Short answers, pulled from the story.
Vladivostok means 'Lord of the East' or 'Ruler of the East.' The name derives from the Slavic word vlad, meaning 'to rule,' and the Russian word vostok, meaning 'east.' It was first applied to a bay in 1859 by Governor-General Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky, then transferred to the new settlement after an expedition by Alexei Karlovich Shefner in 1860.
Vladivostok was founded on June 20 (July 2 in the Gregorian calendar) 1860, when the transport ship Mandzhur of the Siberian Military Flotilla, under Lieutenant-Commander Alexei Karlovich Shefner, landed a military unit at Golden Horn Bay to establish a military post. The first civilian settler, merchant Yakov Lazarevich Semyonov, arrived on the 31st of October 1861.
A Soviet decree dated the 11th of August 1951 imposed a special closed-city regime on Vladivostok, effective the 1st of January 1952, primarily because of its role as the home of the Pacific Fleet of the Russian Navy. The closure ended when Boris Yeltsin signed decree No. 123 on the 20th of September 1991, opening the city to foreign visitors starting the 1st of January 1992.
On Stalin's orders, both the Chinese quarter Millionka and the Korean enclave Sinhanch'on were liquidated and their residents deported between 1936 and 1938. At its peak, Millionka housed up to 50,000 Chinese residents, and by 1915 around 10,000 Koreans lived in Sinhanch'on. By the 2010 census, Koreans and Chinese together made up roughly 1 percent of the city's population.
Vladivostok is the eastern terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which was completed in 1905 and built specifically to link European Russia with the city. During World War II, the port processed lend-lease cargo at nearly four times the volume of Murmansk and nearly five times the volume of Arkhangelsk, making it a critical supply corridor for the Soviet war effort.
Notable people born in Vladivostok include film actor Yul Brynner (1920-1985), who was born at 15 Aleutskaya Street and has a granite statue in his honor outside that address; physicist Igor Tamm (1895-1971); rock musician Ilya Lagutenko (born 1968), founder of the band Mumiy Troll; and soldier Stanislav Petrov (1939-2017), credited with averting a nuclear war.