Sovetskaya Gavan
Description
Sovetskaya Gavan is a town in Khabarovsk Krai, Russia, and a port on the Strait of Tartary which connects the Sea of Okhotsk in the north with the Sea of Japan in the south. Population: 27,712 (2010).
It was previously known as Imperatorskaya Gavan (until 1922).
Name
The name of the town is often informally abbreviated to "Sovgavan".
History
On May 23, 1853, Lt. Nikolay Konstantinovich Boshnyak of the Russian-American Company ship Nikolay discovered the bay on which Sovetskaya Gavan is located and named it Khadzhi Bay. On August 4, 1853, Captain Gennady Nevelskoy founded a military post named after Admiral Grand Duke Konstantin, and renamed the bay to Imperatorskaya Gavan ('Emperor's Harbor' or 'Port Imperial'). The bay was also known to the English as Barracouta Harbour. Nikolay Boshnyak was appointed the commander of the post, which became the first Russian settlement in the area, and the predecessor of today's Sovetskaya Gavan.
After the abandonment of the military post before 1900, the area became a center for timber production, including concessions to companies from other countries such as Canada.
The bay and the settlement were renamed Sovetskaya Gavan in 1922.
During World War II, construction was begun on a railway from the right bank of the Amur River near Komsomolsk-on-Amur to the Pacific coast, with Sovetskaya Gavan chosen as the endpoint. Sovetskaya Gavan was granted town status in 1941; the railway reached the town in 1945. This section of railway was the first section to be completed of what would later become the Baikal-Amur Mainline.
From 1950 until 1954, the town was the site of the prison camp Ulminlag of the gulag system.
In 1958, the town's northern neighborhood, on the Vanino Bay, was separated into a separate urban-type settlement of Vanino.
In 1963–1964, six sounding rockets of "Kosmos 2"-type were launched. They reached the height of 402 km.
