Vladivostok is an important Russian city and port in the Far East. It was founded in 1860 as a military post "Vladivostok", in 1880 it received the status of a city. Throughout its existence, Vladivostok was called a "fortress". At the same time, neither battlements, nor high defensive towers, nor numerous bastions have ever surrounded this Russian city. Throughout its existence, it was a fortress of modern times - the crown of the fortification art of the last century, a combination of iron, concrete and powerful coastal artillery.
The defensive structures, which were created around Vladivostok for decades to protect the city from attacks from land and sea, have never become participants in serious military clashes with the enemy. However, their role in strengthening Russian influence in this region can hardly be overestimated. It was the power of the Vladivostok fortifications by its mere presence that held back a potential aggressor who simply did not dare to attack the "fortress" of Vladivostok.
Officially, Vladivostok was declared a fortress on August 30, 1889, which was announced exactly at noon on the same day by the shot of a cannon installed on Tigrovaya Hill. At the same time, the Vladivostok Fortress is the world's largest fortification; of all the sea fortresses in the country, only it was included in the list of unique historical monuments by UNESCO. The "fortress" occupied more than 400 square kilometers of land and underground. The fortress at different times included up to 16 forts, about 50 coastal artillery batteries, dozens of different caponiers, 8 underground barracks, 130 different fortifications, up to 1, 4 thousand guns.
Vladivostok itself was distinguished by its advantageous geographical location. Located on the Muravyov-Amursky peninsula, the city is washed by the waters of the Amur and Ussuri bays, which are part of the Peter the Great Gulf of the Sea of Japan. In addition, the city today includes about 50 islands, the largest of which is Russky Island with a total area of 9764 hectares. The rest of the islands have a total area of 2,915 hectares. Also, a feature of the area in the city and its environs is the presence of a large number of hills. The highest point in the historical part of the city is the Eagle's Nest (199 meters). The highest point on the territory of the urban district within the modern borders is an unnamed mountain with a height of 474 meters (popularly called the Blue Sopka).
Vladivostok, view of the eastern part of the city, 1894
At the first stage of its development, the Vladivostok fortress faced two main problems: remoteness from the rest of the empire and, as a result, difficulties in the delivery of building materials and skilled labor. The second problem that hung over the fortress throughout almost its entire existence was the lack of funding for the work. And if the first problem became easier after the opening of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the attraction of local labor (Chinese, Koreans), then the lack of funding, in fact, could not be overcome, which did not prevent the construction of a fortified outpost in the Far East. The city, already based on its geographical location, was prepared for the fate of the outpost of Russia on the Pacific coast, a coastal fortress. The very name of the city is consonant with the expression of the Lord of the East, which most fully reflects the role and significance of the city and fortress for our country.
In the first period of its history, Vladivostok did not have reliable protection and fortifications. Even 20 years after the founding of a serious defense of the city from the sea and land simply did not exist. The city, which was very young at that time, was covered only by 4 fortifications and about 10 coastal batteries, all of them were made of wood and earth. From the technical innovations that appeared here quickly enough, one could single out several powerful electric searchlights, which were placed on the shores of the Golden Horn in 1885 for firing at night. These searchlights became the first example of the use of electricity in Vladivostok.
The weakness of the fortifications of the city and the port was not the result of underestimation of its role or negligence. Just for the 19th century, this city was located too far from Russia, separated from the central provinces of the country by a huge territory of Siberia and the impenetrable Amur taiga. In order to get to Vladivostok in those years, it took 2-3 months to sail by steamer from the ports of the Black Sea or the Baltic, literally halfway across the globe. In such conditions, any construction in the city, especially such labor-intensive and material-intensive as the construction of powerful fortifications, became very expensive and difficult. The construction of modern fortifications in the city, according to estimates in 1883, cost 22 million rubles at a time and up to 4 million rubles annually, for comparison, all expenses on education in the Russian Empire at that time amounted to just over 18 million rubles. It is not surprising that Vladivostok was officially declared a fortress only on August 30, 1889, when it received its fortress flag.
The next year, the construction of concrete fortifications began here. At the same time, foreign hired workers from among the Chinese and Koreans were involved in the construction work. It is curious to note that the first potential enemy of the new Russian fortress was considered to be the fog, which is not uncommon for these places (in such conditions, the batteries on the hills simply did not see where to shoot). In addition to the fog, the powerful British fleet, as well as the large army of China, were enlisted as potential enemies. At that time, the military simply did not consider Japan as a serious enemy of Russia.
