While encroaching civilization has brought comfort and modern amenities to Russia’s Southern Kurils, some residents yearn for the freedoms of times past.
At six o’clock on the misty and dark morning of November 26, 1941, a fleet of 28 warships quietly departed from Hitokappu Bay, in the Kuril Islands under the command of Captain Mitsuo Fuchida of the Imperial Japanese Navy and set sail on a secret mission toward the icy waters of the North Pacific Ocean. Eleven days later, on the morning of December 7, planes took off from the fleet’s aircraft carriers to carry out their attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, bringing the United States into World War II. Iturup Island, which contains Hitokappu Bay, made its small but important imprint on world history.
After the war, the Soviet Union annexed the Southern Kuril Islands from Japan, setting off a diplomatic dispute that has prevented the signing of a formal peace treaty between the two powers to this day. The islands’ Japanese residents were deported to Japan several years after the war, although some elderly Russian locals fondly recall the brief years they cohabitated on the islands with their Japanese neighbors. Today, creeping civilization and a desire to attract tourist income has opened the islands up to the outside world as never before, but not all of the changes have been welcomed by their nearly 20,000 residents.
The Southern Kurils’ natural beauty and otherworldliness more than compensate for their remote location. The sound of waves smashing against the hardened black lava along the coastline can be heard day and night on Iturup, the largest of the islands and home to Hitokappu Bay (now called “Kasatka” in Russian).
Inland, a dense, impenetrable forest of cypress trees serves as a natural shelter for abundant bears and other wildlife, protecting them from the many local and visiting hunters. Clouds of fog periodically meander across the hilly landscape, a reminder of the island’s notoriously unpredictable and rainy weather. The fog sometimes obscures the many active and inactive volcanoes that act as navigational beacons for locals and travelers alike.
National Geographic recently named Iturup’s white cliffs among the most picturesque spots in Russia, and the abundance of natural hot springs that dot the island’s vast landmass may hold the key to a future economy based on eco-tourism. On nearby Shikotan Island, a Cape known as Krai Sveta (“Edge of the World”) has attracted tourists from around the globe.
Today any visitor planning to see the islands is advised to get a permit from the border service of Russia’s Federal Security Service. Luckily, if you live in Russia, this can be done online via the government’s remarkably efficient state services portal Gosuslugi, and received either in-person or via post at a Russian address (a foreign traveler may have to rely on an agency and apply at least a month in advance). A couple of weeks after submitting the necessary form online, along with photographs of our passports, I received a call clarifying the details of our trip from a courteous and professional official who soon thereafter approved our applications.
The easiest way to get to the Southern Kurils is an hour-long plane flight from the Russian Far East island of Sakhalin, which is where we opted to pick up our passes in person. The ease of connection with the outside world is a relatively new phenomenon for Iturup’s residents. Prior to the opening of a new airport in 2014, the only way off the island was either via ship or a World War II-era Japanese airfield, deliberately constructed in an inhospitable area of dense fog. Residents of Iturup’s capital, Kurilsk (pop. 2,000), recall how, not long ago, they would have to travel for several hours by truck through muddy roads only to spend days camping until conditions were clear enough for a safe takeoff.
Isolation was not the only hardship residents experienced in recent history. A Los Angeles Times article by Robyn Dixon from 20 years ago described the Southern Kurils as “Isles of despair… neglected by Moscow politicians” and bemoaned “[t]he profusion of the junk metal, used instead of concrete on the old runway… the casual, ubiquitous theft; the paucity of material goods because of the island’s isolation; the Soviet-era industrial trash lying everywhere.” In Kurilsk, the largest city on Iturup, school buildings constructed in the 1990s under various international aid programs stand as stark reminders of the islands’ fluctuating fortunes.
This extreme isolation is now a thing of the past. Iturup’s new airport, located a few miles out of town and accessible by a modern road, was but one of many projects covered by a vast $1 billion, 10-year federal program to develop the islands launched in 2016. New schools and medical facilities dot Kurilsk’s landscape of two-story residential buildings as privately funded hostels, hotels, thermal spas, and restaurants mushroom across the (still) predominantly wild island. A thousand-room hotel with a ski complex is currently under construction on Kurilsk’s outskirts. Recently announced plans to make the Kuril Islands a special economic zone with special tax, customs and administrative breaks for both Russian and international investors have irked Tokyo and put plans to jointly develop the islands on hold.
Today, many who left are moving back, and one of the government’s aims is to increase the islands’ total population by 25 percent – to 24,000 by 2025. One of these “repats” is 32-year-old Roman Mashnin, a local forest ranger who grew up on Iturup and moved away to Southern Russia’s Krasnodar region, only to return in 2018.
“Islanders have a special connection to each other that outsiders don’t really understand,” Mashnin explains while scanning the horizon from the driver’s seat of his dark green 1994 Toyota Land Cruiser. He enjoys watching US reality TV shows about how forest rangers and other law enforcement professionals perform their jobs in America. Mashnin has taken advantage of a state program that helps new arrivals acquire affordable housing on Iturup. It’s helping him to raise his young family more economically.
