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Founding
Founding of Vladivostok
Russian city and the administrative center of Primorsky Krai
- 20 June 1860
- Europe
Founding
Russian city and the administrative center of Primorsky Krai
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
Vladivostok is the largest city and the administrative center of Primorsky Krai and the capital of the Far Eastern Federal District of Russia. It is located around the Golden Horn Bay on the Sea of Japan, covering an area of 331.16 square kilometers (127.86 square miles), with a population of 603,519 residents as of 2021. Vladivostok is the second-largest city in the Far Eastern Federal District, as well as the Russian Far East, after Khabarovsk. It is located approximately 45 kilometers (28 mi) from the China–Russia border and 134 kilometers (83 mi) from the North Korea–Russia border.
Vladivostok was historically part of Outer Manchuria. Shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Aigun between Qing China and the Russian Empire and affirmed by the Convention of Peking – from which it is also known as the Amur Annexation – the city was founded as a Russian military outpost on July 2, 1860. In 1872, the main Russian naval base on the Pacific Ocean was transferred to the city, stimulating its growth. By 1914 the city had experienced rapid growth economically with a population exceeding over 100,000 ethnically diverse inhabitants of which slightly less than half of the population were Russians. During this time, large Asian communities developed in the city. The public life of the city flourished; many public associations were created, from charities to hobby groups. After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Vladivostok was occupied in 1918 by White Russian and Allied forces, the last of whom, from the Japanese Empire, were not withdrawn until 1922 as its wider intervention in Siberia wound down alongside the collapse of the antirevolutionary White Army forces. The Red Army occupied the city that same year, absorbing the Far Eastern Republic into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the city became a part of the Russian Federation. Vladivostok remains the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean, and the chief cultural, economic, scientific, and tourism hub of the Russian Far East. As the terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the city was visited by over three million tourists in 2017. The city is the administrative center of the Far Eastern Federal District, and is the home to the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet of the Russian Navy. Due to its geographical position in Asia combined with its Russian architecture, the city has been referred to as "Europe in the Far East". Many foreign consulates and businesses have offices in Vladivostok, and the city hosts the annual Eastern Economic Forum. With a yearly mean temperature of around 5 °C (41 °F), Vladivostok has a cold climate for its mid-latitude coastal setting. This is due to winds from the vast Eurasian landmass in winter and the cooling ocean temperatures.
Vladivostok means 'Lord of the East' or 'Ruler of the East'. The name derives from Slavic владь (vlad, 'to rule') and Russian восток (vostok, 'east'); Colloquial Russian speech may use the short form Vladik (Russian: Владик) or "vdk" (Russian: вдк) to refer to the city.
The city, along with other features in the Peter the Great Gulf area, was first given its modern name in 1859 by Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky. The name initially applied to the bay, but following an expedition by Alexey Karlovich Shefner in 1860, it was later applied to the new settlement. The form of the name appears analogous to that of the city of Vladikavkaz ("Ruler of the Caucasus" or "Rule the Caucasus"), now in North Ossetia–Alania, which was founded and named by the Russian Empire in 1784.
Chinese maps from the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) referred to Vladivostok as Yongmingcheng (永明城; Yǒngmíngchéng). Since the Qing dynasty, the city has also been known as Haishenwai (海參崴; Hǎishēnwǎi, Hǎishēnwēi; 'sea cucumber bay') in Mandarin Chinese, named for its historical abundance of sea cucumbers. The Manchu name Haišenwei (Manchu: ᡥᠠᡳᡧᡝᠨᠸᡝᡳ) comes from Mandarin, although occasionally some modern Chinese sources falsely claim that it is the original name meaning "seaside fishing village". In China, Vladivostok is now officially known by the transliteration (Chinese: 符拉迪沃斯托克; pinyin: Fúlādíwòsītuōkè), although the historical Chinese name 海參崴 (Hǎishēnwǎi) is still used in common parlance and outside Mainland China to refer to the city. According to the provisions of the Chinese government, all maps published in China must bracket the city's Chinese name.
The modern-day Japanese name of the city is transliterated as Urajiosutoku (ウラジオストク). Historically, the city's name was transliterated with Kanji as 浦鹽斯德 and shortened to Urajio (ウラジオ, 浦鹽).
