vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #163 / Business / Reading article...

The Sakhalin Oblast administration is resisting a federal plan to gradually empty the island's struggling northern cities, replacing them with short-term workers on major oil projects.

The federal government plans on July 1 to start rotating temporary oil workers and others to the north, Sakhalin administration officials said. Each shift will stay for a month or so before returning home.

Meanwhile, the federal government has been encouraging emigration from the island and allowing the northern cities' economies to stagnate.

People have been leaving at a steady rate from the Oblast's 59 islands, which ring the southern end of the Sea of Okhotsk. As of 1992, 719,200 people lived in the Sakhalin region, according to the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk newspaper. By Jan. 1 of this year, the population had dropped to 620,000.

According to a forecast by the Sakhalin Oblast Migration Service, there will be only 586,000 people left in Sakhalin and Kurile islands by the year 2000 (the Kuriles are part of Sakhalin Oblast).

The government says it is too expensive to maintain the previous system of paying allowances to people who live in harsh northern conditions. Thus it has helped pay for apartments on the mainland for Sakhalin residents.

The northern end of Sakhalin Island has been the hardest by economic deprivation. Much of the population is either leaving the island or moving south, driven by hard times and the destructive 1995 earthquake. Middle Sakhalin towns such as Makarov, Poronaisk, and even the big port of Kholmsk are almost dead, said Victoria Nikulnikova, a political analyst for the daily Sovetsky Sakhalin newspaper.

Alexander Turinov, an economist and head of the Sakhalin Oblast Inter-Regions Department, said the once-successful port is in a deplorable state because of the decline of manufacturing. High prices both consumer goods and food are also driving people out.

"Right now, we cannot really help the regions, because as you know, everything depends on finances," Turinov said.

Nikulnikova said people who have no jobs aren't willing to stake their future on the hope of petro-dollars. "Besides, people have to live until the [oil] projects start working," she said.

Igor Andreyev, the head of the Sakhalin Migration Service said in an interview with the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk newspaper that 53 percent of the residents live below the poverty level, and it will take 10 to 13 years to improve this.

(In Moscow only 37 percent of population lives below the poverty level, and it will take about seven years for the relative economic bloom to start there.)

Other factors may discourage people from staying in Sakhalin. Until recently, the Russian government considered Sakhalin Oblast a northern territory, and paid local residents extra money for living in such harsh conditions. Now the government is thinking of removing this status from some Sakhalin areas, Nikulnikova said.

Zoya Medvedeva, a spokeswoman for the Sakhalin Economic Committee, said the oblast administration does its best trying to keep people in Sakhalin, contrary to federal plans.

"We came up with an alternative program to the government's," Medvedeva said.

The government says that because Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk is on the same latitude as Sochi, on the Black Sea, residents shouldnOt get an allowance for living in northerly conditions. Medvedeva disputes this.

"They should understand that even if our zone is on the Sochi latitude, it is extremely uncomfortable for living, and the long cold winter is not the only northern factor," she said.

The oblast administration has high expectation of the shelf oil projects. But, she said, "They will only come into real effect in three or four years."