Big City Dead End
How civilization arrived in the Samara village of Zakladbischensky, along with the tram and the Sixth Tupik, and what it all led to
Impenetrable mud and karst sinkholes, Zolotoray Street and the "Gudok" (literally, "Horn"), Fyodor Chaliapin's mother and Shchors's tombstone, a pharmacy in a morgue and Mikhail Bulgakov's conversation with Yuri Olesha—all are mixed together in this story about the so-called Samara settlement of "6th Dead End." Why it's located completely differently from Yandex Maps, why the words "He's been in 6th Dead End for a long time" were followed by condolences, and how strong the connection between post-revolutionary events and the present day is—"NotMoscow Speaking" explored this jumble of facts and legends.
Tram No. 6 on the poor outskirts
Samara is a city of all sorts of dead ends. Initially, dead ends were the termini of all tram routes, but then streets appeared with the word "dead end" in their names. There's Rabochiy Dead End, Ovoshchnoy Dead End, Melovoy Dead End, Kalmytsky and Bogatyrsky Dead Ends, Zavodskoy, Shkolny, and even—and here's a healthy criticism—Upravlenchesky Dead End. There are more than 20 of them in the city.
On Yandex map you can find an entire village with the name 6th Dead End — a large private sector between the Samara River and Verkhne-Karernaya and Aurora streets. But this, as they say now, is a fake.
"We don't have any Sixth Dead End there. Where did you get that from?" blogger and Samara history researcher Igor Makhtev asked in a conversation.
It's not "we took it," but some local joker put it on the map either by mistake or out of ignorance. In fact, it's village of ZapanskoyThe original 6th Tupik was located on the site of today's Krymskaya Square (formerly Uritsky Square). This was a poor outskirts of the city, officially called the settlement of Zheleznodorozhny, but commonly known by its old name, Zakladbischensky. It bordered the settlement of Yamy. The karst sinkholes here were used to drain waste from the entire area; the settlement was inhabited by gold miners (sewage workers) and the poor, who couldn't afford houses closer to the center.
On Zakladbischenskogo Street in the 1990s ("Another City")
On August 2, 1927, a new tram route, No. 6, opened in the city, ending at the border between Yamy and Zakladbischensky. The tram here was a marvel of wonder.
Tram No. 6 ("This is Samara")
"The Zheleznodorozhny (formerly Zakladbischensky) station is connected to the city. The opening ceremony was modest, without much fanfare, yesterday. With the new tram line, mud is no longer a problem. They won't have to wade through the mud and autumn rain from the village to the city anymore. The tram will get them there!" Wrote almost 100 years ago in the regional newspaper "Kommuna".
At first, the tram consisted of just one car, and at the final stop, the driver transferred from one cab to the other. Then, tram #6 became a two-car line. Three years before this route was launched, Mikhail Bulgakov wrote in his notes about the city's meager transportation system: "Ilf and Yuri Olesha arrived from Samara. There are two trams in Samara. One has a sign: 'Revolution Square—Prison,' the other: 'Soviet Square—Prison.' Something like that. In short, all roads lead to Rome!"
On this same outskirts, all roads led not to Rome, but to the All Saints Cemetery. It was founded in the mid-19th century and by the early 20th century had become the largest in the city. With the advent of the tram terminus, people colloquially combined the Yamy, Zakladbischensky, and All Saints Cemeteries into a single toponym: the Sixth Dead End. The Samara expression "He departed for the Sixth Dead End" by no means meant "he took a ride on the tram"—the person was carried to the cemetery and died. "The Sixth Dead End" denoted a one-way street.
A solid cemetery
“Since the construction of the Gudok began, I swore off visiting it, you’ll understand why later,” he said first of all. local historian Igor Makhtev, leaving the shopping center. - And today I had to park my car here.
In a couple of hours, Makhtev will pay for breaking his oath, but for now we're heading out on a tour of the Sixth Tupik, which has long since become practically the city center. The train station is nearby, and the Lokomotiv stadium is just as far away, along with a monument to film hero Yuri Detochkin. On the other side of Krasnoarmeyskaya Street is Shchorsa Park. In the first half of the last century, such a street didn't exist; there was a cemetery. A large one.
"We're standing on the site of a former cemetery," says the man at the Gudok station. "And now we're sitting over graves," he says, sitting in a cafe. "And now we're walking through a former cemetery," he mentions casually, a few hundred meters from the shopping center. It's getting unsettling.
