Once here, in Voennoye Obozreniye, reading the article by Vyacheslav Olegovich Shpakovsky "Voynushka" - the favorite game of Soviet children ", I remembered my childhood, which I spent on Fr. Sakhalin in the military town of the village of Smirnykh. At that distant time, we often climbed the underground passages and trenches of the Japanese left over from that war. They found bayonets, cartridges and even an aerial bomb. And so I decided to write several articles about the development of this, dearly beloved, island, about its liberation from the Japanese militarists.
Russia began to explore the Far East, namely Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands in the 17th century. Geographical descriptions and maps of that time indicate that neither in Europe nor in Asia there were any real ideas about the area of present Sakhalin and the mouth of the Amur River. The land called Tartaria ended with the "Ocean Sea". Even in neighboring Japan, there was only fragmentary information about this island, as well as about other islands to the north of it. The then rulers of Japan pursued a policy of strict isolationism. They did not develop any external relations and, on pain of death, forbade the Japanese to visit other countries.
“And the Amur River fell into the Ocean Sea with one mouth, and opposite that Amur mouth in the sea is a great island, and many foreigners live on it - Gilyaks of the breed,” - this is how one of the ancient Russian documents says about Sakhalin.
In Russia, the pioneers of Sakhalin were the Cossacks-explorers who came to the Amur from Yakutsk. They sailed in plows and rafts along fast and rapids rivers, walked mountain paths, wandered through the taiga, sailed along the rivers again, leaving on their way fortified points - forts. Such travels took many months and sometimes years.
So in the winter of 1644-1645, a detachment of Cossacks Vasily Danilovich Poyarkov ended up in the lower reaches of the Amur. Having struck up friendly ties with the local residents - the Nivkhs, the Cossacks found out that there was a large island opposite the mouth. With V. D. 130 Cossacks went to Poyarkov, only 20 returned, five of which, under the leadership of Mikula Timofeev, he sent as messengers to Yakutsk. In the "questioning speeches" the messengers described Sakhalin and its inhabitants to the Yakut governor: a hundred and fifty. " The information of the expedition of Vasily Poyarkov, who declared the Gilyaks to be served by the Moscow Tsar and his drawings of Sakhalin were used in 1667 in drawing up the "Drawing of All Siberia, taken in Tobolsk."
Vasily Danilovich Poyarkov and Ivan Yurievich Moskvitin
There is information that before V. D. Poyarkov in 1640 near Sakhalin was visited by a detachment of the Cossacks of Ivan Yuryevich Moskvitin, sent here to "mine new lands", and on the way - "to visit" the sea. The story of I. Yu. Moskvitin about this voyage was recorded in the Yakutsk clerk hut as follows: “And they went by sea with reins near the shore to the Gilyatskaya Horde to the islands. And how few of the islands of the Gilyatskaya Horde did not reach the bottom and went ashore and with a sinful measure the leader left them. And one, Ivashko and his comrades, after the reins reached the islands. And the Gilyat land appeared, and the smoke turned out to be, and one did not dare to go into it without the reins, because many people and their hunger had taken out and ate to eat grass and one came back from hunger”. Let me explain that the "leader" is a guide.
Since that time, Russian explorers began to visit Sakhalin, tying up an exchange trade with the locals. The Cossacks received from them a tribute in furs in favor of the Moscow state and at the same time took an oath of allegiance to the new government. In 1649 and 1656, the Cossacks, who settled on the Amur, collected 4827 sable skins "in the land of the Gilyaks". So, in the middle of the 17th century, the Russians began to settle down on the island of Sakhalin.
The brave Russian explorer Erofei Pavlovich Khabarov made a great contribution to the exploration and development of the Far Eastern lands. In 1649, at the head of a detachment of free people, he left Yakutsk and for five years traveled and studied the Amur region. Sent in 1652 to communicate with E. P. Khabarov, the Cossacks under the command of Ivan Nagiba missed him and repeated the route of V. D. Poyarkova. They not only confirmed the information of Moskvitin and Poyarkov, but added new information about the island.
Simultaneously with Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, inhabited by "autocratic", that is, not subordinate to anyone, Ainu tribes - the Kurils, were also being developed. In the Kuril language, “kuru” means “person”. Hence the name of the islands. In 1649 Fedot Alekseevich Popov with a detachment of seventeen people first arrived at the Kuril ridge. Following him, in 1656, the polar seafarer Mikhailo Starukhin visited the Kuril Islands, and in 1696 the Yakut Cossack Luka Morozko.
The most important stage in the expansion of the Far East, and in particular the Kuriles, was the famous campaign from the Anadyr prison of the Cossack Pentecostal Vladimir Atlasov.
