Sakhalin penal colony in the works of modern british, american and german historians

The article presents an overview of major works of contemporary Anglo-American (J. Stephan, A. Gentes, Sh. Corrado, D. Beer) and German (M. Ackeret, D. Dahlmann) researchers who studied various issues related to the history of Sakhalin penal colony. The author notes that even though Western authors had long demonstrated great interest in the history of exile and penal labour in prerevolutionary Siberia and Russian Far East, only a few professional historians addressed these issues in their studies using a rather wide range of historical sources from the Russian and foreign archives. One of the earliest monographs on Sakhalin’s history was published in 1971 by John Stephan (University of Hawaii) who attributed the penal colony’s failure to the tsarist government’s false assumption that the island’s economy could successfully develop based on the convict labour. Contemporary researchers, using the methods of «new cultural and social history», «historical penology» and «gender studies», focus on the reasons for the establishment and closure of Sakhalin penal colony, plans and projects of the island’s colonization, changing public attitudes and images of Sakhalin, composition of exile population and its contribution to the development of culture, education, and economy of the island. Western researchers agree that the penal colony was unsuccessful primarily due to the chaotic and inconsistent policy of the tsarist government.