Translated material
One of the nameless islands of the Kuril chain may be named after the Soviet diplomat Gromyko
The representative office of the Russian Foreign Ministry in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk proposed that the Sakhalin branch of the Russian Geographical Society (RGS) name one of the nameless Kuril Islands after the Soviet diplomat Andrei Gromyko.
The Sakhalin branch supported this proposal and sent it for approval to Moscow to the Russian Geographical Society, Vladimir Nosov, a representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, told the Interfax agency.
“Despite the fact that A. Gromyko has never been to Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, his role for the Sakhalin region is very important. From the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the USSR, being then still one of the leading employees of the commissariat, he was part of the group that prepared the Yalta and the Potsdam Conference of 1945,” the agency’s interlocutor noted.
According to him, this group prepared a number of important documents that were signed by Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, including on the terms of the USSR's entry into the war with Japan and on the return to the Soviet Union of Southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, lost by Russia in the Russo-Japanese War.
“In this way, we want to pay tribute to the foreign policy department of our country, Soviet diplomacy, thanks to which the Sakhalin region today exists within its current borders,” added V. Nosov.
He also said that at the Sakhalin Regional Museum of Local Lore, the representative office of the Russian Foreign Ministry in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk opened the exhibition “Andrei Gromyko: Service to the Fatherland” on the eve of Diplomatic Worker’s Day.
It was organized on the initiative of the representative office of the Russian Foreign Ministry on the basis of materials provided by the Foreign Policy Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry. These are more than 40 documents and photographs, as well as three books by A. Gromyko.
A. Gromyko was the USSR Ambassador to the USA, the USSR Envoy to Cuba, and from 1957 to 1985 he headed the USSR Foreign Ministry. In 1945, he led the delegation that signed the UN Charter on behalf of the USSR at a conference in San Francisco in the USA, which became a kind of Constitution of the modern world order.
The exhibition will be open at the museum until February 22, admission to it is free. In the future, the representative office of the Russian Foreign Ministry plans to present it to the attention of the residents of the Kuril Islands.
More than 200 geographical objects of the Sakhalin region, including the nameless islands of the Kuril chain, still do not have names. In this regard, the government of the Sakhalin region, together with the Russian Geographical Society, created an expert council, which, together with residents of the region, should determine the names of these objects.
Thus, during an expedition to three nameless islands of the Kuril ridge last fall, it was proposed to name one of the islands in honor of the famous scientist and TV presenter Sergei Kapitsa, the commander of the Kuril landing operation of 1945, Major General Alexei Gnechko, and the former governor of the Sakhalin region, who died in a plane crash in Kamchatka , Igor Farkhutdinov. The Sakhalin residents themselves chose these names for the islands, proposing them on the website Rosostrova.ru.
For the remaining nameless islands, capes and rocks, Sakhalin residents proposed the names of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, actors Andrei Mironov, Yuri Nikulin and Anatoly Papanov, researcher Gennady Nevelsky, writer Anton Chekhov.