Tears of Karafuto or Fragments of Two Empires. Sakhalin Island. From the series "Hermits of Russia"
115 settlements on Sakhalin are slated for liquidation. These are villages and settlements where almost no one lives. Some have been resettled in "towns." This term is used here, including for district centers that bear little resemblance to a city in the traditional sense. Some have been waiting for the promised apartment for several years. And others have no intention of leaving their homes and their familiar way of life: the sea, fishing, gardening, peace and quiet...
Coast Strait of Tartary — the first place to be actively settled during the development of Sakhalin. This development was conditional, as the indigenous peoples of Sakhalin lived here before the Japanese and Russians. Nivkhs, Ainu, UiltaThe first coal was mined on the coast of the Tatar Strait, the first Russian outpost was founded, Douai — Sakhalin's first capital. Convicts were landed on the shores of the Tatar Strait, where they were expected to actively participate in the island's development. Chekhov, revered by some on Sakhalin for bringing fame to the island, then little known in Russia, came here in 1890. Others criticize him, however, for the unsightly scene he described: filth, bedbugs, convicts and their guards, most of whom had long since given up.
We will travel along the west coast from south to north. The southern part up to the 50th parallel was under Japanese control from 1905 to 1945 (Karafuto Governorate), and the northern one belonged to Russia.
ORLOVO. Japanese name Ushiro
Until 1945, it belonged to the Japanese Karafuto Governorate and was called Ushiro (village). It was named after the navigator and explorer D. I. Orlov, who founded the first Russian outpost on Sakhalin, Ilyinsky.
According to Orlov's own surviving report, the Ilyinsky outpost was founded on August 17, 1853, in the Ainu village of Vendu-esa:
“Where the Kurils (Ainu) met us, kneeling with low bows, waving a willow branch with hanging shavings (planed in a circle from the same branch)... The village of Vendu-esa consists of five male souls living in three small yurts made of bark.”
In 1935 (Karafuto), 1883 people lived here. Now there are no more than ten residents.
Anatoly Kuznetsov's house stands out among the few buildings nearby. It's new. Anatoly is a local entrepreneur. He's lived here for 24 years. But he recently registered a hectare of land in the Far East as the property.
We found him pickling burdock, a popular Korean dish on Sakhalin. The burdock stems are boiled in a huge vat. Then they're peeled, salted, and sold for salad. The volumes are impressive. Anatoly employs several people processing the burdock.
"Everyone's left Orlovo. There used to be a fish farm here, and I worked there. Now I fish for myself. This year, 2023, is an odd year, not a good year for fish. There are few fish, but even those that do are not allowed to spawn. The entire river is blocked with nets. There are only three fish inspectors for the entire district (Uglegorsk), what can they do?! Poaching can be banned quickly. The buyers who accept the caviar need to be punished. Because poachers catch the fish, gut them, and then throw them away."
Incidentally, cheap caviar on Sakhalin is a myth. In early July, retail prices at markets ranged from 7 to 10 rubles per kilogram, higher than on the mainland. Prices only drop in August, when the market is, so to speak, saturated.
"The village here was bigger than Uglegorsk. There were Japanese houses all over the hills. I tore down the last one. Why wait for it to be burned down? Who needs it if the state doesn't need it... How about showing you where I can dig for Japanese pottery? I've found a lot of pottery here, and old Japanese coins. When the Japanese who were born here last came, about five years ago, I gave them some coins as a souvenir."
Anatoly hit the nail on the head regarding my interest in old Japanese tableware. Upon arriving in Uglegorsk, I was taken to a landfill on the very first evening! I was in for a culture shock at the sight of so many pieces of stunningly beautiful Japanese tableware. I collected three bags. It's a shame there were almost no intact ones. Sakezuki, meshiwan, kyusu, takkuri, chawan... The evening was spent learning the names and origins of various designs on Japanese tableware.
On Sakhalin, these fragments are called "Tears of Karafuto." The analogy is clear, and not just because they are fragments. When the Japanese were deported from Sakhalin in 1945-48, they were allowed to take, according to various sources, from 20 to a maximum of 100 kilograms of personal belongings. Dishes were broken in anger, but many buried them in the ground, hoping that history would reverse itself and they would be able to return to what had become their home. Just imagine the volume of these abandoned dishes. By 1941, the population of the Japanese-occupied part of Sakhalin was 415! Today, the entire Sakhalin population is slightly higher: 460.
