PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKY (Russia): To drive the coastal highway of this port city on the Bering Sea, or to go out to its airport, is to navigate an obstacle course of potholes and bounce past blocks of crumbling apartment buildings. Compensating for the jarring ride is the natural beauty of Avacha Bay and the two majestic volcanoes that overlook this once-closed provincial capital.

In Soviet times, the secretive nuclear submarine bases and other military facilities here on the Kamchatka Peninsula were so sensitive that after a Korean Air Lines jumbo jet strayed off course and flew over the region in 1983, it was shot down as a suspected US reconnaissance aircraft. All 269 people aboard the Anchorage, Alaska-to-Seoul, South Korea, flight were killed.

Those days seemed a distant memory when military teams from Britain, the United States and Japan raced here earlier this month in a successful effort to save seven crew members trapped underwater for days in a Russian mini-submarine that had become entangled in military antenna cables and fishing nets. But the collapse of the Soviet Union, which led to warmer ties between Moscow and the West, also has resulted in military spending cutbacks that have plunged this city into hard times.

“Changes have mostly been for the worse, unfortunately,” said taxi driver Mikhail Chugunov as he manoeuvred the coastal road, which winds along hills that overlook fishing and commercial harbours packed with hundreds of rusting cranes used for unloading ships.

“There are social problems, problems with the apartment buildings,” he said. “The condition of apartments is really poor. There’s no repair and restoration work. Practically nothing is being done. Even the roads haven’t been maintained for a long time.”

Many people have reacted by leaving town: Since 1989, the population has dropped from 269,000 to about 185,000. As well, many submarines have been decommissioned.

Alexander Pershin, a military base employee, said he feels sorry at the downgrading of Russia’s military presence. But he draws comfort from the natural beauty that has survived largely due to the underdeveloped economy, still primarily dependent, as it was during Soviet days, on the military and the fishing industry.

“I’ve never seen such beauty as here — the nature, such clean air, clean water,” he said. “There’re no chemical plants here, no factories. That’s why it’s so clean. Americans must be envious of our clean water. In the United States you can’t drink water out of the river, and here you can do that.”

Little pre-Soviet architecture remains in this city, some 5,000 miles and nine time zones east of Moscow. Post-Soviet construction of supermarkets and some other buildings has been undertaken, but most of the city consists of poorly maintained multi-story apartment, commercial and office blocks, many built of concrete. A huge statue of Soviet founder Vladimir I. Lenin remains standing in the city’s main square. A few attractive wooden buildings hint at the nature of the frontier town this was in Czarist days.

Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky — the name means Peter Paul of Kamchatka — has a long and rich history. The city was founded in 1740 by Vitus Bering, a Danish-born captain who explored northeastern Siberia on behalf of Russian Czar Peter the Great and his successors. Bering named the city after his two ships, the Saint Peter and the Saint Paul.

In 1779, the log-cabin settlement was visited by a British exploration team led by Captain Charles Clerke. His ships, the Discovery and the Resolution , had been commanded previously by the famed British explorer Captain James Cook, who had been killed earlier that year in Hawaii.

British and French forces sailed into Avacha Bay during the 1853-56 Crimean War, which pitted Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire against Russia. But that August 1854 attack was repulsed by the city’s defenders, and monuments to the Russian victory still stand.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent opening of Kamchatka to foreigners, efforts have been made to develop a tourism industry in the peninsula, which is about two-thirds the size of California. Natural attractions include about two dozen active volcanoes; the Valley of the Geysers, sort of a Kamchatkan Yellowstone; brown bears that are slightly larger cousins of the American grizzly; and fishing that attracts Americans who fly in helicopters from the provincial capital to vacation spots.

Chugunov, 38, who spent three years in Moscow before returning to his hometown, said that nature is the only thing better here than in the nation’s capital. He still gets a thrill, he said, from seeing bears or foxes from the road when he drives through the countryside.

Dmitry Dadonov and Galina Verigina, a married couple who are both physicians, bemoaned the failure of post-Soviet reforms to improve life. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service