Would You Like a Sealskin Suitcase? Convict Craft and Carceral Labor on Sakhalin Island

Although Sakhalin’s regional museums are rich with artifacts from the island’s cultural history, items of convict craft, made by the prisoners who inhabited the imperial Russian penal colony (1869–1905), are largely absent. This notable dearth of objects raises the question of whether the approximately thirty thousand prisoners participated in the creation of any type of craft or material culture. If they did, what did the prisoners produce, under what circumstances, and why are such objects no longer accessible? This article answers such questions by focusing on the various spaces of craft production that existed within the penal colony according to historical accounts. First it examines the function of the official prison workshops and the goods which were produced therein; it then brings attention to the private and charitable settings that did not fall under the purview of the penal administration in which prisoners created items for sale and barter. Interwoven into this discussion is the Russo-Japanese War, which was fought in Sakhalin in 1905, and resulted in the destruction of the penal colony itself

Convict · Craft · Fishing · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Soviet and Russian History