Coastal battery No. 319 "Bezymyannaya" for 9-inch coastal guns, model 1867
In the spring of 1893, the first "mine company" - a military unit designed to lay underwater sea mines, arrived in Vladivostok on the steamer "Moskva". The garrison of the fortress by that time consisted of only three infantry battalions - two in the city itself and one on the Russian island. Even then, the main task of the fortress was to protect the Russian fleet, which had taken refuge in the Golden Horn Bay from attacks from the sea and land. The defense system of the fortress consisted of three main elements. First, coastal batteries located on the islands and in Vladivostok, which were supposed to prevent shelling of the bay from the sea. Secondly, underwater minefields covered by these batteries. Thirdly, a whole chain of land fortifications that crossed the Muravyov-Amursky peninsula and protected the fleet from attack and shelling from the land side.
Lack of funding for a long time prevented the start of the construction of the most powerful fortifications. Instead of the planned 4 million rubles a year, at best 2 million rubles were allocated for construction. At that moment, the tsarist government was carried away by the project of developing the leased Port Arthur, which was considered a more promising base for the Russian fleet in the Pacific Ocean than Vladivostok. Therefore, the latter was financed on a leftover basis. The shortage of Russian builders also affected, which forced the Chinese to be massively involved in the work. In turn, this had a very bad effect on secrecy. The intelligence services of China and Japan knew perfectly well the location of the Vladivostok fortifications.
At the dawn of the 20th century, the Vladivostok fortress included 3 forts, 9 field fortifications (redoubts, lunettes, etc.), 20 land and 23 coastal batteries. At the same time, by the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War, far from all the objects of the fortress were ready in full, there were not enough weapons. The garrison of the fortress, not counting the artillerymen, consisted of two infantry regiments - in the city and on the Russian island.
During the Russo-Japanese War, the fortress made its combat debut. A month after the start of the war, on February 22, 1904, at 13:30, a detachment of five armored cruisers from the Japanese squadron began shelling the city. The Japanese knew well the location of the Russian coastal batteries, so they fired from the most secure position for themselves from the Ussuri Bay. Since the ships were afraid to come closer to the fortress, they fired from afar, causing minimal damage. In the city, one person died from their fire, and the building of the 30th East Siberian regiment also caught fire. The shelling lasted 50 minutes and did not cause any harm to the fleet and fortress, however, the Japanese ships themselves did not meet with resistance.
Fort "Russian"
For all its shortcomings, the unfinished fortress played its role, the Japanese did not even think about landing in the south of Primorye. At the same time, during the war years, the garrison of the fortress was immediately increased 5 times, and a large number of field fortifications were erected around Vladivostok. After the end of the war, in which Russia lost Port Arthur, Vladivostok became not only the country's only fortress and naval base in the Pacific Ocean, but also the only equipped port of Russia located in the Far East, which immediately increased the importance of the city.
After the war, General Vladimir Irman became the first commander-in-chief of the fortress, who during the defense of Port Arthur distinguished himself for his personal heroism and skillful command of the troops. It was he who appointed officers with extensive experience in the defense of Port Arthur to command positions in the Vladivostok fortress. It was under their leadership that work began on the creation of the most powerful and modern fortifications at that time, which were built taking into account the experience gained during the defense of Port Arthur.
In the period from 1910 to 1916, the fortress was radically strengthened according to the project, which was developed by a team of military engineers under the leadership of engineer-general A. P. Vernander. At the same time, the plan for the modernization of the Vladivostok fortress cost a lot of money - more than 230 million rubles, or more than 10 percent of the annual sum of all income of the Russian Empire. At the same time, immediately after the war, it was possible to allocate only 10 million rubles, and over the next 10 years, another 98 million rubles in gold.
In the course of the work, several new forts and strongholds were built. More than 30 coastal batteries were re-built or reconstructed, 23 coastal anti-landing caponiers were erected, 13 tunnel powder magazines were built, an airfield on the Second River, a casemated meat refrigerator on the First River, more than 200 kilometers of highways. The new fortifications under construction in the fortress had a large number of casemates and underground shelters, the thickness of concrete floors laid along steel channels on an asphalt concrete layer reached 2, 4-3, 6 meters, which provided reliable protection even when the fortifications were fired with 420 mm guns. At the same time, the configuration of the forts being created exactly corresponded to the terrain, the shape of which did not change, and the firing structures were specially dispersed over a large area, which seriously made it difficult to zero in the enemy's artillery.
