Sakalin – Far East Russia
EDITOR’S NOTE: Below is some basic information about Sakhalin Island. The Engage Russia team will be visiting Sakhalin over the next few weeks and months and will be posting videos, photos, and print materials from those trips as soon as they become available. If you are interested in getting more information about Sakhalin or creating a partnership in that area, send an email to TellMeMore@EngageRussia.org.
Sakhalin Island, Far East Russia
Sakhalin Island is a large elongated island in the North Pacific, a part of Russia and is its largest island.
Peoples
The indigenous peoples of the island are the Sakhalin Ainu in the southern half, the Oroks in the central part, and Nivkhs in the North. Most Ainu relocated to Hokkaidō when Japanese were expelled from the island in 1949.
A Japanese settlement in the southern end of Sakhalin of Ootomari was established in 1679 in a colonialization attempt. Cartographers of the Matsumae clan created a map of the island and called it “Kita-Ezo” (Northern Ezo, Ezo is the old name of Hokkaidō). The 1689 Nerchinsk Treaty between Russia and China, which defined the Stanovoy Mountains as the border, made no explicit mention of the island. Nevertheless Russia started occupying the island, with an army made up of convicts from the 18th century onwards. The Qing Empire also claimed sovereignty over the island. However, as the Chinese governments did not have a military presence on the island, people from both Japan and Russia attempted to colonize the island, albeit from different ends.
Sakhalin became known to Europeans from the travels of Ivan Moskvitin and Martin Gerritz de Vries in the 17th century, and still better from those of Jean-François de La Pérouse (1787) and Adam Johann von Krusenstern (1805). Both, however, regarded it as a peninsula, and were unaware of the existence of the Strait of Tartary, which was discovered in 1809 by Mamiya Rinzo.
On the basis of it being an extension of Hokkaidō, geographically and culturally, Japan unilaterally proclaimed sovereignty over the whole island in 1845, as well as the Kuril Islands, as there were competing claims from Russia. However, the Russian navigator Gennady Nevelskoy in 1849 definitively recorded the existence and navigability of this strait and — in defiance of the Qing and Japanese claims; Russian settlers established coal mines, administration facilities, schools, prisons, and churches on the island.
In 1855, Russia and Japan signed the Treaty of Shimoda, which declared that both nationals could inhabit the island: Russians in the north, and Japanese in the south, without a clear boundary between. Russia also agreed to dismantle its military base at Ootomari. Following the Opium War, Russia forced China to sign the Treaty of Aigun and Convention of Peking, under which China lost claim to all territories north of Heilongjiang and east of Ussuri, including Sakhalin, to Russia. A katorga (penal colony) was established by Russia on Sakhalin in 1857, but the southern part of the island was held by the Japanese until the 1875 Treaty of Saint Petersburg (1875), when they ceded it to Russia in exchange for the Kuril Islands.
After the Russo-Japanese War, Russia and Japan signed the Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905, which resulted in the southern part of the island below 50° N reverting to Japan; the Russians retained the other three-fifths of the area. South Sakhalin was administrated by Japan as Karafuto-chō, with the capital Toyohara, today’s Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, and had a large number of migrants from Japan and Korea.
Geography
Sakhalin is separated from the mainland by the narrow and shallow Mamiya Strait or Strait of Tartary, which often freezes in winter in its narrower part, and from Hokkaidō, (Japan) by the Soya Strait or Strait of La Pérouse. Nearly two-thirds of Sakhalin is mountainous. Two parallel ranges of mountains traverse it from north to south.
Population
At the beginning of the 20th century, some 32,000 Russians (of whom over 22,150 were convicts) inhabited Sakhalin along with several thousand native inhabitants. The island’s population has grown to 546,695 according to the 2002 census, 83 percent of whom are ethnic Russians and followed by Koreans at about 30,000, Ukrainians and Tatars. The native inhabitants consist of some 2,000 Nivkhs, 750 Oroks, 200 Evenks and some Yakuts. The Nivkhs in the north support themselves by fishing and hunting.The capital Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, a city of about 175,000, has a large Korean minority, typically referred to as Sakhalin Koreans, who were forcibly brought by the Japanese during World War II to work in the coal mines. Most of the population lives in the southern half of the island, centered mainly around Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and two ports, Kholmsk and Korsakov (population about 40,000 each).
The 400,000 Japanese inhabitants of Sakhalin (including all indigenous Ainu) were deported following the conquest of the southern portion of the island by the Soviet Union in 1945 at the end of World War II.
Sakhalin is a classic “resource economy” relying on oil and gas exports, coal mining, forestry, and fishing. Limited quantities of rye, wheat,oats, barley and vegetables are grown, although the growing season averages less than 100 days.
Text source: Wikipedia – 2009
