Word: sakhaliners
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...territorial ambitions in the Far East. These were finally laid out in full detail and traced on a map by Stalin in a conversation with Ambassador Harriman on Dec. 14, 1944. Items on the Kremlin's demand list: "return" to Russia of Japan's Kurils and southern Sakhalin; leases on Manchuria's Port Arthur and Dairen, plus operating rights on the Manchurian railways; China's surrender of its claims to Sovietized Outer Mongolia...
...State Department experts looked askance on some of Stalin's claims. They recommended that 1) southern Sakhalin and the northern Kurils should not be annexed by Russia, but should be assigned as trusteeships; and 2) the southern Kurils should be kept for Japan...
Roosevelt quickly replies there is "no difficulty whatsoever" over the Kurils and southern Sakhalin. As to Dairen, it ought to be a free port...
...Russians also could pay much: trade and fishing concessions, or the return of Southern Sakhalin and the speckled Kuril Islands of Japan's northwestern shores, or the return, say, of 10,000 Japanese P.W.s still held in Soviet labor camps. And the Russians, as usual, could gain much by dangling such baubles without delivering them. Obeying Japan's new impulse to neutralism, Mamoru Shigemitsu commented that "there is need for a careful study of the sincerity of the Russian statement." Molotov's initiative, he added, was "a big step forward...
...which Smirnov discovered, 20 refineries and 1,000 miles of pipeline are operating. One refinery, transported from Germany to Irkutsk, has a yearly capacity of 10.5 million gals. (250,000 bbls.) of high-quality aviation gasoline. In the Far East, says Smirnov, the most important oil area is on Sakhalin Island, which has proved reserves of about 350 million bbls., and may actually have ten times as much. Before World War II, Sakhalin's production was about 3,500,000 bbls. a year. Now, Smirnov estimates, "it could be as high as 21 million bbls...