Nakhodka

Port city in Primorsky Krai, Russia, located on the Trudny Peninsula jutting into the Nakhodka Bay of the Sea of Japan, about 85 kilometers (53 mi) east of Vladivostok, the administrative center of the krai. Population: 159,719 (2010 Census).
The Nakhodka Bay, around which the city is organized, was first known to the Russians on the corvette Amerika, which sought shelter in the bay during a storm in 1859. In honor of this occasion, the ice-free and relatively calm bay was named Nakhodka, which in Russian means "discovery" or "lucky find". An imperial settlement existed here from 1868 to 1872 but was abandoned following the death of its administrator, Harald Furuhjelm. In the fall of 1870, Otto Wilhelm Lindholm established a whaling station across the bay from the settlement. In the spring of 1871 he fitted out his schooner Hannah Rice and sailed to Posyet, where he caught six gray whales. Until the 20th century, the area around the bay remained uninhabited. When the Soviet government decided to build a harbor in the area in the 1930s, a number of small settlements were founded, which were merged as a work settlement in the 1940s. On May 18, 1950, the settlement, by then with a population of about 28,000 residents, was granted town status.