The paradox of Russian reality is the life of the hinterland.
Blogger Sergey Anashkevich writes about the most terrible city in Russia in his LiveJournal.
To be honest, I have never seen a more trashy city in Russia. Real hole. It seems that the war here ended not so long ago. And this is only two hundred and a few kilometers from Moscow. But Torzhok could look completely different if it were not for this amazing neglect and devastation, and numerous ancient churches and monasteries have been restored and brought to a divine state. But no... Everything is as it is.
Sad, depressing, hopeless...
2. Not far from Torzhok, on the way to the village of Rashkino, there is a river called Darkness. You know, it is named very appropriately. That's right on point.
3. To be honest, when we drove into Torzhok, I did not think that everything would be somehow bad. Well, they decided in the "Interns" to find a town like Uryupinsk or Tmutarakan, which would be associated with a remote province, and mock him, but ... after all, for good reason.
First, wine and vodka shops went one after another ...
6. And even just knocked out where no one lives ...
7. There were more and more boarded up windows, and on many houses you can see a flaunting "For Sale" banner.
8. And, apparently, there is only one real estate agency left afloat here - "Trust".
9. And then we came to the center of the town, judging by the monument to Lenin in the park near administrative building. Across the road from the square we saw a breathtaking fence, some kind of ruined building, all covered with obscenities and other "funny" things. We leave the car here and continue walking.
10. On the fence, details of the personal life of a certain Olya Gvozdeva
11. Behind the fence is a small wasteland with a strange gate at the opposite end, from which, despite the snow and -1, children in sweaters run out...
12. It turns out that behind the fence is the school yard and the premises where labor lessons are held, where half-dressed schoolchildren run.
Nice school yard, nothing to say!
13. Labor office
14. Dressing room.
15. Schoolchildren. I would like to hope that all five from this photo will break out into people, and will not become regulars in the store from the third photo
16. Literally behind the fence is a monument to Lenin. He reproachfully looks at the ruins of the house opposite his square.
17. The house, apparently, was chosen by the lumpen, lovers of alcohol and the homeless
Very strange tire fitting
19. Residential houses and a yard full of joy. Get those two cars out of here and you could be lost in time. Living texture for films about the Soviet past
20. But a beautiful building! How could it have been brought to such a state?
21. People working in this building are trying to brighten up the surrounding dullness as best they can.
21. last hope on palm trees. Not real ones on tropical islands, but such as they are ... From under beer bottles.
22. And the view from here is beautiful!
Spring is probably not so sad here
23. Residential buildings nearby.
24. Do local residents, apparently, in the norm of things to arrange an auto cemetery in your yard.
And it's not just that either. Apparently, for many, everything is bad with income, since they are not able to repair their car, which is not the worst, and it is forced to slowly rot
25. Boomer...
26. What good name streets...
27. Bench - the top of engineering. Probably, in the same labor office they teach how to do such
28. Garbage thrown right onto the road is not even surprised
30. A bit of romance on the pavement. But what's a little further?
32. We go down to the river and the embankment ... What interesting inscription in an abandoned house...
33. Good, at least without a phone number
34. Dogs here do not spare passers-by
I introduced myself great opportunity not only to tell, but also to show how life is in the Russian outback. Perhaps the inhabitants big cities imbue.
Many times on the Internet the topic of how people live in the Russian outback was raised.
It is my deep conviction that the inhabitants of big cities have two polar opinions about how villages live. To one, the villages seem to be such gingerbread houses with carved architraves, white stoves and housewives-grandmothers who only do what they bake delicious pies and weave lace. They feed everyone they meet with pies, and cover all conceivable and inconceivable surfaces in their home with lace.
Others watch not only serials on TV, but no-no in the news, and information will slip through that Russian villages live poorly. Therefore, they know that it’s bad to live in the village, but what exactly this badness is already somehow not very good.
“It’s better to see once than hear 100 times”, so we look at the pictures, read the comments.
So, the initial data: my friends and I went to visit Smolensk region, to a distant relative of one of the comrades. We deliberately keep silent about the name of the village, it is located about two hundred km from Moscow, 5 km from the city of Gagarin. Those. not some Siberian wilderness, but the most that neither is central region- neighbors of Muscovites.