The biggest impediment for those seeking to return is financial: due to simple logistics, nearly all goods, including basic food supplies, go for several times what they cost on the Russian mainland. While you can get a kilo of cucumbers or tomatoes for R150 (just over $2) in Moscow, they might cost up to R550 (nearly $8) on Iturup in the winter. Fruits can cost up to R800 ($11) per kilo. Prices for real estate are comparable to St. Petersburg: a three-room flat can easily cost R9 million ($127,000). Even caviar prices on Iturup are comparable to Moscow, despite its abundance in the wild (a black market exists with cheaper prices).
Local salaries, however, are only slightly above Russia’s national monthly average of R50,000 ($650). A federal inspector, cop or fireman can expect to make around R60,000 ($850). Drivers make slightly more (R70,000, or $1000), and salaries for local officials begin at R100,000 ($1400).
But locals have innovative ways of making ends meet. “A lot of folks in town used to grow their own vegetables in greenhouses, but that’s gone out of fashion, as we’ve been trying to appear less like a village at the edge of the world,” Mashnin explains. Today, it’s more common for Iturup’s residents to pool their money to order a large container of supplies, like diapers or nonperishables, from Vladivostok at wholesale prices. You can place orders on the island from online retailers like Alibaba, just like anywhere else in Russia, but it may take up to a month for the goods to arrive. Some products, like antifreeze, are constantly in short supply.
Subsistence fishing has also become less common, as the largest local employer, the fisheries conglomerate Gidrostroy, lobbied to make it illegal to fish in Iturup’s major river. The company catches the fish commercially with a net and processes them at a local plant. You can still fish in the surrounding ocean but are legally limited to catching just three fish per day. Those caught with over three kilos of illegal caviar face a fine of up to R800,000 (over $11,000) and two years in prison. Bear hunting remains a viable and legal option for extra income (the bile is highly sought after in traditional Chinese medicine), with a carcass fetching nearly $1,500.
Not all of Kurilsk’s residents welcome the island’s development. “We used to function as one big family, the law was only applied in extreme circumstances,” recalls Mashnin. Until the recent past, according to locals, drunk driving would go unpunished on Iturup. “Today, everyone worries about permits and fines.”
The construction bonanza also brought a boom in low-skilled immigration. Many of the crews working on the island consist of workers coming in search of better pay from as far away as Uzbekistan. Some locals resent the fact that contractors would rather rely on cheap foreign labor than pay higher salaries to islanders. “Some of the major employers have a lax attitude toward their workforces and don’t particularly care about skillsets,” says 30-year-old construction foreman Yevgeny Dukhno. “It’s not uncommon to have immigrants who bought driver’s licenses in their home countries flipping over trucks and causing other trouble at jobs they clearly weren’t trained to do.”
However, a recent visit to Iturup by Russia’s Prime Minister, Mikhail Mishustin, suggests the island’s development will proceed as planned and that federal dollars will bolster infrastructure improvements and provide subsidies to attract outside investors into the nascent tourism industry.
Since 2018, a squadron of Su-35 fighter jets has been based at Iturup’s airport, a reflection of the island’s strategic importance in securing Russian control of the 600,000+ square mile Sea of Okhotsk. The move drew the usual note of protest from Japan. Despite generous cultural exchange programs with the neighboring island of Hokkaido, and visitation rights for Japanese citizens to their ancestors’ graves on the Southern Kurils, traces of Japanese influence here seem to be eroding. The weathered concrete shell of a POW camp on Iturup’s coast, adjacent to a complex underground tunnel system used during World War II, represents some of the few remaining signs of the island’s Japanese history.
“Japan’s best chance to get the islands back was in the 1990s, when we were poor,” says Mashnin. “My mother worked in the local administration, and I distinctly remember at the time everybody was excited about an offer from the Japanese government to pay the relocation costs and a significant monetary bonus to any islander willing to relocate elsewhere in Russia. In the end, not a single person accepted.”
Recent changes to Russia’s constitution forbidding any transfer of land to another country make the prospects of a compromise solution even more bleak. Nor does the 2004 discovery on Iturup of Rheniite, a very rare rhenium sulfide mineral used in the aerospace industry. Iturup now holds a major chunk of the Earth’s known Rheniite reserves. On a beach near parts of Iturup’s famous white cliffs, you can apply an ordinary magnet to attract black sand particles with a magnetic iron core that Japanese Samurais used to make swords in ancient times.
Like its dynamic landscape, formed by millennia of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, heavy winds and other elements, Iturup is constantly changing and evolving. And many here are looking to the future with cautious optimism. Mashnin recently quit his job as a ranger to do tourism full-time. “We’ve got the natural beauty; we’ve got abundant resources – everything else is just about managing them right and being in harmony with your surroundings,” he says. Mashnin is currently looking into expanding his tourism business and possibly constructing a hostel on the island. “Iturup’s a great place to raise a family; it’s home,” he adds with a smile.
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