Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk

Capital, cultural and economic centre of Sakhalin oblast (region) in the Russian Far East, situated near the southern tip of Sakhalin Island; population (1996 est) 181,000. Economic activities centre on fishing and canning, and paper milling. In the mid-1990s, oil was being prospected by multinational concerns in the vicinity of the town.

Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk was founded in 1881 as Vladimirovka, taking its name from a director of the penal colonies then sited on Sakhalin. By the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth, which concluded the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, the settlement, along with the entire south of the island, was ceded to Japan. The Japanese developed Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk (Toyohara) into the administrative and commercial centre of the region. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union occupied Sakhalin, and made the town the capital of South Sakhalin oblast in 1947.

In 1990, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk was the scene of a pioneering attempt (known as the ‘Sakhalin experiment’) to supersede Soviet centralized economic planning with a free-market system. However, imposition of privatization and an entrepreneurial culture met with only limited success.