"There are still a lot of buried warehouses here—military, food. The Japanese would mark a spot on the map and then plant bamboo there." "And have they ever found such warehouses in our time?" "We have. But if it's a military warehouse, you have to hand it over to the FSB. If you start selling it, you'll end up in prison..."
We looked at a place where the Japanese once lived. A small river flowing into the sea. The banks are overgrown with grass. But nearby there's some lumber; someone has claimed a Far Eastern hectare here. I found a small piece of broken pottery lying on the surface. As we walk to the old Japanese pier, Anatoly explains the meaning of the Far Eastern hectare to me. He's claimed it too and is now cultivating the same burdock "legally."
"Have you ever tried sea urchin caviar? Let's go to the Japanese pier, I'll catch you some right now." With his bare hands, Anatoly quickly takes something out of the water, breaks a sea urchin on a rock and picks out the caviar with his finger. - Here, eat it! - Just like that, raw? - Well, what kind of food! Eat it, don't be afraid! It purifies the blood. I try it with trepidation, but the caviar turns out so delicious that I immediately devour the second urchin. The only thing holding me back is the fear that my stomach, unaccustomed to fresh seafood, might ruin such a wonderful breakfast. — Can you dry a hedgehog shell? — What do you need it for? — It's beautiful. — How strange! Although in Korea they dry these shells, grind them into powder and treat diathesis. There's a lot of calcium here…
Now Anatoly snatches a small crab from the water with his hand. "It's a spiny crab, commonly known as a king crab. Well, this one's still small. There's nothing to eat. But look, this is a hermit crab. It lives in a whelk shell…" We walked along the pier for a long time, studying the coastal fauna. I wondered where the kids were, who should now be perpetually hanging out on this pier. Anatoly explained that there were no kids in Orlovo anymore. A car with a boat on a trailer pulled up, but the fishermen first cautiously confirmed that we were just "tourists" before heading out to sea.
On the way from Orlov, we take our time and explore what remains of the Karafuto Governorate. The remains of an old Japanese power plant. Its chimney is still visible from afar. It's been standing for over 80 years and is still intact. They say the Japanese knew the "secret" of concrete that's "thin and doesn't crumble." In Uglegorsk, we stop to see the Japanese stone gates, or torii, which once marked the entrance to a now-destroyed Shinto shrine. We also explore a couple of Japanese school pavilions, or hoanden. One of them is located on the grounds of a private auto repair shop.
During the Karafuto period, such hoanden housed a portrait of the Emperor of Japan and a copy of the Imperial Education Decree. Schoolchildren were taken to venerate the portrait, as part of the state's policy of instilling in the youth a belief in the divine origin of the Emperor and the sacredness of the empire.
Portraits used to be kept in schools. Schools were built of wood. Sometimes they burned down. During a fire, the first thing they would do, even at the risk of their lives, was remove the emperor's portrait. Losing the portrait could lead to the principal committing suicide. So, later, they began building freestanding stone khoandens. These are the ones that remain throughout southern Sakhalin. They are not recognized as historical or architectural monuments and are slowly falling into disrepair.
NADEZHDINO, Japanese name Tio
After the Japanese left, the village of Nadezhdino and the Zvezdny logging site were settled by loggers (mostly from the Bryansk region) and fishermen (from the Astrakhan region). The village's heyday was in the 1950s and 1960s, when over a thousand people lived and worked there, and there was an eight-year school, a medical center, a post office, and a club. In 1971, industrial logging ended, and most residents moved to the village of Belye Klyuchi (now closed). Three families now live in the village. Almost no one knows the name of Nadezhdino's long-time resident, but everyone told me his nickname—Leshy.
Leshy turned out to be a well-built pensioner, with a tattoo on his arm depicting Sakhalin: “It’s a little unfinished, I also wanted to write it nicely: PUNISHMENT WORKER.” Leshy explained his nickname simply: “I used to disappear into the forest all the time,” and introduced himself as Vladimir Sergeevich Golovin.
