Lev Shternberg: Anthropologist, Russian Socialist, Jewish Activist

2. Sakhalin

25 2. Sakhalin On May 19, 1889, Lev Shternberg set foot on his “island prison,” where he was to remain until 1897. Located in the Sea of Okhotsk, Sakhalin Island is nearest the Amur River delta on its northern end and the Japanese island of Hokkaido to its south.1 Sakhalin is about 600 miles long, and its width varies from 16 to 100 miles. Its area is about 30,000 square miles, which is a fraction smaller than Hokkaido. The northern part of the island is occupied mainly by low-lying taiga, while the southern end is heavily forested and mountainous. Sakhalin ’s climate is rather severe and capricious, especially in its north. The winters are raw and the summers damp. The east coast facing the Sea of Okhotsk remains frozen for half the year. A warm ocean current coming from the Sea of Japan influences the west coast, but the Tatar Strait, which separates the island from the mainland, remains frozen from November to March. During the summer, thick fogs make navigation difficult, while inland travelers have to endure numerous gnats, mosquitoes, and flies. Sakhalin’s natural resources are quite rich, in fact richer than those of many parts of Siberia and the Russian Far East. Fish (salmon, herring, and cod) and game are plentiful, as are berries and edible plants. The island also contains large amounts of timber and sizable coal and petroleum deposits (Stephan 1971). When Shternberg arrived there, the entire island had been Russian territory for only fourteen years. The Russians assumed control of the island from the Japanese, who had succeeded the Chinese. Evidence suggests that the Chinese became aware of the island and its inhabitants—the Gilyak (Nivkh), the Orok (Uil’ta), and the Ainu—as early as the beginning of the first millennium 26 ce, and more certainly by the sixth century ce.2 When, in the late thirteenth century, the Mongols reached the mouth of the Amur River on the mainland across from the island, they attempted to control the local indigenous population . While some native groups submitted to their suzerainty, others resisted. By 1287 the Mongol Yuan Dynasty had established garrisons on the island, and by the early fourteenth century the last of the Ainu chiefs had submitted to them. However, with the decline of the dynasty, its posts on the island were abandoned. The Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) resumed China’s contacts with the island, but unlike the Mongols the Ming forces expanded into the lower Amur delta and Sakhalin without resorting to arms. Instead, they collected tributes of furs in exchange for beads and silk products. In the seventeenth century the Manchu replaced the Ming Chinese as the dominant power in the region, and 1. Sakhalin Island, 1900. From Bruce Grant, In the Soviet House of Culture.© 1995 Princeton University Press. Reprinted with permission of Princeton University Press. 27 sakhalin from about 1700 to 1820 the Nivkh, the Uil’ta, and the Ainu of Sakhalin sent tribute missions to Manchu posts on the Amur River. A few years earlier, in 1635, the first well-documented Japanese landing on the island took place, although given the Japanese proximity to Sakhalin, contacts between them and the local natives might have occurred earlier. When a Japanese explorer named Mamiya Rinzo visited the island in 1808–9, he observed that the Manchurian administration made only a limited attempt to control its native inhabitants. He also noted that with the increased availability of Japanese goods on southern Sakhalin, native-Manchurian relations had weakened even further. While the Japanese offered hides, axes, cotton, kettles, tobacco and liquor, the natives, who traveled to the south to trade and sometimes work on Japanese farms, provided jewels, sable fur, and fish (Stephan 1971; Forsyth 1992; Grant 1995). The Russians arrived on the scene in 1644, when Vasilii Poiarkov led a band of Cossacks down the Amur River to the shores of the Tatar Strait; however, there is no solid evidence that he actually landed on Sakhalin. In the early decades of the nineteenth century several Russian maritime expeditions explored the coast of Sakhalin. During the same period the Russians and the Japanese began maintaining a more substantive presence on the island, even though neither country was able to penetrate its interior. In 1849 the tsar authorized the exploration of the lower Amur, which led to the establishment of a major post (Nikolaevsk) at...