Port history

In December 1950, on the once deserted shore of Nakhodka Bay, near Cape Basnin, a mooring wall grew. The future port was a swampy lowland by the sea, backfilled with rocky soil. The first berth and several metal warehouses were erected. There was no railroad yet. On a huge construction site, work was just beginning to boil. This is how the history of the Nakhodka fishing port began. The idea of ​​building a fishing port in Nakhodka Bay was born much earlier, back in 1939. Under the threat of military danger, it was decided to transfer the cargo transshipment center in the Far East from Vladivostok to Nakhodka, including cargo transportation between the Far Eastern fishing regions and the continental part of the country. According to the Order of the NKRP of the USSR No. 117 dated March 18, 1939, a brigade left for Nakhodka Bay to draw up a project for the preliminary placement of a fishing port on the site, on October 7 of the same year, the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks decided to build a commercial seaport in Nakhodka Bay fleet and port of the fishing industry, as well as bases of other departments. At the end of 1939, the State Institute for the Design of Industrial Enterprises of the Fishing Industry of the USSR (Giproryba) compiled the first design assignment for a fishing port. In 1940-41, taking into account the comments made earlier, the Tsentromorproekt of the NKMF of the USSR proposed a project for the hydrotechnical part of the port, and Giproryba a project for coastal facilities and industrial enterprises. In 1941, having barely begun, the construction of the fishing port was stopped. After the victory, everything had to start from scratch. Nevertheless, already on July 5, 1945, the State Defense Committee decided to carry out new preparatory work and allocated two million rubles for this purpose. By this time, two new fishing areas in the Far East – South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, as well as numerous fishing areas in Kamchatka, which were previously rented by the Japanese, were included in the composition of the fishing areas of the Far East. As a result, a completely new project was prepared. And if in the plans of 1939 it was supposed, in addition to the fishing port, to concentrate a number of fish processing enterprises in Nakhodka, then in 1949 these plans were abandoned. And it was decided to create here only a transport hub as a center for transshipment of cargoes of the fishing industry. In this case, the choice fell on Nakhodka not by chance, since in Primorye there is no bay more protected and adapted for this, which, moreover, does not freeze at all in its main water area. In addition, by this time a railway had already been laid to Nakhodka, and the nearby Suchansky coal mine could provide the port with both bunkering fuel and cheap electricity. On the territory of the transit fishing port in Nakhodka Bay, it was also planned to build a tin and can factory, a cooperage factory and a medical fat factory, as well as a workshop for correcting defective fish products. In addition, the fishing port of Nakhodka was supposed to serve as a port base for crab and whaling fleets operating in the Far East, the entire production cycle of which takes place on the high seas. The port construction project provided for the introduction of deep-water berths with a total length of 650 meters, stone multi-storey warehouses based on the maximum monthly cargo turnover of the port, a refrigerator for 12 thousand tons, a boiler house, a power plant, an independent water supply system using artesian wells. In a word, the port was supposed to be a self-sustaining closed cycle system. True, not all of the plans were realized, some of which had to be abandoned in the process of work. In addition, the planned task for the construction of the port provided that it would include a shipyard of metal shipbuilding for the construction and repair of large fishing vessels. It was also planned to build a Rybak settlement to serve transit workers, with one thousand permanent and five thousand temporary places. A similar “communal settlement”, as it was called in the engineering documentation, existed before the war in Vladivostok, in the region of the Second River. Nakhodka Rybak, organized by analogy with Vladivostok, gave the name to the whole district of the city, which is now, however, better known as the Third Southern Microdistrict. Prisoners from two camps located in the immediate vicinity of the port also took part in the construction. On December 4, 1950, the Council of Ministers of the USSR issued Decree No. 4852 on the formation of the Sea Fishing Port of Nakhodka, and on December 11 of the same year, by the relevant Order of the Ministry of the Fishing Industry, it was included in the number of operating ports. From this date, the history of the Nakhodka fishing port begins. In April of the following year, three teams of port workers headed by Alexander Grinkzh, Vasily Morozov and Mikhail Pilipchuk, as well as machine operators and engineering and technical workers, were seconded from the Vladivostok fishing port to Nakhodka. The port chief was