patrilineal line, and that sons would accompany their fathers on tribute missions to inherit the titles. In return, the Ming awarded silk uniforms.

  The Manchu Qing dynasty, which came to power in 1644, continued the fur-tribute system that the Yuan and Ming had established. By 1750, fifty-six hala (patrilineal clans) and 2,398 households were registered as fur tribute payers. Those who offered especially large tributes were granted the right to marry an official's adopted daughter, creating a familial bond with members of the Manchu Eight Banners. In 1732, the registered numbers were smaller: 6 hala, 18 gasban, and 148 households. The office handling fur from the lower Amur and Sakhalin was established in Ningguta, situated midway along the Mudan River. During the reign of the Qianlong Emperor, who ruled from 1735 to 1795, a trade post existed at Delen, upstream of Kiji Lake, and the explorer Rinzo Mamiya recorded between 500 and 600 people attending the market there.

• 4. Japan's Ambitions and Anton Chekhov

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  In 1635, Matsumae Kinhiro, the second daimyo of Matsumae Domain in Hokkaido, sent two men, Sato Kamoemon and Kakizaki Kuroudo, on an expedition to Sakhalin. The following year, another Matsumae explorer named Kodo Shozaemon overwintered on the island, then sailed along the east coast to Taraika, now called Poronaysk, in the spring of 1637.

  A Japanese settlement was established at Otomari on Sakhalin's southern end in 1679. By the 1780s, the influence of the Tokugawa Shogunate on the Ainu of southern Sakhalin had grown considerably. But the Matsumae clan, which was nominally in charge, neither protected nor governed the Ainu. Instead they extorted them for Chinese silk, which they sold in Honshu as Matsumae's special product. To obtain that silk, the Ainu fell into debt, owing fur to the Santan people, who lived near the Qing office. The Tokugawa government, recognizing this failure, took direct control of Sakhalin in 1807, the same year Japan proclaimed sovereignty over the island. Two years later, the explorer Mamiya Rinzo confirmed that Sakhalin was indeed an island.

  The Russians established a penal colony on Sakhalin in 1857. The legal basis came on the 18th of April 1869, when Tsar Alexander II approved the "Regulations of the Committee on the Arrangement of Hard Labor," formalizing Sakhalin as a site of katorga, or hard labor. The colony's most famous visitor arrived in 1890: the author Anton Chekhov, who spent three months on the island. He interviewed thousands of convicts and settlers for a census, and published his memoir Sakhalin Island describing what he found. Chekhov's account brought the colony to wide literary attention outside Russia.

  Between 1848 and 1902, American whaling ships also worked the waters around Sakhalin, hunting bowhead and gray whales to the north and right whales to the east and south. On the 7th of June 1855, the ship Jefferson, a vessel of 396 tons from New London, was wrecked on Cape Levenshtern on the northeastern side of the island during a fog. All hands survived, along with 300 barrels of whale oil.

• 5. Divided and Redivided

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  Russia and Japan signed the Treaty of Shimoda in 1855, which allowed nationals of both countries to inhabit the island without drawing a clear boundary between them. Twenty years later, in 1875, the Treaty of Saint Petersburg resolved the ambiguity: Japan surrendered all claims to Sakhalin in exchange for the northern Kuril Islands.

  The resolution did not hold. Following the Russo-Japanese War, the Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905 divided the island along the 50th parallel north. Russia kept the northern three-fifths. Japan took the south, administering it as Karafuto Prefecture with its capital at Toyohara, the city known today as Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. A large number of migrants were brought in from Korea to work there. The northern half became Sakhalin Oblast, with its capital at Aleksandrovsk-Sakhalinsky.

  In 1920, during the Siberian Intervention, Japan occupied the northern portion of the island following the Nikolayevsk incident. It returned the north to the Soviet Union in 1925 after the Soviet-Japanese Basic Convention was signed on the 20th of January that year. Japan then formed the state-owned firm North Sakhalin Oil, which extracted oil from the Okha Oil Field near Okha from 1926 to 1944.

