Vladivostok

Russia is a magnificent country, and you can almost consider it a continent by its sheer size. It is the world’s largest country with a giant name in history, having emerged as a world power during Peter the Great’s reign. It has many beautiful cities you can visit as a tourist, many of them historical, with battlefield relics and artifacts from the time of the Russian Civil War and World War II, but it is not only the big cities such as St. Petersburg and Moscow that are worth seeing. If you’re going to drop by the Russian Federation, why not make a stop at Vladivostok while you’re at it?

Vladivostok is the nation’s largest port city on the world’s biggest ocean, the Pacific. It is also an important scientific research center and the heart of the administration of Primorsky Krai, located at the Golden Horn Bay’s head, not very far from the nation’s border with North Korea and China. The Russian Pacific Fleet has the city as its home port. The harbor serves as fishing and whaling base.

The population of Vladivostok is around 600,000, composed mostly of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. Only Soviet citizens were permitted to live in the city or even make a visit from 1958 to 1991. Before this happened, Vladivostok had a large number of Korean and Chinese people residing in it; they were deported during the regime of Stalin, but have since returned.

The territory of Vladivostok has become part of many nations in the past, nations such as Jurchen, Balhae, China, and the Mongol Empire. And as aforementioned, Koreans and Chinese reside in the area due to the nation’s proximity to North Korea and China. These account for the slightly more diverse culture present in the city, as compared to the cities located farther from the Russian border and nearer to the north.

You may visit the universities, which are numerous in the city, one of them being the Far Eastern State University, which was founded in 1899. There is also the naval outpost that was founded by Count Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky in 1859. It was named after the model of a Russian stronghold in the Caucasus, the Vladikavkaz fortress. Following the erection of the naval outpost, a complex system of fortifications was constructed between the 1870s and 1890s.