Historian finds links to home

By Beverly Creamer
Advertiser Education Writer

A Russian scholar and historian studying the migration of Russians to Hawai'i from the mid- to late 1800s into the early 20th century has found poignant evidence here:

Scholar Amir Khisamut recently completed eight months of research here and in California on Russian migration across the Pacific. Photo courtesy of Amir Khisamut

Those stories are all fodder for Amir Khisamut, an expert on Russian migration across the Pacific. He has tracked his people from ports such as Nikolaevsk to China, Korea, Japan and on to Hawai'i and California, in a quest to know and write about their lives.

Most recently Khisamut has been using resources at the University of Hawai'i's Hamilton Library, and old files from the Sugar Planters' Association and the first Russian Consulate, which opened in 1867.

"It's more romantic than we recognize," said Khisamut. "Hawaiians worked in the Russian Far East as sailors (in the mid-1800s)."

To hear him tell the stories is to realize how much traffic moved across the Pacific before 1900. Russian trading ships coming from Europe invariably stopped in Hawai'i for supplies before heading home, and wealthy Russians from Vladivostok owned property in Waikiki and liked to vacation here in the late 1800s.

But the biggest Russian influx occurred between 1906 and 1916 when 6,000 Russians came to Hawai'i as laborers for the sugar plantations. They're the largest group after the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, said Khisamut.

"They stayed here and worked, but unfortunately the weather not so good for Russians and many moved to San Francisco," said Khisamut. "A few of the families are still living here. They married Hawaiians, Koreans, Japanese, Chinese. I met one lady who has so much blood from Hawaiians but her grandmother was Russian."

With 1,000 names in his database, Khisamut has traced individuals, turning up such intriguing tidbits as the fact that after the Russian Civil War, Leo Tolstoy's daughter came from Japan to Hawai'i, staying here for a time.

"I read letters from first Russians — with love from Hawai'i — in the 20th century," he said. "They always moved. That was the biggest problem about Russian immigration. Because of the open border, after the Russian-Japan War of 1906 and the civil war, many Russians left and lived in China and Japan. After 1945, when the communist regime came to China, many Russians left the cities and lived everywhere. Always something happened in the political situation and always they are moving, moving, moving, always moving. The Communist Chinese hate White Russians and they are always afraid of being captured and sent to Gulag in the Soviet Union. "

Khisamut recently completed eight months of research here and in California and is now back home working on his newest book about Russians in Hawai'i and teaching history at the Far Eastern State Technical University in Vladivostok.

"I have so many people," he said. "For example, a young guy from Kamchatka had leprosy and died on Moloka'i. He was the adopted son of an American and they brought him to Moloka'i to help him ... I have been on Moloka'i and the people there say 'We don't have records.' "

That's one of the reasons he was excited to find the Hawai'i grave of World War I hero Mikal Yakovlev, who was awarded the highest military medal of Czarist Russia. The young combat hero came to Hawai'i in 1921 to visit his brother, succumbing here to lingering medical problems from his war wounds.

"There is his picture on the monument, a nice young guy, 27," said Khisamut. "His brother worked for the agricultural station but left Hawai'i and died in San Francisco 30 years later. But I don't know about his children."

Reach Beverly Creamer at bcreamer@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8013.