Russia's Far East capital — where the Amur meets the Trans-Siberian
Khabarovsk is the most livable city of the Russian Far East — a city of wide boulevards, clifftop promenades above the vast Amur River, and a genuine café culture that feels more European than its extreme eastern longitude would suggest. It sits at the confluence of the Amur and Ussuri rivers on the border with China, and its position as the eastern terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway (before Vladivostok was built) means its historic core still has the ordered, civic ambition of a city that once expected to be the capital of Siberia.
Khabarovsk was founded in 1858 as a military post by Count Nikolai Muravyov-Amursky, who forced the Treaty of Aigun on China that year — ceding the left bank of the Amur to Russia and opening the Pacific coast to Russian settlement. Named for the 17th-century Cossack explorer Yerofei Khabarov, the city became the administrative centre of Russia's Far Eastern territories and a major point of conflict in the Russian Civil War (1918–1922), when Japanese, American, and Czech forces all occupied the city. It remains the administrative capital of Khabarovsk Krai and the largest city in the Russian…