Janow Stan

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
settlement
Janow Stan
Янов Стан
Federal district Siberia
region Krasnoyarsk
Rajon Turuchanski
Height of the center 41  m
Time zone UTC + 7
Geographical location
Coordinates 65 ° 59 ′  N , 84 ° 19 ′  E Coordinates: 65 ° 58 ′ 34 ″  N , 84 ° 19 ′ 19 ″  E
Janow Stan (Russia)
Red pog.svg
Situation in Russia
Yanov Stan (Krasnoyarsk Territory)
Red pog.svg
Location in the Krasnoyarsk Territory
The Janow Stan settlement. In the foreground you can still see the remains of the tundra rim from the summer of 2013 (black vegetation), on the left above the old school building (light roof). The new building (red roof) is the home of the meteorologist, his weather station is the gray square grass area to the left of the picture. The small black huts are the last two of the former five, almost 100 year old residential huts. In the background are the pillars of the unfinished bridge over the Turuchan.
Janow Stan's Meteorological Station
The unfinished bridge over the Turuchan near Janow Stan. View from the river in north direction to three of a total of four completed piers (the left bank pillar cannot be seen). The wooden beams in the water should protect the reinforced concrete against the ice floes. On the right of the pillar you can still see the remains of a telegraph line that ran from Moscow to Igarka in the 1950s. For size comparison: The pillars are each 27 meters apart.
The almost finished bridge piers: You can clearly see how the cladding has not been removed and has defied the weather for 60 years. It can be clearly seen that pillars are still missing: there should have been two more.

Janow Stan ( Russian Янов Стан ) is a small settlement on the Turuchan River , a left tributary of the Yenisei , in the West Siberian lowlands. From an administrative point of view, the place belongs to the Krasnoyarsk region (Central Siberia) and developed into a small town between 1949 and 1953 when the Arctic Circle Railway , the so-called Stalin Railway, was built along the Arctic Ocean on the orders of Josef Stalin . Janow Stan was very important in this railway project.

The place currently has very few residents who live here permanently.

Location and strategic importance

Janow Stan is a settlement on the upper reaches of the Turuchan River. The area is influenced by polar weather, which is why you can sometimes “feel the breath of the Arctic even in July.” Turuchan is frozen over for almost eight months a year. In the few ice-free months, however, it is in principle navigable up to Janow Stan. However, this is only possible from mid-June to the end of July, because from then on the Turuchan - depending on the intensity of the last snowmelt or the amount of rain - carries too little water.

Janow Stan had existed as a trading post for fur for a long time, but with the construction of the Stalin Railway from 1949 to 1953 the settlement gained strategic importance. The Stalin Railway runs for 1264 km from the Polar Urals to the east. However, the five major rivers in this area flow from south to north, so there were only five points along the entire railway line that could be reached directly in the short ice-free time. There are hardly any navigable rivers that run parallel to the Stalin Railway and that could be used to bring material directly to the construction site. The big exception was the Turuchan River! So Janow Stan was easy to reach, although it is in an otherwise difficult to access area. Because the village is located in the area of permafrost , which in summer, when the surface thaws, turns everything into mud and bog. There were no paved roads to the next villages (by the way until today) over such great distances in the almost deserted area. The population density there was around 1949 at only 0.05 people per km². After the work on the Stalin Railway was stopped, the place lost its strategic and logistical importance again.

Previous meaning

In a census report from the polar region of the former Soviet Union from 1926/27 it was noted that Janow Stan was an important trading point for fur. The hunters came here in winter and sold their goods to middlemen. The Selkup and Nenets ethnic groups live in the region . In 1924 a kind of boarding school opened in Janow Stan for the children of these nomadic peoples. Georgi Prokofiev was the school director from 1925 to 1928. He was a well-known researcher who studied the language and culture of the Selkupen, Nenets and other Samoyed peoples . His wife, Ekaterina Prokofiev, an ethnographer to whose publications almost all modern researchers of traditional Selkupian culture refer, worked as a teacher. Prokofiev wrote about his years in Janow Stan in 1931: “In 1925 there were six huts in Janow Stan. ... The population of the village consisted of four Russian families, including my wife and one-year-old daughter. The rest of the population were six native families and nine boarding school students. Everyone crowded into the five small huts and two shelters. A room measuring 3.2 × 3.6 meters was available for me and my family. ”In 1927, the“ Committee of the North ”in Janow Stan finally built a school building.