Battery No. 355 for ten 11-inch mortars, model 1877
The rebuilt fortress was to become the strongest in the world. It was planned that 1290 guns would cover it from land alone, and 316 guns from the sea side, including 212 large-caliber guns. In addition, it was planned to widely use well-proven machine guns for the defense of the fortress - only 628 machine guns in specially prepared protected bunkers.
By the beginning of the First World War, up to 12 thousand hired workers from the central regions of the Russian Empire and thousands of Chinese and Koreans were working on the construction of the Vladivostok fortress. For reasons of secrecy, the military tried to refuse to attract foreign labor to the construction, but in Primorye there was still a shortage of the Russian population and, as a result, labor. The complexity of construction work required military engineers to use the most modern equipment that was not previously used in our country: pneumatic jackhammers, electric concrete mixers and lifting winches, the world's first Benz trucks and much more. In the most difficult-to-pass places, cable cars were organized (on such a scale they were used for the first time in the world) and temporary narrow-gauge rail tracks. At the same time, a railway line was specially built to deliver thousands of tons of cement, crushed stone and sand to the forts from the Vtoraya Rechka railway station, which still exists today.
All new fortifications of the Vladivostok fortress were very complex engineering structures. In order to better understand the volume of construction work, imagine that the fort "Peter the Great", located on Mount Vargina, contained several floors hidden in the rock mass, more than 3.5 kilometers of underground communications with concrete vaults up to 4.5 meters thick. The construction of this fort alone cost the Russian treasury more than 3 million rubles. By the time the First World War began, the large barracks fund of the fortress could freely accommodate a garrison of up to 80 thousand people.
The outbreak of the First World War seriously slowed down the process of building forts in Vladivostok, and the revolution of 1917 led to a halt in all work. The subsequent several years of civil war and foreign intervention, as well as a chaotic change of power in the region, turned the most powerful Russian fortress into a set of abandoned fortifications and looted warehouses. When the Japanese invaders finally left Primorye in 1922, they signed an agreement with the Far Eastern Republic on the "demilitarization" of the Vladivostok fortress. All artillery weapons were dismantled from its batteries and forts, it seemed that the fortress had disappeared forever.
"Voroshilovskaya battery"
But in reality, they began to actively restore it already in the early 1930s, when Japan seized Chinese Manchuria, and the USSR found a very aggressive and strong neighbor near its Far Eastern borders. The Soviet leadership was well aware of this, and the process of reviving the fortress began. Already in 1932, the first 7 heavy batteries received the old fortress positions on the islands and near the Golden Horn Bay. One of the people who was involved in the revival of the fortress was the commissar Semyon Rudnev, who would become famous in the years of the Great Patriotic War as a hero of the partisan movement.
At the same time, in the south of Primorye, a large number of concreted machine-gun points were created in case of a possible war with Japan. For example, in order to protect Vladivostok directly, it was planned to build 150 concrete pillboxes with machine-gun or cannon armament. Pillboxes were also erected on the islands to cover coastal batteries from a possible landing.
Since the Soviet fleet had practically no warships in the Pacific Ocean and was unable to withstand the Japanese fleet, which by that time was already one of the strongest in the world, the armament of the Vladivostok fortress began to be reinforced with powerful coastal artillery. Already in 1932, they began to build batteries of new 180-mm cannons, capable of throwing 97-kilogram projectiles at 37 kilometers. This allowed the guns deployed on the Russkiy and Popov Islands to cover the Amur and Ussuriisk bays with fire, covering all approaches to the city from the sea.
All heavy batteries built in the 1930s were installed in closed positions. They were equipped with a large number of underground and concrete structures and shelters, which ensured the protection of ammunition cellars and power stations from heavy artillery shelling, aerial bombardment, and the use of poisonous gases. A system of emergency irrigation of the cellars was also envisaged in the event of a fire or explosion of ammunition. The command posts of the new batteries were built at a significant distance from the firing positions. As a rule, they were connected with the batteries by special underground galleries (posterns). Unlike the pre-revolutionary period, this time all military facilities were built exclusively by soldiers. Only for the construction of ancillary structures and barracks were hired workers Koreans and Chinese involved, who in those years still lived quite a lot on the territory of Primorye.