— Coo, coo, chick, chick... I've been keeping pigeons since I was eight, I think. My father bred them, too. After the war, my father came here to work as an electrician in the mine. People used to buy these pure white pigeons from me, back when there was a registry office in Shakhtyorsk. Newlyweds would come, buy them, release them, and they'd come home. Well, not all of them, just the trained ones. They'd even grab beggars from the city. I call stray pigeons beggars. I've had up to a hundred pigeons. So they used to justify themselves. But now the registry office is only in Uglegorsk, and there are competitors there. — They say they've already resettled Nadezhdino, but why did you stay? — And how will they resettle me if I don't want to move to the city! Then I'll live in a tent. Or I'll drag the garage to the sea and live in it. What would I do in the city? Here, on the contrary, people are planning to build. A guy from Vladivostok took a hectare. I had a vegetable garden there, a plot left over from someone. I should have registered the land myself, but somehow I held off. - Are you happy with this neighborhood? - Let him live there. The more people, the better.
The Sakhalin government was banking on the "hectare owners," hoping they would populate the empty land. The program runs from 2017 to 2035. It's difficult to say whether the Far Eastern Hectare will save Sakhalin's hinterland from desolation. Where one-hectare plots were once handed out on the coast, there are no more available. Under the program's terms, building a summer house or a small fishing "hut" on a hectare is enough to secure a 49-year lease or ownership, so the coastal plots have been snapped up.
On Sakhalin, nearly 10 plots were ultimately allocated to the Far Eastern Hectare. But across the vast territory, they vanished without significantly improving the situation. Currently, the only available plots are in the Tymovsky District, which is in the middle of the island, landlocked. And people are no longer so eager to take up the hectare.
"Why wouldn't you live here? The road's good now. They plow it in the winter. There's a network. My son comes over, and he talks on his tablet right from the yard. And I have a little push-button Nokia—you have to go out there to the sea, but you can at least talk to America from there."
And he points somewhere to the east. And suddenly this figurative phrase takes on a completely different meaning. After all, here America is actually almost twice as close as Moscow.
We're heading to the sea. There are boats on the shore; fishermen from Shakhtyorsk came here for a weekend fishing trip.
— Do they leave their boats unattended? — Well, who would steal them? It's immediately obvious. And this is an island! Now in July the sea will be calm, everyone will go out to sea, catch cod, pollock, flounder. But I only fish for myself. I come to the shore, set out a net, and catch 2-3-5 kilograms of smelt. I fry it or make soup. What's the point of more? Then I go back and set out the net again. Well, if you get caught, they'll fine you. But there's still a proper fisheries inspectorate. They understand that I'm not selling it. And to register the net, you have to go to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. You're not going to travel 360 km for that piece of paper.
Seaweed and sea grapes are scattered along the shore. I've never heard of the latter before. Leshy shows me what it looks like and says Korean sea grape salad is tastier than fern salad.
"Oh, how Koreans used to cook so well! But they're not the same anymore, and there aren't many of them left. There's grass growing on the shore, light blue, like wormwood. One day, I see a Korean granny from Shakhtyorsk gathering it. I ask, 'Aunt Sonya, why are you gathering it?' She says, 'For buns.' She gathered a whole sack. I tried those flatbreads later. They're delicious!"
Koreans and Japanese, as former neighbors, are often mentioned on Sakhalin. Vladimir says they used to have separate Russian and Korean schools. Then they were merged. He attended the combined school, sharing a desk with a Korean girl. And beyond Nadezhdino, where the Zvezdny forest plot used to be, there's a Korean cemetery. Not long ago, two families from Korea came to visit the graves. Urns containing the ashes of their ancestors are buried somewhere there.
"And just four years ago, the Japanese came here. I spoke to them through an interpreter. They remember everything! Where the houses were. They even called the girls they were friends with by name. I know them, those old ladies, many of them are gone now. By the way, I have a Japanese teacup, I found it in the garden. I don't know how old it is. I'm already in my seventies, and it was God knows how old before me. But no one used to take care of it. My brother found an old Japanese figurine in the ground. A healthy cat, with a bow. And there was this guy who apparently collected them, bought chocolates, and we gave him the cat for the chocolates, oh my god..."
TELNOVSKOYE, Japanese name Kitakozawa
After South Sakhalin was transferred to the USSR, the village was named in honor of the Soviet officer I. N. Telnov, who, according to the official version, died in battle with the Japanese. During Soviet times, Telnovsk became a large mining settlement, with a population of up to six thousand. It boasted two fish processing plants, a port, a large school, two clubs, and a movie theater.
Two years before the settlement's closure, a three-story retirement home was built. The Telnovskaya mine was one of the first to close on Sakhalin, in 1992. The Japanese narrow-gauge railway was dismantled at the same time as the mine's closure. Almost all the miners were provided with apartments under the resettlement program. By 2006, Telnovsky had virtually disappeared.