There are 32 houses in the village, a normal asphalt road goes to it, in the village itself the soil is of average quality.
Of the beauties of nature - a pond that blooms by mid-summer, around unplowed fields, wetland, liquid forest.
The store is in the neighboring village, the rest of the infrastructure is in the city. Gas, plumbing, sewage - they've never heard of it here. Electricity is cut down regularly, we stayed in the house for less than a day, there were 3 shutdowns.
The mistress of the house is a rather imposing, by village standards, lady retirement age. DOES NOT PLUMP, does not work, there are no children, it is not clear what exists. Several of them live in the area. distant relatives, some of which seem to be adequate, the rest come to their native village exclusively to thump and rage.
I draw Special attention that the pictures are crooked, not because the photographer, i.e. I have crooked hands, but because this is how it looks in reality.
And here is the house! When we arrived, I was sure that they hadn’t lived in it for 20 years, but no, they live constantly both in winter and summer.
Porch.
Welcome to the house! The front door from the inside: the gaps in it and in the windows are palm-wide. In winter, snowdrifts lie here.
A cold corridor, from which you can get into the winter part of the house and onto the terrace. The terrace is some kind of incredible wreck, where now there is a toilet (a bucket with a toilet seat).
Winter house. This is a corridor-entrance-dining room all rolled into one.
The brightest detail of the interior.
To the right is the kitchen, it was scary to walk there: the slope of the floor was 25 degrees, the boards creak and sag underfoot.
There is a stove in the kitchen, but they don’t heat it, food is cooked on a gas stove (gas in a cylinder is in the kitchen and poisons, so they don’t try to use it often) and on an electric stove, which for some reason lives in the room. While the kettle boiled on it, we waited 40 minutes.
In the dining room for heating the house there is such a potbelly stove, the pipe is led into the chimney and something is crumbling there all the time. It is heated with firewood, but because it blows wildly from all the cracks, then there is not much heat from it. And this is at a temperature of +10 on the street, which in winter is not clear to me, the hostess walks all the time in a hat and jacket. There is also an antediluvian electric heater in the room, which cannot be turned on for a long time - firstly, it is expensive, and secondly, it is short.
The only room in the house. The hostess did everything to make it seem comfortable. But in the house there is a smell of dampness and rotten wood, it blows from all the cracks and from all the windows - what kind of comfort can we talk about? On the left, the main entertainment in the house is a TV, it doesn’t reach the plasma panel, right?
House with reverse side, in the photo it is hard to see that the entire wall is patched-patched.
Once it was a bathhouse, now firewood is stored here. On the left is what's left of the toilet.
the only new building on the site - a well, the price of the issue, among other things, 20 sput. In the background is a burnt neighbor's house. The fires in the village should be mentioned separately.
Every spring, plowed fields burn around the village, the area is very windy. When the fire approaches the village, there is practically nothing to do. So last weekend, a neighbor's house burned down and another one burned to the ground. In the distance, smoke was visible in the fields, and we hurried there.
The fire was moving in a large front from the village to a small grove. We tried to deal with it.
Nothing worked out for us, the grove began with a terrible crack.
Well, how do you like living conditions? You might think the locals have a choice! It is impossible to sell this house and land - no one needs it, which means there is no possibility to move. The house is about to fall apart, but the hostess is already so tired of patching holes that she does not think about it.
There is nowhere to work in the countryside, in Gagarin no one needs an aunt before retirement age, plus there is no money for daily round-trip travel. It turns out that there is no money even for the most basic things. The refrigerator is empty, for dinner we were offered potatoes and carrots, boiled in large chunks in a cast iron without oil. At the same time, the hostess was still trying to refuse the products that we brought with us.
Literally 3 houses in the whole village stand out with renovated walls, all the rest are the same as in the pictures. There are many remains of burnt houses, which are eventually dismantled for firewood.
Many thanks to my aunt for her hospitality, but to be honest, it was unpleasant to be in the house: everything is gray, dull, hopeless, like the whole life of local residents.
#life is getting better
"Wherever we, Russian people, live, in whatever position
we have not been, we never and nowhere leave grief
about our Motherland, about Russia. This is natural and inevitable: this
sorrow cannot and must not leave us. She is a manifestation
our living love for the Motherland and our faith in it"
The great Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin (Why we believe in Russia).