In 1934, the Vladivostok Fortress received its most powerful battery in history. A real "underground battleship" appeared in the southeastern part of Russky Island - two rotating three-gun turrets with 305-mm cannons. Details of this battery were produced at the factories of Leningrad using cannons and towers from the still tsarist battleship "Poltava". The most powerful battery of the fortress received number 981 and its own name "Voroshilovskaya battery", in honor of the People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR. The unsinkable battleship on Russky Island was too tough for even the most powerful fleet, and its shells, weighing 470 kg, could cover 30 kilometers. It is no coincidence that this artillery battery remained in service for over 60 years, until the end of the 20th century.
By the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the Vladivostok fortress in official documents was called BO GVMB Pacific Fleet. Behind this long acronym was the Coastal Defense of the main naval base of the Pacific Fleet. At the same time, even pre-revolutionary fortifications and forts were used as positions for anti-aircraft artillery, warehouses and command posts. Even the most powerful fortifications of Sevastopol and Kronstadt could not then be compared with Vladivostok. In 1941, the revived fortress consisted of more than 150 heavy cannons and fifty coastal batteries, as well as a large number of anti-amphibious batteries and machine-gun points. Together with minefields and aviation, all this formed an insurmountable barrier for the Japanese fleet on the sea approaches to the city. The power of the "Vladivostok Fortress" is called one of the factors that prevented Japan from attacking the Soviet Union, despite its alliance with Nazi Germany.
In the spring of 1945, the first artillery radar stations were installed in the Vladivostok fortress, which allowed the cannons to fire accurately in the fog and at night. Although Vladivostok was never attacked by enemy troops and fleets, several cannons that were part of the city's defense system nevertheless took part in World War II. In August 1945, battery No. 250, located on Furugelm Island, fired at its maximum range at the positions of Japanese troops in Korea, supporting the Soviet offensive.
The end of World War II, and then a new era of missile and nuclear weapons, seemed to leave the artillery fortress forever in the past. In 1950-60, almost all artillery, with the exception of the most powerful batteries, was simply scrapped. However, the fortifications had to be remembered already in 1969, after relations between the USSR and China deteriorated sharply, and real battles took place on Damansky Island. They began to urgently prepare Vladivostok for defense in case of an offensive by a multimillion-dollar Chinese army. So in 1970, VLOR was formed - the Vladivostok defense region, the real successor of the Vladivostok fortress.
The old batteries began to install the most modern guns, for example, 85-mm semi-automatic guns, which were supposed to destroy the attacking masses of the Chinese infantry with quick fire. In total, in the 1970s, more than 20 stationary "fortress" artillery batteries were restored or built in the vicinity of the city. Even old heavy tanks IS-2 of the period of the Great Patriotic War were used as fortifications of the "Vladivostok Fortress"; they were dug into the ground and protected with concrete. Such improvised bunkers covered, for example, the Vladivostok-Khabarovsk highway near the city of Artyom.
Separate machine-gun points in the vicinity of the city continued to be built even in the summer of 1991. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union predetermined the fate of this fortress. The last shots of her naval guns sounded in 1992. Then, during the exercises, the famous "Voroshilov battery" fired a 470-kg projectile, which deviated from the target by only 1.5 meters, which is just an excellent indicator even for modern rocketry.
The official history of the Vladivostok fortress finally ended on July 30, 1997, when the "underground battleship" located on the territory of the Russian island was finally withdrawn from the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and converted into a museum. Thus ended the history of the Vladivostok Fortress, which was the most powerful stronghold in Russian history. Another museum was opened on October 30, 1996 in Vladivostok on the territory of the Bezymyannaya fortress battery; a museum with the same name "Vladivostok Fortress" was opened here, dedicated to its history.
Today the fortress is a unique monument, which is recognized as one of the most interesting and visited sites in Vladivostok. Its forts, coastal batteries, caponiers and other structures are spread over a vast territory around the city and directly within its borders. If you are in Vladivostok, be sure to take the time to inspect those objects that are currently available for tourists to visit, and if you are fond of military history, you will definitely get acquainted with the grandiose fortifications of one of the most powerful fortresses in the world.
