Dead End Festival
The story of the Ryazan village of Tupik, which was considered prosperous, but is now almost entirely extinct.
A dozen deserted huts with collapsed roofs, a defunct store with a mirror on its façade, a broken payphone, and a faded tricolor flag on a log barn—this is the Ryazan village of Tupik in the Yermishinsky District, home to the last 13 residents. It's the last settlement on the border with the Nizhny Novgorod Region. For over half a century, the villagers divided their time between two regions: they were registered in one, and traveled to the other by narrow-gauge railway for school and other needs. In the 1990s, everything went wrong, work disappeared, and the residents of Tupik dispersed. Those who remained have become accustomed to the spartan conditions, stockpiling firewood for the winter, and have no plans to leave.
To the main square through potholes
The GPS was a lie. Instead of the promised four hours, the drive from Ryazan to Tupik took only five, thanks to a drunk driver of a Gazelle van we met. He pointed out the correct route, avoiding a swampy puddle on Krasnaya Gorka Street in the district center. "Heh, you won't get through here. After the police station, turn right, then right again, then go straight ahead, and once you've bounced along the gravel past the ruins, you've arrived," he predicted. And so it turned out.
First came fields and forests, then the walls of the ancient, domeless Nativity Church beyond the Merdush River, about 15 crumbling, grass-covered houses in the deserted village of Mileika, and then a road sign with the name of the village, "Tupik." The road was bumpy: closer to civilization, there were remnants of asphalt, then potholed gravel, then memories of asphalt again.
The center of Tupik is a log building, one half of which houses a medical station open once a week, while the other half housed a store just a couple of years ago. A brand-new sign from the Ryazan Region Ministry of Health hangs above one peeling door, and a dusty mirror hangs next to the other.
Five meters away is a street payphone with a leaky frame. It was installed around 2010, but it was unusable because no one could find a prepaid card for the phone. A miracle happened with the onset of the pandemic: it suddenly started working completely free of charge. True, it disconnected after three minutes of talking, but you could call back and talk to someone from anywhere in Russia for another three minutes. After a year of operation, the phone went silent—apparently forever.
Local residents told me about this a little later, but for now I'm walking down a deserted street, looking at rusty farm equipment that, surprisingly, no one has yet turned in for scrap metal. Two goats are chasing me.
A sturdy barn with a fluttering tricolor flag appears around the bend in the street. Its colors are barely discernible now. A pregnant black cat crosses the road.
At the dead end of the narrow-gauge railway
One of the houses is clearly inhabited: clean curtains hang on the windows, and a ginger kitten, missing a hind leg, darts fearfully under the gate. Its owner, a former local teacher named Tamara Tulyakova, doesn't know where it was injured or where it came from, and she's too busy to find out: five more cats and kittens have wandered into the yard. She takes pity on them and feeds them.
We enter a typical village hut with a vestibule, a stove, and two rooms. There's no running water, only bottled gas, and a wooden outhouse in the yard. On one wall of the large room is a carpet, on the other a reproduction of Ivan Kramskoy's "Unknown Woman." In the small room, there's a small sofa and a landline telephone, the only one in the entire village. It works only when there's electricity.
The hostess opens an old album with the title “Chronicle of the labor glory of the Merdushinsky logging camp” and begins “in a teacherly manner”:
— The year 1929 can be considered the founding of the village, when construction began on houses belonging to the forestry department. Dormitory and office buildings were also built. At first, they chopped wood and burned charcoal. They stacked logs one and a half meters high and covered them with earth; some broken pits remain from that time. This is how they burned charcoal; it was needed for the metallurgical plant in Vyksa. It was transported there. The timber was also transported to Vyksa by narrow-gauge railway.
Tamara Tulyakova took the "Chronicle" from the Tupikovskaya School as a souvenir. It was closed in 1998, and for a time, the school stood with its doors wide open. The former classrooms, teachers' room, and library were littered with trash, discarded books, and class registers. Soon, the log structure was dismantled and sold.
The dead end arose in the middle of the forest, five kilometers from the border with the Nizhny Novgorod (then Gorky) region. Seasonal workers had arrived there much earlier, around 1919. At first, the timber was transported by cart to the 17th kilometer railway point, and from there by narrow-gauge railway to Vyksa. Six years later, the narrow-gauge railway was extended to a logging point in the Ryazan region. It became one of approximately a dozen branches The Vyksa narrow-gauge railway. The line didn't go beyond this point; it was a dead end.
