KHABAROVSK

also spelled Chabarovsk, formerly (185893) Khabarovka, city and administrative centre of Khabarovsk kray (region), far eastern Russia. Khabarovsk lies along the Amur River just below its confluence with the Ussuri. The town was named after the Russian explorer E.P. Khabarov, who made several expeditions to the Amur River basin in the mid-17th century. The modern city was founded in 1858 as a military outpost. Its nodal position at the point at which the Trans-Siberian Railroad crosses the Amur made it an important focus of the Russian Far East, and at one time it administered the entire area to the Bering Strait. Modern Khabarovsk spreads across a series of small valleys and ridges perpendicular to the Amur. The city has an attractive waterfront park and esplanade and a mixture of modern apartment blocks, factories, and old, one-story wooden houses. It is a major industrial centre, with most enterprises located in the upstream district; they include a wide range of engineering and machine-building industries, oil refining, timber working, furniture making, and many light industries. There are polytechnic, agricultural, medical, teacher-training, and railway-engineering institutes and several scientific-research establishments. Pop. (1991 est.) 613,300. also spelled Chabarovsk, kray (region), far eastern Russia. The kray includes the Yevreyskaya (Jewish) autonomous oblast (province). Its focus is the basin of the lower Amur River, flanked by the Sikhote-Alin mountains (south) and by the complex of mountains (north) dominated by the Bureya Range and a series of long, parallel ranges fronting the Sea of Okhotsk, known collectively as the Dzhugdzhur mountains. Almost the entire kray is in dense swampy forest, or taiga, of larch, spruce, and fir, though in the extreme south some deciduous trees occur. The population is overwhelmingly of Russian settler origin, with small numbers of Jews and indigenous groups: Nanais, Evenks, Ulchi, Nivkhs (Gilyaks), and Orochi. The kray is rich in minerals, including coal, iron ore, manganese, tin, gold, molybdenum, and tungsten. The main sectors of the economy are timber working in the Amur Basin, seal hunting and fishing on the coast, tin production in the Solnechny mining area, and metallurgy and petroleum-refining in the two main towns of Khabarovsk, the administrative centre, and Komsomolsk-na-Amure. Agriculture is limited to cultivation of wheat, soybeans, oats, and vegetables in the Amur basin. Area 318,375 square miles (824,600 square km). Pop. (1991 est.) 1,850,700.