Inconspicuous villages - a blurry spot behind the windows of cars rushing along the federal highways of Russia. Who ever looked inside these caskets? Who among you was interested in life there?
moving out with federal highway M2, I ended up in a completely different Russia, the Russia of that time. After reading this post, the atmosphere of sadness and loneliness will not leave you yet for a long time. Perhaps you will consider me a faulty pessimist, but in short, I can say this: life in Russia, to put it mildly, is not sugar; here it is bad everywhere and everywhere the number of minuses far exceeds the number of pluses ...
As you know, "the roots of any civilization grow from the village." I suggest you look at how people live today not in a distant village or farm, but in villages, not some Siberian wilderness, but the most central region - the neighbors of Muscovites. It seems that this is just some other world in which time has stopped.
1. The village of Krapivna ( Tula region). There used to be a city. The population is about 3000 thousand people.
At the very entrance to the village stands an abandoned state farm. Its size struck, it occupies about 10 hectares of land.
Photo 1
The only place where there is a revival all the time is the cemetery, black with fresh graves. There is a ruined temple in the cemetery.
Photo 2
Everything here is sad.
Photo 5
Photo 7
The village consists of 90% of these houses.
Photo 8
Russia has always been strong with its village, at all times it was the village that gave bread and strength to the country. Now the government prefers to import food, food raw materials for petrodollars, rather than to strengthen and develop the rural sector. Together with villages and villages, the so-called small towns wither and die, with city-forming enterprises that close and stop giving the city jobs, while destroying infrastructure and the social sphere.
Photo 11
A typical picture of a Russian village (village) is terrifying. Here you can see overgrown with weeds up to the roofs of the houses. In some of them, pieces of plywood, cardboard or film are inserted in the windows - simply because there are no shops where you can buy glass.
Here they have a central street where they are located: administration, savings bank, hospital, post office.
Photo 13
There used to be a temple here, then a fire department, now there are mice and rats.
Photo 19
Thanks for warning.
Photo 21
Here is the hospital.
Photo 22
There are a lot of these wooden houses there.
Photo 24
There are also two-storey (apartment) houses.
Photo 26
Photo 27
The population of not only villages that simply disappear from the maps, but also small towns and villages has sharply decreased. Do not think that these are only areas Far East, - these are areas located 200 km from Moscow. It is enough to go not far outside this zone, and you will see what is happening there.
Photo 35
Historical building.
Photo 36
Now the local "Gazprom" is located here. Previously, there was a school here, L.N. was a member of the school council. Tolstoy.
At the exit is another temple, or rather the ruins of the temple ..
Photo 38
Photo 40
Previously, the local administration used to sit in this building, now there is no one there, well, almost no one. Next to the building there is also a ubiquitous pay phone, there are 3 of them (I remind you that the state spent 63 billion rubles on them and annual maintenance costs 4 billion). Who will call him? And did you ever call? Hardly.
Photo 42
As it turned out, the Russian Post is located here. Hellish conditions.
Photo 43
In this building, every day from morning to evening, everyone drinks, both boys and girls ... To the question "why do you drink" I received the answer "What to do, there is no work, so bring us with you right now. We are ready to work as guards, drivers. We don't need a lot of money." The guys are young, about 30 years old. Earlier, by the way, there were apartments from the collective farm. There is no collective farm, no apartments. At the bottom left of the window you can see the silhouettes.
Photo 44
There are also two-storey apartment buildings in the village. There is no gas or water in the houses. There is nothing there, there is no life there, but people live. To conduct gas, it is necessary to collect 600 thousand rubles from each house. That kind of money has never been here.
Photo 45
How are you?
The housing stock is dilapidated and is not being repaired, but why, after all, everyone will leave for the city anyway, so there are no roads, no transport, the only regular bus or train routes are canceled forever.
Photo 45
Schools, paramedical stations, clubs, hospitals are closed, and finally, the store is the last to close. Everything, end. Go wherever you want, leave houses, gardens, graves of your ancestors, leave old people to die alone, because where to transport them, and why, when they grew up here, lived, gave birth to children, buried their parents. The village has lost the simple meaning of its existence. The land, the greatest wealth of RUSSIA, is abandoned and dying.