Vladimir Atlasov
In 1697 he set out on a campaign to take Kamchatka "under the high tsar's hand." For three years, his detachment suffered hardships and severe hardships. Out of 120 people, only 20 returned to Anadyr. History almost repeated itself, as with the detachment of V. D. Poyarkova. Arriving in the capital in 1701, he personally reported to Peter I about the subordination of Russia to the Kamchatka Peninsula, about the Kuril Islands he told him, through which the path lies to the "wonderful kingdom of Niphon." He was referring to Japan. His report prompted the tsar to request additional information about this distant land from Yakutsk. In 1711, Kamchatka Cossacks - participants in the rebellion, during which Atlasov was killed, in order to atone for their guilt, went under the command of Danila Antsiferov and Ivan Kozyrevsky on small ships and kayaks to the island of Shumshu and subdued its inhabitants. In 1713, Kozyrevsky with a detachment of Cossacks brought the Kuril Islands of Paramushir into Russian citizenship and collected yasak on both islands. He was the first to draw up a drawing of the entire ridge of the Kuril Islands and reported to the capital.
As you know, Peter I developed a special plan for the study and settlement of the newly appeared lands by Russian people. In accordance with this, he was sent a naval Kuril expedition under the command of Ivan Evreinov and Fyodor Luzhin (1719-1722). Fulfilling the tsar's secret mission to go “to Kamchatka and further, where you were instructed and to describe the places where America converged with Asia,” they put on the map the fourteen largest islands of the Kuril ridge. Securing the rights of Russia to Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, Russian explorers erected here crosses and pillars with inscriptions about the belonging of this region to the Russian state, and taxed the inhabitants with yasak.
The Kuril Ainu paid yasak to Russian collectors, of whom there were only a few people, without the slightest resistance. During the expedition of the Russian navigator Martin Petrovich Spanberg in 1739 - 1740, many Ainu were converted to Christianity, and by the time of the fourth revision, carried out in 1781 - 1787, all the inhabitants of the Kuril Islands were already considered Orthodox. Yasak collection was canceled in 1779. Catherine II wrote: "… the shaggy smokers brought into citizenship should be left free and no collection should be required from them, and furthermore, the peoples living in Tamo should not be forced to do so …".
At the end of the 18th century, at the suggestion of a citizen of the city of Rylsk, Grigory Ivanovich Shelekhov, who later gained the fame of "Russian Columbus", the largest Russian-American commercial and industrial company was created, which from 1799 to 1867 controlled Russian possessions in the Pacific Ocean from Alaska to Japan. including the Aleutian, Kuril Islands and Sakhalin.
Grigory I. Shelekhov
The company played an important role in the exploration and development of newly discovered lands, organized a number of round-the-world expeditions, including to Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. In December 1786, Catherine II issued a decree on equipping the first Russian round-the-world expedition "to protect our right to lands open by Russian navigators" and approved an instruction in which it was ordered "to bypass the large island of Sakhalin Anga Gaga lying opposite the mouth of the Amur, to describe its shores, bays and harbors, exactly like the mouth of the Amur itself and, as far as it is possible, sticking to the island, visit about the state of its population, the quality of land, forests and products."
This expedition took place only in 1803. It was headed by Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenshtern. The expedition was supposed to find a sea route to Russian America, make a voyage to the shores of Sakhalin, deliver to Japan the Russian diplomat N. P. Rezanov, who was one of the leaders of the Russian-American company. As you know, Rezanov's mission ended unsuccessfully. The Japanese government refused to enter into diplomatic and trade relations with Russia. The Japanese answer was: “In ancient times, ships of all nations freely came to Japan, and even the Japanese themselves visited foreign countries. But then one of the emperors bequeathed to his heirs not to let the Japanese out of the empire and to accept only the Dutch. Since that time, many foreign cities and countries have tried more than once to establish friendly relations with Japan, but these proposals have always been rejected due to the long-established ban"
N. P. Rezanov
Rezanov warned the Japanese not to go north beyond the island of Hokkaido and left Japan. On the way from Nagasaki to Kamchatka, Kruzenshtern's ship approached Sakhalin and dropped anchor on May 14, 1805 in Aniva Bay. Ivan Fedorovich examined it in detail, got acquainted with the life of the Ainu, gave them gifts and confirmed the state act executed by his predecessors on the acceptance of the inhabitants of the island into Russian citizenship. In the summer of the same year, the members of the expedition described and put on the map the entire eastern and northwestern coast of Sakhalin, as well as 14 islands of the Kuril ridge. It was the first map in the world to show the true outline of Sakhalin Island.
Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenshtern
By the way, the names of Sakhalin Island, its size and shape on the geographical maps of that time were different. The Russians called the island Gilyat; Gilyaks - Tro Myth; the Chinese - Luchui; Japanese - Oku-Yesso; Dutch - Portland; the Manchus - Sakhalyan ula anga khata, which means “Rocks at the mouth of the black river”; Ainu - Choka, Sandan. Only in 1805 I. F. Kruzenshtern finally consolidated the name of Sakhalin Island.
