A special report, Continent Of Sakhalin. Aleksey Mikhalyov will offer an insight into the life of the eastern end of Russia which has become one of the most dynamically developing regions of the country.
SPECIAL REPORT BY ALEKSEY MIKHALYOV
CONTINENT OF SAKHALIN
Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Sakhalin Oblast
Mountains of Sakhalin. Extreme biking. At some parts of the course, the speed can go up to 70 km/h. Downhill cycling is the youngest sport on Sakhalin. Its rules are simple. Choose a steep slope, preferably with lots of jumps and potholes, and cycle down to the finish line as fast as possible. Not so long ago, 23 miles of eco-trails were built on the Bolshevik and Rossiyskaya mountains, more than 7.5 miles of which are suitable for bikes. In fact, Sakhalin is getting a whole network of bicycle trails that are being built by local authorities and sportsmen alike.
- So it's a grassroots initiative? It all comes from you?
Evgeniy Nikiforov, Member Of Sakhalin Extreme Biking Club: Sure. It all depends on us. Things don't get built on their own. It's all about demand. If there's no demand, where would it come from?
- So you actually build courses?
- Yes, we have a club. The Extreme Biking Club. And we are developing this sport.
During the past two years, Sakhalin gave birth to a host of its own biking stars, as is evident from their wins at regional tournaments. One of these daredevils is Ilya Maleev. In everyday life, he is a level-headed person in scrubs. So there's more to him than just a passion for bikes.
Ilya Maleev, Member of Sakhalin Extreme Biking Club:
- I work in physical therapy.
- So you're a doctor?
- I'm a teacher. I also teach intensive hatha yoga classes. And many other sports, like swimming, running.
Usually, when people talk about islands, they imagine something flat in the ocean with three wide-branching palm trees on them — a sort of tropical dream. Well, Sakhalin and its surroundings are a complete antithesis to that. This is a mountainous area. Take the Kuril islands. Iturup alone has 20 volcanoes, 9 of them active. Among the fans of mountain tourism, be it downhill biking, alpine skiing or snowboarding, this place is coveted and sought after. Cycling is a great way to travel through half of Sakhalin and peek into its most remote corners that go unmentioned in popular travel guides. Here's a fox taking a look at our camera.
But this is also a good base for traveling to a chain of neighboring islands, so aviation remains one of the main means of transportation in the Far East. We're flying to Iturup. Here is the protected wilderness of the Pacific ocean. Real-life illustrations to The Lost World. Actually, the view is so epic that it also looks like the creation of the world. Iturup is located in the southern part of the Greater Kuril Ridge. The largest island in the chain, it is 125 miles in length and 4-12 miles in width. Its surface area is 3,174 square kilometers. It lies 25 miles from the Urup island and 13.5 miles from the Kunashir island. Iturup is part of the Kuril municipality of the Sakhalin Oblast. For tens of thousands of tourists who come to the Kuril islands every year from the western parts of Russia and as part of the visa-free exchange with Japan, Iturup's main attraction is hot sulfurous springs. The water temperature in some of them reaches 90°C, so people bathe in these cascades all year round.
The guardian of this place is the Kurilian Bobtail, a cat with a short tail, also called the Kurilian Earthshaker for his talent to predict earthquakes.
Another thing, just as attractive to tourists, is fresh fish, so plentiful in the Sea of Okhotsk. A common thing to do is a tour to a fish factory that includes such staples as tea and spoonfuls of caviar.
- How much can they produce in a shift?
- Around 30 tons.
- 30 tons?! Of caviar?
- Yes. Sure.
- In one day?
- Yes.
In total, around 40 similar factories operate on Sakhalin and the Kuril islands. They not only process fish but also breed it, releasing more than a billion salmon hatchlings into rivers every year. That allows to catch thousands of tons of, say, humpback salmon without doing any damage to nature. Only a short time ago, the fish was processed old-fashioned way. Like this, for example. Today, the factory in Reydovo yields 420 tons of product per day. There's only one problem. The fish is way too fresh. That's how it was graded by supervisors from Japan and Alaska who supplied the equipment designed for processing fish that was caught far away from the factory.