Photo 46
Residents repeatedly wrote letters to the Kremlin, Putin, hoping that they would be heard, but there was no answer ... They asked for gas, a road, and a bus to go three times a day. There is no hospital, the nearest hospital is 50 km away. There is one shop in the village, though there is vodka vodka vodka.
Photo 47
They burn wood here.
Photo 48
He has two sons, they drink together ... He says in 5 years there will be nothing and no one here. Some will die from drinking, others will kill each other from drinking. From the lack of work, from the meaninglessness of existence, the rural population is degrading at some unthinkable pace, and, first of all, this results in rampant alcoholism, and now also drug addiction among young people.
Photo 49
It has a bad effect on the health of residents and social disorder, which is why after 12 noon most of residents are under the influence of alcohol.
Photo 51
In 2005, the distillery was closed, many locals worked there. Now they are looking for work.
Photo 52
There was a huge collective farm, which occupied leading positions in Russia. Here's what's left of him.
Photo 53
Without city-forming enterprises and infrastructure settlements not just inefficient, but unviable, and their population is not even "consumable", but "waste" material. How people survive these "objective" processes, apparently, the authorities do not care. "Saving the population is the work of the population itself"!
That's it.
According to the most realistic demographic forecasts, the population of Russia in the next decade will not grow, but decline. At the same time in major cities there is a problem of lack of affordable housing for the population. The state, on the other hand, accepts promising programs: to set records for the commissioning of housing, to overtake everyone and everything, and the like. Significantly reduced availability for rural population medical care and education. The Accounts Chamber provided the following statistics: for the period from 2005 to 2010, 12,377 schools were closed in the country, the vast majority - in countryside(81%). The number of hospitals has decreased over 10 years by 40%, and polyclinics - by 25%. The process of dying of the village continues. No measures are taken to develop the village, and even the money that is allocated is stolen. All changes are only on paper, in reality I showed you how it looks.
Some kind of spiritual, deep-seated complaint about a huge injustice, when it seems that you haven’t lived yet, you kept hoping - tomorrow, then, and life has already been lived, and you can’t fix anything. you won’t change, you won’t return, and life turns out to be a big deception, but it’s not clear who is deceiving and why ....
Many times on the Internet the topic of how people live in the Russian outback was raised.
I had a great opportunity not only to tell, but also to show what it is like. Perhaps the inhabitants of big cities will be imbued.
It is my deep conviction that the inhabitants of big cities have two polar opinions about how villages live. For some, the villages seem like gingerbread houses with carved architraves, little white stoves and housewives-grandmothers who only do what they bake delicious pies and weave lace. They feed everyone they meet with pies, and cover all conceivable and inconceivable surfaces in their home with lace.
Others watch not only serials on TV, but no-no in the news, and information will slip through that Russian villages live poorly. Therefore, they know that it’s bad to live in the village, but what exactly this badness is already somehow not very good.
"It's better to see once than hear 100 times", so we look at the pictures, read the comments.
So, the initial data: my friends and I went on a visit to the Smolensk region, to a distant relative of one of our comrades. We deliberately keep silent about the name of the village, it is located about two hundred km from Moscow, 5 km from the city of Gagarin. Those. not some Siberian wilderness, but the most central region - the neighbors of Muscovites.
There are 32 houses in the village, a normal asphalt road goes to it, in the village itself the soil is of average quality.
Of the beauties of nature - a pond that blooms by mid-summer, around unplowed fields, wetland, liquid forest.
Shop in a neighboring village, the rest of the infrastructure - in the city. Gas, plumbing, sewage - they've never heard of it here. Electricity is cut down regularly, we stayed in the house for less than a day, there were 3 shutdowns.
The mistress of the house is a rather imposing, by village standards, lady of pre-retirement age. DOES NOT PLUMP, does not work, there are no children, it is not clear what exists. Several of her distant relatives live in the district, some of whom seem to be in adequate condition, the rest come to their native village exclusively to thump and rage.
I draw special attention to the fact that the pictures are crooked, not because the photographer, i.e. I have crooked hands, but because this is how it looks in reality.
And here is the house! When we arrived, I was sure that they had not lived in it for 20 years, but no - they live constantly both in winter and summer.
