44 Lenin Avenue

A researcher's journey to Siberia

Tag: Solzhenitsyn

Klyuev in Tomsk: A story worth exploring?

19 February 2020 / / 1 Comment

One of the more interesting stories in Tomsk in the 1930s was that of poet Nikolai Kliuev (sometimes spelled Klyuev), discussed earlier in this blog.

While I’m still not fully committed to a focus on Kliuev, he draws together some interesting threads from other subjects I’ve been working on in the 44 Lenin Avenue project.

  • Memory (part 1): Kliuev’s case was one of the first explored by the Tomsk Memorial Society, according to L.F. Pichurin in his short, 1995 book, Poslednie dni Nikolaia Kliueva (Tomsk: Volodei, 1995). It is the Tomsk Memorial Society, of course, that took over basement 44 Lenin Avenue in 1989 with the purpose of creating a museum. Why was this one of the first cases? Aside from being a well-known poet, there had been a mystery surrounding his death. It was well-known that he had been exiled to the Tomsk region in 1934 and had spent time in both Kolpashevo and Tomsk, but his death remained a mystery until there was archival access in the late-1980s. Reports from the 1960s had stated that he died of a heart attack at a train station on the way back to Moscow. Archival documents, however, confirmed his arrest and execution in 1937.

  • Memory (part 2): Kliuev, interestingly, was also subject of an article in the late-1980s in the conservative literary publication, Nash Sovermennik. Iurii Khardikov published some thoughts and re-published some documents pertaining to Kliuev’s time in Tomsk in the 12th issue of the journal from 1989. This publication is noteworthy for the 44 Lenin Avenue project in part because Nash Sovremennik had a slavophile bent, and in some ways fits into some of the ideological debates and discussions that had surrounded the 1909 murder of Ignatii. In Kliuev, we also see early evidence of the memory battles that have played out in post-Soviet Russia, which have seen conservative-nationalist versions of the past pitted against more liberal, human-rights versions (for more on this, see Zuzanna Bogomił’s book, Gulag Memories).
  • Russian Literature: In the 1909 murder of Ignatii Dvernitskii, I have discussed the real or imagined role of Dostoevsky. Kliuev, like Dostoevsky, was in some ways a conservative writer (at least from what I understand – I need to do more research!) who saw something distinct and spiritual about the Russian peasantry. This element to Kliuev’s writings is probably the reason for Nash Sovremennik‘s interest in the writer. But it also links Kliuev to another writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was the first official visitor to the Tomsk Memorial Society’s museum at 44 Lenin Avenue in 1994.

One problem with all of the links to the 44 Lenin Avenue project in the Kliuev story (which is fascinating for a number of other reasons, too, that I won’t explore right now), however, is the lack (so far) of direct evidence that Kliuev spent time at 44 Lenin Avenue. It is likely that he did. The building was, after all, one of two headquarter buildings for the NKVD for the whole period that Kliuev was in Tomsk (1934-37). It also housed an investigative prison in the basement where he could have been incarcerated before his execution. Right now, I’m going through some of these publications pertaining to Kliuev’s time in Tomsk, to see if the building is ever mentioned.

Finding Compelling Stories

27 February 2017 / / 3 Comments

As touched on in several earlier posts (e.g. here and here), the building at 44 Lenin Avenue, from its humble beginnings as a church-parish school to its role as local NKVD headquarters to its transformation into commercial and commemorative space itself provides a compelling story. This story runs parallel to many of the main trends of Siberia and Russia’s tumultuous 20th century. For the early years and the later years of the building, the specific microhistory stories are themselves rather obvious. For example, the construction of the building connects to threads of education, religion, architecture, and Tomsk’s role in the Russian empire. The architect, V. V. Khabarov, was involved in numerous other projects–including the construction of the enormous Trinity Cathedral a stone’s throw from the parish school–that helped make Tomsk Siberia’s capital in the late-Tsarist period. Another compelling story is the 1909 murder of the school headmaster. In more recent years, the founding of the Memorial NKVD Remand Prison Museum, or the visit of Solzhenitsyn to the building in 1994, also make compelling stories related to post-Soviet reckoning with Stalinist repression.

Nikolai Klyuev. Photo via Wikimedia commons. Public domain.

Even though the building’s infamy today largely derives from its role as local NKVD headquarters and remand prison during the height of Stalin-era repression, finding a specific, compelling story is proving somewhat difficult. Several famous prisoners spent time there, including philosopher Gustav Shpet and poet Nikolai Klyuev. It is even quite possible authorities shot Kluev in the basement of the building, or in the underground passageway underneath the building’s small square. So, the story could move to biography at this point. Several NKVD bosses who spent time in Tomsk achieved infamy either there or elsewhere, including Ivan Ovchinnikov (the “local Beria”), Ian Krauze (better known for his NKVD work in Leningrad), and Ivan Maltsev. The stories linked to the building seem so male dominated (the basement murder, Solzhenitsyn’s visit, and so on), and biographical stories related to the building during its NKVD incarnation risk continuing a trend. In any case, as a historian, it is my job to find a story that is both compelling but also representative, or, perhaps, exceptional, but exceptional in a way that leads to important information and analysis of the time in question. I wonder what NKVD stories will fall along these lines?

Storytelling and narrative devices

15 February 2017 / / 0 Comments

Historians tell stories. That’s our job, or part of it. Unlike the novelist or filmmaker, however, historians are limited–at least in part–by available evidence on a given topic. We cannot, in other words, just make things up. This limitation aside, however, there remain almost countless ways that historians can tell stories, and almost countless methods by which historians access the past. For the “44 Lenin Avenue” project, I am trying a new type of storytelling, at least for me: a series of small stories, almost vignettes, of events that all took place within the same building, but in different eras. The story of the building, then, is the narrative thread that holds together the other stories (murder in 1909, Solzhenitsyn’s visit to the building in 1994). While unusual for academic publishing, this type of storytelling is not unique. Here’s a list of a few influences and/or similar types of storytelling projects:

  • Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat. In this book, Brook examines the increasingly globalized world of the 17th century through a series of paintings by the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, all painted in his studio in the town of Delft. Brook uses these paintings as windows into broader currents of global history. The paintings are thus a fun and useful narrative device to tell stories as far apart as a shipwreck of a Portuguese vessel off the coast of China, to Champlain’s search for a waterway that would take him through North America.
  • Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina. Andric’s book is historical fiction, but follows the history of Bosnia and the Balkans from the 16th century to World War I by examining the life of the bridge, and the stories of those who were impacted by it. Andric paints a vivid picture of the importance of place, both how a place can affect the broader world, and how the broader world affects that particular place.
  • Francois Girard, dir., “The Red Violin.” I really loved this movie when it came out in 1998, a series of vignettes all based around the many owners of a mysterious red violin. Like The Bridge on the Drina, this story spans several centuries.
  • In the end, my method of storytelling in “44 Lenin Avenue” will hopefully resemble a layered microhistory, in which the story of the building is one such microhistory, and each event is its own microhistory. In this I am influenced both by Natalie Zemon Davis‘s classic, The Return of Martin Guerre, as well as Jill Lepore’s definition of microhistory as contrasted with biography (below), although I make no claim to even a tenth of their storytelling abilities.

If biography is largely founded on a belief in the singularity and significance of an individual’s life and his contribution to history, microhistory is founded upon almost the opposite assumption: however singular a person’s life may be, the value of examining it lies not in its uniqueness, but in its exemplariness, in how that individual’s life serves as an allegory for broader issues affecting the culture as a whole


– Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88.1 (2001): 129-144, quotation on page 133.

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