Aleksander Semyonov, Fish Factory Shift Supervisor:
- Inshore fishing is close to the factory. The raw product is delivered in 6 hours tops. We have a seine right around the corner. It's 10 minutes away.
- So can the customer taste that?
- In terms of fish quality, of course.
To assess this quality and find out whether an average customer can afford it, we return to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the capital of the oblast. Our first stop is one of the city's biggest hotels, famous for its reverence for culinary tourism in general and for seafood in particular. Sakhalin is one of those places where East meets West, and European cuisine meets Pan-Asian one. This mix is appreciated by foodies open to experiments. But local hotels receive a lot of tourists from South Korea, where the view on food is more conservative, and from Japan, where the knowledge of sushi and sashimi is better than in Europe. So today on Sakhalin, seafood is judged according to global standards.
"There are around 7 species of crab alone that are good for eating, not to mention scallops or sea cucumbers. The Sea of Okhotsk is right here. That allows us to have really fresh food, unlike the food that is brought from far away, usually in a frozen state. So it has a very special taste — and the taste is what gastronomy is about".
It's wrong to think that food of this quality can only be found in restaurants. For example, here's a market with a self-explanatory name Success which is easily confirmed by the look at any of the stands. Last year, a factory started operating in Nevelsk — a port town on Sakhalin — that supplies seafood solely to Russia's domestic market. The shift from export to local consumers in some sense strips away the Far East's exclusive right over the delicacy. But it doesn't stop at food. Sakhalin aims to become a star if not on the planetary scale, then at least in the Pacific region. That requires a high level of service across the board.
Last year, the Sakhalin oblast was visited by 260,000 tourists. Every year this number grows by 40,000 people. Recognizing tourism as the main source of income, Sakhalin started inviting experienced experts from abroad. Boban Pavlovich came from Montenegro. His childhood spent in Yugoslavia during Josip Broz Tito spared him a language barrier in Russia.
Boban Pavlovich, Staff Training Manager at Mega Palace Hotel: Russian is a very powerful language. It's one of the Slavic languages. I love Russian culture — Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Pushkin".
- You probably know that Chekhov visited this place.
- Of course! I was so surprised that there's a Chekhov museum on Sakhalin. And then someone told me that Chekhov stayed here too and loved this place. I'm also Pavlovich, like Chekhov. So we have a similar taste.
That's how Boban Pavlovich and Anton Pavlovich met on an island, so remote to both of them. Chekhov wrote his Island Of Sakhalin that's been translated into dozens of languages and that grants indulgence to local literature scholars.
Evgeniya Firsova, Island Of Sakhalin Museum Director: "We are probably the youngest museum, and unlike other museums dedicated to Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich didn't live here. People were calling us a one-book museum. Nobody believed it would be developing. And yet we are growing. We are getting new exhibits. We don't argue with anyone. We just work. And we like our work".
Chekhov's personal effects, paintings of his talented descendants, contemporary decor. It might not look like much — nowhere near the museum in Yalta — yet even to Yalta they've sent quite a big exhibition: more than 180 original pieces from the turn of the century.
Evgeniya Firsova: "We are doing everything to change the view of Sakhalin as of a penal colony. We don't have bears roaming the streets. We have planes. We have roads. We have cars, buses. We are developing. In some aspects, even faster than Central Russia. And we want to show all that. And we show it through a book, through Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, through a comparison".
And indeed it used to be the land of prisoners who were trusted not only with a pickaxe and a shovel, but also with a serious mission of national scale.
Case Files
The idea wasn't new. Great Britain colonized Australia in most part by prisoners. Simple math. Why should we exterminate our hardcore criminals? Let's send them thousands of miles away. Make them useful. Let them cultivate the remote land, settle down, build a life. The plans for Sakhalin were very similar. But the things went a more complicated way.
Two wars. First, the Russo-Japanese one and then the World War II, drastically changed Sakhalin's destiny, turning it into a stronghold of the Imperial Japanese Army. In the middle of the 20th century, Soviet oil workers, geologists and simply romantics, however naive this footage may seem, completely rebooted Sakhalin.
"People here are cold-hardened. Not everyone will dare to refresh this way after sauna".
