Calamity Islands
Sakhalin and the Kurils – terra incognita of a brutal Russian Empire
Homeland’s Morning
‘Here is where the homeland’s morning begins,’ advertisement billboards claim romantically, representing the power vertical from the Pacific Ocean to the Baltic Sea. The many centuries spent and methods used to colonise the islands have, however, made neither Sakhalin nor the Kuril Islands ‘our Australia’, though in both cases the land was first colonised by convicts at the same time. Why has the forced-labour-based Australia grown into an industrialized country, whereas Sakhalin and the Kurils remain ‘Calamity Islands’?
The causes are plenty but we have failed to comprehend the main one. Colonisation never begins with imprisonment and forced labour, but rather with men making homes for themselves on the land; never with barbed-wire-fenced camps but with freedom to develop. Then again, an island in the middle of the sea has always felt to us like an insufficiently reliable prison and life on it not quite severe a penalty for the crimes committed. This is the reason why we would build a forced-labour-island, chain people to barrows in which they moved coal, flog them with rods and deprive them of the right to as much as dream of freedom. ‘Prison is the antagonist of colony, and the interests of the two are inverse,’ Anton Chekhov concluded in his book of travels across the Sakhalin forced-labour colony in 1890.
