Word: okhotsk
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...1930s and begins with an angry rhapsody to all those who suffered death, punishment and exile. The hero, a Ukrainian Cossack named Hryhory Mnohohrishny, has been sentenced as "an enemy of the State" to 25 years at the slave-labor camp at Kolyma on the frozen Sea of Okhotsk. Now he is one of thousands of prisoners jammed into a 60-car convict train rolling across Siberia to the camp. As a counterpoint to the doomed men in the cattle cars, Author Bahriany describes the comforts of another train, also bound east, which is carrying volunteer settlers to the frontier...
Outside the little shack the snow was packed in deep drifts. Beyond its white expanse lay the forbidding waters of the Sea of Okhotsk, already thick with pack ice drifting down from Siberia. Inside, protected from the cold by walls papered with pages from popular Japanese magazines, barefoot Minoru Goto shuffled toward the iron stove with another piece of kindling and awaited the return of her children from school. "The first thing they'll say is, 'I'm hungry,' " she sighed, "but even if they ask, we don't have anything for them these days...
Five weeks ago, angered at the Japanese for breaking off peace treaty talks in London, the U.S.S.R. imposed severe controls on Japanese salmon fishing in the Okhotsk Sea, the western Bering Sea and parts of the North Pacific (see map) during the four-month spawning season. The prohibition put a merciless squeeze on Japan's fishing industry, which provides Japan's basic food supply. Aggressive Japanese fishermen once ranged the whole Pacific at will, but Japan now finds herself hemmed in by restricted areas...
...joined the Russian navy in 1726 and the Bering expedition in 1733, bringing his wife and son along. It took the straggling army of human whatnot (adventurers, scientists, convict laborers, shipwrights, camp followers) almost five slogging years to cross the 4,000 miles of Siberia and join up in Okhotsk. There, in Arctic cold, the expedition built a large base and a small fleet. One squadron sailed south to study Japan; two ships, one of them carrying Bering with Waxell as his second in command, put out into uncharted seas to explore America from the west...
...Trans-Siberian railway, from Lake Baikal eastward to the lower Amur River region. Under construction: a highway from the mid-Siberian maneuvering and training center of Yakutsk eastward toward Anadyr, near the tip of Siberia, facing Alaska; a railroad from Nikolaevsk to Kamchatka, circling the Sea of Okhotsk and making Japan's northern water flank in effect a Russian lake...