Today, it's one of Russia's most successful regions. Take agriculture, for example. Green Agro-Sakhalin. A breeding facility for 3800 head of cattle and a dairy factory with the daily output of 120 tons. A purebred herd from Denmark. Brand-new equipment. Squeaky clean cowsheds free of foreign smells. For 20 years, after collective farms were disbanded, Sakhalin residents couldn't taste fresh milk. Only imported concentrates. And then came a real breakthrough.
Oleg Kozhemyako, Governor Of Sakhalin Oblast: "We are building several facilities of this type. It's a way to provide Sakhalin residents with locally-produced fresh milk and meat, with those products that used to be imported in a frozen state. By 2020, these problems will be solved. We're going to have high-quality foods, and Sakhalin will become self-sustainable in terms of food production".
Korsakovsky Farm. An agro-town with homestead type houses in Razdolnoye village. 50 turnkey one-story houses, each with an area of 100 sq. m. We walk into the first one we see and find there the farm's construction supervisor, who has the expertise to evaluate the quality of corporate housing.
Artur Zakharyan, Construction Supervisor: There's more good than bad.
- Can you show it to us?
- Sure.
- Let's go then.
- Let's go. Here's the kitchen. The kitchen is also…
- A dining room.
- Yes. It's really great that the kitchen is big. This is the kids' room.
- How many of them live here?
- We have two.
- A boy and a girl. We also got ourselves some animals.
- The cat was the first one to enter the house.
The game-changing development of agriculture has started three years ago. As the result, the meat production grew one third in the last year alone. The production of greenhouse vegetables grew 20%. Local farmers have developed a passion that is not in their job description. In terms of tomatoes, they collect 50 kg from a square meter. For cucumbers, it's 130 kg, and they plan to reach 160.
Igor Balchenko, Agriculturist at Teplichny Farm: "For other businesses of the Primorsky Krai, it's not cost-effective. For them, it's easier to grow soy and export it to China, and in return, China sends here vegetables. But here it's more about the need to provide the home region. So now we are becoming China's competitors. We're starting to supply cucumbers and tomatoes to Khabarovsk Krai, Amur Oblast, Primorsky Krai and Kamchatka Krai".
Teplichny Farm is the largest enterprise in the Far East growing vegetables in protected and open ground. Early this year, they've opened the fourth group of facilities, having upgraded xix hectares of old greenhouses, built back in the 60's. All technologies available in the sphere have found use here. Automated systems of watering, fertilizing, ventilation, intensive lighting. That created dozens of jobs.
Pavel Butkov, Chief Agriculturist At Teplichny Farm: "Today we see a greenhouse boom. And our profession is in big demand. There are not enough specialists. They get poached all the time. So it's an exciting time for greenhouse vegetable growers".
Through this program, the Sakhalin Oblast aims in three years to increase its milk production 2 times, its meat production 4.5 times and its production of greenhouse vegetables almost 2 times.
Sakhalin is the biggest island in Russia. It stretches from Cape Elizabeth in the north to Cape Crillon in the south for 589 miles. In its widest part, it spans 99 miles. The surface area is 76.400 square kilometers which is almost twice the size of Switzerland or the Netherlands. It is bounded by the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk. Separating it from continental Asia is 7 km of Nevelskoy Strait, frozen in the winter. La Pérouse Strait separates it from the Japanese island of Hokkaido.
For the residents of the western part of Russia, it seems so remote that any mention of Far Eastern Hectare program produces a mental image of a piece of land in the middle of nowhere. It's different in Anton Gurkin's case. He exercised his right only partially, getting less than half a hectare because he chose a busy area next to a highway. He leveled his land and started building a recreation center with a hostel, sauna, and multiple closed pavilions.
Anton Gurkin, landowner: "It's easily accessible. People from Korsakov and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk come here. We're on social networks. We even have an Instagram (запрещена в РФ) page. We had guests from Poronaysk once. That's more than 217 miles to the north. The windows of the hostel offer a picturesque sunset panorama. Even though the road might be noisy, the sunsets balance it out".
Anton decided to launch his business because there weren't enough hotels in the vicinity of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. There are more people willing to go to the island than there are vacant rooms in the hotels. For the majority of Russians, Sakhalin is an uncharted and thus alluring place. Even the locals don't know everything about the place.
