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The first Russian settlers founded a village on the present site of Nevelsk in 1789.[citation needed] The region was the site of a struggle for control between the Russians and Japanese. After the treaty of Shimoda officially transferred the southern Kuril Islands to Japan in 1855, the settlement was placed under joint Russian-Japanese administration under the name Honto.


Nevelsk before 1945
Honto reverted to complete Russian administration in 1875, as the Treaty of Saint Petersburg gave control of all the Kuril Islands to Japan, in exchange for complete Russian sovereignty over the island of Sakhalin. It then returned to Japanese rule in 1905, after the Treaty of Portsmouth ceded southern Sakhalin to Japan to end the Russo-Japanese War.

Sakhalin's first ice-free harbor was constructed here between 1916 and 1927, and the settlement developed as a center for the local fishing industry.

The end of World War II saw the Soviet Army retake the full island of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. The settlement was granted town status in 1947 under its present name, in honor of Admiral Gennady Nevelskoy.[citation needed]

The town was damaged by the 2007 Sakhalin earthquake, leaving about two thousand people homeless.[8]