"Many famous people were buried here. Chaliapin's mother [Avdotya Mikhailovna, died in 1892], Alexei Tolstoy's mother [Alexandra Bostrom]. Incidentally, when Chaliapin came here at the beginning of the twentieth century, he gave a concert at the Olympus Theatre-Circus, which is where the Philharmonic Hall is now located," Makhtev points towards the railway station— Before the concert, I came here, to Vsekhsvyatskoye Cemetery. She [his mother] was very poor, she begged, she was a pauper. And she died. They buried her in a common grave. He wanted to find a grave and at least put a cross. They took him to some distant corner of the cemetery and said that, in all likelihood, it was somewhere around here. He took a handful of soil with him and carried it all his life around the world, on all his foreign tours. He had this secret suitcase [more accurately, a box], and his daughter only found out after his death what he kept in it—soil from the Samara cemetery.
Igor Makhtev, researcher of the history of Samara
In this same cemetery were the graves of a chess player, a lawyer whose assistant was Vladimir Ulyanov, Andrei Hardin, an artist and local historian Konstantin Golovkin, a famous Russian historian Sergei Platonov, and other well-known personalities in Samara.
View of the All Saints Cemetery
In 1926, the Vsekhsvyatskoye Cemetery was officially closed. A few years later, a decree was issued permitting the use of tombstones and fences for various purposes. The graves were literally destroyed by looters. And in 2017, at the intersection of Frunzenskaya and Krasnoarmeyskaya Streets, during the replacement of old curbs, discovered a slab from the grave of the "Ukrainian Chapaev" - Nikolai Shchors.
A lot of things happened to the body of the Civil War hero: first, it buried not in his homeland, but in Samara, the wife's homeland, then the monument was used as a border, then the grave was lost, in 1949 the embalmed body was reburied at the Kuibyshev cemetery.
Reburial work on Shchors (Samara Regional State Archive of Social and Political History)
The circumstances of Shchors's death remain unclear. According to the canonical version, the Red Army commander was struck down by a bullet from a Petliura machine gun. However, as early as the late 1930s, there was speculation that Shchors was killed by his own people. This was indirectly confirmed during the exhumation. The size of the entry and exit wounds on his skull indicated that the bullet struck Shchors in the back of the head. The names of those who may have ordered the shooting vary, as do the presumed causes. Today a hero, tomorrow an enemy, posthumously a hero again. Shchors was not the only one to share the same fate in those epic years. At least Kotovsky is worth mentioning. Or Mironov.
Reburial work on Shchors (Samara Regional State Archive of Social and Political History)
The zinc coffin was raised to the surface on the grounds of a cable factory. It was quickly built in the post-war years, right on a strip foundation, right on the cemetery. According to locals, the graves beneath it remained untouched.
Bones everywhere
“There were different burials here: there was an Orthodox cemetery, a Protestant cemetery, separate ones for different sects, and a ‘cholera’ cemetery,” the blogger joins the conversation. ethnographer Igor Kondratiev (He also immediately notes: "And here we are walking through a cemetery"), - In the 1970s, a relative of mine worked for a construction company, they were doing excavations there. They dug up a cholera cemetery near the railway, the builders climbed into the graves, found chains there, all sorts of other things... Then the sanitary services arrived and cordoned off the whole place. What I'm getting at is that even in Soviet times, when everything was centralized and under control, no one really understood "cemetery" matters. They were sent – they dug up: oh, bones! – let's loot. And then they were told: this was a cholera cemetery! But that's not the end of the story. Now there's a new residential complex there. Literally, the "Cholera" residential complex. And the residents don't know about it either. People have working memories like goldfish: five minutes ago, and then that's it.
There were also Jewish and Tatar cemeteries on the Vsekhsvyatskoye grounds. A gelatin factory was built on the Jewish cemetery.
The Volgokabel plant, built directly on the bones, went bankrupt in the early 2000s. For a while, nothing happened there, but workers appeared in the summer of 2013.
"Just look at what's going on in our city! And these aren't isolated finds; human bones—both adults and children—are everywhere! These piles of bones are growing close to residential buildings and, by the way, the Church of the Archangel Michael, which has a clear view of this place. Just look at this terrible dump!" he said emotionally. wrote Then he posted about ten photos on LiveJournal.
Samara activists tried to stir things up for officials, but to no avail. They turned to the Russian Orthodox Church for help, with the same result. Then they remembered that there had been Lutheran burials at Vsekhsvyatskoye, and they approached the Baptists. The Baptists approached the vice-governor, who ordered the construction work suspended. A fire broke out on the spot. archaeological researchThe remains disappeared from the riverbank. History is silent on where they went, and neither are officials.
"This story really affected people. Those who knew about it said we'd never set foot in that center again. It was a huge blow to the [shopping center's] reputation. Another example: during the construction of an office building nearby, remains were also discovered," Kondratyev says, suddenly realizing, pointing in the opposite direction from the Gudok. "The owner himself called in archaeologists, then a priest, held a service, and reburied the bodies in another city cemetery. It was all very humane."
