Time to read: 15 minutes(s)

Road to demand

"Don't trust the GPS, follow the road signs," we were told in the Kholm-Zhirkovsky district of the Smolensk region. Just 40 years ago, instead of roads, there were directions, and there were many of them. But they all, one way or another, led to the railway, which carried the main traffic. A spur line ran from Smolensk through Durovo to Vladimirsky Tupik, along which a diesel locomotive and a small carriage ran three times a day. Beyond Tupik, 72 kilometers away, a network of narrow-gauge railways began.

No one calculated its length, as extensions from the main track were constantly being moved to new sites, but it is said the network extended up to 140 kilometers. The narrow-gauge railway was built immediately after the war.

In its heyday, all the logging companies along it shipped up to a hundred train cars of timber a day. Now, the timber is cut by private individuals, the scale is much smaller, the narrow-gauge railway tracks have been scrapped or used for commercial purposes, and the handcars are rusting in the yards. And any village can be reached by a perfectly good road. This is precisely the route that young people take from these parts in search of a better "urban" life.

Meanwhile, such beauty surrounds us... the pristine Dnieper, just beginning to regain its strength, storks nesting, a quiet, peaceful life. And the only disturbance is "outsiders filming something along the now-defunct railway" (the only train was cancelled on January 1, 2014). The outsiders are us. "Well, tie them up," the head of the village reassured the vigilant locals. He knew they weren't "saboteurs," but journalists determined to tour all the "Tupiki" (dead ends) of Russia—settlements with the word "Tupik" (dead end) in their names.

village of VERKHOVYE

We began our route by taking a slight detour to the village of Verkhovye. Since we're from Tomsk, we couldn't miss it. Verkhovye houses a museum and memorial to the 166th Rifle Division, formed in Tomsk. This division was referred to as "the missing in action."

From July to October 1941, less than a thousand of the 14 men escaped encirclement. Since these soldiers had no graves, they were considered missing in action rather than killed. The memorial and chapel in Verkhovye were erected by Tomsk residents.

Every year since 2006, a search party from Tomsk has come to these areas in an attempt to find and revive the nameless soldiers of the Great Patriotic War. A film crew from the Tomsk television company TV2 has accompanied the search party on several occasions. Denis Bevz's film "Division"The Immortal Regiment", by the way, was also invented by journalists from the TV2 television company in 2012.

In April of this year, the Tomsk detachment, led by Maxim Elezov, worked here again. But, as Maxim told us, of the six remains recovered, only two had a soldier's medallion. One was empty, the other was so decomposed that it was impossible to reconstruct the name from it.

In memory of the division in Verkhovye there is Tomskaya Street, there was a Tomsk state farm and Tomsk rural settlement.

— 40 years ago, you wouldn’t have been able to even get here in the car you just arrived in.", says the head of the Bogdanovsky rural settlement, Vyacheslav Persidsky. "If I remember correctly, the train took us about 11 a.m. to get to the train station in Kanyutino. We had to leave at 7 a.m. on a tractor, and even then, it's not guaranteed we'd get there. And it's only 14 kilometers. There was no road, just a direction. Verkhovye, Baturino, Bogolyubovo—everyone was heading toward the railway. People used it to get to Smolensk, Vyazma, and Moscow. I studied in Smolensk and would come to Verkhovye to visit my parents every weekend. I'd spend the night and then head back. Now there are roads, but it's mostly elderly pensioners who live there. Where are they supposed to go? The Kholm-Zhirkovsky district has a registered population of nine thousand, but if you do the math, maybe four thousand are left. That's why this railway line fell into disuse. Although when it was planned, before the revolution, they wanted to connect it with the Riga-Moscow railway. Then it would definitely have worked."

The railway to Vladimirsky Tupik was built by Count Igor Uvarov in the early 20th century. Currently, Verkhovye has a population of approximately 150 people. The entire Bogdanovsky rural settlement has a population of about 500.

— The Tomsk state farm was abolished. Because it ceased to exist. Then there was the Tomsk agricultural production cooperative, which was also abolished. Because now we have no agriculture at all, no one to work. I was the head of the Tomsk rural settlement for 15 years. I remember going to Smolensk for nails, saying I came from Tomsk. And they told me there were no nails closer (to Tomsk). The Tomsk settlement was consolidated, joining it with Bogdanovskoye in 2019. Now I am the head of the Bogdanovskoye rural settlement. 

The head of the department has some old, no longer needed plaques in his storage room. We happily accepted one of them as a gift.

— What an interesting coat of arms on the plaque. — Coat of arms of the Smolensk region. A cannon and a phoenix.

We stop on the way out of the village. There's an abandoned stone church here, its bell tower blown up during the Great Patriotic War. It hasn't been restored since.

