In 1996 the Sakhalin Museum of Regional Studies will celebrate its centenary. During these hundred years the museum has developed through several stages. It opened on December 6, 1896, in the town of Alexandrovsk, and was one of the first scientific institutions on the island to study local nature and history. Unique collections were made, interpreted, systematized and popularized.

Two former political convicts, L.Y.Sternberg and B.O.Pilsudski, were instrumental in setting up the museum, and later became noted scientists. With its rich exhibits and contents, the museum became well known not only in the Far East, but in Moscow and St.Petersburg.

However, it was short-lived. After the Japanese invasion of the island in 1905, the museum's collections were removed to Japan. It was re-established after the Treaty of Portsmouth later that year (which divided the island between Russia and Japan) but discontinued again during a second Japanese occupation of Northern Sakhalin from 1920-1925.

After Soviet power was regained in Northern Sakhalin the long and laborious task of reconstructing the museum began, and it was re-opened in 1932.

The Sakhalin Museum entered yet another phase in 1945, after South Sakhalin was regained by the Soviet Union. Along with the economic development of the region, a number of scientific and cultural institutions, including the Museum, were established in the new capital, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. On May II, 1946, the Museum was opened for visitors. It was housed in the former Karafuto museum - Karafuto being the Japanese name for South Sakhalin from 1905-1945. It became the present Regional Museum after Sakhalin was unified in 1947, and all the collections of the Alexandrovsk museum passed to it in the early 1950s.

Over all these years Museum researchers have made valuable and unique collections based on local history and natural history. The Museum is particularly proud of its ethnographic collections of the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the island, the Nivkh, Orok, and Ainu, and its collections relating to the Russian-American exploration of the Kurile Islands, as well as its fine exhibits of local flora and fauna.

One of the concerns of the Museum is to encourage a network of local museums on Sakhalin. Branch museums in Okha and Alexandrovsk were opened in 1978, and there are others in Kholmsk (Marine Fauna), in Nogliki (Historical-Ethnographic), in Alexandrovsk (a literary collection: A.P.Chekhov and Sakhalin), and specialist local museums in Kurilsk, Yuzhno-Kurilsk, and Poronaisk.

In 1983 a Regional Art Museum was opened in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, based on the art collections of the Sakhalin Museum. More than 120,000 visitors come to the Sakhalin Museum every year.

T.P. Roon, Director.