Ivan Fomich Yelagin

Ivan Fomich Yelagin is today considered the official founder of the port of Petropavlovsk. He was originally prominent as a 1st rank Captain in the Imperial Russian navy, as well as a navigator on several prominent expeditions, including the Great Northern Expedition to Northwest America. He both made the first map of and founded the first city on the Kamchatsky peninsula. His ‘founding’ manifested as his supervision of construction on the Avacha Bay, which slowly transformed into a residential village. A cape on the Sea of Okhotsk is today named after Ivan Yelagin, as well as a modern street in the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Somehow much of this nomenclature survived the Soviet period, and even today his name graces much of the city.

Stepan Petrovich Krasheninnikov

Stepan Krasheninnikov is a key figure to the port of Petropavlovsk, and Kamchatka more generally, because of his importance in conveying information about the area to higher-ups in the Imperial government. He wrote the famous text ‘Land Description of Kamchatka,’ a holistic ethnographic, geographic, and botanical text which informed treatment of and policy governing Kamchatka and the port of Petropavlovsk for the remainder of the time that it spent under the jurisdiction of the Russian Empire. In the text, he describes Petropavlovsk as striking narrow and full of shipping vessels, even as early as his visit in 1755. He also writes on the great number of prisoners residing in Petropavlovsk, as well as the massive jail here. Overall this traveler and scholar from the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, though never a permanent resident of the port city of Petropavlovsk, had a massive impact in cementing its place in the history of the Russian Empire.