The city is located in the southern extremity of Muravyov-Amursky Peninsula, which is about 30 kilometers (19 mi) long and 12 kilometers (7.5 mi) wide.
The highest point in the city is Mount Kholodilnik, at 257 meters (843 ft). Eagle's Nest Hill is often called the highest point in the city, but with a height of 199 m (653 ft), or 214 m (702 ft) according to other sources, it is only the highest point in the city center, not the whole city.
Located in the extreme southeast of the Russian Far East, in the extreme southeast of North Asia, Vladivostok is geographically closer to Anchorage, Alaska, US and even Darwin, Australia than it is to the nation's capital of Moscow. Vladivostok is also closer to Honolulu, Hawaii, US than to the city of Sochi in Southern Russia. It also is further east than any area south of it in China and the entire Korean peninsula.
Vladivostok has a monsoon-influenced humid continental climate (Köppen climate classification Dwb, Trewartha climate classification Dcbc) with warm, humid and rainy summers and frigid, dry winters. Owing to the influence of the Siberian High, winters are much colder than a latitude of 43 degrees should warrant, given its low elevation and coastal location, with a January average of −11.9 °C (10.6 °F). Winter temperatures are somewhat colder than Milwaukee and far colder than Florence; all three locations are at or above 43 degrees north latitude. They are even colder than those of Moscow and Minneapolis, interior locations at 55 and 44 degrees north, respectively. Since the maritime influence is strong in summer, Vladivostok has a relatively cold annual climate for its latitude. For example, Vladivostok is 9.5 degrees Celsius colder than Sochi in terms of average temperature, and 17.5 degrees Celsius colder in terms of January temperatures, despite both being at 43 degrees North.
In winter, temperatures can drop below −20 °C (−4 °F) while mild spells of weather can raise daytime temperatures above freezing. The average monthly precipitation, mainly in the form of snow, is around 18.5 millimeters (0.73 in) from December to March. Snow is common during winter, but individual snowfalls are light, with a maximum snow depth of only 5 centimeters (2.0 in) in January. During winter, clear sunny days are common.
Summers are warm, humid and rainy, due to the East Asian monsoon. The warmest month is August, with an average temperature of +20 °C (68 °F). Vladivostok receives most of its precipitation during the summer months, and most summer days see some rainfall. Cloudy days are fairly common and because of the frequent rainfall, humidity is high, on average about 90% from June to August.
During the summer season, the city is prone to typhoons and tropical storms. Typhoon Sanba struck the city as a tropical storm in 2012. In Artyom, near Vladivostok, more than 300 ha (740 acres) of crops were inundated. Preliminary losses over the region were estimated to be ₽40 million (US$1.29 million). Typhoons can be rare, but tropical storms happen from the Sea of Japan after a typhoon landfall from South Korea and Japan.
On average, Vladivostok receives 840 millimeters (33 in) of precipitation per year, but the driest year was 1943, when 418 millimeters (16.5 in) of precipitation fell, and the wettest was 1974, with 1,272 millimeters (50.1 in) of precipitation. The winter months from December to March are dry, and in some years they have seen no measurable precipitation at all. Extremes range from −31.4 °C (−24.5 °F) in January 1931 to +33.6 °C (92.5 °F) in July 1939.
Some modern Chinese historians claim that the city was the site of a Chinese settlement around 600 AD, where it was known as Yongmingcheng (永明城 [Yǒngmíngchéng], "city of eternal light") during the Yuan dynasty.
For a long time, the Russian government looked for a stronghold in the Far East; this role was played in turn by the settlements of Okhotsk, Ayan, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, and Nikolaevsk-on-Amur. By the middle of the 19th-century, the search for the outpost had reached a dead end. None of the ports met the necessary requirement: to have a convenient and protected harbor next to important trade routes. After China was threatened with war on a second front by Governor-General of the Far East Nikolay Muraviev when China was suppressing the Taiping Rebellion, the Aigun Treaty was concluded by Muraviev's forces, after which Russian exploration of the Amur region began, and later, as a result of the signing of the Treaty of Tientsin and the Convention of Peking, the territory of modern Vladivostok was annexed to Russia. The name Vladivostok appeared in the middle of 1859, was used in newspaper articles and denoted a bay. On June 20 (or July 2 of the Gregorian calendar), 1860 the transport of the Siberian Military Flotilla "Mandzhur" under the command of Lieutenant-Commander Alexei Karlovich Shefner delivered a military unit to the Golden Horn Bay to establish a military post, which has now officially received the name of Vladivostok.
