Tyumen & Tobolsk: Siberian River Cities

Tyumen is a city of startling contrasts. A provincial Siberian administrative center with quiet streets and picturesque log houses, Tyumen is coping with the contradictions of great wealth from natural resources. Thirty-five years ago, huge oil and gas reserves were discovered in Tyumen region, and, despite their plundering for decades by Soviet central planners, much of this wealth remains. To this day, Tyumen sits atop Russia’s largest oil and gas reserves. Yet, even in the post-Soviet era, little of the wealth earned from these natural resources has trickled down to effect the lives of ordinary Russians.

Founded in 1586 on the site of an earlier Tartar settlement at the confluence of the Tura and Tyumenka Rivers, Tyumen was the first Russian town in Siberia. Conquered in 1581 by Yermak, Tyumen’s name derives from the region’s Tartar name and the Russian word t’ma, meaning “multitude” or “ten thousand”—a suitably imposing name for a distant outpost.

Although Tyumen has expanded since the Second World War to some half million inhabitants, a walk through the historic center of town shows only a few streets with pre-revolutionary, brick commercial buildings, rarely more than two stories in height. The grand building boom at the turn of the 20th century seems to have passed by Tyumen. Yet the boom of the 1960s and 1970s did not. As is typical in Siberian towns, most residents live beyond the center, in new, monotonous housing developments with (relatively) modern conveniences .

Yet the modest appearance in the central district belies Tyumen’s considerable power. Tyumen is the capital of an enormous province that stretches north to the Arctic Ocean. There is estimated to be enough natural gas under Tyumen region to supply Russia’s current domestic needs for 150 years. The oil under the region’s swampy ground is estimated at around 135 billion barrels of oil—Russia’s single largest oil reserve, and equivalent to about 40 years of Russia’s current annual production. And yet, amid this apparent wealth, there is inefficiency and rancor. Inefficiency because about one-fourth of the region’s oil wells stand idle due to economic and technical problems; rancor because there is a vicious battle underway for control of the region’s main oil production company.

While such battles are fought, life for most citizens continues at the uncertain pace typical of Russian provinces today: modest advances accompanied by a lingering sense of uncertainty. Little points up this contrast better than the sleek modern buildings inserted into Tyumen’s otherwise modest urban setting. Some of the new buildings are apartment houses, strikingly well built; others are banks; still others are part of the rapidly expanding Tyumen State University (the expansion is particularly active in areas such as law and management).

But to the foreign visitor, and to many Russians, the most visible sign of the new, if highly uneven, prosperity brought by the petroleum industry is the presence of a sleek, new eight-story Quality Hotel, part of the international Quality Inn system. This decidely mid-range hotel chain is the quintessence of rooming luxury in Tyumen. And it is not a protected foreign enclave: most of the guests are Russians.

Tyumen has always been an industrious town. Like most early Russian Siberian towns, it originally served as a fortress-settlement for Cossacks and other troops, who protected newly-developing trade routes, particularly with China in the seventeenth century. Tyumen’s importance as a center for transportation and small factories continued to grow in the eighteenth century. The first steamboat to ply a Siberian river was constructed here in 1838.

The greatest impulse for economic growth came with the completion of a railroad from Yekaterinburg (see Russian Life, March/April 2000). This line eventually became an important segment of the Trans-Siberian Railway, transporting the wealth of Siberia’s forests and new grain farms, as well as leather and other products of local factories. On a more lugubrious note, Tyumen’s importance as a transportation nexus also inevitably involved it in the exile system, as the town became an administrative center for exiles and convicts in the nineteenth century. At the same time, over half a million settlers passed through the town at the turn of the 20th century, en route to colonizing Siberia.

Today, remnants of the Tyumen’s old Siberian past are being carefully preserved. The efficacy of this effort is especially evident in the city’s historic wooden houses, with elaborate framed and carved window surrounds that are unique to Tyumen. Many Siberian cities, such as Tomsk and Novosibirsk, have their own specific style of decorative windows, but Tyumen is unique in the massive quality of the window construction, which often includes carver panels below the sill as an additional decorative and protective device.