Dips, a mirror colossus and evil spirits
We're walking along Krasnoarmeyskaya Street toward that very same dead end of the 6th tram line. It seems endless and starts right at the Volga. There are people on the street Museum of Modern Art in the old Kurlina mansion (literally behind it is the Catholic церковь Heart of Jesus), monument to the stern fighters for Soviet power, Serafimovskaya церковь, about a dozen monumental "Stalinist" buildings, there are also crumbling houses, who are long overdue for resettlement. They also stand on the site of Vsekhsvyatskoye, and Kondratyev insists that the courtyards "exude a chill of death."
The two-story buildings adjoin spacious plots where people planted trees and tried to create gardens, but somehow it didn't take off. One of the buildings on Krasnoarmeyskaya Street still remains. Constantine's Almshouse Built in 1872, it was located on the edge of the cemetery. During the Soviet era, the building housed a forensic medical examination center and a morgue; today, it sells medications—it houses a pharmacy. Both local historians are amazed at how this is possible: "Everything there is soaked through with cadaveric poison and blood."
As we approach the dead end, the old squat buildings are left behind, and high-rise apartment buildings and glass towers rise up ahead. Somewhere among them remains a single private home, which began its existence in the village of Zakladbischensky.
Almost nothing remains on Krymskaya Square to remind us of the existence of the 6th tram dead end and the Sixth Dead End as a poor suburb. The square is surrounded by modern nine-story buildings, and three years ago, a mural featuring portraits of Samara heroes of World War II was painted on the façade of one of them: People's Artist of the USSR Mikhail Pugovkin, pilot Olga Sanfirova, and pioneering Soviet aircraft designer Dmitry Vorfolomeyev. The square is just a square, with a convenient roundabout around it.
"Over there," Makhtev waves his hand somewhere beyond the buildings, "were the Vedeneyev pits. The city had no sewer system, and all the waste was dumped into these pits. They were enormous lakes of sewage. There was a gold miners' settlement right there, who collected waste from all over the city in barrels and dumped it there. In the spring, it all melted and flowed into Samara. We have a lot of karst sinkholes that filled and filled with sewage. They're like bottomless barrels, spreading under the entire city. So the entire city stands on graves and, pardon me, on... sinkholes."
"My great-grandfather got out of the camp and bought a house right there," adds Kondratyev. "They weren't expensive; he helped build the reservoir... Those who were imprisoned in 1930-1931—the NKVD hadn't yet become brutal back then, and they still paid. And relatives said that the pits behind these houses were filled with waste and bones."
Behind us lies a huge "mirror" building, seemingly at odds with its surroundings and looming over the entire square. It's a completely different era, far removed from life in Zakladbischenskoye. Makhtev concludes the tour:
"First, there was the Sixth Dead End here, which in pre-revolutionary Samara symbolized the realm of the dead, the afterlife, and now across from it stands [gestures toward the high-rise] the Sixth Cassation Court. For many years, it was unfinished, and then suicides would climb it and jump off."
We're silent and wrap ourselves in our collars: it's frosty and damp in Samara. "Ding-ding," goes the tram, the only witness to a century-old tragedy. It passes along Krasnoarmeyskaya, turns onto Uritskogo, and then onto Penzenskaya. We manage to hop on. The fare is 35 rubles. The tram is old, a little younger than the times we were talking about. It moves slowly, its wheels clacking and swaying. I ask the conductor if they're planning to abolish this mode of transport as obsolete.
"What are you saying?" he laughs in response. "They wanted to close it, but people rebelled. We love the tram, especially the grandmothers. It's a memory of our youth!"
P.S. Igor Makhtev, who had broken his vow not to visit the Gudok shopping center, lost his Chevrolet Niva. The group circled the half-empty underground parking lot multiple times, losing each other several times—as if some evil spirit was leading them in circles—but the car was nowhere to be found. The local historian suspected the workhorse had been stolen for parts and went to inform the security guard. The Niva was eventually found in another underground parking lot. Perhaps modern video cameras helped, or perhaps the ancient spirit of Zakladbischenskoye.
PS:
Behind us are the Tupiks (dead ends) in the Tver and Ryazan regions, and the Republic of Mordovia. Ahead is the Tupik in the Zabaikalsky Krai. Reaching the latter will be extremely difficult. This Tupik is 810 kilometers from the regional center, Chita. The last hundred kilometers are completely off-road. People reach this village either by helicopter, or by all-terrain vehicles, snowmobiles, or boats, depending on the time of year. Zabaikalsky Tupik is a fairly large settlement with a thousand residents. Some of these are schoolchildren from nearby small villages who live in the Tupikovsky boarding school. Without your help, we won't be able to get there. You can support the project with any amount on the platform. Planeta.ruAs the list of Russia's Dead Ends grows, we will create an interactive map where readers and viewers can choose a Dead End that interests them and read a story about it, view photos, or watch a film about it.
Link to collection: https://planeta.ru/campaigns/tupikirussia
