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Tuesday, Oct. 31, 2000
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Off the Beaten Track
The Breaking Point
Despite abundant natural resources, the people of Sakhalin are just scraping by
By ANDREW MEIER Sakhalin
 Russia, to paraphrase the recent words of its president, is a rich country with a poor people. Nowhere is that paradox more evident than on Sakhalin Island, a mountainous sliver of Arctic tundra in the Sea of Okhotsk off Russia's eastern coast.
To many in the West, Sakhalin may be best known as the launching pad for the Soviet Su15s that shot down Korean passenger plane KAL 007 in 1983. But the island was once the largest penal colony in Czarist Russia. Sakhalin still echoes with the pain and loss that Anton Chekhov heard here more than a century ago. In 1890, Chekhov left the comforts of Moscow and early fame to journey across Siberia to the edge of Russia. His aim: to see for himself the worst evils of the empire. He succeeded, witnessing here flogging, child prostitution, murder. Chekhov called Sakhalin "the most depressing place in our land I have been," but would be forever thankful for making the trip. Here he found his moral voice; his most famous dramas came after his pilgrimage. "Sakhalin," Chekhov wrote his friend, the publisher Aleksei Suvorin, "was the breaking point."
Few traces of the prisons Chekhov saw remain on Sakhalin. But there are still descendants of the prisoners whom Chekhov met. And every so often the locals dig up a rusted set of chains — while I was on the island, two kids playing on the beach unearthed a pair of hand and foot manacles — and such souvenirs hang on the walls of many local living rooms.
Today Sakhalin's inhabitants are neither exiles nor prisoners, but they are trapped all the same. Thanks to the decade of license that followed the collapse of the USSR, and set the island's economy adrift, the local population has dwindled from 700,000 to 600,000. And for those who remain there is little work. The Soviet-era pulp mills stand idle and rusting. The collective farms for fish and caviar, timber and fur are all but shut down. A few notable exceptions — salmon fisheries and crab exporters — have proven that life in the private sector is possible on Sakhalin. In the main, however, the people of Sakhalin have been left to scrape for a living below the poverty line. Today, the island ranks as one of the poorest regions in Russia.
Not that Sakhalin lacks for natural riches. Seduced by the lucrative Asian markets that lie in close proximity, local chieftains and foreign pioneers compete for Sakhalin's wealth — fur, timber, salmon, caviar and, most of all, oil. In recent years, Western oil men — led by Royal Dutch/Shell and ExxonMobil — have come to Sakhalin. Executives from Alaska and Aberdeen live in the "American Village," as the locals call the ersatz Californian suburb the oil men have built just outside the capital, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Up along the northeast coast, in the grim town of Nogliki, where cows graze amidst the ruins of Soviet apartment blocks, the oilers convene on weekends to splash through expense accounts in the town's sole nightclub. The reserves beneath Sakhalin's shelf, they confide, are huge. "They could make the North Sea deposits look like a pair of Arkansas gas stations," one Exxon man assured me.
Another popular source of income is poaching. "When the fish are running, the bodies start flying," one fisherman announced, relating how the turf wars turn lethal during spawning season, when the fishing lords tend to fall victim to contract hits. Sure enough, days later, a fishery director in the town of Nevelsk on the west coast was shot dead on his doorstep.
Given the proximity of Japan, the Koreas and China, Sakhalin also reveals the strong eastern influences that have spread across the Russian Far East in the first post-Soviet decade. The Asian imprint — from glitzy Japanese hotels to cheap Chinese markets to the Korean brothel that graced the top floor of my hotel in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk — is not favored much. And the political wild card of the region, the fate of the Kurile Islands — the archipelago of sparsely-inhabited islands that lies east of Sakhalin and remains a prime source of contention between Russia and Japan — is almost a daily topic of discussion. But not debate. After all, Vladimir Putin is not about to sell the islands back to the Japanese.
When Putin visited Sakhalin in September, the date he picked was hardly random — September 3, the day the Soviets seized the Kuriles in 1945. Putin vowed to be obliging to the foreign oilmen, though, much to their surprise. He called for cutting the red tape and speeding up the development of more foreign oil ventures. "It's strategically unprofitable for Russia," Putin declared, "to slow down the signing of new agreements or to prevent existing projects working."
Sakhalin's environmentalists — young and strident and not afraid to take on the world's oil giants — are exercised by the discovery last summer of dead herring washed up on the beach, stretching for kilometers along the shores of the Bay of Piltun, not far from where the oilers have been drilling for over a year now. In the northern city of Okha, one local, Volodya, tells how he bagged some of the herring and dragged them home to fertilize his small garden. He knows the local environmentalists later had the fish tested by scientists in Vladivostok and Moscow, and that high levels of petrochemicals were found. But Volodya simply shrugs and says, "I don't know why the herring died. I only know that we sure had a great harvest of potatoes."
One day Sakhalin may, of course, reap huge rewards from its oil and bountiful other natural riches. But for many on this island, the arrival of the Westerners has only heightened their distance from the global economy — they have returned to a life of hunting and gathering. With a healthy sense of irony, they are the first to point out, and even take pride in, the paradox of Sakhalin.
Check out timeeurope.com for more Fast Forward Europe stories in the days and weeks to come. Our Fast Forward coverage culminates in a year-end special issue and website to be published on December 14
PHOTO: JACQUELINE MIA FOSTER for TIME
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