Lusty Memories Sustain Women of Woebegone Isle

As far away from Moscow as a single girl could travel in the days of the Soviet Union, there was an outpost known as the island of love: the mystical, beautiful Shikotan.

From the 1960s to the mid-1980s, hopes of romance and high salaries drew thousands of adventurous young women to this island on the eastern fringes of Russia. Soviet authorities shipped the women like bulk goods as seasonal workers for the island’s gigantic fish-processing plants, in the belief that they were stable and docile, well-suited to monotonous factory work.

As one might expect, Love Island Soviet-style was no holiday camp. It meant 12-to-16-hour shifts cutting up dead fish, cramped dormitories at night and a ban on alcohol for much of the year--plus the threat of deportation to the mainland for misbehavior.

The women met their first disappointment when they sailed into port: a critical man shortage on Shikotan.

Of the 3,000 locals, 80% were women, many of whom had stayed on after previous seasons. Thousands more female seasonal workers swelled the disparity. Even today, sailors and sea captains--who evened up the numbers a bit at the start of each fishing season--recount sly tales of lusty women who so outnumbered men here that males weren’t safe.

The myth that men risked being mobbed by desperate Shikotan women was just wishful thinking. But any man who stepped ashore certainly risked a gentler seduction, as women on the island recount, nostalgic smiles playing across their faces.

The recruitment policies and unbalanced demographics on Shikotan fed a permissive culture unusual for the Soviet Union.

“It was a free-love zone. The sailors came with money and love. Everyone was young. No one had any commitment to anyone. One day your man would be living with you--the next he’d be living with another woman,” said Lyubov Drugina, now 59, whose mother sent her to the island to find a new spouse after her first husband died.

“We’d go around and kiss and cuddle together and maybe more than that,” said Valentina Myagkova, 51. “Young girls would come here, breaking away from the control of their parents. They just couldn’t resist the temptation.”

For some it was a great romantic adventure, between the fish guts and the drudgery. They met the men of their dreams and earned fantastic money. Others saw their dreams slip through their fingers like quicksilver. Many women gave up looking for husbands and, eager to be mothers, got pregnant and raised their children independently.

“My two goals in life were to work and raise my daughter,” said Galina Buravlyova, 50, a divorced woman who learned to rely on herself and her female friends.

Nearly everyone on Shikotan tells a story of coming for a short time but never leaving. In Soviet times, money was a pragmatic reason to stay. But by the late 1980s, the economy was decaying. In 1994, things turned really sour when an earthquake ruined four of the six fish plants, leaving most of the workers unemployed.

Many of them were trapped on the island, with no money to escape to the mainland--not even hope of a holiday there.

The old dormitories have fallen down. The women live in shabby apartments, unemployed or in menial jobs, angry at Moscow so far away.

But some still carry the memories of past romance in their hearts. And thanks to a vicious little weed, toxicodendron orientalis, that lurks in the undergrowth on Shikotan, others carry the physical scars, decades later, of late-night trysts in the forests. Yes, poison ivy. When it touched their skin, it caused a blistering, burning reaction.

Still, many took the risk: With eight beds per room, the dormitories were hopelessly inconvenient for romance.

“You had to either go to his boat or do it on the hill. But the hill had this poisonous vine growing on it. If a girl came back with a severe rash all over her back and legs and buttocks, that meant she had been out making love on the hill,” Myagkova said, giggling.

Laughing coyly, she pulled back the hair below her ear to show a red rash that still troubles her from those heady days, mischievously hinting that the rash covered a great deal more of her skin.

In an attempt to impose rigid social control on Shikotan--one of the disputed Kuril Islands also claimed by Japan--the Soviet authorities had strict rules. But officials turned a blind eye to the romantic fraternizing, which would have been impossible to police. Pregnancies were discouraged by deporting most pregnant women to the mainland.

Vodka was banned during the fishing season, and anyone who was caught drinking or who skipped work was forced to leave the island.

