Nikolayevsk-on-Amur

 city, district center

Town in Khabarovsk Krai, Russia located on the Amur River close to its liman in the Pacific Ocean. Population: 22,752 (2010 Census). The town is situated on the left bank of the Amur River, 80 kilometers (50 mi) from where it flows into the Amur estuary, 977 kilometers (607 mi) north of Khabarovsk and 582 kilometers (362 mi) from the Komsomolsk-on-Amur railway station. It is the closest significant settlement to the Strait of Tartary separating the mainland from Sakhalin.
The Russian settlement, likely preceded by the Manchu village of Fuyori, was founded as Nikolayevsky Post by Gennady Nevelskoy on 13 August 1850 and named for Tsar Nicholas I. The settlement quickly became one of the main economic centres on the Pacific coast of the Russian Empire. It became Russia's main Pacific harbour (replacing Petropavlovsk) in 1855 after the Siege of Petropavlovsk of 1854. It was granted town status and renamed Nikolayevsk-on-Amur in 1856, when Primorskaya Oblast was established. Admiral Vasily Zavoyko supervised the construction of a naval base in Nikolayevsk-on-Amur. The town emerged as an important commercial harbour; however, due to navigational difficulties caused by the sandbanks in the Amur estuary and because sea ice made the harbour unusable for five months each year, the main Russian shipping activities in the Pacific transferred to the better situated Vladivostok in the early 1870s. The town remained the administrative centre of this region until 1880, when the governor relocated to Khabarovsk. Anton Chekhov, visiting the town on his journey to Sakhalin in 1890, noted its rapid depopulation, although this trend slowed somewhat in the late 1890s with the discovery of gold and the establishment of salmon fisheries. During the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922 the town's population plummeted from 15,000 to 2,000, as a local Soviet partisan leader, Yakov Tryapitsyn, later executed by the same Bolsheviks he was supposed to be aligned with, razed the entire town to the ground and massacred the minority Japanese population along with most of the Russian population. In response to this event, Northern Sakhalin was briefly occupied by Japan between 1920 and 1925. During this time, the town was called Nikō (尼港町, Nikō-chō).