"People live here!" reads the sign at the entrance to the courtyard of a seemingly abandoned two-apartment building. From the front, the building truly looks abandoned. But from the courtyard, there are curtains on the windows, locks on the doors, and a planted vegetable garden. Most likely, the former residents of this building use the plot as a dacha. Many do so on Sakhalin. Cultivated land is scarce. We drive through the once-vast territory of the village.
The remains of industrial buildings remain, and here and there, ruined walls of houses still protrude, but for the most part, everything is overgrown. A couple of houses on the coast are residential. Fishermen live there. They carefully check the type of vehicle that has pulled up to make sure it's not a fisheries inspector. There's a guard at the entrance to one of the hills—a Moscow businessman is still mining coal there.
Following the car tracks, we drive down the once-overgrown main street of the village, turn into an alley, and see a house. Alexander Elenchuk, a longtime resident of Telnovsk, is repairing his car in the yard. Everyone else has been resettled, but he's gone. Alexander is 70 years old. He was born in Telnovsk, and his children and grandchildren were also born here. For almost twenty years, Alexander has been waiting for the apartment he was promised upon resettlement. His house, where he is still registered, burned down long ago. The house was municipal property, but it's no longer listed. Now Alexander lives in an abandoned, but still sturdy, house. He's essentially living on the fringes of a house.
"I don't know, maybe we should go to court. They lied to us about the apartment. I worked at Sakhalin Coal in the motor pool. When the village was being resettled, the mine director called us drivers, several of us. He said that in order to support life in the village until the liquidation was complete, we were transferring to the municipal housing and utilities department. And then, when they started giving us apartments, they told us that since we didn't work at the mine, we weren't entitled to them. My wife never got an apartment. She died three years ago. And why did she die? Because there was no medicine. She could have been cured." Alexander shows a miraculously preserved "general plan" of the village from 1980. The enormous map shows every house and everything that existed in Telnovsk at that time. "We had 300 or 400 houses here on Sovetskaya Street alone. This was a warehouse. Nagornaya Street was here, Zheleznodorozhnaya Street was here. And this is a stadium. We even had our own football team."
PILVO. From the Nivkh "pild" – to be large, "vo" – a camp, a settlement, a village.
Pilvo was founded in 1894. It was previously called Poro-Kotan (Ainu for "Big Village"). The Ainu and Nivkh are the indigenous peoples of Sakhalin.
According to the map, the easiest way to get to Pilvo from the Uglegorsk district is by driving further along the coast to Boshnyakovo. However, the map shows a road from Boshnyakovo, but in reality, it's not really a road, but an extreme route for advanced off-roaders, suitable only for two vehicles. So, we have to make a huge detour to return to the highway leading to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Instead of 125 kilometers, we have to travel almost 600 kilometers. There's no communication with Pilvo, so we brought a tent with us, planning to spend the night right on the shore.
According to our data, only two people live in Pilvo—a husband and wife meteorologist. But that's in winter. In the summer, Pilvo is more crowded. People fish here, the main catch being the local shrimp, or chilim. From here, the tourist route begins, heading to the lighthouse at Cape Korsakov and then on to Ambetsu, an abandoned Japanese village 16 kilometers from Pilvo. Between Ambetsu and Pilvo runs the 50th parallel, which once served as the border between the Japanese and Russian parts of Sakhalin.
The road to Pilvo turned out to be a well-trodden dirt road, albeit narrow in places. We passed several oncoming cars along the way. Just before the village, people were filling large cans with fresh water at a spring. Teenagers raced down the main street on a rattling motorized cart, and cars darted back and forth along the shore, sinking slightly in the sand. The coastal strip was lined with tents occupied by fishermen. As I was told, no one here vacations without fishing.
- How noisy! - That's in the summer, it's quiet here in the winter.
Natalya Vladimirovna Tishkova sat on the shore, atop a pile of haphazardly piled concrete blocks, looking out at the sea. She's a meteorologist who lives in Pilvo permanently.