A number of the city’s churches are also being renovated and refurbished. On the northern fringes of the city is the Trinity Monastery, founded in 1616 on the high, right bank of the Tura River and originally dedicated to the Transfiguration of the Savior. The monastery was transformed in the early part of the eighteenth century by an energetic Ukrainian prelate, Bishop Fedor Leshchinsky, thus some of its architecture shows clear traces of the Ukrainian baroque. Its surviving structures include the main Church of the Trinity (1709-1715) and the Church of Saints Peter and Paul (1741-1755). The Trinity Church was completely gutted during the Soviet period, and its structural integrity has been threatened by the construction of a water purification plant close to the north wall of the church.

On more solid ground in the city center, the large Cathedral of the Icon of the Sign (Znamensky) has been splendidly refurbished as the center of Orthodox religious life in the area. Built in several phases between 1768 and 1801, with a major expansion in the early twentieth century, the cathedral displays the florid decoration typical of so much of Siberian church architecture.

Although Tyumen is now the leading city in the vast territory that bears its name, for much of the history of this region, Tobolsk, located 247 km northeast of Tyumen, was the commanding citadel, sitting on a high bank overlooking the Irtysh River.  From the 17th to the early 20th centuries, Tobolsk was the cultural and educational capital of Siberia (producing, among others, the scientist Dmitry Mendeleev, the composer Alexander Alyabyev and the painter Vasily Perov). From 1708 to 1824 it was the capital of Siberia. In 1620, the first Siberian Eparchy (bishopric) of the Russian Orthodox Church was located here.

The reason for this precedence was Tobolsk’s location on the banks of the Irtysh river, from the late 1500s to the early 1800s a primary channel for river navigation to the East. Indeed, of the many rivers that run through Siberia, none has more historical and emotional resonance than the Irtysh, which served as a critical artery for the Russian movement into Siberia. It was on the Irtysh that a hardy band of Cossacks, led by Yermak and supported by the Stroganovs in Solvychegodsk (see Russian Life, Feb/March 1999), won their epochal victory over the Tartar troops of khan Kuchum in 1582. And it was near the Irtysh that Yermak met his demise from a surprise attack in 1584. Indeed, Tobolsk was founded in 1587 by the Cossack leader Daniel Chulkov, near the site of Yermak’s victory, at the confluence of the Tobol and Irtysh Rivers (see page 34). For nearly three hundred years, Tobolsk’s location on the Irtysh river made it a vital transit point for trade between Europe and China. But in the 19th century, the main trading route to the East moved south of Tobolsk and the Transsiberian railroad was built through Tyumen.

Tobolsk (population around 100,000) is sharply divided by the landscape into two sections: upper and lower. The lower part, being closer to the river, was the most intensively developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The upper part was reserved primarily for institutions of power: the archbishop’s residence (1773-75), the main Cathedral of St. Sophia, the Gostinny Dvor, or main trading complex (1703-05), and the eparchal citadel—later the main office of the provincial administration, to which was attached a large prison that functioned until 1989. The Russian Orthodox Church was particularly strong in Tobolsk. The Sophia Cathedral (photo, page 1) in its present form dates primarily from the end of the seventeenth century. The archbishop’s palace, built during the reign of Catherine the Great now houses an excellent Historical Museum.

Most of the historic buildings of the upper city were located in or around the Tobolsk kremlin, founded by Peter the Great in 1700 and constructed throughout the eighteenth century. Peter the Great attached much significance to the development of Tobolsk as an anchor for Russian expansion in Siberia. Indeed, it was he who designated Tobolsk the administrative center of the Province of Siberia (extending from the Urals to the Pacific) in 1708. Peter also sponsored a number of major building projects, some of which were realized with the help of skilled Swedish prisoners captured by Peter’s armies during the Great Northern War. The general design and construction of the Tobolsk Kremlin in the early part of the eighteenth century took place under the direction of the gifted architect and planner Semyon Remezov, who also produced a number of drawings of the city.

Today the lower town lags in development, despite a valuable historical environment that includes a number of houses and monumental baroque churches, largely ransacked during the Soviet period. One of these, the Church of the Archangel Michael, has been restored to active use, but most of the other churches of the lower town are either completely gutted or boarded in various stages of restoration, halted for lack of funds. The lower town’s former Governor’s House (1788), now a site of national historic significance, has also been restored. It was here that Nicholas II and his family spent several months, from August 1917 through April 1918, before their fateful transfer to Yekaterinburg.