Since 1924 the area belonged to the administrative area of ​​the "Taz Tundra". In 1944 there was a territorial reform that suddenly put Janow Stan on the edge of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, only 40 kilometers from the border with the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug . As a result, Janow Stan lost its importance as the center of the Selkupen. These now moved to Farkovo, which is 213 kilometers downstream, i.e. to the east in the direction of the Yenisei. Janow Stan was gradually almost depopulated.

Janow Stan becomes an important transshipment point for the Stalin Railway

In January 1949 Josef Stalin decided in distant Moscow to build a single-track railway line. This should run from the Asian side of the Polarural to the east. The geologists and engineers decided to lay the Stalin Railway, named after the "idea carrier", along the small settlement of Janow Stan and even to build a train station here. From 1949 tens of thousands of Gulag forced laborers were brought into this area across the Yenisei River from southern Siberia. Thousands were reloaded on smaller cargo ships in the town of Turuchansk and taken over the Turuchan, the 288 kilometers of the river to Janow Stan. There they were distributed to the labor camps that were set up along the railway line to be built, often under primitive circumstances. According to the records, a total of 4,252 workers must have arrived in Janow Stan.

In June 1949, 1,500 GULag prisoners and 10,000 tons of building materials were brought here in the first year. In the three following, very short periods of the Turuchan floods (1950, 1951 and 1952), new material and new prisoners kept arriving here. Even in the last navigation period (June / July 1952) 22,480 tons of material were delivered. Depending on the level and the corresponding draft, the maximum load of a towing convoy was 3000 tons. The division into the drive ship and the so-called lighter ones has the advantage of being able to transport heavy loads with a shallow draft.

By 1953, two completed railway sections were built from Janow Stan. One led over 140 kilometers to the northeast of Yermakowo and the other went west to the river Great Prodigal, where rails were laid with a total length of 36 kilometers. At the beginning of 1953, passenger traffic to the east as far as Yermakowo was opened. Two locomotives were delivered by ship for the western route to support the construction work. There was no connection between the two railway lines because the construction of a bridge over the Turuchan near Janow Stan was no longer completed. Janow Stan's train station also remained an illusion, although its exact location had already been determined. Two parallel tracks have already been piled up for this purpose, perhaps a wooden platform has been erected, but there was no time left for the construction of a station building.

The time after the construction work on the Stalin Railway was stopped

When the construction of the route was stopped immediately after Stalin's death (March 5, 1953), it was decided to transport most of the prisoners from Janow Stan in the same shipping period. Everything was left standing and lying. Even today, the climbing formwork on the bridge piers that was not removed bears witness to the abrupt end of the construction work. Hardly anything was dismantled; what could not be taken away immediately stopped. It is not known how many people lived in Janow Stan over the next few years.

In 1964 there was renewed activity in Janow Stan. It had been decided that the rails would be dismantled during this shipping period and transported to Norilsk . It is no longer known whether the two locomotives on the section to the east of Janow Stan were knocked off the rails. However, the overturning did not help much, because only the rails from Yermakowo to Janow Stan were dismantled. Almost none of the rails further to the west have been dismantled and are still in place today.

Janow Stan today

Currently, the settlement is only being maintained because of the weather station. It is operated manually; Various measured values ​​are read every three hours and transmitted by radio. Of the five small huts that Prokofiev wrote about in 1931, three have been demolished and replaced by a larger sheet-metal-clad house in which the meteorologist on duty lives. Only the school building, which was extremely large for the time, still reminds of that time.