An empty stork's nest on the water tower. And a store, still in operation. Recently, according to an ad, a van was selling pullets nearby. The ad said the van would park for five minutes. Apparently, they were a hot commodity.

We return to the main road via the same Kanyutino railway station, through which a passenger train ran three times a day on the Durovo-Vladimirsky Tupik route.

Now, the only reminder of the former movement is a pile of papers scattered in the deserted station house. One of them takes us back to 1989. An application for a personal ticket to Yevpatoriya, from the "honorary railwayman," station attendant Mikhailov.

Just here, while we were filming, the village tractor drivers noticed us and reported to the top asking “what to do?”

NIKITINKA village

There are a lot of advantages to the fact that everyone knows each other here. For example, we were immediately told that Valery Petrov, who worked as the chief engineer of the narrow-gauge railway from 1986 to 1998, lived in the village of Nikitinka on the way to Vladimirsky Tupik. We stopped in.

Valery Anatolyevich, like many others, has pieces of rails from a narrow-gauge railway supporting his fence, and in his yard there is an old motorized railcar, which he used to inspect the forest plot entrusted to him.

"I'm taking care of it. I always wanted to convert it to a wide track, so I could go hunting with friends. Just put an engine in it, replace the rotten planks, and you're good to go."

Some railcar owners have actually begun converting their railcars to broad gauge. After all, the railway is now empty, so why not take advantage of it? The railway line is still in excellent condition. After all, just before its actual closure, the line from Durovo to Vladimirsky Tupik was completely overhauled, replacing the wooden sleepers with reinforced concrete ones and filling the surface with crushed stone. Moreover, according to rumors, this crushed stone was transported all the way from Siberia to the Smolensk region. Since so much money had been invested, the locals assumed the route had potential. So the cancellation of the only train was a bolt from the blue. No one understood the strategy, but they decided that "the government knows best."

— The narrow-gauge railway was under my control, — says Valery Petrov. "There was a main highway, and the timber haulers that ran along it were used for delivering timber. When I came to work along the narrow-gauge railway, there was still a village called Samsonovka on the border with the Tver region; there were seven or eight houses there. Then, there was just one old woman left there and she lived there until she died. Now that village is gone. It's overgrown."

Samsonovka wasn't the only village to emerge along the narrow-gauge railway. In the 1960s, at kilometer 13, there was the village of Ogonki, which operated as a correctional labor facility until the 1960s. At that time, not only "free" loggers but also prisoners worked in the forest. In the 60s, the "zone" was closed, and Ogonki became a "free" forest settlement; its last residents left in the 1980s. Also along the narrow-gauge railway was the village of Bukovo, a subsidiary farm of the logging company.

— The central line of the narrow-gauge railway was still somehow maintained; they sawed special sleepers. And the runners, they were temporary. They removed the timber, dismantled the narrow-gauge railway, and moved it to another location where they would continue cutting it. The move was no easy task. We had a special team for this. And in the summer, student brigades would come to help. In particular, I, as the chief engineer, supervised them. We built huge bridges across ravines, using round timber. The bridges were about 10 meters high. Diesel locomotives often fell off the rails in these ravines, and people jumped out while moving to avoid being killed. After all, if a locomotive with a car loaded with timber started to tumble back and forth along the hill like a seesaw, you couldn't stop it until it stopped itself. There were many cases of diesel locomotives derailing. They had to be recovered.

"One time, some deputy minister came to see us, a meeting was going on, and at that moment a locomotive fell. A man came in and reported it. And this deputy minister, as I call them, the city one, said, 'What should we do now? Do we need a crane to lift it?' A locomotive weighs 14, 18 tons. I'm telling you, no crane is needed. We've figured out how to lift them ourselves. We'd cut out special rails, make covers out of sleepers, and pull them out with ropes. We'd put the locomotives on the narrow-gauge railway, stitch everything together, and keep going."

"One day, some procurement people came to see us. And boom, the locomotive fell through the bridge. The engineer's name was Dyoma. He sat there in the locomotive, then, when they lifted him out, he returned to the station and said: 'It's better to live in the sun than underground.' He left and never came back, and never even got his pay. They were brave men, these locomotive engineers." 

"When I was still working as chief engineer, we wanted to privatize this logging company, turn it into a private enterprise, buy it out. But the regional administration wouldn't let us. Maybe we'd still be here. Well, the narrow-gauge railway isn't there anymore, but we have new sawmill equipment and logging trucks. The narrow-gauge railway was convenient—we could harvest timber year-round, instead of waiting for the winter road to be repaired by Santa Claus... But with new equipment, it's cheaper and easier. But they abandoned the people, while we should have created, built private enterprises on this foundation; there was plenty of equipment, huge facilities. And now these same workers go to Kholm-Zhirki to work. There's nothing left here."

