Russia's ‘last barren islands'

In the turbulent transition from Soviet Empire to Russian nation-state, the Southern Kuril Islands ¹ became a locale of intense meaning in regional discourses of belonging and identity. This chapter focuses on the reproduction of these discourses in debates over the destiny of these islands amongst the political and intellectual elite on Sakhalin. It examines how in the post-Soviet era these debates have not always been articulated in response to Japanese narratives and claims but are in fact often directed towards political elites in Moscow. It is argued that on Russia’s Far Eastern periphery, the notion of the military outpost, the iconography of the frontier and a distinct sense of insecurity constitute a regional memory for which these islands are symbolic. The peculiarities of identity associated with this region can be interpreted in the context of a borderland as a ‘crucible of new identity’, where a sense of peripherality forces many distortions in the conceptions of national interests and identity produced and promoted in the centre (Kaplan 2000: 48).