The Inconspicuous Dead End
What did the residents of Tupik and surrounding villages in the Vologda region do when industry disappeared?
The shortest route to Tupik is via the A114 highway: first, turn off for Somino, before the western border of the Vologda Oblast, then a couple dozen kilometers of dirt road, often requiring you to slow down to third gear. A couple of kilometers before that, a tall water tower juts out of the forest, bearing the Russian tricolor, installed by a local daredevil without any instructions.
The Toropovskoye settlement officially has a population of over 1100 (excluding summer residents), but only ten residents are registered in Tupik itself. Yet, a lime factory once stood here. A now-empty concrete elevator near the railway siding serves as a reminder of it.
Yes, the village was named Tupik because it's located near a dead-end railway line. Construction began in the 1930s. But now Tupik is so inconspicuous to the outsider that there isn't even a road sign at the entrance to the village.
"Actually, the village of Tupik was built before the war. My father and grandmother moved here. We think the name is related to the railroad tracks. There was a timber yard and peat bog development. There was a railway line that ended in a dead end," recalls a local resident. Tatyana Suslova.
Among the few remaining old-timers are two neighbors, Tatyana Suslova and Lyudmila Gavrilina, who were born here. They grow vegetables and flowers and visit each other. If the weather is nice, they sit down to eat right outside near the entrance to one of the houses. Their parents, one might say, were at the origins of the settlement.
“When the peat bog was being developed here, a narrow-gauge railway went there,” he says. Lyudmila Pavlovna— There are still ridges and remnants of peat there. But something didn't work out, and everything was abandoned. My grandparents bought a house here—it had previously been an office. Next door was a barracks with workers. That's all there was. My father was a tractor driver—he started delivering houses for people back in '37, probably, or '36.
Lyudmila Pavlovna is 85 years old. Despite owning an apartment in a Khrushchev-era building in the regional center of Babayevo, she continues to live 25 kilometers away, in the village where she grew up. "I can't even get to the fifth floor anymore. And I don't want to go anywhere else. We went there once, even moved all our things. And everything was flooded. And I said, 'Let's go home,'" she explained.
The Rise and Fall of Dead End
From the 1930s until the end of the USSR, Tupik was considered an industrial, workers' settlement, just like its neighbors: Smorodinka, Teshemlya, Tokarevo, and Toropovo. The latter is now the center of the Toropovskoye rural settlement.
The villages lived off the businesses. Their residents worked at the lime plant, in the logging industry, and at the rafting office, where they floated timber down the Kolp River. The river meanders here, and a bend in the river is called a "torop" in these parts. This is where the name of the settlement's center, the village of Toropovo, located a couple of kilometers from Tupik, came from.
"They loaded the cars by hand here. Women did the loading—they'd put the car down and use ropes to lift it up a log. I remember it clearly. The foreman stood there and shouted: 'Moscow is falling behind, Leningrad, stop!' Or vice versa," he says. Tatyana Suslova.
Logging is the only industry that emerged alongside the villages, surviving both the USSR and the hard times of the 1990s and the booming 2000s, and remains in existence to this day. Only now, the forest is harvested by private individuals, transported by logging trucks. And in 1948, a lime plant was established. Although lime production had been going on in Toropovo itself before the war—there's now a place there called the Old Plant.
At first, all work at the plant was done manually, but in the early 1970s, a grain elevator was built. It's clearly visible from the garden plots of Tatyana Adolfovna and Lyudmila Pavlovna. Raw materials were stored there and transferred to train cars. Residents of Tupik and Teshemli worked there until 1992. The plant shut down, veteran workers retired, and young people moved to the cities. It's a typical story for such places, especially for villages in the Russian north, which are located far from large cities and lack the agricultural advantages of the southern regions.
The entrance to the former factory grounds is now blocked by a wooden barrier. However, the long barrier isn't secured in any way, allowing cars to continue on. The first thing you see upon entering is the three-story factory office building, whose windows, for some reason, have double-glazed windows.
"In the early 2000s, the plant was bought by Ammofos," local residents say, referring to the chemical plant in Cherepovets by its former name, the PhosAgro holding company. "They wanted to resume production here. They renovated the building. But then either it didn't work out, or they changed their minds. So, everything's still the same."
