Lighthouses of Sakhalin

The Road Begins in Silence

September 6, 2024

The layman thinks: a motorcycle is freedom. In the movies, setting out means just rolling the bike out of the garage. In life that's enough for an evening ride, maybe a visit to friends a couple of kilometers from home. But if the road ahead is long — ferries, overnight stops, storms — the easy-rider style is best left where teenage dreams gather dust: up in the attic.

An experienced biker, before taking the road, plans the route, checks the machine, makes arrangements with the people who can help if something happens far from signal and roads. He thinks about medicine too. He plans what to eat, where to sleep, what to fuel the motorcycle with. Even just getting far from home is already a trial.

And if you also dreamed up the project yourself — carry it to shore. Sakhalin Lights is not a metaphor but thirty living lights at the edge of the map. Each with its own character, its own wind, its own pause. To each one leads a road, a conversation, a shoot. And all of that is days, gasoline, editing, lodging. Open the budget — and nothing is left of the romance of the road. Only an Excel sheet: the skeleton of a dream, neatly broken into rows. From the outside it's hard to believe, but the preparation took more than a year. And that was with me rushing and gathering a large team of helpers.

I sank into the biography of Piłsudski — a figure who surfaced in the archives by chance but matched the mood of the expedition with surprising precision. A stranger among strangers, and yet one who stayed. An ethnographer who lived many years among the Ainu, he studied their life and culture, trying to save the vanishing memory of the Nivkhs and the Ainu.

And in parallel I was assembling another chronicle — of the lighthouses: their construction and the history of the island's “navigation towers.” Until then I hadn't suspected that my own map of Sakhalin would turn out as white as the snow on a mountain pass.

Then it struck me: behind that white snow hides something singular. Sakhalin is the only island in the world where the lighthouses of three powers have survived. Russian, Japanese, Soviet. Three eras laid over one another.

Sakhalin seemed not to open but to be remembered. Photographs, notes, old articles didn't settle into archives — they laid a path, connecting the lighthouses, on the map and in my head.

While I sorted through archives and spread out paper maps, a second, no less important work was under way — preparing the route. Not romantic but engineering: the island is not a straight road. Especially if you're on a motorcycle. Especially if behind you there's a project, not a joyride.

I found Andrei Tsoy by chance. Or rather, he found himself — through a classmate who heard about my idea and said:

— Max, mine's always tearing up the hills on his enduro. They've got their own team. And they put on the No Place to Run race every year.

The first conversation ran more than three hours. Tsoy, calmly, without grand words, told me about their crew — Sakhalin Enduro Park — about the tracks and the races, about how they look for routes where there have never been any. That evening it was already clear: if anyone could help lay a path to all the lighthouses, it was them.

Then we moved to phones. He passed coordinates, refueling points, shared experience: where to expect fords, where the long climb is, where it's better not to poke in. Their part of the route he and the team put together by terrain, by memory, by the traces of past runs. I checked it against the maps, refined the logic.

The project had to be split into two stages: in the fall of 2024 — sixteen lighthouses of southern Sakhalin on motorcycles; in the spring of 2025 — the northern lighthouses on snowbikes. Without Tsoy's team the whole route would have stayed on paper: beautiful but unviable.

Even before the start I sketched the first script for the future film and roughed out the structure of the book. I knew: after the road everything would have to be rewritten — it always tells its own story. But even that turned out to be not enough: it suddenly emerged that almost all the Sakhalin lighthouses are Defense Ministry sites, and access to them is closed to civilians. I had to fire off letters to the regional authorities asking for support. Either I was persuasive enough (read — pushy enough), or they really took to the idea, but six months later we had all the permits we needed.

In February 2024 I flew to the island — only for a few days, to meet the expedition team. They insisted on it themselves: Sakhaliners are a thoughtful, cautious people. The island leaves its mark, apparently: you don't take the road with a stranger. The snowbike had to be tested too. I had never sat on one and had to make sure I could handle the second part of the route — and that it could handle me.

Everything came together: the friendship with the team took shape on its own, the weather turned out gentle. Our snowbikes glided over the snowy crowns of the hills, the skis sang under the wind, frost and sun went together, as in the classic. The soul answered with the same rhythm.

Freedom flooded over me. But I kept myself in hand: in a state of anything-goes it's easy to fly out of the saddle and then gather yourself piece by piece on a frozen lake hidden behind the next “white dune.”

What struck me most was how unspooked the local fauna turned out to be. Sparse — it was winter, after all — but alive enough that the forest breathed along with us. The roar of the snowbikes troubled neither the sables nor the red-listed musk deer. They watched our maneuvers calmly, as if they had forgotten they were still part of the food chain.

In one of the hollows — narrow valleys between the hills — having stopped for a couple of “epic” shots, I saw a hunt. Five sables had surrounded a musk deer that had let down its guard. One of them, in a lightning-fast, honed leap, sank into its withers. It happened almost soundlessly. I stood without moving, watching life leave in the span of minutes. The deer fell and became dinner.