Today only the unfinished concrete bridge piers in the Turuchan tower spectacularly into the sky. They are the emblem of Janow Stan. Like warning steles, they remind - probably for a long time to come - of the dream of a single ruler who never came true.

Population development

year Residents
1925 approx. 50
1952 ? [*]
2006 7th
2010 20th
2015 approx. 5

[*] Since there are no ruins of houses or the like in the immediate vicinity of Janow Stan, it can be assumed that the many prisoners were distributed from here directly to the camps to the west and east. The accommodation of the employees who organized the logistics could have been done in halfway winterproof tents - as they were used on a large scale in Yermakowo. The literature gives no indication of the number of people living here permanently during this period.

literature

  • Norbert Mausolf: The Stalin Railway Trilogy. In search of traces in the Arctic Circle . Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt 2011, ISBN 978-3-8423-5398-5 .

Web links

Commons : Janow Stan  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.memorial.krsk.ru/Public/90/19990205.htm
  2. ↑ http://www.memorial.krsk.ru/deu/Dokument/Publik/200508131.htm
  3. ↑ a b Михаил Ю. Афанасьев: Полярная магистраль. ВЕЧЕ, Москва 2007, ISBN 978-5-9533-1688-0 (The Polar Highway, Russian), p. 235
  4. ↑ http://only-maps.ru/morskie-karty/enisej-sxemy-sudovyx-xodov-rek-turuxan-xantajka-kas-i-sym.html
  5. ↑ http://www.mintrans.ru/upload/iblock/f9a/ts_karta_koridory2.jpg
  6. ↑ http://www.r-arcticnet.sr.unh.edu/v4.0/ViewPoint.pl?Point=6632
  7. ↑ http://93.189.147.27/docs/desc/19/57/47/
  8. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ↑ http://www.abdn.ac.uk/polarcensus/
  10. ↑ a b Prokofjew, GN: Three years in the Samoyed school, magazine "Soviet North"
  11. ↑ https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Карта_Енисейской_Губернии.jpg
  12. ↑ http://wikimapia.org/14320948/ru/Фарково
  13. ↑ a b http://minlang.srcc.msu.ru/ru/naselennyy-punkt/yanov-stan or http://www.siberian-lang.srcc.msu.ru/ru/naselennyy-punkt/yanov- stan
  14. ↑ http://www.memorial.krsk.ru/Work/Konkurs/7/Balavadze/Balavadze.htm
  15. ↑ http://textual.ru/gvr/index.php?card=221905
  16. ↑ http://www.memorial.krsk.ru/deu/Dokument/Ariicles/199850303.htm
  17. ↑ http://www.lib.csu.ru/vch/119/012.pdf
  18. ↑ http: //красноярские-архивы.рф/gosudarstvennyi-arkh/users/informatsiya-o-pamyatnykh-sobytiyakh/273
  19. ↑ http://www.memorial.krsk.ru/Public/90/199902051.htm
  20. ↑ http://www.memorial.krsk.ru/Articles/503Karta/1.htm or http://www.cons3.narod.ru/DeadRoadRUS002.html
  21. ↑ http://www.memorial.krsk.ru/Public/90/199010.htm
  22. ↑ Михаил Ю. Афанасьев: Полярная магистраль. ВЕЧЕ, Москва 2007, ISBN 978-5-9533-1688-0 (The Polar Highway, Russian), p. 287
  23. ↑ http://www.memorial.krsk.ru/Articles/503/17.htm
  24. ↑ http://wikimapia.org/22504958/ru/Бывшая-ж-д-станция-Турухан
  25. ↑ http://www.pogodaiklimat.ru/weather.php?id=23463
  26. ↑ http://wikimapia.org/6779617/ru/Янов-Стан
  27. ↑ 2010 census in the Krasnoyarsk region (see Excel table: sheet 3.2, line 2323)
  28. ↑ The number is the result of a request to the local airline in Turukhansk, which flies to with the Janow Stan helicopter if necessary.
  29. ↑ http://wikimapia.org/23983430/ru/ПГС-Ермаковский#/photo/2622062 top photo