image) Paramushir was inhabited by the
Ainu at the time of European contact. The island appears on an official map showing the territories of
Matsumae Domain, a
feudal domain of
Edo period Japan dated 1644. Russian fur traders are known to have visited the island in 1711 and 1713, and
Russian Orthodox missionaries established a church in 1747 to convert the local inhabitants.
Imperial Russia's claim of
sovereignty over the island was initially confirmed under the terms of the
Treaty of Shimoda in 1855, but was transferred to the
Empire of Japan per the
1875 Treaty of Saint Petersburg, along with the rest of the
Kuril Islands. The Japanese established a settlement, Kashiwabara, on the site of the largest Ainu village, which became the major port on the island, and a center for the
commercial fishing industry. The island was administered as part of Shimushu District of
Nemuro Subprefecture of
Hokkaido. During
World War II the island was strongly garrisoned by both the
Imperial Japanese Army and
Imperial Japanese Navy. The headquarters of the IJA 91st Infantry Division, responsible for defense of the northern Kurils, was established at Kashiwabara, and numerous
coastal artillery positions and fortified bunkers were constructed in various locations around the island. In addition, the Imperial Japanese Army constructed four airfields: Kashiwabara Airfield in the northeast with
Ki-43 Oscars, Kakumabestu Airfield on the southwest coast with a runway and
Ki-44 Tojos, Kitanodai Airfield on the northeast coast with a runway, and Suribachi Airfield, an auxiliary base in the center of the south coast with two runways. The Imperial Japanese Navy had Musashi Airfield on the south-western tip of the island with two runways, one and another , operating a variety of aircraft as well as a radar site. These bases were subject to sporadic
air raids from the
US Army Air Forces and
US Navy based in the
Aleutian Islands from 1943 until the
end of the war.
Soviet troops landed on Paramushir on August 18, 1945, during the
Invasion of the Kuril Islands, and combat operations continued through August 23, ending with the surrender of the surviving members of the Japanese garrison. The Soviets forcibly deported the remaining Japanese civilian inhabitants and sent the
prisoners of war to
labor camps. Kashiwabara was renamed
Severo-Kurilsk and the island annexed by the Soviet Union in 1946. Japan formally gave up sovereignty over the island under the terms of the
San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951. In November 1952, Severo-Kurilsk was destroyed by the
1952 Severo-Kurilsk tsunami and was rebuilt in another location. Following the
dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990, the population of the island has decreased (2592 in 2002 census, 5180 in the 1989 census), and villages that once lined the coast are now ghost towns. This is due in part to the crash of the formerly lucrative
herring fishery, to the extremely destructive
tsunami of 1952, and general economic hardships in the more remote reaches of Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. The island is now administered as part of the
Sakhalin Oblast of the
Russian Federation. ==See also==