A cold corridor, from which you can get into the winter part of the house and onto the terrace. The terrace is some kind of incredible wreck, where the toilet (a bucket with a toilet seat) is now located.
To the right is the kitchen, it was scary to walk there: the slope of the floor was 25 degrees, the boards creak and sag underfoot.
There is a stove in the kitchen, but they don’t heat it, food is cooked on a gas stove (gas in a cylinder is in the kitchen and poisons, so they don’t try to use it often) and on an electric stove, which for some reason lives in the room. While the kettle boiled on it, we waited 40 minutes.
In the dining room for heating the house there is such a potbelly stove, the pipe is led into the chimney and something is crumbling there all the time. It is heated with firewood, but because it blows wildly from all the cracks, then there is not much heat from it. And this is at a temperature of +10 on the street, which in winter is not clear to me, the hostess walks all the time in a hat and jacket. There is also an antediluvian electric heater in the room, which cannot be turned on for a long time - firstly, it is expensive, and secondly, it is short.
The only room in the house. The hostess did everything to make it seem comfortable. But in the house there is a smell of dampness and rotten wood, it blows from all the cracks and from all the windows - what kind of comfort can we talk about? On the left, the main entertainment in the house is a TV, it doesn’t reach the plasma panel, right?
The only new building on the site is a well, the price of the issue, by the way, is 20 sput. In the background is a burnt neighbor's house. The fires in the village should be mentioned separately.
Well, how do you like living conditions? You might think the locals have a choice! It is impossible to sell this house and land - no one needs it, so there is no possibility to move. The house is about to fall apart, but the hostess is already so tired of patching holes that she does not think about it.
There is nowhere to work in the countryside, in Gagarin no one needs an aunt before retirement age, plus there is no money for daily round-trip travel. It turns out that there is no money even for the most basic things. The refrigerator is empty, for dinner we were offered potatoes and carrots, boiled in large chunks in a cast iron without oil. At the same time, the hostess was still trying to refuse the products that we brought with us.
In the whole village, literally 3 houses stand out with renovated walls, all the rest are the same as in the pictures. There are many remains of burnt houses, which are eventually dismantled for firewood.
Many thanks to my aunt for her hospitality, but to be honest, it was unpleasant to be in the house: everything is gray, dull, hopeless, like the whole life of local residents.
Chekalin, Vereya, Totma, Krapivna, Belev... Russian empire- here, and not in megacities like Moscow, seethed real life. How do the small towns of Russia live today (or rather, how do they survive), what help do they need, and what will our country and our history lose if these centers of Russian provincial culture disappear from the map one by one?
A city built on gold
Artyomovsk cannot be called a typical city. There are no cinemas, restaurants, convenience stores or even traffic lights.
There are only a few paved roads, residential developments are ordinary village houses with small vegetable gardens, cows walk around the city center, and there is a “birdhouse” toilet in the yard near the city hall.
From Krasnoyarsk to Artemovsk 350 km, along the road for many kilometers the taiga. In fact, 1.5 thousand people live here today. School, Kindergarten and the paramedic's station huddle in the same building. There are no graduates of medical schools who want to go to work in such a city. The pediatrician comes twice a week from the neighboring village, “ Ambulance” also gets to Artyomovsk for 25 km. Locals complain that in some cases visiting doctors have no one to save.
View of the city of Artemovsk. A photo:
But once upon a time everything was different. AT Soviet time Artyomovsk had 25,000 inhabitants and was administrative center district. But that was a different time. Golden. AT literally. These places are rich in gold, which has been mined here since Catherine's time. “I started working at the mine in 1975. mountain foreman. I received 300 rubles a month - good money, ”says the hereditary gold miner Viktor Bautin. Viktor Evseevich saw as much gold as others could not even dream of, but it seems that he did not become infected with the gold rush. Lives modestly in an ordinary country house, keeps chickens.
According to Viktor Bautin, about 200 tons of gold are hidden within a radius of 30 km from Artemovsk at a depth of 400-500 m. He drew these conclusions on the basis of research Soviet years. In order to develop these reserves, the state needs to simplify the licensing system, the pensioner believes.
By the way, Artyomovtsy live very close to Moscow. Moscow-mountain is the name of one of the Sayan peaks. There is a sign: as the first snow falls on the Moscow Mountain, so it will cover the city. In general, signs and legends are taken seriously here. Locals say that gold deposits in the mountains are not randomly located, but in the form of a huge horse hidden in the bowels of the earth.
