Remembering longtime library supporter John J. Stephan, pioneering scholar of Russia in Asia

New Russian edition of his landmark book Sakhalin: A History highlights the enduring impact of his scholarship

Two people sit at a table in a garage. The woman is holding up a book with a blue and purple cover, as the man smiles. — *Patricia Polansky delivers copies of a new Russian-language edition of John Stephan’s 1971 book, *Sakhalin: A History,* to Stephan at his home in December 2025.*

John J. Stephan, a pioneering University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa historian whose scholarship transformed our understanding of Russia’s role in Asia and whose generosity helped strengthen Hamilton Library’s collections, died on Aug. 12, 2026.

Just months before Stephan passed, the emeritus history professor had received eight copies of a new Russian-language edition of his landmark 1971 book, Sakhalin: A History. Published to commemorate the anniversary of the original work, the book includes new introductions, two supplements, a bibliography and name indexes. It also includes an essay titled, “Pervyi blin—komom”—meaning the first pancake is always spoiled—in which Stephan recounts the history of his work on Sakhalin and includes testimonies from scholars about the significance of his work.

The books arrived at Hamilton Library in December 2025, sent by the printer in Beijing. Because diplomatic and postal connections between the United States and Russia have been disrupted by the war in Ukraine, it was the only practical way to deliver the newly published book to Stephan.

The Russian edition is a fitting coda to a work whose history mirrors the dramatic political changes of the region it chronicles.

During the Soviet era, Sakhalin: A History was denounced and locked away from general use. It was reportedly used in Sakhalin to test prospective KGB officers’ understanding of English. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, portions of the book were serialized in Germes, a newly independent Sakhalin newspaper. Plans for a new Russian translation began about four years ago, with permission eventually granted by authorities in Moscow.

“It is especially meaningful that John lived to see Sakhalin: A History translated into Russian,” said Patricia Polansky, his longtime friend and the Russian Bibliographer at Hamilton Library. “When he wrote the book, he wanted to bring together Russian, Soviet, Japanese, Chinese, Western European and American sources to tell the history of Sakhalin from multiple perspectives. That a work once suppressed in the Soviet Union has now been published in Russian is a remarkable testament to the lasting importance of his research.”

Polansky, who has worked at Hamilton Library for 57 years, had the pleasure of delivering the books to Stephan after they arrived.

Stephan’s research crossed national, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries, establishing a model for the comparative study of the Russian Far East.

His connection to the subject began after he came to Hawaiʻi in 1964.

As a young scholar who had studied Russian and Japanese at Harvard, Stephan chose UH Mānoa in part because of its proximity to Japan and Hawaiʻi’s active Japanese community. He and his wife, Barbara, arrived intending to study Japan under historian George Akita, who happened to be on leave. Instead, a recommendation from the History Department chair led Stephan to a course on Siberia and the Far East taught by John A. White, a longtime Russian history professor at UH.

That course helped chart the course of Stephan’s career.

Stephan became part of a small group of scholars at UH Mānoa that fall who developed a lasting intellectual community around the Russian Far East. Among them was Polansky, who had studied Russian with Russian-language professor Ella Lury Wiswell and later became Hamilton Library’s Russian Bibliographer. Wiswell and White were also in this group that formed lifetime friendships based on their shared interest in the Russian Far East in general, and Sakhalin in particular.

Polansky and Stephan remained colleagues for decades, consulting regularly about acquisitions for the Russian collection and exchanges with libraries in the Soviet Far East.

In 1966 John left Honolulu for London. During that trip he went to Khabarovsk, a city in the Soviet Far East. The rich collections of the regional library drew him back two more times 1970 and 1972, while he was working on the Sakhalin and Kuril Islands books.

While traveling by train from London to Bristol in November of 1968, the idea to write about Sakhalin came to Stephan. He wrote the first draft in pencil in about three weeks. By 1970, the third draft was finished and sent to Oxford.

Stephan’s interest in Russia had begun even earlier. In 1959, he traveled to the Soviet Union with his father and was in the audience for the famous “kitchen debate” between U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. From 1961 to 1962, he was an apprentice of bookseller P.D. Perkins at the Perkins Oriental Books store in Kyoto, Japan. A letter from Perkins became an important early influence on Stephan’s interest in Russia in Asia — and his lifelong appreciation for books and libraries.

“John understood the importance of libraries because he knew firsthand how much they could shape a scholar’s work,” Polansky said. “His scholarship opened new ways of understanding the Russian Far East, while his support of Hamilton Library helped make sure that others would have the resources to continue exploring those subjects.”

A lasting legacy at Hamilton Library

A woman, stands behind a large, textured painting of a map of Sakhalin, showing it to a man who is seated. — *Patricia Polansky shows John Stephan a three-dimensional geological map of Sakhalin made in Japan (c. 1930) during his last visit to Hamilton Library on Sept. 5, 2024.*

Stephan’s relationship with Hamilton Library extended far beyond his own research. He was a generous donor to the library for more than two decades, supporting collections that reflected his broad scholarly interests, as well as Hawaiʻi’s connections to Asia and the Pacific.

His commitment to the library grew naturally out of his own experience as a scholar. Early in his career, Stephan spent hours exploring Hamilton’s Russian holdings, where he encountered firsthand accounts, literary works and other materials about Siberia, the Russian Far East and the Russian Civil War. Those discoveries helped shape the questions that would define his research.

Over the course of his career at UH Mānoa, where he taught history from 1970 until his retirement in 2001, Stephan produced a body of scholarship focused on Russia in Asia. His books included The Kuril Islands: Russo-Japanese Frontier in the Pacific (1974), The Russian Fascists: Tragedy and Farce in Exile, 1925-1945 (1978), Hawaii Under the Rising Sun: Japan’s Plans for Conquest After Pearl Harbor (1984), Soviet-American Horizons on the Pacific (1986) and The Russian Far East: A History (1994).

In 1986, UH Mānoa established the Center for the Soviet Union in the Asia-Pacific Region (SUPAR), later renamed the Center for Russia in Asia (CeRA). Stephan served as its founding director, helping to establish UH Mānoa as an important center for scholarship on Russia and the Asia-Pacific region.

His scholarly legacy now extends back to Sakhalin in an unexpected way. A book conceived more than half a century ago, written to bring together sources from countries on opposite sides of the Cold War, has been translated into Russian and returned to the region whose history it sought to illuminate.

For Hamilton Library, the new edition also represents something more personal: the continuing legacy of a scholar who understood the value of collections, libraries and access to knowledge — and who spent decades helping to ensure that future generations of researchers would still have those resources.