Time to read: 10 minutes(s)

White stone tombstones from the 18th century, which once stood on the graves of simple peasants, young ladies in crinoline dresses and gentlemen in frock coats (who also turn out to be “from the common people”), old glass negatives, a photographer’s dilapidated house Ivan Filatov — everything is mixed up in this story. It's about the astonishing transformation of serfs in the Ryazan village of Izhevskoye into free farmers, the photographer who captured it all, and the former journalist who decided to collect it all in one place. "NeMoskva" visited the future museum, which already transports you back to Izhevsk's past. It's just 100 kilometers from Ryazan. We continue our series "A Provincial Museum Isn't Boring!"

A year ago, a former journalist from Novaya Gazeta Nikita Girin called a native of Uzbekistan Shokhrukh Ibragimov and asked him to sell the house—an ancient one, built in 1900, with sturdy walls, but still somewhat crooked. Nikita explained that the house belonged to photographer Ivan Filatov, who photographed the Ryazan village of Izhevskoye and its inhabitants from the 1890s until 1937. He and his family lived in the house, and a photo studio operated in the annex. Now, a group of like-minded people dream of turning it into a museum. The owner was impressed by the idea of ​​preserving local history—local traditions, distinct from national Russian traditions, with an imperial twist—and agreed to sell the house at the "purchase" price of 500 rubles. He never lived there himself, and before the purchase, the building had been uninhabited for a couple of decades.

Squat, pink-plastered with exposed red brick, with numerous windows and brick arches above them—that's the house on Srednyaya Street in Izhevsk. It's accessed via a plank walkway over a ditch, then a more substantial walkway over a hole in the building itself—it's undergoing major renovations. Even in warm weather, the interior is damp: the cold emanates from the walls themselves, which haven't been heated in a long time. The interior contains a simple table, sofa, barrel, and cabinet—each piece of furniture a hundred years old or more.

"True, there's almost nothing left of the Filatov family here, except for a hook in the ceiling beam where they used to hang a cradle. And maybe a couple of panes of glass—they're uneven, different from modern ones. The antique furniture was given to us by friends. It was made without a single nail." - says Nikita, demonstrating wooden chopsticks.

At the entrance, on the wall, hangs a photograph of a curly-haired man with a bushy mustache. One of the first selfies, from the late 19th century, is by local photographer Ivan Filatov, who captured his reflection in a mirror. Since the late 1890s, he has photographed hundreds of fellow villagers and residents of surrounding villages, dozens of local festivals, houses, landscapes, churches—thousands of photos in total. Nikita Girin, along with activists Andrey Merkunov и Sergei Pogonin We found and attributed over 500 photographs. They reveal the history of the village, as well as the smallest details of everyday life—costumes, hairstyles, interiors, and other indicators of wealth.

Someday there will be a real museum here, but for now Nikita draws the blackout curtains and turns on the film projector.

— Who do you think is in the photo? — Nikita asks, smiling faintly.

Two ladies, one of whom frowns slightly, sit on ordinary oak barrels. Both are dressed in decent outfits with ruffles and lace, knitting in their hands; one has the toe of a good shoe peeking out from under the hem of her shoe.

— These are Izhevsk peasant women, on the right is Filatov’s wife Alexandra IvanovnaShe was from Spassk [the regional center]. They sit on those same Izhevsk barrels.

The owner of the village Nikolay Demidov At one point, he came up with the idea of ​​sending coopers on seasonal work to the south to make barrels. He pitched the idea to the peasants and went back to his business far from the village, which he visited extremely rarely, only collecting quitrent. Anton Voronkov He also quickly realized that the business was profitable and attracted most of the villagers to it. As a result, the peasants of Izhevskoye became obscenely rich, which led to even more astonishing events, but more on that later.

Another photo—of a young couple. The lady wears a satin dress and jewelry, the gentleman a fine jacket and ankle boots—high society, no doubt. But no: still peasants. It's a wedding photograph with a caption on the back: "As a token of my deepest respect, I present this to my father-in-law, Ivan Mikhailovich, and mother-in-law, Anna Alexandrovna, in memory of our wedding. Comp. February 10, 1910." Dmitry and Maria Sharshukov».

The intricate flourishes on jewelry and lace, the creases and frayed edges of boots, the stitches in the seams of a dress, every curl of a hairstyle—every tiny detail can be easily discerned by enlarging the image. This is a characteristic of glass plate negatives. In another photograph, the wings of flies perched on the hem of a dress are clearly visible; in a third, a tea box with the inscription "Hanging Tea" is in the window of a house in a group shot, with the house in the background. The negative itself, however, could have been slightly larger than a matchbox.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, photography in Izhevsk was a rare phenomenon, but accessible to everyone.

By the early 20th century, you could afford to have your photo taken once or twice a year and buy a set of cards. A photographer would take and sell half a dozen portraits at a time. A 13x18 portrait, for example, would cost about 20 kopecks. Three loaves of white bread cost the same. A worker's wage was about 35 rubles. So photography was affordable, and having a photo taken by Filatov was considered a matter of honor. People came and went to his studio from neighboring towns.

Filatov, following family tradition, should have become a blacksmith, but he left to work in Kolomna, then in other regions. At some point, he became interested in self-education and wanted to become an artist, but he returned to Izhevsk and began taking photographs. For income, he photographed portraits and family celebrations; for pleasure, he photographed buildings, landscapes, and group celebrations. One of these was Independence Day, which bears no resemblance to the modern date of June 12.   