Valery's three sons have grown up and also live and work in Kholm-Zhirkovsky. There's no work in Nikitinka; people spend their time gardening, fishing, and hunting. Valery shows me a box of May beetles. "Tomorrow at five in the morning, I'm going to the Dnieper to catch chub with beetles."

VLADIMIR'S DEAD END

We quickly found the head of the village in Vladimirsky Tupik. There's no megaphone there, so we were left without communication. But locals immediately told us where they'd seen Mikhail Kozel's blue UAZ. The emphasis is on the O. Mikhail Vladimirovich arrived here from Belarus on April 1, 1986, to work. He emphasizes the exact day of his arrival, smiling to himself.

So, he settled down here, worked in the logging company, and now heads a settlement where there are two dead ends—Vladimirsky Dead End, which seamlessly transitions into Dead End at kilometer 72. And that's definitely a dead end. Beyond it are only the embankments of the narrow-gauge railway, which are currently used as roads near the village.

— The narrow-gauge railway was a kind of life. Passenger cars ran along it, too. Berry and mushroom picking trips were officially organized. A notice was posted in the logging company's dispatch office announcing that tomorrow at 6:45 a.m. a small train would leave for the entire day near the village of Pochinki to pick cranberries. But there were also plenty of homemade motorized railcars. The simplest ones were made from a chainsaw. You just tightened the string and it moved. People made them as best they could. After all, you couldn't ask the logging company every time. Everyone needed haymaking, and all the clearings along the narrow-gauge railway were mown, not like they are now. Everyone used to keep livestock. Now there are probably six cows left. But, of course, we scolded them for the homemade railcars; they just go whenever they want, and there were often no brakes. And then there's a load of timber coming the other way. They accelerated, came around a bend, and crashed into a diesel locomotive. There were no fatalities, but some sustained injuries and fractures.

Despite it being a day off, Mikhail Vladimirovich is rushing to the district center for work. He needs to deliver concrete to the playground. Vladimirsky Tupik has a school and a kindergarten. They serve three nearby villages. The school has 42 students, and the kindergarten has six. After some discussion, we declined the "tour" of the Tupiks, so as not to delay the mayor, but Mikhail Vladimirovich insisted, and rightly so; we wouldn't have been able to figure out the intricacies of these streets on our own. Everything is laid out in such a convoluted manner, and it's unclear where exactly one Tupik ends and the other begins.

At the junction of two Tupiks, we pass a huge abandoned bakery building. Tupik bread was once famous far beyond the neighborhood. A few years ago, the bakery was still in operation. The oven was wood-fired, and unsplit logs still lie in the bakery yard. It feels as if they shut down production overnight. Previously, as the mayor explains, 1,500 people lived here, including seasonal workers. And the bakery baked not only bread but even cakes.

"You used to go to Smolensk and they'd ask you to bring me some of your Tupiki bread. Now they bring bread to Tupiki from Smolensk (they're 177 km apart by the shortest road). Now the population in both Tupiki has dropped to 520. The young people are leaving, the old people are staying. Work is only possible in the forest. There are few private loggers, but they exist."

A signal light is on at the railway line's end. No trains have run on it for nine years. There used to be occasional freight traffic, but now, they say, that won't be the case. The signal light, however, is still working. It's just always red.

"They've re-laid the rails and put rubber pads underneath them to reduce noise. So much work has been done here during the renovations over the past two years. And now they're saying it's no longer profitable for us to maintain it. A car used to run three times a day; it was very convenient, and it would still be convenient; not everyone has a car. But I think they even took this line off the road for freight traffic in the fall. There was talk about that. Because they keep calling us to check the condition of the crossings. Basically, everything's moving toward taking it off altogether soon. But they're not taking it off yet, maybe for safety reasons."

"Oh, what an interesting roof the house has." "It's also covered with wooden shingles. Sawn planks. There was a store."

Next to the abandoned store building stands a new trash container. The village streets are now full of containers, and trash is collected regularly. Another improvement is the gas line that now runs to every plot, even the abandoned ones. Gas was installed in the village two years ago. However, homeowners are responsible for bringing it into their homes themselves. That costs 200-300 rubles. Few people can afford that kind of money.

"Well, the gas connection program was completed up to the land plot boundary. But in the end, only a few people connected. Only 20, 30. That's at least 200 people. So there's gas, but we're still burning wood. We don't have coal, and we don't have central heating. The wood is a lifesaver."

On the way back from Vladimirsky Tupik, we finally spot a stork's nest. The owner of the house next to where they're staying says the storks built the nest last year. This year, they've started breeding for the first time. She laughs, noting that they have three children and five grandchildren. One grandson was just born. But the prospects for children here are slim. Teenagers in Vladimirsky Tupik keep saying they'll finish school and move away.