The metal detector beeps furiously. A minute later, the shovel strikes some aircraft wreckage. This year, the Russian Search Movement is turning 30. Artyom Bandura and his associates celebrate the date by going on another expedition.
Artyom Bandura: "Something here. Looks like a part of the engine".
The remains of Soviet soldiers who died in 1945 during the Invasion of the Kuril Islands remain unburied in Sakhalin. Recently, Sakhalin search enthusiasts have discovered the remains of 88 soldiers. They managed to identify many of them and even contact their relatives. However, there’s another dramatic aspect of this story.
Artyom Bandura, search enthusiast: We found four soldiers lying on the surface barely covered by the leaves. Some of the bones were bright white from the sun and the Sakhalin winds. No soldier that we had found had his handgun. They had ammo and grenades but…
- What does that mean?
- It means their bodies were found. The scavenger group took their weapons and possibly their papers. For some reason, they abandoned them without burying them.
The regional department consists of 35 experienced searchers who created a small but incredibly informative museum of both Japanese wars of 1904 and 1945. However, the main Japanese war collection is located at the Pobeda (Victory) museum complex in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.
"There was no information about the depth, but they had to swim anyway, dropping something off on their way, removing their pouches because 30-40 kg worth of equipment was weighing the soldiers down like an anchor, dragging them down to the bottom".
Now, it's hard to imagine that decades ago, Sakhalin was divided at the 50th parallel. The USSR and Japan had a land border and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk was called Toyohara. It's even harder to fathom that in August 1945, when the country was celebrating victory, the conquerors of Berlin were returning home and whole villages were gathering at festive tables, Soviet troops led by Marshal Vasilevsky defeated the million-strong army Kwantung Army in Manchuria.
"Our troops captured 594,000 Japanese soldiers and officers".
The dramatic finale of the Second World War was imminent. During the invasion of the Kuril Islands, the Soviet troops demonstrated selfless valor.
Igor Samarin, Pobeda museum: "Few people know Vlasenko, Babich, and the heroic sailors who, strapped full of grenades, jumped under Japanese tanks. They sacrificed their lives to stop the Japanese. Not a single one of them was proclaimed a Hero of the Soviet Union".
During the attack on the Handasa police outpost, Soviet troops attacked it without even scouting it, unaware of what awaited them. The Invasion of the Shumshu Island was the most tragic episode of August 1945. Few people know the details of that war outside of Sakhalin. The locals consider fixing that mistake a matter of honor.
Yelena Savelyeva, Pobeda museum: "We come to the museum to see that the 1945 exhibition says that the war ended on May 9th, 1945. And the Infernal August of 1945 is only represented by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here, we tried to fill those historical gaps. The earth here is covered in blood, and that's not an exaggeration. The 50th parallel was a place of fierce fighting. The locals know their heroes and respect them. We look after our cultural heritage sites and the monuments commemorating the battle. There are 117 of them in the Sakhalin Oblast".
If Sakhalin had a single sacred mission, it would be preserving and sharing historical accuracy. The collection of the local lore museum clearly shows that. Along the unique armor pieces, it preserves the history of the indigenous people of the island: the Nivkh, the Uilta, and the mysterious Ainu people. The locals don't draw a line between the modern era and ancient history, not to mention the Karafuto era, when Japan owned half of the island.
Endo Yonesichi, a Japanese patron of arts, lived here. People loved him so much that, after he died, they gathered money to erect a monument in his honor. Now, there’s a new monument in its place: an apology for what people failed to preserve when the initial monument was demolished in the middle of the 20th century. Not so long ago, in this century, the foundation of the old monument was found at a hotel construction site. At first, it was a mystery. Only after conducting their own research did the businessmen realize what they had found. Their question was, "What should we do?" The decision was made to alter the project and move the building a few meters, incurring significant costs in the process. That's not just an example of love towards their homeland but something much bigger.
Here's an antique hieroglyph-marked cauldron in the courtyard of a typical apartment block. It was installed by collector and scholar Mikhail Sherkovtsov.
- What kind of leather is that?
- Buffalo.
There are a lot of hidden treasures in Sakhalin left by the subjects of the Japanese emperor when they were fleeing the island. Mikhail has gathered a collection of those artifacts, which he displays at various exhibitions.
