Sovetskaya Gavan City Info
Sovetskaya Gavan is a port on the Pacific coast linked to Komsomolsk-na-Amure, 500 km west, by an extension of the BAM. Nowadays it has about 40,000 inhabitants. The city was originally known as Imperatorskaya Gavan (Emperor's Harbor), and in 1926 became Sovetskaya Gavan (Harbor of the Soviets). The city is built on the south side of a deep-water inlet, 11 km long, with three bays.
From the day the gulf of Sovetskaya Gavan was discovered in 1853 by Admiral Boshnyak, the area has been militarily significant both as a naval base and as forward defense against Japan. The gulf was an ideal invasion place for the Japanese who occupied parts of the Far East after the 1917 Revolution until 1922. For this reason, there are numerous old trenches, bunkers, and observation points built before the WWII dotted around Sovetskaya Gavan's coastline.
After Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Sovetskaya Gavan is Russia's third-largest naval base of the Pacific Fleet. At its height in the 1950s and 1960s, it normally had 7-10 major surface combatants such as cruisers, destroyers, frigates, coastal patrol ships, and submarines and their small support vessels harbored there. The navy started using the base for fitting out half-built ships and submarines from the Komsomolsk-na-Amure shipyards when the first floating dock of 5,000 tons arrived in 1939.