Renovation of the lower town has been impeded not only by a weak economy but also by a primitive infrastructure. As a result of poor drainage, for example, the lower town has no functioning sewer system. Therefore, most investment in contemporary shops and other businesses goes to the modern upper town. Here one can find the new regional administrative center, the sleek new Hotel Slavyanskaya (built by Yugoslavs), the large new Baptist Evangelical Church, and the prefabricated apartment buildings in which most of the city’s inhabitants live. This modern part of the city was developed in no small degree with the expectation that Tobolsk would share in the petroleum boom, particularly with the construction of a refinery or petrochemicals plant.

These hopes have not yet been realized, and large-scale investment is still on hold. Even in the modern developments, the infrastructure is prone to breakdowns—water and electricity are often switched off for a good part of the day.

Such inconveniences pale in comparison with the conditions for other “denizens” of Tobolsk, for whom it is a prison town. Indeed, throughout its history, Tobolsk has been a major link in the Siberian prison system (see Russian Life, Oct/Nov 1999). The famous religious dissenter of the latter part of the 17th century, Archpriest Avvakum, was sent to Tobolsk as part of his exile, as was the noted thinker and writer Alexander Radishchev at the end of the eighteenth century. Many of the Decembrists were exiled through Tobolsk, and Fyodor Dostoevsky passed through the city’s transit prison, which still functions as a preliminary detention center.

As in detention centers across Russia, cells here overflow with young detainees awaiting trial. Males and females are kept in separate cells within the same buildings. There is a small chapel, various workshops, a power plant, and a bakery with stacks of fresh loaves of black bread, which, on sampling, proved to be of excellent quality and taste. Of course, the prison grows and produces whatever it can on its own. For even the pittance that the state promises to provide for maintaining each prisoner is rarely delivered.

Amid the carefully tended graves (including some of the Decembrists) at the city’s main cemetery, another side of post-soviet criminal life was on display. Here there are two grave sites remarkable for their lavishness. These were the graves, as a local acquaintance put it, of two “not entirely innocent victims” of local crime wars. Dead in their early forties, their ghostly figures were etched in the black granite of their gravestones.

There was a memorial of a different type on the grounds of Tobolsk’s former state prison (not to be confused with the pre-trial detention prison), near the Kremlin. Although the prison was closed in 1989, its semi-ruined state retains the power to haunt. A large wreath had been placed to commemorate the victims of Stalinist repression shot on this site in large numbers during the late 1930s. No one seems to know what to do with the empty prison buildings, strong brick structures located near the seminary and the museum. All are dangerously infected with tuberculosis bacilli.

Whatever the dark pages of the past, Tobolsk and Tyumen seem determined not to turn their backs on this history, but rather to build from the strengths that have made them an enduring part of the Russian legacy in Siberia. Many cultural institutions are thriving: the Historical Museum has large plans for expansion, and the Russian Orthodox Church is increasing its activities under the energetic direction of Dmitry, Bishop of the Eparchy of Tobolsk and Tyumen (established in 1990). Siberia’s first religious seminary of the Soviet period opened near the cathedral in 1989, and there are many dedicated students at this institution, with its beautifully restored historic buildings. All of this gives cause for hope. As is usually the case in Russia, a city’s attitude toward its past says much about the confidence and spirit with which it approaches the future.  RL

William C. Brumfield is Professor of Slavic Studies at Tulane University. A leading authority on Russian architecture and an accomplished photographer, he is a regular contributor to Russian Life. His article on Yekaterinburg appeared in our March/April 2000 issue. He is also author of several books on Russian architecture, some of which are available through Access Russia, ph. 800-639-4301.

As part of the US Library of Congress World Wide Web project, Meeting of Frontiers (frontiers.loc.gov), William Brumfield journeyed east across Siberia, photographing and chronicling the lives and towns of Russians living there. This article is the third of six in a series to appear in Russian Life, leading readers on an historical journey from the Urals, across Siberia to the shores of Lake Baikal.