— I'm watching my daughter and her grandchildren swimming in the sea. — Brrr, the water is cold. — 16.5 degrees. — And all the rest are tourists and fishermen? — Well, yes, fishermen. They say they have permits, but who checked them? Last year, several teams came here, too, with a thousand traps. Now they'll clear it all out, and the sea will be empty. Hectares of sawdust from the Far East have all been taken up. There's no free land here. People come to fish for the whole summer. And in the winter, there are only four of us left. My husband and I, the guards at the tourist base, and another old man across the river doesn't want to move. After the flood in 2015, they decided to resettle the village, and those who actually lived there were given apartments in Smirnykh. — Do they clear the road to you in the winter? — No, but we have a snowmobile. This winter, there was even a road 40 km away from us. There, they were picking timber from the clearing. You could get there by snowmobile, and then transfer to a car, having arranged for someone to meet you in advance. — And how do you communicate with the mainland? There's no cell phone service here, I think. — The guy who runs the tourist camp has satellite phone service. You can go there and call. Although we used to have service in the village itself—MTS. We were still surprised that the village was about to close, and here we were getting service, with electricity 22 hours a day. And before, two hours a day was a blessing; if someone died, then the lights would be on all night.
The Tishkovs now have their own diesel engine, wind generator, and solar panels. They have all the alternative energy options, so to speak.
"We also fill gas cylinders, just in case. The department could have taken care of it and provided us with gas cylinders. But no one wants to take responsibility. It's not supposed to be done according to safety regulations. Last year, for example, they sent us a first aid kit. It contained a sheet, a bandage, and nothing else. The deputy head of the department came to see us, and I said, 'Are you allowed to put any pill in there?' And he told me Putin issued some decree that only medical workers can dispense medication. I don't know what the laws are, but eventually they finally delivered some pills, just in case."
Tatyana and Andrey Tishkov have lived in Pilvo for 35 years. Andrey's parents were meteorologists, and the Tishkovs' youngest daughter is now also a meteorologist, coming to the station in the summer to cover for her parents during their vacations. Technically, they're required to take vacations, although they never leave Pilvo. Why bother, when this place is practically a "free resort?" And, as the saying goes, summer feeds you all year round. You can't abandon your garden, and fishing provides additional income.
"Last year, the wave was three meters high. And all the seawater went into the garden. All the potatoes were flooded. And we're a subsistence farm; we don't even have a store. Food is only delivered to the weather station once a year. Well, the most vitamin-rich stuff... squash caviar, eggplant caviar, lots of onions, which we don't eat. We're supposed to have a certain set of food items for the year, and that's what we get. So, we can't live without a garden... Now we're catching shrimp, selling them, and we'll earn some money over the summer and buy what we need, not whatever they send us. Stations like ours survive on their own. If you keep getting stronger, we won't shut you down."
It turned out that the haphazardly piled concrete blocks were coastal stabilization, installed and paid for by the Tishkovs themselves. In 2015, during a typhoon, the sand beneath their house, which also serves as a weather station, was washed away, leaving a corner suspended in mid-air. Sand was added, and the shoreline was stabilized.
"Look, Maneron closed down. There aren't many stations like us left. Young people don't want to go. Not everyone can live like that."
Tatyana's grandchildren are returning from a sea fishing trip. They caught some flounder, navaga, and a goby. For the boys, summer vacation in Pilvo is a real adventure. As we say goodbye, we buy two kilograms of large, fresh shrimp from the Tishkovs. A thousand rubles a kilogram. We eat it on the shore, admiring the wonderful sunset.
DOUÉ. The cape was named after La Pérouse, after the small town of Douai, located in northern France.
Sakhalin's oldest settlement. Sakhalin's first capital, its first coal mine. The first convicts were brought to Dui. Chekhov visited and described in detail what this settlement was like in 1890:
"The first few minutes, as you enter the street, Due gives the impression of a small, ancient fortress: a smooth, level street, like a parade ground, clean white houses, a striped guardhouse, striped posts; all that's missing to complete the impression is a drum roll. The commander of the military detachment, the warden of Due prison, the priest, officers, and so on live in the houses. Where the short street ends, a gray wooden church stands across it, blocking the unofficial part of the port from the viewer; here, a crevice forks in the shape of the letter Y, sending ditches to the right and left. On the left is a settlement formerly called Zhidovskaya, and on the right are various prison buildings and a settlement without a name..."
The mine, which had operated for over a hundred years, closed in 1977. The fleet no longer needed the coal, and mining became unprofitable. Due began to decline. In the mid-1990s, the kindergarten and school closed. Most of the village's residents left.
