Republic of Choka

From the book Calamity Islands by Oleg Klimov

If asked what my most powerful impression over the two years on the islands was been, I would – without a second thought – say the starry nights in the open sea, when two elements of infinite freedom, the sky and the ocean, blend into one, to only part ways when the sun rises above the endless skyline. The overwhelming sensation of being part of the world.

The islanders’ love for the Sakhalin and Kurils’ nature – coves, bays, mountains, plains and lakes – is amazing. At any spare moment, they will ‘go to the sea’ in their Japanese SUVs on Russian mud-locked roads. It is a kind of substitute for the missing cultural life. Any environmental violation, therefore, arouses protest and a sense of personal injustice, without being a display of civic responsibility. More often than not, the islanders have no civic sense, they simply want to live in paradise.

Many of us today know of the ‘American dream’, but hardly anybody remembers there once was a ‘Sakhalin dream’. In 1810, a group of young people in Saint-Petersburg, who rose to fame as ‘the Decembrists’, founded a secret society purporting to proclaim a free Republic of Choka in a place no other than Sakhalin.

‘To retire at island inhabited by savages, to educate the local population, and to form a new republic based on equality and justice.’ These ideas were not only induced by French Enlight- enment figures, mostly Rousseau, but by some geographical discoveries of Laperouse as well.

The irony of it was that the young and naïve people dreaming of social justice in the capital city turned out to be correct to call Sakhalin an island, whereas Laperouse, a seasoned voyager, considered it a part of the continent.

Willy nilly, we come to this world with an immense benefit of the doubt that is drained through- out the years. Whether it is an innate sense of justice, one granted to us from above, or some- thing else, the story of even the happiest childhood is a story of betrayed trust. The world proves to be unfair and unequal. To preserve their best qualities, children create imaginary cities, states and countries, mostly on remote islands. The Republic of Choka or Sakhalin Island is one such vivid infantile reverie.

Sadly, the young men, later known as ‘the Decembrists’, were on a preordained path: some were publicly hanged, others exiled to Siberia. The path of Sakhalin, however, was to never become a republic but rather its opposite – a ‘hard-labour island’. Nowadays, it is neither a hard-labour colony nor a republic but a ‘shift-work island’, and I am convinced there exist new ‘secret societies’ aspiring to make a better place of the islands than the adults have done of the continent. The price to be paid for betrayed trust, however, remains a question.

Oleg Klimov‘s Observation Diary, Sakhalin island, summer 2016

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