Певек: Тарихы, климаты және құлдырауы

There are two theories for the origin of the town's name. The first is that it is derived from the Chukchi word for fat; it was originally named for the nearby hill Peekin'ey, meaning "swollen mountain". The more macabre theory is that the name is derived from the Chukchi word "Pagytkenay", meaning "smelly mountain". During the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the town's population dropped by more than half as commercial navigation in the Arctic went into decline and people began to gravitate towards the central Russian regions. Though these claims are based on anecdotal evidence, it is in line with the Russian census from 2021 that verifies significant drop in population in Chukotka.

The workforce for the mines that provided the Soviet Union with tin and uranium throughout the large parts of the 20th century were prisoners in the Gulag system. to which it is directly subordinated. As a municipal division, the town of Pevek is, together with two rural localities (the selos of Apapelgino and Yanranay) incorporated within Chaunsky Municipal District as Pevek Urban Settlement.

Pevek has a tundra climate (Köppen ET), with long, very cold winters, and short, cool summers. February is the coldest month, with average temperature of , while July, with , is the warmest. Although the average temperature for July is below , sometimes it may be several degrees warmer with a record high average of for July 2007. Sometimes, but very rarely, it happens that the lowest night temperature stays above , which is characteristic for subtropical areas with very mild climate. The lowest temperature ever recorded was on February 7, 8 and 10, 1978, and the highest was on July 8, 2010.

The town is a large port on the Northern Sea Route, the most important northern port in Chukotka, although shipping levels have dropped significantly in recent years. The port is the eastern base of the northern sea route's Marine Operations Headquarters, run by the Far East Shipping Company (FESCO) from an icebreaker in the harbor, though the port is still owned by the Russian Ministry of Transport. The port's authority stretches as far as 125° east, just west of the Lena River. Past this point, the western Marine Operations Headquarters, in Dikson, has control. Despite its prominence as the eastern Marine Operations Headquarters, the level of cargo the port has had to deal with in recent years has been declining rapidly. Although there is still gold mining around Bilibino and Leningradsky, there is little in the way of cargo generation as a result of that industry. The port is not a significant exporter of goods at all and is mainly responsible for dealing with the import of fuel (coal from Beringovsky and oil from Europe and the United States) for the region, though in the second half of the 1990s even this activity rarely exceeded a few thousand tons, and in 1997, Mys Shmidta, traditionally the second most important of the northern Chukotkan ports, was handling nearly four times as much cargo. The future does not look promising either, and although mining for other materials such as tin still occurs in the region, many of the mines have closed, being deemed unprofitable, and a number of settlements, such as Iultin, Komsomolsky, and Krasnoarmeysky have been depopulated, with any remaining economic activity producing only very low cargo volumes at best. this is for a port whose average sailing season lasts only until October 25. The port has a maximum ship draft of .

Besides the port as a key transport link with the rest of Russia, the town is also served by the Pevek Airport, located to the northeast of the town in the village of Apapelgino, a locality established specifically to house the airport's staff.