A taxi from Aleksandrovsk-Sakhalinsk dropped me off at the only two-story residential building. It was built three years ago to finally house the remaining several dozen people in Dui. Why they weren't relocated to Aleksandrovsk, for example, is a question. There are two entrances. One houses the administration, the club, and the first-aid station—each with a room. It was Monday, and a woman emerging from the administrative "block" snapped, "What do you want?" (I introduced myself.) "Monday, Tuesday—days off."
An elderly woman emerged from the second entrance to the building. But she refused to talk about life in Due, explaining that although she was exactly the person I needed—a local historian—she'd gotten into trouble with her boss for her last interview, so she wasn't giving any interviews anymore.
Further down the street, two- and three-story buildings stand with empty window sockets. Some are already roofless. But I notice curtains in a couple of windows, and laundry drying on a line beneath. A well-trodden path into the entryway confirms that people are definitely there. The entryway is in disrepair. But all the apartments have locks. On one of the front doors hangs a warning dated 2019:
"In connection with the acquisition of a comfortable residential property in the Aniva District, we are notifying residents that you must deregister from the address Due, Chekhov Street, Building 132, within ten days of receiving this notice. Failure to comply will result in legal action..."
I continue to enter buildings that, judging by the windows, appear to be residential apartments. Chekhov Street, 134, 156. Imagine how many buildings there used to be! But right now, there's not a soul in sight. However, I think I've found an explanation—there are vegetable gardens behind the buildings. Later, I was confirmed that the former residents of these buildings, having already moved to Aleksandrovsk-Sakhalinsky, are using their former apartments as dachas.
I'm still walking alone when the same woman, the administrator, suddenly catches up with me in a car. She explains that no one will give me an interview here: "The mayor has forbidden it. Otherwise, those bloggers will twist everything!" But then she clarifies that Anatoly Yufkin lives on a hill by the sea; he's a native of Due and likes to "chat." And it seems this Yufkin doesn't obey the mayor. So I turn around and head toward the sea. It's impossible to get lost in Due. There's just one long, straight street. A man emerges from that same brand-new two-story building. It's morning, and he smells faintly of alcohol: "Vitka, a pensioner, just out for a stroll."
— He's still young for a pensioner. — And I worked in the boiler room. — Why did they build this two-story building if the village was practically evacuated and liquidated? — Who knows...
Victor shrugs, but confirms my guess about some apartments in abandoned buildings being converted into summer cottages. We say goodbye. And then I see the administrator returning down the street again, this time in a different car. Apparently, for covert purposes. Oh, this Vitka's going to get into trouble now. Incidentally, the head of the DUE apparently got tired of performing the supervisory function herself, and only the driver was keeping an eye on me now, driving past him several times.
But Anatoly Yufkin really turned out to be talkative.
— What was our first capital of Sakhalin? Due. Then Aleksandrovsk. And now Due has nothing to do with it at all. I recently saw a banner in the city — Aleksandrovsk-Sakhalinsky, the first capital of Sakhalin. Well, that's not true! Oh, if only you had come eight years ago. We still had the first log cabin where the sailors spent the winter. — And why didn't they preserve it? This turns out to be a historical building, directly related to the history of Sakhalin's development! — Well, we Russians are like Ivans who don't remember our kin. What we have we don't treasure, and we cry when we lose it. And Due truly has a rich history. Our village is associated with all the firsts, look: the first outpost, the first lighthouse in the Far East, the first telegraph, the first church. The first mine in 1854, before there were convicts, the sailors dug the first coal.
— I wonder, but Sofya Blyuvshteyn, Sonya the Golden Hand, she served hard labor somewhere around here, didn't she? — Of course! Here. The ship arrived, and where our pier was, there was a quarantine prison, so there she was, sitting in a corner cell. In shackles. But she didn't sit there for long. The governor arrived. And you women have something, a certain vibe. Look at her photo—there's nothing interesting there. But she somehow got him. And the governor took her back to town. There's a good film about Sonya. Oh, how she used to have sex with men! And she got caught with that Vovchik from Odessa. And she sat on him. Otherwise, she would never have ended up in hard labor. — And where is she buried? She died on Sakhalin. — Yes, she's buried in Aleksandrovsk, in the old naval cemetery. Where the weather station is. The cemetery had long since been razed to the ground. But we had a teacher at school. They told me she remembered how, as a child, she painted the fence around her grave. A relative was buried nearby, and when they came to clean the grave, her father said to her, "Daughter, you should also paint this fence, because the famous Sonya the Golden Hand lies here!"