And suddenly, in that silence, amid the white cover and the animal precision, a thought pricked me: what if the roar of the engine wakes a bear? By the locals' account, there's no shortage of them here. A cold sweat slid down my back.

I looked back, smoothly twisted the throttle, and shot off to catch the group. On the snow the sables were tearing at the musk deer — an animal the size of a dog. Their dark bodies darted lightning-fast, like shadows come to life. The snow darkened, the silence tore into rasps, and through the frost cut the sweetish smell of blood.

I sped up, knowing: this would stay with me. In three days I rose from the level of “fearless greenhorn” to “pre-retirement junior,” and from there to “advanced novice.” Once the ice broke right under the bike. I went in up to the waist, but, to my surprise, didn't catch cold: the snowboard boots kept me from freezing. Another time I shot up a slope too sharply and at full speed hit a birch hidden under the drop. I clenched my teeth — and broke one. Still, it could have ended far worse, if not for the helmet. No other tree was harmed during the winter expedition. I swear on the tooth.

After all the trials I fell for the snowbike for good and was already savoring the joys of the winter motorcycle journey to come.

After the training I stopped by the State Archive of Sakhalin Oblast. A few years ago I had handed over boxes of film from the family archive: seven thousand photographs and eight documentary films shot by my grandfather, the director Vladimir Andreyevich Privezentsev. Since 2016 the archive has been painstakingly digitizing this material. By the time I arrived, most of it was already processed, including rare footage of lighthouses from the fifties and sixties. A colossal labor. Through the grain of the old film came the light of lanterns, faces clenched by the wind, and the island as it was before us.

Then — the local history museum. And again the same thought: the hardest thing is not the road, not the machine, not the budget. The hardest thing is the myth. Finding the legends of the indigenous peoples turned out to be a task from another era. The internet is empty. The diaries of Piłsudski and other ethnographers are in Old Russian, on paper, hidden in reading rooms that smell of dust, leather, and silence.

Having found nothing in the Sakhalin holdings, on my return to Moscow I went to the Russian State Library — the old Leninka on Vozdvizhenka, next to the Kremlin. There, among the archives of Bronisław Osipovich Piłsudski, his diaries were kept. Handwritten, dense, in places filled out in Old Russian.

And in one of them I came upon a strange tale. It was titled simply — “On the Blue Bear, Spirit of Sky and Ocean.” Piłsudski had written it down without analysis, without a footnote. Just as he heard it — as if he knew such things aren't commented on.

I ran my eyes over a few lines: a beast without a name, blue as morning fog. And further on — fragments that held more questions than answers.

I closed the notebook. The myth lived only here — in the archive, between the pages, in that view from the side that needs no explanation. It settled on my memory like an invisible bookmark.

I remembered it on the Moscow–Sakhalin flight on September 3, 2024. The first stage of the expedition. Everything packed. All business behind me. I settled into the seat, put my hands on the armrests, and for a second closed my eyes. To the right — the window, the wing, clear sky. To the left — an empty seat. Maybe I'd get lucky and no one would sit. That would be good.

Into the seat beside me lowered a man of about forty. Worn camo, a medal on his chest. And he gripped our shared armrest at once. Didn't take it — seized it. I ran my eyes over his jacket: on the sleeve, a stain shaped like a bear. And in that instant something seemed to jab me in the chest: recognize it?

The modern version of the myth: the bear in a man — not in the paws but in the gestures. To go backward, for him, means not to return but to hold.

Who is he fighting? Me — over two centimeters of plastic? Or himself — over the illusion of control?

It's a half-trouble if the man across from you is polite: he moves his elbow, and that's that. But if it's a bear beside you? Pushing back is absurd. Explaining is pointless.

A war like that is lost before it begins. I turned away. Pleased, he snorted: — Heading home? — You could put it that way, — I answered. He muttered something about gifts for the relatives. I nodded, put on the headphones, turned on some old blues, and dove into the sound. There everything was in its place.

I was alone. Inside an acoustic shell, where there's nothing to fight for — not centimeters, not meaning.

I wrote in my phone: “The settled prejudice that man supposedly always thinks still clings to everyday notions. But I'd sooner believe in the existence of the Blue Bear than in man thinking often. Thought is not a stream but a rare blink of a dim lamp in the empty corridor of consciousness. The rest is the habit of waiting for the light.”

When the plane dropped back down through the clouds, the first thing I saw was the island. Submerged in murk, like an old photograph in a tray of developer.

And in that deep dark — white lights. Bright. Blinding. Alive. Lighthouses. They flickered in the night — for sea and for air. As if they were waiting. I remembered a children's game: The town's asleep — and waking now are… the lighthouse keepers. I had never been inside a lighthouse. I'd seen them in films, in photographs, in articles. But I'd never gone in. Never touched the walls, never stood beneath the dome of light, never felt the concrete hum under the wind. All the more interesting to learn what they're really like — when you meet them not with your gaze but with your hand. When you don't look but touch.