Sakhalin Island is what international oilmen might call a "hardship post." It is on the very edge of the Russian Far East, the historic equivalent of America's Wild West. The narrow, 600-mile-long island is populated by only half a million people, and its seasons are severe even by Russian standards. But underneath the surface of the island and the surrounding seas is enough oil and gas to power the United States for as much as a decade.

Ten years ago, energy giants Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil and other multinationals negotiated contracts with a Russian government hard up for cash and eager for foreign investment. Deals were made to extract Sakhalin's oil and gas for export to markets from Shanghai to San Diego. Moscow was promised a cut of the profits once the projects got out of the red.

Then the protests started ... over environmental damage, public health and the rights of indigenous peoples. For the most part, Moscow stayed out of the fray. But then, in 2006, with construction nearing completion on Shell's Sakhalin 2, the world's largest oil and gas project, the Kremlin intervened. The project was shut down, and the Russian national gas company, Gazprom, maneuvered to take it over. Some energy experts viewed it as a nationalist takeover under the guise of environmental protection.

While the power play between Western oil companies and the Russian government unfolded, I traveled the length of the 500-mile pipeline to see the project firsthand. I wanted to know what construction had already meant for the people living in its shadow ... and what difference, if any, Russian ownership would make.

My interest in the story began in 2002 in Novosibirsk, Siberia, nearly 2,000 miles away from Sakhalin. I had been invited by an American environmental group to lead some training workshops for Russian nonprofits. I witnessed Russia's burgeoning grassroots environmental movement and also became aware of the country's vast oil and gas reserves.

Several years later, news of the massive Sakhalin development and the protests it provoked made its way into national papers in the United States. It quickly became clear that events on Sakhalin were going to tell the outside world a great deal about the future of foreign investment, the growth of citizens' movements and the evolving role of the central government in Russia.

Sakhalin is a remote and rough place with a long, contentious history. In 1890, when the great Russian author Anton Chekhov visited Sakhalin, it was divided between the Japanese inhabitants in the south and the Russian prisoners in the czarist penal colonies in the north. The island was also home to hundreds of native peoples, such as the Ainu, the Nivhki and the Evenki.

During World War II, the island's wealth of natural resources was cause for the Soviets to wrest southern Sakhalin from the Japanese, deporting them and the Ainu wholesale from the island. The Russians began prospecting for oil, although fishing remained the mainstay for much of the island's population.

Today, the relics of Sakhalin's past litter the landscape -- ships rust near the island's main port; old Japanese paper mills decay along the coast; and military outposts built by Stalin to defend against a possible American invasion lie in ruins along the main road. Cratered dirt roads are the only means of transportation on most of the island, but signs of change and modern development are everywhere, from the boomtown capital, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, to the colossal offshore oil rigs. In many places I visited, it is hard now to imagine what the island was like before energy companies laid claim to this frontier territory.