Among the people, Sonya the Golden Hand, whose "occupation," as Wikipedia states, was theft and fraud, is indeed much more popular than other Sakhalin convicts, such as the ethnographers Bronisław Pilsudski or Lev Sternberg. Many people served hard labor or, later, exile in Soviet times, on Sakhalin. But people are embarrassed to admit it, even in cases where the illegality of their exile is obvious.
— My dad was captured in Austria. And then the fucking Allies took him to England. — And then your dad wasn't punished for being captured? — And what was there to punish him for? Well, you were captured, should you have shot yourself for that?! Sometimes I wonder, what would you have done in his place, you bastard?! — So your dad escaped Stalin's camps or not? — People like my dad were lucky, they were sent here to work in the mines. — So he was exiled for being captured? — Of course! Like, he's guilty either way. My dad was the kind of man the country depends on! In 1945, they were driven here in a crowd like slaves to the mines. There was a village here of over five thousand people. And every family's fate was so broken.
Anatoly is 71 years old. He was born in Douai, but left several times. And returned. There is no better place on earth for him than Douai.
"The only thing we have left that's valuable is fucking nature, the air. Especially when you come here from the city, and the air is so sweet, can you imagine!"
MANGIDAI and TANGI
These villages north of Aleksandrovsk-Sakhalinsky are officially resettled. But every summer, former residents return to them. To their old homes. To the sea, to fishing, to their vegetable gardens and memories. Tangi becomes very crowded in the summer. We were concerned about the road; judging by the descriptions, it could be very bad. But since a bus runs twice a week through these former villages to the outermost settlement of Viakhta, there was a chance the road was in decent condition. It turned out that a grader had passed through the day before and leveled the road.
"Well, our village isn't completely closed yet. We have another family living here in the winter. They were also granted resettlement, but they don't want to leave. The road here is cleared in the winter, and further on are Khoe and Trambaus, so they live there. Now they're gone. My wife took my husband to work," say Vera and Alexander Titanov, former residents of Mangidai and now summer residents. "We were given an apartment in Alexandrovsk, and we're happy. And we come here in the summer. If the logging companies hadn't been destroyed, people would still be living here."
Smelt is drying in the Titanovs' yard. A local Sakhalin delicacy. You can't stock it by the ton, so at the market, smelt is several times more expensive than salmon. They treat us. We sample the dried fish on the shore in Tangi, having set up a picnic. Nearby, some boys, having had their fill of swimming, are building a shelter. The fishermen set and check their nets every half hour, lamenting that they didn't manage to catch a huge fish before the seal got to it. The seal is a real scourge for the fishermen: it eats the fish and ruins the nets. Another man is filling cans with seawater to cook crabs.
My whole life revolves around the sea. I note to myself that during my two weeks on Sakhalin, even though I'm a meat eater, I didn't eat meat once or even think about it. Caviar, fish, shrimp, crab, scallops... So delicious! Especially when it's fresh, straight from the sea.
— That’s why we rarely got sick before, because we ate everything natural." ," concludes Grandma Ulyana. At 95, she's living proof of that. We met on the beach. Grandma comes here for a walk every day. Luckily, here, "you just walk out of the kitchen and there's the sea, no steps." In Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, where they were relocated, they live on the second floor. — We come to Tangi for the whole summer. Our house is already old. We live in the summer kitchen. We planted a vegetable garden. My son-in-law is also sick, he has a bad leg, he doesn’t work. The three of us live on our pension. It was difficult for me in the city at first. I’ve never lived in a city in my life. Well, I’ll have to get used to it and die there. What can I do? My mother, my husband, my brother, and my son are buried in Tangi. All our family is here, about ten people. We moved here from Mordovia in 1959, because there, on the collective farm, they didn’t pay us at all. They only put down sticks—workdays. And my brother was already living here and, he said, come to Sakhalin, there’s plenty of fish here. There used to be a lot of Mordvins here. I’d go to the store, everyone would speak Mordvin... I’d go to the shore and remember. There were about 15 houses on this hill. Relatives and godparents used to live here. We used to visit them. But now it's empty, no one there. — Does anyone live here in the winter now? — No one lives here in the winter. Everyone leaves. Because there's no power. When people pack up for the summer, they go to Hohe, fill out some paperwork. And then you have to pay for the power at the end of the summer. But in the winter, there's no one here.
Khohe is a fairly large village, even with a store. People from Tanga go there to buy groceries. However, bread is sold only by list, and you have to sign up in advance. Selling bread by appointment, it turns out, is actually a local tradition. In Viakhta, bread is also sold by list, so you don't have to carry extra.
