On October 18, 1943, the staffing table of the Vanino port point was approved, which is considered the birthday of one of the largest transport hubs in Russia. However, the history of its formation dates back to the middle of the 19th century.
It was then that, by order of the head of the Amur expedition, Gennady Nevelsky, his subordinate, Lieutenant Nikolai Boshnyak, set about investigating Sakhalin and the northern part of the Tatar Strait. And in the summer of 1853, sailing on an ordinary ship along the mainland coast of the strait, he discovered a vast bay with many bays and coves. The Orochi who lived here called the bay Hadji. Boshnyak gave it the name Imperial Port (now Sovetskaya Gavan). And then Tsarevich Alexander Bay, Cape Anastasia and Konstantinovsky Bay appeared on the map, named after members of the imperial family.
Boshnyak also described the Vanino Bay, but for some unknown reason he did not give it a name.
It appeared near the bay only 20 years later, when Colonel LA’s expedition worked in these places. Bolshevik. Among them was the military surveyor Iakim Klimentievich Vanin, who carried out surveys of the imperial port and, among other things, an unnamed bay, called Vanin Bay after the surveyor.
At the beginning of the 20th century, there was only a small sawmill and two or three fishing grounds on the shore of this bay. Life dragged on slowly. But everything changed dramatically on May 21, 1943, when the State Defense Committee of the USSR issued a decree on the construction of the Komsomolsk-on-Amur – Sovetskaya Gavan railway line and a seaport in the Vanino Bay. The State Defense Committee attached special economic and defense importance to the construction, which was carried out secretly and mainly by prisoners. The road and port played an important role in the summer and autumn of 1945, during the war with imperialist Japan, when military supplies for the final operations of the Soviet army passed through Vanino.
After the end of the war, on June 24, 1946, the steamer Dalstroy, which made regular trips to Magadan with prisoners to Kolyma, exploded in the port of Nakhodka. After this, prisoners began to be sent through Vanino, which is when the famous 20-zone Vanino transit and transit camp appeared.
Those who were involved in the transfer of Vanino recalled:
“Everything was mixed in Vanino Bay: the criminal world, deserters, Vlasovites, Banderaites and those convicted of war crimes, and the so-called politicians, although no one called them that, only “fifty-eighth” and many famous people. The following went through the transfer: the submariner A. Marinesko, the journalist and cameraman A. Sandler, the poet N. Zabolotsky, the film playwright A. Dobrovolsky, the writers V. Yankovsky, V. Shalamov, the artist V. Tsympakov, the musician E. Rosner…
And soon a song was born that became a kind of anthem for those who passed through the Gulag camps. Writer Anatoly Zhigulin, also a Magadan prisoner, wrote that “Vanino Port” is one of the most expressive prison songs. Especially if the Kolyma residents sing…
I remember that port of Vanino and the gloomy smoke of the steamers, how we walked along the gangway on board towards the cold and gloomy holds.
The author of the original text is unknown. The names of Nikolai Zabolotsky, Boris Ruchev, Fyodor Demin, Konstantin Sarakhanov and even Boris Kornilov, who died in 1938, are mentioned as versions. But with many variations, the first verse remained unchanged.
The Vanino transit camp was liquidated in 1954 after Stalin’s death. From that moment on, the port developed as a commercial port. Its main objective was the export of goods to countries in the Asia-Pacific region, mainly raw wood. From 1973 to the present, a ferry service operates daily connecting the mainland to the port of Kholmsk in Sakhalin.
In recent decades, the port of Vanino has been reused for the export of hard coal. Huge construction works are being carried out here in which astronomical sums are invested. In terms of turnover, Vanino is almost one and a half times ahead of Nakhodka and more than twice as much as Vladivostok.
