Calamity Islands | Digital Book

Sakhalin and the Kurils — terra incognita of a brutal Russian Empire

“Here is where the homeland’s morning begins,” proclaim the billboards on Russia’s Pacific frontier. But whose homeland is it, and what does it mean to make a home on land governed for generations through coercion, displacement and extraction?

In Calamity Islands, documentary photographer Oleg Klimov explores Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands through photographs, encounters and reflections on their colonial past and unsettled present. The legacy of the penal colony described by Anton Chekhov runs through a landscape now shaped by fishing, oil and gas, where prisoners have given way to shift workers and the interests of distant powers continue to determine local lives.

Moving between everyday experience and the larger history of empire, Klimov asks what remains of belonging when a territory is treated as a prison, a resource or a geopolitical claim. His account is personal and sharply critical, attentive to the distance between the people he meets and the ideologies that speak in their name.

At the heart of the book is a question: can a place truly become home if its inhabitants are not free to shape their own lives?

Digital edition — PDF + EPUB

Your purchase includes both formats. The PDF preserves the book’s page design; the EPUB offers an alternative for compatible reading apps. A short viewing guide is included.

Photographs and Observation Diary © 2014–2020 by Oleg Klimov, Moscow 

Downsides of an Empire © 2022 by Hubert Smeets, Amsterdam

Why and How Anton Chekhov Went to Sakhalin © 2020 by Donald Rayfield, London

The First European on Sakhalin Island © 2020 by René Attema, Harlingen 

You can also purchase a print edition of the book