A couple of garages remain on the site, as well as the elevator itself. Freight trains regularly pass by, occasionally stopping at the Tešemlya station. They soon resume their operations when the railway is clear again.
A quiet corner
The village of Toropovo still has a nine-year school, a kindergarten (there used to be four, now there's only one), a community center, and a hospital with social beds. The former head of the village speaks of them with some pride. Olga MorozovaShe served here for four terms, from the early 2000s to 2017. She then retired, but remained in politics and was elected as a deputy for the district into which the Babaevsky District was transformed.
"Our settlement is alive and kicking. True, the population is declining. There used to be around 2000, but now there are about 1300 people living there," she says.
A significant part of the settlement is the village of Toropovo itself; quite a few people live in Smorodinka and in the remote Verkhnevolskoye. This makes Tupik the smallest settlement in the settlement. Six families plan to stay there this winter.
"What if he gets a job? But where are the guys going? They've all been shut down," laments Lyudmila Gavrilina.
Together with Tatyana Suslova, they recalled a family moving from Tupik to Tešemlja, a village between which there's no visible border on the map, but on the ground there's greenery and a dirt road. The father of the family is officially unemployed, the mother is on maternity leave, and in Tešemlja, they own an apartment purchased with maternity capital.
"So where are there more? If there aren't any children, then they've closed them," former head Olga Morozova says, catching herself. "There used to be about a hundred children in four kindergartens, now we have 21 children enrolled. And even then, the Teshemlevs get bus rides."
But still, Tupik is “the best place to live,” local residents conclude.
"It's quiet here, you can't hear the cars at all." "It's true, we have a railway, but we're already used to it," he says. Tatyana Adolfovna"We had little ones last year. My son has twins, and they were happy to jump out and watch the train arrive. And we were somehow... Pavlovna and I were born here, we grew up here, it's just a habit for us." "And I'm deaf and I don't notice anymore," she echoes. Lyudmila Pavlovna— I came to work on the railroad as a track fitter. And then I retired. I worked for 38 and a half years. And I would have kept working if my mother hadn't gotten sick. I took care of her for six years. Now I'm an honorary employee of the railroad and a labor veteran. And the apartment in Babayevo is empty; they gave it to me back then.
Tupik has one unnamed street and two dead-end roads. Theoretically, you can take the street to Teshemlya station, but locals prefer to bypass the village on a more substantial dirt road. On the other side is a vast swamp, partially overgrown with pine forest. Blueberries and mushrooms grow on the muddy hummocks, and further into the swamp are cloudberries, but this year there wasn't a good harvest. Locals go berry picking, and some try to make money by selling blueberries at a collection point for 95 rubles per kilogram.
"It's a berry and mushroom region. Starting in June, people pick strawberries and blueberries. Some live off that. In September, the lingonberry and cranberry harvest begins. Those who aren't lazy go often," he says. Vera Klepova.
Vera Kirillovna doesn't want to talk much about it—her job is waiting. She works in the territorial department—the former settlement administration—as a chief specialist. This is one of three positions in the former administration, which even before the abolition of the settlement-level government, employed only four people. The salaries of village officials aren't very high, and her husband, a pensioner, takes his surplus berries to the collection point. This provides a small additional income for the family.
Berry pickers generally don't like attention. They're probably afraid to jinx their berry-picking spots. The men driving past the administration building in a Niva didn't stop for long either—they didn't want to reveal where they'd picked their berries and mushrooms.
Dolls instead of industry
In the center of Toropovo stand several public buildings. The smallest of them is the former administration building. The largest is the community center, and between them stands a new wooden church, built to replace the one once destroyed.
Local women and grandmothers gather under the soaring ceiling in the assembly hall. They are dressed in traditional costumes—a concert rehearsal is underway. The group begins a song about the village—not their own, but in general. It has endless fields, forests, and ravines. The women ask the village for forgiveness, because it is "not forgotten only by the elderly."
But the community center also found something to keep children busy. The community center's director, Tatyana Kikh, took a liking to doll-making—a folk craft that has seen a revival in recent years. She opened a club at the community center for both children and adults, and a small museum featuring dolls and household items from the 19th and 20th centuries.