More than 650 people on one black and white photoWith beards and peaked caps, with moustaches and fire helmets, in jackets and tunics, in fashionable hats under umbrellas - it seems the entire population of Izhevsk is here. Photographed on June 10 (June 23, modern style), 1914, on the 82nd anniversary of Independence Day. On this day in 1832, Emperor Nicholas I signed a draft agreement on the redemption of the peasants of the Ryazan province of the Spassky district of the Izhevsk volost from Mr. Nikolai Ivanovich Demidov. Even under their master, they lived freely and comfortably, but rumor spread that Demidov had lost money at cards and was going to sell Izhevsk to cover the debt. The peasants decided to become free farmers and pledged to pay 3,4 million rubles for their freedom - in today's money this is about 2,5 billion. They were redeemed, as in a fairy tale, over 30 years and 3 years. Part of the payments took over 100 richest peasants of the village.

"In Izhevsk, we see that freedom is a factor in well-being. That is, the more freely people live, the more mature and responsible they are. Living together and understanding that their personal well-being depends on their common good, they find ways to live without any bosses and see that it's better that way. And we want to breathe a little of this life back into the village through our projects. And not only through ours; it's a big story."

Not everyone immediately embraced the idea, but little by little, they began telling the stories of their ancestors, retrieving rare household items from attics to furnish the museum, and searching suitcases for photographs of Filatov, which almost every family had kept. Nikita says that there seemed to be a demand for a story of their ancestors' love of freedom, prosperity, and dignity, and local residents joined in.

For Nikita, digging into local history proved crucial: after 10 years of working at Novaya Gazeta, chronicling the problems and misfortunes of others, he felt lost in these texts, vanishing into the publication, losing himself. He wondered who he was, whether he could survive without the newspaper, and so he went to his childhood village to care for his grandmother. She's no longer alive, and Nikita remains in the old house with its stove and its freedom-loving cat, Lev. Now he sits on the wooden porch and reflects:

I lived in Moscow for 15 years [for university and work], but I barely saw Moscow itself: I'd go on business trips to the regions, report back, and then leave again. I've talked a lot about grassroots initiatives: how people are trying to protect their land from something, how they're reviving things. Now I find myself in the shoes of some of my heroes. When I arrived in the villages, many people looked askance: how could I leave the capital, what's the catch? Yes, in the regions, especially in villages, it's hard to find work. After all, a big city is a constant stressor; life in small towns is more natural for people. That's why we're trying to get this job-creation mechanism going: if tourism comes along, everyone will be able to find something to do.

According to Nikita and other activists, tourism is literally everywhere here. For example, Andrei Merkunov, a former Moscow marketer who was also drawn to Izhevskoye, calculated that wealthy peasants built over 700 stone houses in the village between the mid-19th century and the 1930s. Based on this, he concluded that Izhevskoye is the richest village in the Russian Empire; one of his tours is even called that. Merkunov has a dream: he and a group of tourists could knock on any gate, and a descendant of a freedom-loving Izhevskoye peasant would open it and tell the family story. Perhaps he would show a signature Filatov photo. The tours would become interactive, and local residents could earn a little money—whether from herbal teas or from pies baked according to a great-great-grandmother's recipe.

A new photo—darkness in a house with curtained windows—a click of the computer mouse—another photo. Autumn harvesting, schoolgirls with a teacher in a stunning hat, the funeral of the respected villager Larion Voronkov, a cow of the rare Charodeika breed—each photo reveals signs, if not of wealth, then of prosperity.

Here's a photo with a completely different theme: civil funeral service For the five communists killed during the peasant uprising in Izhevsk. A new turn in history. The Izhevsk peasants couldn't understand why they had to mobilize into the Red Army, hand over their surplus food supplies, and against what oppressors they were being forced to fight. The uprising was brutally suppressed, and the frivolous hats and jewelry disappeared from Filatov's photographs. Independence Day was replaced by another holiday, with slogans like, "Long live the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution!" Instead of fashionable ankle boots, they wore puttees or tarpaulin boots; instead of brightly colored outfits, they wore standard gray, black, and brown coats.

Ivan Filatov died in 1937. Some of his photographs were found in the museum of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who was born in Izhevsk, and some were preserved by his daughter. Other photographers continued to photograph Izhevsk. For example, Vladimir Simakin took off the whole photo chronicle of drowning collective farm and personal equipment in the deep Izhevsk mud.

Furnished with wreaths the grave a Wagner PMC fighter immediately to the left at the entrance to the Krasnoulskoye cemetery, tombstones in flowers and Easter cakes after the spring church holidays, the stone foundation of the destroyed Church of Timothy of Prussia, Which was built In honor of the final self-sacrifice and the attainment of independence in 1865, a sort of local "Statue of Liberty." In 1961, a storm toppled the bell tower, and the church was never restored. For the third year, Nikita and his friends have been creating a lapidarium here using 300-year-old white stone tombstones. They also marked the graves of ordinary peasants, but in this cemetery they were piled together: the graves themselves are no longer recognizable. Nikita cleared them of debris and moss, and was able to decipher some of the inscriptions. "Reader! This stone does not honor me. But it reminds you that, having completed the number of certain days, you will move into a hut similar to mine.""—" the ironic epitaph is inscribed on the tombstone of peasant Kuzma Fetisov, who died in 1789. Another touch to the portrait of a wealthy Izhevsk peasant, an example of old burial traditions. Otherwise, the cemetery is just like any other cemetery—mournful and well-kept. Only one grave, at which the tour would have logically ended, has been lost for almost 90 years.

"The temple ruins and tombstones are also part of Izhevsk's unique history. They need to be preserved somehow, preserved for history, and shown to tourists. But we won't be able to show where Ivan Filatov is buried. His grave..." - Nikita points his hand to the very center of the cemetery, - somewhere there. No exact information about the location has been preserved.