Moscow-mountain. Photo: official website of the City Administration of Artemovsk
Near Artyomovsk there is a real Golden Key. There is so much perit (a companion of gold) that on a sunny day the bottom literally glows. According to the old-timers, the tools of prospectors from tsarist times are still kept near the stream. Since ancient times, not only gold was mined here, but also furs. Now there is less game, and there are only a few fishermen. But the population of bears is growing every year. Clubfoot do not disdain to rummage through the garbage heaps, and sometimes stagger at night on remote streets adjacent to the taiga.
The saddest thing for the city is not the lack of asphalt or skyscrapers, but total unemployment. In order to feed their families, men go on shift and do not live at home for several weeks, or even months. Such a schedule becomes fatal for some families. But in December 2016, a pilot plant was put into operation in Artyomovsk to produce gold from stale tailings (the so-called waste after processing gold-bearing ore). It is planned to process up to 200 thousand tons of raw materials per year and receive 120-130 kg of precious metal each. There were 130 jobs, the budget began to receive payments.
The construction of the pilot plant, they say, cost investors 400 million rubles. But, according to the old-timers, given the prospects for raw materials, these investments will pay off, gold mining will flourish here again, and Artyomovsk will flourish along with it.
| The smallest cities in Russia |
| Chekalin (Tula region) - 965 people |
| Vysotsk (Leningrad region) - 1120 people |
| Verkhoyansk (Yakutia) - 1131 people |
| Kurilsk (Iturup Island) - 1547 people |
| Artyomovsk ( Krasnoyarsk region) - 1777 people. |
| Ples (Ivanovo region) - 1796 people |
| Primorsk (Kaliningrad region) - 1960 people |
| Ostrovnoy (Murmansk region) - 1960 people |
| Gorbatov ( Nizhny Novgorod region.) - 1982 people. |
| Vereya (Moscow region) - 5123 people |
Two faces of one Primorsk
2,000 people now live in Primorsk.
- I will say culturally: we are the "fifth point" of the world, - says local resident Nina Ivanovna. “There are only jobs for the military here. House of culture, school, kindergarten, two or three shops - that's the whole set of "entertainment". Life in Kaliningrad and Baltiysk! And our pluses are fresh air and silence.
“But what about healing mud,” I recall the “lure” from the guidebook.
- Dirt? the young woman thinks. - That's good enough! As the rain passes, mud is all over Primorsk ...
In perestroika, devastation reigned around. AT last years the situation is slowly changing. Khrushchev houses on the main street were restored, flower beds and the Walk of Fame were laid out, where veterans planted personalized trees. Vacationers, usually passing by Primorsk, began to increasingly turn to the bay - they have equipped an excellent recreation area there. And the fishing here has always been excellent. Primorsk has potential - just invest in its development!
Military archaeologist Kirill Opalenik will name a thousand reasons for the Russians to visit him native city. home - rich historical heritage. AT next year Fischhausen (as Primorsk was called before the war) will be 750 years old. Once the district was called the paradise of East Prussia.
Copper engraving depicting Fischhausen. Photo: Public Domain
“Life in Fischhausen was seething,” says Kirill. - In addition to the brewery, which produced 15 varieties of beer, there were two brick, fish and dairy factories, three mills, 22 coffee houses, six schools, a children's sanatorium ...
Most high building city - water tower. Under the Germans, there was an observation deck from which a wonderful view opened. Now it does not work - the spiral staircase has not been repaired since 1914.
And from the main attraction of the region - the Fishhausen castle of 1700 - only ruins remained. It was the main strategic object Teutonic Order. During World War II, there was a hospital here. An English air bomb destroyed him along with his patients. But the castle bridge remained. Its design is unique: in the middle, plates are manually opened for the passage of ships. In 1945, the Germans mined the bridge, but two of our officers managed to save it.
And here is the oak, which was planted in 1870 in honor of the end Franco-Prussian War collapsed a few years ago. A resident of Germany, who took over the baton of the caretaker of the oak from his father, came to Primorsk and wept at the remains of the trunk, as if close friend. In return, the residents of Primorsk planted a young seedling opposite.
