Hard Labour

17 hrs. 23 min.

Language Russian

Author Valentin Pikul

Narrator Alexander Bordukov

The first chapters of the novel “Katorga” (“Hard Labor”) were published in the newspaper “Kamchatskaya Pravda.” In 1987, the complete version of the novel appeared in the journals “Molodaya Gvardiya” and “Dalniy Vostok.” The novel was published as a separate book in 1988 by the “Sovremennik” publishing house.

“Katorga” tells the story of Sakhalin penal servitude convicts who did everything possible and impossible to defend the island from the Japanese army that captured it during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905.

“…In 1869, the first convicts came ashore from the ships. And if you believe eyewitnesses, many of them bitterly cried when they saw where they had ended up. But tears also flowed from the convoy soldiers who guarded them… Even Chekhov, sailing toward Sakhalin, experienced a painful feeling of anxiety, nostalgia, and—partly—even fear. Indeed—what a terrible picture. The silhouettes of gloomy mountains were shrouded in smoke; somewhere above, at the level of the sky, tongues of flame bubbled from forest fires; the lighthouse beam barely pierced this hell, and enormous whales, swimming nearby, sprayed steaming fountains as they tumbled through the sea like prehistoric monsters.

But if the writer Chekhov found the sight unbearable, what must it have been like for the convicts who were to live and die there? Didn’t their famous Sakhalin proverbs form then: ‘Around is the sea, and in the middle—misery; around is water, and inside—trouble…’

In 1875, Sakhalin was recognized as legal Russian territory. From that time, Sakhalin was urgently built up with new prisons, and the police bureaucracy could no longer cope with the enormous mass of brutal criminals. The executioners’ hands cracked with lashes, gallows worked, cemeteries grew, forests burned, animals scattered, and they killed for a bottle of liquor. Russia and the Russian people feared Sakhalin like the plague, and convicts sentenced to penal servitude in Sakhalin often maimed themselves—just to get rid of the exile. In those days, even the death penalty seemed like a lighter punishment…

V.S. Pikul describes without embellishment the inhuman conditions under which penal convicts lived, the beatings, tortures, and mockery inflicted on them. And all the more surprising is that these people—so-called “society’s scum”—in a single burst of unity rise to defend their Motherland, this small piece of land called Sakhalin, when the Japanese decided to seize the island and become its full owners.”

1. Wealth (narrated by Alexander Bordukov) 2. Three Ages of Okini-San (narrated by Vsevolod Kuznetsov) 3. Cruisers (narrated by Ivan Litvinov) 4. Hard Labor (narrated by Vladimir Sushkov) 4. Hard Labour