No one knows exactly how crowded Tupik was during its heyday, which spanned the 60s and 80s. The elementary school and eighth-grade school each had one class, each with over 30 students—that's more than 250 children. Some families had two children, others none. "Definitely more than 600 people," Tulyakova concluded.
"The club was also open: they showed movies all week except Mondays, and there were dances. There was a store with good goods—our supplies were better than in the city. Condensed milk, Chinese stewed meat called 'Great Wall,' clothes, furniture. The bosses from Yermishi came to us to stock up. All the goods for the logging industry workers were transported from Gorky on the narrow-gauge railway. And once a week we took passengers—some went to Vyksa for work, some went to study, many got married in Vyksa and moved there permanently," Tulyakova recalls. "But we didn't forget Dead End. Every summer, an actress from Vyksa came to visit my grandparents." Irina PegovaAnd then to my dad, who moves here for the summer to take care of bees. I just haven't been here this summer. Yes, we're proud of such a compatriot.
Until recently, the pensioner had no need for anything: her husband, who could drive her to any store or pharmacy, and her son were nearby. A couple of years ago, they all died one after another: her husband, son, and daughter—from COVID-19. Tamara Tulyakova was left alone. Only the stray cats in the yard remind her that life goes on.
"The ambulance won't come to you."
Almost at the very end of Dead End, Lyudmila Galko sits on a bench, struggling to resist the camera aimed at her: "I'm like this! I wasn't prepared!" She's the owner of the pregnant black Simka and the sister of the owner of the faded flag over the barn. I never got a chance to see Igor Sedov; he'd left early that morning to pick mushrooms. He worked on the local railroad until his last days, until management ordered the tracks dismantled in 2002. The surrounding forest had become depleted, and the forest plots had reached the end of their useful life. Communication with the neighboring region was cut off.
Galko left for Moscow to earn money in the mid-1980s and stayed. She returned in 2012 to care for her elderly parents. She still has an apartment in the capital, but plans to spend the winter in Tupik.
"First, my mother died, then my father, 92-year-old Nikolai Nikolaevich Sedov, died on September 21st. I called the paramedic, and she said, 'I'm on vacation, the ambulance won't come to you, you'll have to manage on your own.' Luckily, my brother went into the woods and came back two hours later. He called [the funeral service] to shave my father and change his clothes, because he was already frozen solid. The ambulance used to come, but after 2018, there were such problems. There are fewer people now, and the roads are covered in snow in the winter. They clear them, but only once after a snowfall, and that's it. The paramedic comes every Thursday. Three people come to her and take my blood pressure," Galko says.
"And if it's really bad, what should I do? Lie down and die?" I ask, surprised.
"I guess that's how it works (laughs). The closest medical and surgical departments were in Yermishi, but they've all closed. Now there's only one in Sasovo, 80 kilometers from here. If you call an ambulance, it doesn't always come, and they don't even go to see the elderly. They say the roads are bad, and there's only one car for the whole area. They find a way to convincingly refuse," she replies, shrugging.
She's trying to count the remaining residents—apparently, there are 13 left. There used to be more recently, but salesperson Lidiya Maslova died of COVID-19, and social worker Natalya Grishina moved to another neighborhood. The oldest resident is Anna Rozhkova, 88, and rarely leaves her house. The youngest is under 60, but he's a "business man" and rarely seen. When the older couple was younger, they would bring their grandchildren to stay with them for the summer, but now the crowds don't increase even during the warmer months.
On the street that stretches from the "main square" to the forest, there's only one well left. A social worker who comes once a week uses it to bring water to the pensioners. The limit is four buckets, but Tamara Tulyakova, for example, takes pity on the worker and asks her to bring only two. She gets water for washing dishes and floors from a barrel—rainwater, or water she fills with snow.
In the evenings, it’s sometimes scary to go outside: wolves and foxes run through the village, especially in the spring when they are hungry.
