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Kuril Islands
Kuril Islands or Kuriles , Jap. Chishima-Retto, Rus. Kurilskiye Ostrova, island chain, c.6,020 sq mi (15,590 sq km), Sakhalin region, E Russia. They stretch c.775 mi (1,250 km) between S Kamchatka Peninsula and NE Hokkaido, Japan, and separate the Sea of Okhotsk from the Pacific Ocean. There...
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Sea of Okhotsk
Sea of Okhotsk , Rus. Okhotskoye More, 590,000 sq mi (1,528,100 sq km), northwest arm of the Pacific Ocean, W of the Kamchatka peninsula and the Kuril Islands. It is connected with the Sea of Japan by the Tatar and La Pérouse straits and with the Pacific Ocean by passages through the Kuril ...
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Ainu
Ainu , aborigines of Japan who may be descended from a Caucasoid people who once lived in N Asia. More powerful invaders from the Asian mainland gradually forced the Ainu to retreat to the northern islands of Japan and Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands in what is now the Russian Far East; today, they r...
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Sakhalin
Sakhalin , formerly Saghalien , island (c.29,500 sq mi/76,400 sq km), off the coast of Asian Russia, between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan; separated from the Russian mainland on the west by the Tatar Strait and from Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, by the Soya Strait. With t...
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Kamchatka
Kamchatka , peninsula, 104,200 sq mi (269,878 sq km), Kamchatka Territory, Russian Far East, separating the Sea of Okhotsk in the west from the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean in the east. Extending from lat. 51°N to lat. 61°N, it is 750 mi (1,207 km) long and terminates in the south in Cap...
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Yalta Conference
Yalta Conference meeting (Feb. 4-11, 1945), at Yalta, Crimea, USSR, of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. Most of the important decisions made remained secret until the end of World War II for military or political r...
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Japan
Japan , Jap. Nihon or Nippon, country (2005 est. pop. 127,417,000), 145,833 sq mi (377,835 sq km), occupying an archipelago off the coast of E Asia. The capital is Tokyo , which, along with neighboring Yokohama , forms the world's most populous metropolitan region.
Land
Japan proper ...
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Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Rus. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, former republic. It was established in 1922 and dissolved in 1991. The Soviet Union was the first state to be based on Marxist socialism (see also Marxism ; communism ). Until 1989 the Communist ...
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