Situated seven time zones east of Moscow, above Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, Sakhalin’s sliver of land extends for 589 miles, nearly touching the Sikhote-Alin Mountains in Russia’s southeastern corner. Sakhalin separates the Sea of Japan to the south from the Sea of Okhotsk to the north. The treacherous moving ice of the Okhotsk sends temperatures on Sakhalin to as low as –50°F.

The island’s history has been as forbidding as its climate. Inhabited originally by fishing tribes, Sakhalin was fought over and bargained for by the Russians and Japanese for more than 100 years. In the 19th century, Russia dispatched an occupying force of convicts, and the czars later turned the island into a gulag, made notorious by Anton Chekhov in his 1895 book Sakhalin Island. During World War II, the Japanese brought Korean workers there to toil in the coal mines.

Japanese signs still hang above the fish stalls and corner beer kiosks in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the loud, dusty capital, which manages to feel at once like a picaresque Soviet backwater and a boomtown. Migrant workers from every corner of Siberia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (including the so-called Stans, as in Uzbekistan) live in tumbledown shanties and khrushchoby, crumbling apartment blocks dating from the Khrushchev era. Impoverished babushkas beg for kopecks, and children in tattered clothing play along dirt roads. Boys poach salmon from the rivers, and old men sell wild mushrooms they pick in the forest.

Meanwhile, new Toyota Land Cruisers clog the intersections, and expensive hotels are popping up (the garish—and garishly named—Mega Palace being one of the latest examples), along with nightclubs and supermarkets. So are office towers, the most conspicuous of which is the new Exxon Mobil installation, a gray glass compound that looks as if it might have been imported from a Dallas business park, and the Rosneft outpost, a drab metal fortress. Exxon Mobil and Rosneft are partners in Sakhalin I, a $12 billion energy project also on the island. A few blocks off Lenin Street sits Sakhalin Energy’s more subdued headquarters. But the real work of Sakhalin II goes on in the wilds of the island, beginning in the far north, where Sakhalin Energy has installed three offshore drilling and production platforms in the Sea of Okhotsk. These platforms, battered by 90-foot waves and caked in ice from December to May, will feed the plant in Aniva Bay, where the gas is to be cooled to liquid form and then piped onto tankers for export. Impressive as those facilities are, they’re not the pièce de résistance of Sakhalin II. That honor belongs to the pipeline that runs almost the entire length of the island and to which roughly half of Sakhalin Energy’s 25,000 employees and contractors are devoted. To get a closer look, I travel to a work camp outside the town of Sokol, where one of the last unfinished spurs is being installed. The camp is set up in a pasture, behind a dinky guard post. Cows meander nearby.

“You’ve got mountains. You’ve got swamps. You’ve got landslides, mudslides, communities,” says Steve Burt, the camp’s large, gruff manager, as we sit in his makeshift office, a ceiling-high map of his portion of the pipeline hanging behind him. Burt, 54, looks and sounds uncannily like Charles Laughton, the British actor who, among other roles, played Captain Bligh to Clark Gable’s Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty. Like all of the Sakhalin Energy higher-ups I have met, he is not Russian, but English. He started out with Shell. I ask when he’s scheduled to return home, and he says ruefully, “Eighteen months ago.”

The pipeline, he explains, crosses 1,100 waterways and 21 seismic zones. The faults are no piddling fissures, either. In early August, a series of earthquakes on Sakhalin left 3,000 people homeless, and in 2002, a volcano erupted outside Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Burt’s workers also contend with swarms of biting flies and, worse, brown bears (about 3,500 inhabit the island), which kill a few people every year.