  At the 1897 census, the island's population stood at 28,113. Of that total, 56.2% were Russians, 8.4% Ukrainians, 7.0% Nivkh, 5.8% Poles, 5.4% Tatars, 5.1% Ainu, 2.82% Oroks, 0.95% Germans, and 0.81% Japanese. The non-indigenous population lived mainly from agriculture or were convicts and exiles. The Ainu, Japanese, and Koreans lived almost exclusively in the southern part of the island. In 1937, 1,155 Koreans in the Soviet-administered north were deported to Central Asia, becoming part of the population later known as Koryo-saram.

• 6. August 1945

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  The Soviet attack on southern Sakhalin began on the 11th of August 1945, a few days before Japan's formal surrender. The invasion had been planned secretly at the Yalta Conference after the Soviet Union repudiated its neutrality pact with Japan.

  The Soviet 56th Rifle Corps, part of the 16th Army and consisting of the 79th Rifle Division, the 2nd Rifle Brigade, the 5th Rifle Brigade, and the 214th Armored Brigade, attacked the Japanese 88th Infantry Division. Despite outnumbering the Japanese three to one, the Soviets advanced only slowly against strong resistance. The breakthrough came on the 16th of August, when the 113th Rifle Brigade and the 365th Independent Naval Infantry Rifle Battalion landed at Toro, a seashore village on the western coast. That landing broke the Japanese defense line. Actual fighting continued until the 21st of August. From the 22nd to the 23rd, most remaining Japanese units agreed to a ceasefire. The Soviets completed the conquest of Karafuto on the 25th of August by occupying the capital, Toyohara.

  Of the approximately 400,000 people who lived in South Sakhalin in 1944, mostly Japanese and Korean, about 100,000 were evacuated to Japan in the war's final days. The remaining 300,000 stayed behind. From December 1946 to July 1949, a total of 279,356 Sakhalin residents, including indigenous Ainu who had taken Japanese citizenship, were repatriated to Japan. Tens of thousands of Sakhalin Koreans and a number of their Japanese spouses remained in the Soviet Union.

  Most Ainu on Sakhalin moved to Hokkaido, 43 km to the south across the La Perouse Strait, when Japanese civilians were displaced from the island in 1949. No final peace treaty between Russia and Japan has been signed. The status of four neighboring Kuril islands remains disputed to this day.

• 7. Oil, Earthquakes, and a Downed Airliner

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  On the 1st of September 1983, Korean Air Flight 007, a South Korean civilian airliner, flew over Sakhalin and was shot down by the Soviet Union just west of the island, near the smaller Moneron Island. Soviet commanders on the ground had realized it was a commercial aircraft, yet it was destroyed. All 269 passengers and crew died, among them a U.S. Congressman, Larry McDonald.

  On the 27th of May 1995, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck the former Russian settlement of Neftegorsk with a maximum Mercalli intensity of IX, rated Violent. The total damage was estimated between $64.1 million and $300 million. There were 1,989 deaths and 750 injuries. The settlement was not rebuilt.

  Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Sakhalin experienced an oil boom. The island holds an estimated 14 billion barrels of oil and 2,700 cubic kilometres of natural gas, developed under production-sharing agreements with international companies including ExxonMobil and Shell. In 1996, two large consortia, Sakhalin-I and Sakhalin-II, signed contracts to explore for oil and gas off the island's northeast coast. Their combined pre-project cost estimate was $21 billion; by September 2006, costs had nearly doubled to $37 billion, triggering Russian governmental opposition. The Sakhalin II project drew criticism from environmental groups, including Sakhalin Environment Watch, for dumping dredging material in Aniva Bay and for the potential impact of offshore pipelines on whale migration. The consortium rerouted the pipeline to avoid the migration path. By 2000, the oil-and-gas industry already accounted for 57.5% of Sakhalin's industrial output, with projections for that share to reach 80% by 2006. Gazprom subsequently acquired a 50% plus one share in Sakhalin II by purchasing stakes from Shell, Mitsui, and Mitsubishi.

  The waters off Sakhalin are the only known feeding ground for the Western Pacific gray whale, making the island a critical habitat for a species listed as endangered.