"But what holidays we have at the beginning of August!" Lyudmila Galko says, suddenly reminded. "I studied at the Ryazan Pedagogical Institute, but I didn't work here, whereas Tamara Grigoryevna [Tulyakova] has students from all over the country come to her every year. On the first weekend of August, we celebrate Village Day. Sometimes they set tables right outside, but this year, we had a party in an empty house because of the heat."
Tulyakova consults her notes again, this time with her own "chronicle," and lists: this year, students came from Krasnoyarsk Krai, Norilsk, Yermishi and Sasovo, Vyksa, and other places. This year, there were just over 70 people, but sometimes there were as many as 200 guests—all natives of Tupik. She says, looking thoughtfully into the distance, that no one wanted to leave, but life forced them:
"When the school building was dismantled and sold, the children had to be sent to the Yermishinsky boarding school for the entire week. They'd be there the whole week, and then walk back here on the weekend. Who would want that? And there were no jobs left."
No connection, but with TV
There's no internet connection in Tupik, no cell phone service, and the only sources of information are the main TV channels and a food truck that arrives on Sundays ("They charge a lot, a third of the city price markup"). Galko enjoys watching Andrey Malakhov's talk show and "60 Minutes" with Olga Skabeeva, and she always watches the news and keeps up with events in Ukraine. She believes that "we're doing everything right":
— What's your attitude toward the situation? They probably should have [started the "special operation"] earlier. Some people criticize him, saying, "Why did Putin interfere in Ukraine?" But that's not true. The people asked for help, just like in Crimea. So he did the right thing; he should have done it long ago. How long have the [Ukrainians] suffered, since when? They helped in Kazakhstan [by suppressing protests in January 2022]. So what if Ukraine is a different country? NATO was already approaching Russia's borders, they're already hitting ours, and what would we have seen if it had gone a little further? I don't know how this will end; maybe some negotiations will help, but this Zelenskyy is for nuclear war.
She suddenly remembers that Ukrainians worked here for a couple of years: on the very spot where the rusty excavators and truck cabin remain, there was a repair shop for agricultural machinery. A local entrepreneur ran the shop, and the remains of the machinery are his property. They worked there until 2014 and then left. I wonder how strongly the Ukrainians promoted anti-Russian ideas, and how often conflicts with the locals arose.
"No, no, no conflicts, they even helped us chop firewood, they were hard workers. They were all surprised, saying, 'What kind of houses do you have? They're so run-down, we don't have anything like that in our village. What, you guys don't have enough men here? And you don't plant anything.' They were so surprised. And we said the state gave us these houses as temporary, and now they're rotting.
The neighbor averted her eyes when asked about Ukraine. Her husband's niece lived in Donetsk, and they had visited there, but Tamara Grigoryevna didn't like it: the air was thick with coal dust, and she remembered almost nothing else.
"I don't know... On the one hand, it's wrong, on the other, it's right. Is it really good that US bases will be established in all the seceded territories? That the people there lived in such horror... If they're telling us the whole truth. And the US always wanted to break us up, and they've already divided the Union. How did they divide it? That's politics, not for our minds," she concludes.
We debate a bit further about who destroyed the Soviet Union, or whether it collapsed on its own. The pensioner recalls that Yermishi produced everything—dairy, meat—but the residents of the regional center themselves received almost nothing: the produce was shipped to the capital and other major cities. Meanwhile, residents of the regional center traveled to Moscow for groceries, because their local stores were also empty. And how this economic nonsense was connected to American machinations remains unclear in our conversation.
Meanwhile, the sun flared for the last time and began to set. It grew suddenly dark and cold. Ghostly creatures in white flickered in the mirror of the former store—goats still wandering back and forth along the only two streets. At the end of one was impassable forest, at the end of the other, impassable forest. A dead end, in a word.
As an afterword. This is the first article in the "Dead Ends of Russia" project. Almost every region of Russia has its own Dead End. These settlements were named for a simple reason: the road ended behind them. Some Dead Ends have a history spanning several hundred years. Some were renamed to something more optimistic during Soviet times, but the essence remained the same. Although, if you already live in a Dead End, it's not as bleak as it looks from the road. And in general, each of these settlements has its own dead end story. So, we've decided to map them all on an interactive map in the future. It will include stories, photographs, and films—anything we can, thanks to journalists from across Russia. If you have Dead End stories you'd like to see on our interactive map— Write to me on Telegram @nemoskva_bot
