[4] By the end of the 18th century, Taganrog had lost its importance as a military base after Crimea and the entire Sea of Azov were absorbed into the Russian Empire.

When the White Russians were defeated and Bolshevik power was established in the city on 25 December 1919, Denikin's remaining troops and the British Consulate were evacuated by HMS Montrose.

During World War II, Taganrog was occupied by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1943 during Operation Barbarossa, when two SS divisions entered the city on 17 October 1941, followed by the Wehrmacht.

Taganrog's main trading partners are the CIS countries, South Korea, Turkey, Italy, Greece, and Egypt.

Anton Chekhov featured the city and its people in many of his works, including Ionych, The House with an Attic, The Man in a Shell, Van'ka, Three Years, Mask, and My Life.

It is believed that Taganrog may have been the Lukomorye (fairy tale land) in which Alexander Pushkin's Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820) was set.

[23] The city also appeared in the novels of Ivan Vasilenko and Konstantin Paustovsky and in the poems of Nikolay Sherbina and Valentin Parnakh.

The legend of "Elder Fyodor Kuzmich" is cited in the book Roza Mira by Russian mystic Daniil Andreyev.

According to this legend, the Russian tsar Alexander I did not die in Taganrog, but instead left his crown and the status of monarch to continue his life as a traveling hermit.

In Maria Kuncewiczowa's 1945 novel The Stranger (New York, LB Fischer publisher), the city of Taganrog plays an essential role as a place of nostalgic happiness for the uprooted Polish musician and matriarch, Rose.