Mikhail Sherkovtsov, collector of Japanese antiques:
- The bride used to get an intricate hairdo before the wedding and used these pillows not to mess it up.
- Used it just once?
- Pretty much. Here you can see the crack I left with my shovel. I was a millimeter away from shattering it.
- Did you find it here?
- Yes. I found it at the bog in the western part of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.
Here's a monk staff. These are carbon cryptography pencils. Here's a sword similar to the one used to injure the Russian Prince and future Emperor Nicholas II. Here's a token of some secret unit.
Mikhail Sherkovtsov: "It was a secret border unit. They used to sabotage our border patrols. Here's a special cup. The face of your loved one appears when you pour sake in it".
Here's an especially valuable exhibit — a shellac record of a radio drama. There are only six of them left in Japan. The rest were destroyed by American bombs.
Mikhail Sherkovtsov: "In order to find an intact piece, one has to spend eight hours in a wet pit pulling out tiny shards. And there's no guarantee that by the end of the day you'll find an intact piece. But each time I find something, I always say that it's time well spent. It means I saved a piece of history. I'll tell people about it, write about it, exhibit it, and show it to people".
One of the major parts of the lives of Sakhalin and its citizens is sports. More than 40% of the local population aged from 3 to 79 do sports. People can take part in more than 90 sports activities, the majority of which, from paragliding to park yoga, are open to anyone and are often free. We're talking about mass sports here. There are 1084 sports-related places, including three stadiums that can fit 1,500 viewers each, three roofed synthetic ice rinks, 250 gyms, 15 swimming pools, and 19 ski resorts. Skiing is the key word here. All its various types are represented in Sakhalin all year round. Unique roller ski tracks, water skiing areas, and ski slopes allow skiers to train all year round. In general, it's hard to avoid doing sports in Sakhalin.
"Each village that organizes skiing competitions has its own track. We're going to the town of Tamari (population: 5,000). It has its own roller ski run, two tracks, and a shooting range. Irina Ulitina, skiing coach: The warm Tatar Strait is also nearby. We'll be skiing, swimming, running, and doing all sorts of activities. And all that is available in our region".
Many of the facilities she mentioned can be found in the center of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk at the Mountain Air all-season sports complex. It's the most well-lit ski area in the Far East. The combined length of its 16 slopes is 24 kilometers. The Russian freestyle team used to train here.
Sergey Burenkov, Minister of Sports (Sakhalin): The climate is very similar to Japan or Korea. The quality of snow is almost the same thanks to the same latitude.
- The mist is also similar.
- That's right. The time zones are also similar, so the athletes have no jet lag during the competitions.
Sakhalin is an island, but in reality, it's a crossroad; a living spot in the middle of the sea, as spacious and diverse as a whole continent. Nowhere else could Anton Chekhov have met Boban Pavlovich, the envoy of distant Montenegro.
Boban Pavlovich, HR training manager: "I had my doubts at first about coming here. I figured it was far away. But when I got here, I found fulfillment. The nature here is wonderful. There are mountains here. The sea is here. It was the first time I saw the ocean. There was a sea back home, but that was the first time I saw such a massive body of water".
"This place is great for ice fishing. The city is empty during winter, but there are crowds of people gathering by the lakeside and at the Okhotsk Sea coast. People try to catch smelt or navaga. It's a family adventure. People come to camp there with tents and hotplates. It's an event".
Oleg Kozhemyako, Governor of Sakhalin Oblast: "We must build the infrastructure to make our people comfortable, so people would confuse Sakhalin Oblast with Moscow Oblast. We must create quality working environments and provide accommodation. If we do that, people will come here".
Evgeny Nikiforov, extreme cyclist:
- There are lots of things to do, and there's lots of work.
- What about money?
- There's enough money as well.
Eugenia Firsova, Ostrov Sakhalin museum: "The island is so huge and there are so many different things here. Recently, it has been the center of major international events. I'm comfortable here. I've been to many large cities and even abroad, but I would never give up the Island of Sakhalin for any of them. If they really want to, and if they are determined, anyone can find self-realization here. With a little effort, they can make it happen".
