Five miles farther is Vladimirovka, settled in 1881, and named in honor of a major named Vladimir, who was in charge of penal work. The settlers also call it Chernaya Rechka [Black Stream]. Inhabitants, 91: 55 male and 36 female. It has 46 homesteaders, 19 of whom are bachelors, and they milk their cows themselves. Only 6 of the 27 families are legally married.
As an agricultural colony this settlement is worth as much as both the Northern districts put together. However, of the great number of women who have followed their convict husbands to Sakhalin, those women who are free and umouched by prison and the most valuable to a colony, only one has been settled here, and even she was recemly imprisoned on suspicion of having murdered her husband. The unfortunate free women who are forced to languish in Due by the Northern officials in family barracks would be of inestimable value here. In Vladimirovka there are over 100 head of horned cattle, 40 horses, fine meadowland, but there are no housewives, and therefore no true homesteads.11
In Vladimirovka the settlemem inspector, Mr. Y., lives in a government house with his wife, who practices as a midwife. Here there is an agricultural farm known by the settlers as "the firm." Mr. Y. is interested in the natural sciences and especially in botany, and he calls plants by their Latin names. When beans are served at his table, he will say, "This is Phauolus." He calls his nasty little black dog Favus. Of all the Sakhalin officials he is the most knowledgeable in agronomy and he goes about his work lovingly and conscientiously, but the yield on his model farm is often poorer than that of a settler, a state of affairs which evokes surprise and derision.
In my opinion this accidental difference in crop yields is no more due to Mr. Y. than to any other official. A farm which has no meteorological station or cattle, no manure, no decem building, no agricultural expert who will work from morning to night, is not a farm, but rather a "firm"; it is an empty plaything pretending to be a model agricul- tural station. It cannot even be called a research station because there are only five desyatins of land. As to quality, there exists an official documem stating that an average plot was purposely chosen "with the aim of demonstrating by example to the settlers that with known methods and with the best kind of cultivation even an average plot can successfully yield a satisfactory result."
A love story took place here in Vladimirovka. A cer- tain Vukol Popov, a peasant, caught his wife in bed with his own father, pulled up his sleeves, and murdered the old man. He was sentenced to penal servitude, sent to the Korsakov district and then assigned to the firm of Mr. Y. as a coachman. He was young, handsome and athletically built, and he had a mild and earnest character. He was al- ways silent and thinking about something, and from the start the settlers trusted him. When they left home they were sure that Vukol would not steal the money in the chest and would not drink the alcohol in the pantry. He could not marry in Sakhalin because his wife was still liv- ing back home and would not give him a divorce. Such, very roughly, was our hero.
The heroine was a convict, Yelena Tertyshnaya, co- habitating with a settler called Koshelev. She was an absurd, stupid and homely woman, and she began arguing with her lover, who complained to the district commander. As a punishment she was assigned to work at the firm, and here Vukol saw her and fell in love with her. She also fell in love with him. Koshelev obviously noticed this, because he began to beg her passionately to return to him.
"Well, that's fine, but I know you well enough," she said. "Marry me, and then I'll come back."
Koshelev presented a petition to marry the maid Ter- tyshnaya, and this was granted by the administration. Mean- while Vukol declared his love and begged her to live with him. She also declared her love for him, saying:
"I can come and see you, but I can't live with you! You are married, while I am a woman and must think of myself. I must marry a good man."
When Vukol learned that she was going to marry Koshelev, he became despondent and poisoned himself with wolfsbane. The woman was questioned, and she ad- mitted she had spent four nights with him. They say that two weeks before his death, watching her scrub the floor, Vukol said:
"Women, women! I went to prison over one woman and J'II probably have to die for another!"
In Vladimirovka I met the convict Vasily Smirnov, who was sentenced for forging credit notes. He had com- pleted his sentence and his settler's term and was now engaged in hunting sables. This was something he obvi- ously enjoyed very much. He told me that the forged credit notes netted him 300 rubles a day, and he was caught after he had abandoned forgery and was living hon- estly. He spoke about forging notes like a specialist. In his opinion present-day credit notes could be forged by any woman. He spoke calmly of the past, not without irony, and was very proud that he was defended in court by the lawyer Plevako.
Just outside Vladimirovka you come upon a vast stretch of meadowland covering an area of several hundred des- yatins, in a semicircle four versts in diameter. On the road where the meadow ends there is the Lugovoye settlement, or Luzhki, founded in i 888. It has 69 men and only 5 women.
Four versts farther on, you arrive at Popovskiye Yurty, which was settled in i 884. They wanted to name it Novo- Alexandrovsk, but this name was later abandoned, Father Simeon Kazansky, known as Pop Simeon, rode on a dog sleigh to Naybuchi to "place a fast" on the soldiers, but was caught in a raging snowstorm and became seriously ill (others say he was returning from Alexandrovsk). Luckily there were Ainu fishing yurts nearby, where he found shel- ter. His driver went to Vladimirovka, where free settlers were living at the time. They came for him and brought him to Korsakov Post. He was barely alive. After this the place where the Ainu yurts had been was called Popov- skiye, and the name was given to the whole district.
The settlers also call their settlement \'V'arsaw because it contains many Catholics. There are i i i inhabitants, 95 males and 16 females. Of the 42 homesteaders, only io are married.
Popovskiye Yurty stands exactly in the middle between Korsakov Post and Naybuchi. Here ends the basin of the Susui River, and after crossing the slight, almost impercep- tible ridge of the watershed we descended into the valley watered by the Nayba.
The first settlement of this basin is eight versts from the Yurty and is called Berezniki, because at one time it was full of birch trees. This is the largest of the Southern settlements. It has i 59 inhabitants, 142 male and 17 female; 140 homesteaders. There are already four streets and a cleared area, where it is planned to build a church, a tele- graph station and a house for the settlement inspector. If the colonization is successful, they also propose to make Berezniki the small district center of several villages. But the site is very boring and the people are bored. They are not keen on the new district and think only of serving their sentences as soon as possible and leaving for the mainland. When I asked one settler if he was married, he answered in a bored tone, "I was married. I murdered my wife." An- other man, who was spitting blood, followed me around when he heard I was a doctor. He kept asking me if he had consumption and gazed searchingly into my eyes. He was terrified of the thought that he might not live long enough to obtain his peasant rights and would die on Sakhalin.
Kresty [The Crosses], founded in 1885, lies five versts farther on. Some while ago two vagrants were murdered here and over their graves there once stood crosses, which have now vanished. There is another version: a coniferous forest, which was cut down long ago, formed a cross over the Yelan. Both explanations are poetic; obviously the name Kresty was given by the settlers themselves.