According to rumors, this tree passed german line defense, a lot of blood was shed. In honor of dead soldiers- both German and Russian - a monument was erected nearby from fragments of shells, bayonet shovels and other military "iron".
Town from the Tretyakov Gallery
The town of Gorbatov, which is located in Nizhny Novgorod region, famous for its landscapes. Here in the neighborhood Nikita Mikhalkov filmed Burnt by the Sun 2: The Citadel. Gorbatov became a city back in the 18th century, but today it has 2,000 inhabitants. From the main road to the city, you will have to wind 25 km. The road is broken in places as if real, not cinematic battles took place here. Writer Andrey Melnikov-Pechersky about Gorbatov wrote: “The city is tiny and quiet. Not a soul on the streets. They are overgrown with grass." And now the main flat city highway - st. Lenin, in other places you can see fragments of pavements of the 19th century. Previously, Vladimirka passed here - the highway from Moscow to Nizhny, along which Catherine II, poet Alexander Pushkin... We go to the library to find out what tourists can see in Gorbatov. — Beautiful landscapes! - we hear in response. In the reading room of the local library, you can look through a touching homemade album printed on a black and white printer. The only pity is that next to the photo of beautiful houses of a bygone era, there is often a signature: “Demolished”. There are two viewing platforms. From one, which is on the central Pervomaiskaya Square, there is an amazing view of the Oka floodplain. The river in the Gorbatov region makes a large bend, the Klyazma flows into it. On the central square rises the main cathedral of Gorbatov - Trinity. It was erected in honor of the victory over Napoleon. Now the cathedral is being restored, services are going on in it. In past centuries, the square was buzzing, trade was brisk. Famous artist Abram Arkhipov at the beginning of the 20th century. it was here that he found characters for the paintings “Away”, “Traders”, “On a Spring Holiday”. Now his works hang in the Tretyakov Gallery. You look at them and you understand: little has changed here since that time. Unless the famous Krasnogorbatov cows no longer walk the streets... Gorbatov froze in history, like a fly in amber. No tourist buses, no hotels and restaurants, no guides and excursions. A few general stores and quite a decent dining room. But what kind of views of the Oka are there - you can’t buy them for any money!
"You can't buy us for a penny!"
Most small city Russia - Chekalin - is located 120 km from Tula.
It has 15 streets, 266 houses and 965 inhabitants. However, to winter, according to head of the local administration Irina Usenkova, remain no more than 400 people.
in the city for normal life there is almost everything - there is not only work, so pensioners and creative people live here well. From iconic places there is a cathedral in the Empire style, which is almost 200 years old, secondary school with 105 students, House of Culture, library, fire department (not a single fire in a year), vocal and instrumental ensemble, post office.
Special pride - historic building Nobility Assembly, prison castle, City Treasury. But they come here mainly for the sake of inspecting the Likhvinsky geological section. 400 thousand years ago, a glacier left its marks here, forging outlandish plants, fish and even a few remains of mammoths. All this beauty is in plain sight, cut like a layer cake - watch and admire.
Chekalin never surrendered to the enemy, and even more so you won’t take him with economic troubles. Photo: RIA Novosti / Maria Savchenko
Until 1944 the town was called Likhvin. They say that it got its name due to the dashing character of its inhabitants, who never surrendered the city to the enemy over the centuries. Therefore, on the coat of arms of the city - a lion.
Little Chekalin is planned according to the model ancient cities- mesh. The master plan of 1776 with the geometric clarity of the streets and lanes has survived to this day. The small size of the "ancient policy" has long haunted the authorities. They say it was in the 1950s. They wanted to delete Chekalin from the list of cities and turn it into a village, but then something distracted the father of the peoples Stalin, and the city with the letter "H", which turned out to be at the end of the list, remained uncrossed out. Recently, the regional authorities have returned to this topic. Chekalin residents were promised to introduce rural benefits for changing their status: both the working day is shorter and the cost utilities lower than in the city, and a 25% wage increase for state employees. The Chekalins gathered for a meeting and... categorically refused! Although most of the city's residents are pensioners who count every ruble in their wallet.
We were a city, a city and we will remain! - the Likhvin-Chekalins proudly declared. "You can't buy us with pennies!"