TRAMBUS
From here and further north begins the territory where the Nivkhs traditionally lived.
"There are five of us Nivkhs left here now. In total, there are only about ten people living in Trambaus."
We found Marina and Dmitry Mavgun's house without any trouble. The first person we met gave us directions. They said it was behind the dormitory. The dormitory is an old wooden hut that used to house a store, post office, medical center, and library. Now, in the winter, it's home to two or three fishing crews who come here for the navaga fishing season. Navaga is the main fishery in Trambaus, providing jobs and income.
"They wanted to resettle us, but we couldn't get out of here. In the city, there's just building on top of building, it's all overwhelming. And here, there's space. So we refused to apply for an apartment right away." "Well, if they close the village, how will you live here? Without electricity?" "We'll live the same way they live in Rybnoye."
It turns out Mavgun had seen my first film about the life of the Nivkh people in northern Sakhalin, in the now-closed village of Rybnoye. They'd downloaded it and brought it to them to watch. But they didn't recognize me. It was winter in Rybnoye, and I was wearing a hat and a wind mask.
"We probably have four people who just left. Most people rent apartments in the city and come back here to their homes in the summer. The berries will be here soon, and they'll all come." "What kind of berry do you have?" "Canabobel, scientifically known as gonobobel, cloudberry, bilberry, sixa, klopovka." "Klopovka is considered a Sakhalin brand. Why is it called that? Does it smell like bedbugs?" "No, it doesn't smell like bedbugs, we don't know why they called it that."
Marina treats me to some homemade bedbug syrup. Indeed, it doesn't smell like bedbugs. Meanwhile, my traveling companion has found a large, freshly caught pink salmon on the shore. The fishermen gave it to her as a gift. On the Sakhalin coast, it's common to share fish and caviar with those who can't catch it themselves. My friends were once cycling around Sakhalin and practically never got out their own stew.
— Do bears come to see you? — There are a huge number of bears on Sakhalin and I was haunted by the fact that on the very first day I didn’t have time to take a photo of the bear we met on the road. — I came by last year. He was measuring our garden. He went through the potato patches and the beds.As we leave, Marina advises us to stop by the library. I'm surprised that a village with only ten people has a library. "It's because of us, the peoples of the north, that they keep it. It's supposed to be that way. Well, that's what they say. The last time I was there was last year, when Alexandra Ivanovna was still alive. I borrowed a book about homesteading. Now they've sent us a new librarian from Nogliki. She'll let you know that she visited."
The library door was closed, even though it was business hours. It turned out I'd simply knocked on the wrong door. This was the residential section, and the entrance to the library itself was on the other side. But the grass there was tall, so I hadn't noticed the path.
— I live in that half.— the librarian came out to meet them on the porch. — How did you end up here? — They asked, so I came. I'm not really a librarian by profession. I'm a preschool teacher. But I worked at Rosneft for 13 years. I retired and decided to return to my hometown. I was born in Viakhtu, married in Trambaus, and my older children were born here. And I'm half Nivkh. But I'll see how they prepare me for winter. The locals say the library is cold. They'll bring firewood, so I'll spend the winter there. Otherwise, I'll go back to Nogliki; I have an apartment there. But I've been wanting to move to this coast for a long time. It's warmer here than on the Sea of Okhotsk. And it's quiet.
Angelica Borzunova apologizes for the slight mess. She's preparing to go through and write off old books. And she has some housework to do.
— While I was on a business trip, I came back and the stove was smoking. Just now I went down to the shore to get some clay and put some plaster on it. Can you smell the burning? Anyway, there's a lot to do every day. Besides the library. — Do you have readers? When was the last time they were here? — A fisherman came by today. He needed the internet. We have Rostelecom at the library, it's free. A girl also came by for a book the other day. She came here for the holidays. And on Saturday, a friend of mine from Viakhtu is coming to visit me; I go to their bathhouse every weekend. She usually borrows "Home Tips."
The process of resettling and eliminating small settlements on Sakhalin has been ongoing for decades. So far, all the villages we visited exist only formally, according to lists. This isn't just because some people, for whatever reason, have never been provided with apartments, but also because some residents themselves don't want to leave their homes. They're willing to live without electricity, roads, or social infrastructure, but in their own home on the shores of the Tatar Strait. And home here is a concept that's much broader than just four walls.