The women would march to their factories singing Soviet songs. When a load of fish came in late at night, supervisors knocked on the windows of the dormitories to summon their crews to work. The shift finished when the fish ran out.

“We’d work 12 hours a day and then we’d go out to the social club and come back and sleep for three hours, and then we’d go back to work,” said Myagkova, who came from Siberia in 1979 expecting to make some fast money and then leave after a year.

“We danced till we fell down,” Drugina said.

Sailors brought not only money and love but also food and alcohol.

Myagkova said about 10% of the recruited female workers escaped work by wandering from one ship to another.

“They made love for food so they would never have to go back to shore,” she said.

Galina Buravlyova, 50, came to work as a cook on the island for six months. She stayed 25 years.

She sums up the island’s attraction in two words: nature and romanticism, words that echo repeatedly among those who never escaped the island’s magnetic pull.

“I guess it was the romanticism that attracted people, the beauty of nature and the sea so close,” Buravlyova said. “It was such a beautiful place, I didn’t leave.”

The divergent perceptions of men and women about the gender imbalance on Shikotan still echo in today’s attitudes.

Local men snicker and tell stories of wild women drunk on eau de cologne, ending in a common refrain about women raping men.

But repeat these tales of victimized men to the women who lived on Shikotan in its Soviet heyday, and their eyes pop with indignation.

“It was just a sailors’ myth about the place,” Buravlyova said. “Sailors never just want pretty eyes. They want a woman in bed.”

Any woman, she said, could simply go out and pick up a man in the street and whisk him off to bed. “There was no crime about it. If you wanted, you could go out into the street and find a man,” she said.

Nikolai Grigorenko, 54, a KGB man on the island at the time, dismissed the legends. The main problem, he said, was skipping work.

But even 50 boatloads of sailors in the springtime--when the harbor was so crammed you could walk across one deck to another--weren’t enough to go around several thousand women. And most of the sailors were married, Myagkova said, making it hard to find a husband. Often, sailors kept one family on the mainland and a second family on Shikotan.

One result of the recruitment policies was a high proportion of unwed mothers, many of whom managed to stay on the island despite the deportations of many of their peers. Today, their children are grown, never having known their fathers.

“There are very few married women here. A lot of women live on their own, and they just had children for themselves,” Myagkova said. “They didn’t care if they had a husband.”

She met one of her great loves, a sailor, in her first few months on the island. He was married but came back to her each season for four years running.

The fifth year, he didn’t come.

“It was over. Of course, I suffered with a broken heart. But you drive one wedge out by driving another one in. I quickly found another love, and I’ve been with him ever since,” she said, smiling.

On a cold and foggy morning 25 years to the day after her arrival, Galina Buravlyova stared with faraway eyes into the flames of the small fire she was burning at the Shikotan garbage dump.

Huddling close, despite the odious chemical smoke, she prodded the burning heap and reflected on the bitter coincidence that for her transformed Shikotan from the island of love into the island of lost dreams.

His name was Sasha. She smiled a secret smile at the memories of her one true love, a tall, serious boy with brown hair and blue eyes who wanted to take her away with him forever.

She lost him because of a mix-up over names.

There were two Galinas where she worked. Buravlyova changed workplaces, and the other Galina left the island for good. When Sasha came looking for her at work, he was told that Galina had gone forever.

“He never figured it out. I was literally sitting in the building next door. He sailed away. By the time I found out what happened, it was too late, he’d already gone,” she said. “He must have thought I’d thrown him off for no reason.”

She has photos of Sasha that she takes out from time to time.

“I still think of him and regret that we did not stay together,” she said.

She later married and had a daughter, but her husband, a builder, left 20 years ago. Buravlyova doesn’t deign to use his name and sniffs that she does not even remember where he came from.

In the end, what sustained Buravlyova through sadness and tough times was not love, but dedication to her daughter, now 23, and her friendships with other women.

“We would never leave our friends stranded. We’d always support each other. Men are different. They’re here today, gone tomorrow,” she said, sadly shrugging off the past.