This is the concluding part of a two-part series on the history of the Uilta people and of Uilta activist Daxinnieni Geldanu/Kitagawa Gentaro. Part 1 can be found here.
The Uilta are the smallest of the three indigenous people groups of Sakhalin Island, currently falling within Russia’s internationally recognized territory. Formerly a semi-nomadic people who herded reindeer and were part of a vast trade network that stretched outwards from Sakhalin to Kamchatka, Japan, and China, the Uilta’s lifestyle was disrupted by territorial claims to their homeland made by the encroaching empires of Japan and Russia. In 1906, Sakhalin was split in two by Russia and Japan, with half the Uilta community stuck on one side or the other. In the southern half, soon to be the Japanese settler colony (and later prefecture) of Karafuto, Uilta were relocated to the manufactured “traditional village” of Otasu, where their children were educated to be model charges of the Japanese empire. All the while, they were also featured as exotic tourist attractions for visiting Japanese.
The Uilta Daxinnieni Geldanu, given the Japanese name Kitagawa Gentaro, grew up in colonial Otasu. Trained to venerate the emperor and that his people were backwards and uncivilized, in 1942 he greeted conscription into the Japanese army with great expectations. Longing to be accepted as Japanese, he eagerly participated in secret missions across the border into the Soviet side of Sakhalin. In 1945, however, his whole world came crashing down as the Soviets suddenly invaded from the north, routing the Japanese military and bringing an end to Japanese Karafuto. He soon found himself in a makeshift Soviet prison, his crime: espionage against the USSR. His life, and the history of the Uilta, had changed forever.
Consigned to the Gulags
After their harsh interrogations and perfunctory sentencing, Gentaro was elated to find himself alongside his fellow Uilta and Nivkh “war criminals” on the ferry to Vladivostok. These people were his naaneini, his compatriots. From Vladivostock, four of them together road the unending Siberian rail lines towards their individual sites of exile. Among them was Gentaro’s sister Aiko’s husband, an ethnic Evenk. Gentaro’s brother-in-law, sadly, would not survive the gulags.
Each stop on the line led to separations, as Gentaro’s compatriots were sent to connecting lines towards whatever labor camp awaited them. At long last, after many languid days and freezing nights spent staring out the barred windows of the train car, the locomotive stopped. The guards barked at Gentaro to get out. A snow-filled, desolate plain, without even a train platform, greeted him. He’d arrived at his first site of exile: the town of Kansk in Krasnoyarsk Krai, 3200 miles from his home in Otasu.
As he trudged through the snow to the Kansk Gulag, the only friend still with him was Masao. They were soon given Russian names. Geldanu, who had been Gentaro, was now Gennadiy (called Genya for short). Placed in the general prison population, Genya quickly picked up Russian while engaged in his daily drudgery.
After two years in Kansk, Genya was shifted to the neighboring gulag of Krasnoyark. There, he was reunited with his older brother Heikichi, also in exile. The two were overjoyed to be reunited, but their life in Krasnoyark was harsh. They did manual labor in the outdoors, where, exhausted and malnourished, they were battered by the Siberian winds. Genya would later recount that all his dreams were about food. Life there was so harsh that when transfer orders came in and Genya was moved to yet another gulag, he considered it to be a narrow escape from death.
Genya’s final years in the gulag system were spent in Dorgomosk. There, he was reunited with a dear childhood friend, the Nivkh Igarainu. The labor in Dorgomosk was somewhat lighter than in Krasnoyarsk, but still back-breaking. One winter’s day, Igarainu collapsed in the snow, laid low by overwork. He was only able to be buried in May, after the thaw. Genya found himself shedding tears during the burial. His only remaining link to his childhood in Otasu was gone.
Uilta, Soviet Citizens
Back in Sakhalin, the manufactured village of Otasu slowly disintegrated. The entire surrounding Japanese society evaporated piecemeal, as the hundreds of thousands unable to flee Karafuto before the Soviet takeover was complete were slowly allowed to repatriate over the next year and a half. Soviet reeducation began; the Uilta were to face repressions based on perceived loyalty to Japan. (Still, they were lucky to escape the mass purges their Uilta cousins and Nivkh neighbors across the former border had experienced in Soviet Sakhalin in ’30s, when 36% of the adult population killed or disappeared). Otasu vanished from the map in 1946, absorbed into the larger Soviet town of Poronaysk.
