Tomsk at 400

A Siberian city examines its roots and looks to the future.

Museum guide Valya Tevroleva walks carefully up the rickety steps of the Tomsk City Museum, stopping to shine her flashlight on the hand of a statue extended across the pathway.

“Be careful,” she tells her charges. “The lights aren’t working today.”

The visitors crouch under a low doorway and wend the wooden, circular staircase. Emerging onto a round balcony at the top, they take in the view of the city, the pink, white, yellow, blue and brown hues intensified by the grey-blue sky and the recent rain. From their vantage point, all is visible – from the red brick home of nineteenth century anarchist Michael Bakunin to the white tower of Bogoroditsa-Alekseyevsky Monastery, where Pushkin’s great-grandfather spent time under arrest and where Emperor Alexander I reputedly hid, disguised as a monk. Nearby, two Russian Orthodox churches flank a most unusual statue of Vladimir Lenin. In 1851, firefighters used this tower as a lookout for fires that plagued the wooden city. Today, the museum and the lookout tower, just opened in advance of Tomsk’s 400-year anniversary, serve as a place to gaze out over history.

Tomsk’s history is one of the most vibrant, as Siberian cities go. Tsar Boris Godunov declared Tomsk a city in 1604, basing it in a Tatar, Selkup and Khanty populated area. It was founded to guard the Ob Basin from Central Asian nomads marauding across southern borders. The first fort was actually located on the raised land where the museum now stands, bordered by a swamp on one side and a river on two other sides. Constructed of wood, it burned down frequently.

“People lived a hard life because of the climate,” Tevroleva said. “It went down to minus forty degrees in the winter and the summers were cold, not like now.”

Located almost in the center of the Siberian highway (trakt), Tomsk quickly developed as a trading center, where silk and tea came in from China and furs were sent to Europe.

In 1888, the first Siberian university, the Tomsk State Emperor’s University, opened. It was the first university in the Asian part of the Russian empire. Just over a decade later, in 1901, the Technological Institute, the first one east of the Urals, opened.

Even though Tomsk had been part of the main Siberian trading route for 300 years, the Russian government decided to route the Trans-Siberian railway south of the city. Some say it is because Tomsk did not lobby hard enough for the railway, others say St. Petersburg was hoping to prevent the region’s separatist movement from gaining force by separating it from the future transit line. Regardless, the population around Tomsk increased nine times in the decades after the railroad was built.

Throughout its history, Tomsk served as a site of exile, housing compounds, forwarding prisons, and transit centers. “Until Stalin’s death in 1953, 30 percent of Tomsk city was exiles,” Tevroleva said. About half of those exiles during Stalin’s reign may have been executed. Adam Hochschild, author of The Unquiet Ghost, tells of a sick “socialist competition” which took place between the Tomsk and Novokuznetsk secret police forces, to see which city could arrest and execute more people. Tomsk won and the head of the secret police received an award.

From the Stalin era until September 25, 1992, Tomsk was one of 21 major cities in Russia closed to foreigners. Its closed history remains evident in the suburb of Seversk (also known as Tomsk-7 – the feature of an article in Russian Life in April 1996), still strictly closed to non-residents, and in the nagging fears of environmental pollution following the 1992 explosion at the nuclear weapons complex, the second largest nuclear accident in the former Soviet Union.

“When I first came to Tomsk, I was really worried about the radiation,” said Slava Rozhkov, a Kazakh manager who came to Tomsk in 2001. “I would brush my teeth and wash my face only in BonAqua (bottled water). Then one day I went to my favorite restaurant and I thought, are they using BonAqua to cook my food? I don’t think so. So I started to use the water.”

Driver Alexander Sayrsky, said people are still fearful. “Even though the radiation may be low now, it’s still there,” he said. When asked what people do to preserve their health he replied, “Drink vodka. There is nothing else to do.”

Government officials try to assure residents that the area is safe. According to Alexander Adam, head of the Oblast Administration for Ecology and Professor of Ecology at Tomsk State University, the greatest potential danger comes from the Sibir Chemical Factory, the largest of its kind in the world.

“Since the 1993 explosion,” Adam said, “we installed the best automatic control system. Every eight minutes, updated information on wind, temperature, and radiation levels is available on the internet.”

Yuri Zubkov, director of the Radiation Safety Office, said that high levels of radiation have not been registered since 1993. His lab collects and tests, among other things, grasses and fish, to look for high radiation levels.

“The potential danger is always there,” he said. “People are afraid of radiation. They feared it before and they fear it now. This is for several reasons: the fact that this was a secret place for so many years, a person’s inability to see or sense radiation, and the fact that unseen dangers always seem greater.”

Today, foreign oil and gas workers, students and teachers, as well as some tourists venturing off the trans-Siberian are those most likely to come to Tomsk. A visitor today will find that the city has one of the best collections of historic wooden buildings in Siberia – intricately carved window frames and doorways stand next door to casinos and electronics stores (see article, opposite page). But they will not be here forever: the heat and weight of the wooden buildings thaws the permafrost below them, causing them to sink a fraction of an inch each year.

An intellectual current runs through the city. Tomsk is home to six universities and several affiliated institutions, which means that students make up twenty percent of the population. Many of them, upon completing their studies, never leave Tomsk.

Anna Akinina is one of those who decided to stay. She came here in 1985 from Kazakhstan and studied to be a car mechanic. She joined a mountain-climbing club at Tomsk Polytechnic University and could not stop climbing. Today, she is reputedly the only Siberian woman ever to have reached the top of Mount Everest. During the week, she alternates her time between training for future climbs and working as a men’s hairstylist at a beauty salon.

“Of the group that ascended Everest in 2001, seven of the twelve were from Tomsk, including the doctor,” said Akinina. “Five were successful.” One died. Akinina was the only woman in the group.

Olga Vorobyova, a credit officer, came to Tomsk nine years ago from the northern oil town of Strekhovoy to study history. “I decided to stay here after my studies, because I love this city,” she said. “It has a close, warm atmosphere and a lot of energy, thanks to the students. Recently, I went to Novosibirsk and, at the end of two weeks, I was longing for Tomsk. I didn’t know that I’d become so attached to it.”

Today, this city, once a science-centered town, is transitioning to a more diverse economy. Trained engineers, physicists, and mathematicians have retrained as hair stylists, small business owners, or translators.

Pavel Kilanov, a stocky man with a slick leather jacket and a constant smile, is an accidental entrepreneur. Five years ago, as an unemployed law school graduate, he began to help a friend restore furniture. Their business slowly grew and now he and his friend run a small factory, Syntez Furniture, where they design, create, and sell soft furniture to businesses and middle-class families.

Kilanov, at 30, is the oldest person in the 15-person company. He moves easily through his showroom, into the assembly areas, and upstairs into the small room where sewing machines hum as women create the cushions. “We pay a very good salary to people who work here, and part of it is based on production,” Kilanov said. “Our workers average $300 a month; most people in Tomsk earn $200 a month. We want our workers to feel faith in us and to be loyal to the firm. We also want to be able to be strict – to demand that they come to work on time and fulfill their tasks.”

Yekaterina, a trim, sprightly chemist with pink glasses and reddish hair piled into a bun, is studying at night to become a translator. Seven decades ago, her grandparents were deported to Tomsk as kulaks, “because they had a little money,” she said. Yekaterina lives with her mother in a small, aging apartment – the first she’s ever owned.

Unlike the many of the city’s scientists who have left their profession, due to late and unpaid wages, Yekaterina has stayed on. Does this grandchild of kulaks expect life to get better in this Siberian town? “Yes, I do,” she said. “It has to, because there is no other route.”   RL