"Both young and old people come on the tour. It's like nostalgia for them," he says. Tatyana Kikh— I added dolls here, since our settlement brand is the Country of Folk Dolls.
It used to be just a club, but then the doll became very popular in the village. "Everyone is involved with the doll," he says. Tatyana KikhAnd this small hobby began to transform into a calling card for the Toropovskoye settlement. The first local children's festivals emerged, and next year there will be an interregional festival. So, according to locals, the doll is more than just a hobby. It has become a source of inspiration for local residents, who now have something to do again. Sewing in folk style—not just dolls—has become a source of income for some.
“We have craftswomen who sew not only dolls, but also patchwork bedspreads, blankets, and potholders,” explains Olga Morozova"By the way, they sell well—a blanket costs 7 rubles, a satin one can cost 15. They're popular with people from St. Petersburg and Moscow. And the craftswomen make a living from it."
A distinctive feature of the folk doll was the absence of a face. "Why does the doll have no face? When someone buys a doll from us, the owner must draw the face themselves. The face is the soul of the doll, and each owner draws their own face for it," Olga added.
Chronicle of dive bombers
Opposite the administration building and the community center, as is often the case, stands a mass grave and memorial to those who fought in the Great Patriotic War. The memorial, however, has its own peculiarity: a large airplane propeller with damaged blades stands prominently in the most prominent spot. It was dug up by local search teams.
In the Vologda region, the front only reached the area of Lake Onega. So where did the search parties in the Babayevsky district come from? The railway supplied the front, including Leningrad under siege, and the Road of Life began relatively nearby. And this area was regularly bombed. But one of the main war stories of the Toropovskoye settlement could have been comical, if not for the loss of life.
"Here's the story," the former head recalls. "On July 28, 1943, planes, Pe-2 bombers, were being ferried from the Kazan airfield to Plekhanovo airfield. And then two planes—the guys either got carried away playing or something… but they hit tails. Both planes crashed into a swamp near Tupik. One plane was pulled out immediately, but the other sank so deep into the swamp that it remained there to this day."
In 2012, search teams began recovering the plane. They had to work in winter, searching for parts, diving into peat bog, and pulling them out. Over the course of four years, they managed to recover most of the plane and the pilots.
"There were a lot of them flying then, and some saw what happened. It was 1943, interrogations... Everyone told the tragedy in their own way. And then the story was classified, and we had to work with declassified documents."
Then they began searching for the relatives of the eight deceased pilots. One of them, the brother of the deceased, was found in Kyiv, and he was informed of the news in 2017. "He waited a long time for his brother to come or for some news. When he finally did, he died the next day. That's the story," says Morozova.
Well, how have you, descendants, built communism already?
Meanwhile, locals strive to showcase all the village's beauty, boasting its historical heritage and demonstrating how it fits into modern life. They even remembered their time capsule.
On the outskirts of the village stand two ancient estates. One is in poor condition and unused, while the other is relatively well preserved. The merchant Fyodor Nemchikov lived in these parts and built this estate house. The two-story building was half brick and half wood. The brick ground floor housed a small shop, while the Nemchikov family lived on the second floor. However, Fyodor Petrovich was dispossessed during collectivization, and the building was converted to educational facilities. At various times, it housed a boarding school and a school, and now houses school workshops.
The estate stands on the high bank of the Kolp River—a narrow but winding river flowing through a deep canyon. A pine alley lines the path, and on the opposite bank, a boy of about 10 or 11 years old fishes alone. Next to the estate house is a neat school garden with potatoes and vegetables.
And this place also has its own time capsule.
“Five years ago, the graduating class of the Toropovskaya school retrieved a capsule that had been planted 50 years earlier,” says a local resident. Olga Dolgova.
In 1967, residents of many cities and villages across the USSR buried or sealed time capsules containing messages from their descendants into the walls of their homes. Having just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, Soviet citizens engaged in conversation with those they planned to celebrate the centennial of the socialist state. Residents of Toropov were no exception.
The message contained romantic overtones. "It described how they worked there, and wished us to continue working and move toward communism," former head Olga Morozova roughly recalled.
The graduates left their message for 2067, but the authors of the message did not admit what was written in it.