On October 31, 1861, the first civilian settler, a merchant, Yakov Lazarevich Semyonov, arrived in Vladivostok with his family. On March 15, 1862, the first act of his purchase of land was registered, and in 1870 Semyonov was elected the first head of the post, and a local self-government emerged. By this time, a special commission decided to designate Vladivostok as the main port of the Russian Empire in the Far East. In 1871, the main naval base of the Siberian Military Flotilla, the headquarters of the military governor and other naval departments were transferred from Nikolaevsk-on-Amur to Vladivostok.
In the 1870s, the government encouraged resettlement to the South Ussuri region, which contributed to an increase in the population of the post: according to the first census of 1878, there were 4,163 inhabitants. The city status was adopted and the city Duma was established, the post of the city head, the coat of arms was adopted, although Vladivostok was not officially recognized as a city.
Due to the constant threat of attack from the Royal Navy, Vladivostok also actively developed as a naval base.
In 1880, the post officially received the status of a city. The 1890s saw a demographic and economic boom associated with the completion of the construction of the Ussuriyskaya branch of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Chinese-Eastern Railway. According to the first census of the population of Russia on February 9, 1897, roughly 29,000 inhabitants lived in Vladivostok, and 10 years later the city's population had tripled. Korean haenyeo divers from Jeju Island and vicinities were active in Vladivostok.
The first decade of the 20th-century was characterized by a protracted crisis caused by the political situation: the government's attention was shifted to Lüshunkou and the Port of Dalian (Talien). As well as the Boxer uprising in North China in 1900–1901, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, and finally the first Russian revolution led to stagnation in the economic activity of Vladivostok.
Since 1907, a new stage in the development of the city began: the losses of Lüshunkou and Dalian (Talien) again made Vladivostok the main port of Russia on the Pacific Ocean. A free port regime was introduced, and until 1914 the city experienced rapid growth, becoming an important economic hub in the Asia-Pacific, as well as an ethnically diverse city with a population exceeding over 100,000 inhabitants: during the time ethnic Russians made up less than half of the population, and large Asian communities developed in the city. The public life of the city flourished; many public associations were created, from charities to hobby groups.
During World War I, no active hostilities took place in the city. However, Vladivostok was an important staging post for the import of military-technical equipment for troops from allied and neutral countries, as well as raw materials and equipment for industry.
Immediately after the October Revolution in 1917, during which the Bolsheviks came to power, the Decree on Peace was announced, and as a result of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk concluded between the Bolshevik government of Russia and the Central Powers, led to the end of Soviet Russia's participation in World War I. On October 30, the sailors of the Siberian Military Flotilla decided to "rally around the united power of the Soviets", and the power of Vladivostok, as well as all of the Trans-Siberian Railway passed to the Bolsheviks. During the Russian Civil War, from May 1918, they lost control of the city to the White Army-allied Czechoslovak Legion, who declared the city to be an Allied protectorate. Vladivostok became the staging point for the Allies' Siberian intervention, a multi-national force including Japan, the United States and China; China sent forces to protect the local Chinese community after appeals from Chinese merchants. The intervention ended in the wake of the collapse of the White Army and regime in 1919; all Allied forces except the Japanese withdrew by the end of 1920.
Throughout 1919 the region was engulfed in a partisan war. To avoid a war with Japan, with the filing of the Soviet leadership, the Far Eastern Republic, a Soviet-backed buffer state between Soviet Russia and Japan, was proclaimed on April 6, 1920. The Soviet government officially recognized the new republic in May, but in Primorye a riot occurred, where significant forces of the White Movement were located, leading to the creation of the Provisional Priamurye Government, with Vladivostok as its capital.
In October 1922, the troops of the Red Army of the Far Eastern Republic under the command of Ieronim Uborevich occupied Vladivostok, displacing the White Army formations from it. In November, the Far Eastern Republic liquidated and became a part of Soviet Russia.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Vladivostok”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.