The flooded city of Mologa (Russia) - description, history, location. Exact address, phone number, website. Tourist reviews, photos and videos.
Surely many people know the creepy-looking old black and white photographs, in which one can see the roofs of houses barely sticking out above the water and already rotted. A little higher above them rise the domes of churches with domes, from where the solemn and bright glaze has long since faded... It seems that this is some kind of apocalyptic picture or a still from a science-fiction film. But, unfortunately, this is the real reality. Modern Atlantis, the City of Kitezh, but in fact the city of Mologa barbarically flooded by the Bolsheviks, which today lies under the waters of the Rybinsk Reservoir.
History paragraph
This city, located at the confluence of the Mologa and Volga rivers, has been known since the Middle Ages, namely since the 14th century. The local Afanasyevsky Monastery housed the revered miraculous icon of the Tikhvin Mother of God. The city grew and developed, and the main activities of the locals were fishing and, of course, trade. For a long time, Mologa was considered one of the main centers of trade in the Upper Volga region, which ensured its constant prosperity.
If the city had not been destroyed, today we could see its sights - the Afanasyevsky Monastery, built in the 16th century, the Resurrection Cathedral of the 18th century in the Naryshkin Baroque style, the All Saints Cemetery Church and many others. Malaga survived World War and three revolutions, it was destined to be sunk in the dark 30s.
How Mologa went under water
In their brazen manner, the authorities bluntly announced their decision in 1935. Initially, it was planned to resettle the residents and move the buildings before the beginning of 1937, which was, of course, impossible. As a result, the resettlement began in the spring of 1937, when the ice melted from Mologa and the Volga, and lasted until 1941. Many Mologans were resettled in surrounding areas and cities, most of ended up in the village of Slip, not far from Rybinsk, while others settled in Yaroslavl or Moscow.
Every year, the children and grandchildren of former Mologans go to the flooded Mologa to worship the land of their ancestors.
In the early 60s, during the Thaw era, meetings began former residents cities. And in 1972, a tradition began to gather every second Saturday in August in order to honor their hometown. This tradition still exists today.
What to see
Periodically, the water level in the reservoir drops, the roofs of houses and in some places even the foundations become visible. Most low level was recorded in 2014, when the city was examined in almost the smallest detail. Depending on the weather and water level in spring and summer, you can negotiate in Rybinsk with the owner of the boat and sail to the former Mologa. Or go to Museum of the Mologa region and get a closer look at the tragic history of a once magnificently prosperous city that now rests at the bottom of a reservoir.
Children and grandchildren of former Mologans go there on ships to worship the ancient flooded city, as well as see the land of their ancestors.
Practical information
Mologa was located 32 km from Rybinsk, GPS coordinates: 58.19972; 38.44111.
You can't get there on your own without a boat. It is necessary in Rybinsk to negotiate with local captains who are ready to provide their watercraft and gasoline for the whole day for about 3,000 RUB. Prices on the page are as of October 20167.
Perhaps the statement that a Russian person most often lives with his past rather than with his present or future is not so far from the truth, a member of the Union of Writers of Russia once wrote Boris Sudarushkin in his magazine "Rus". He wrote this in connection with the eternal theme for Rybinsk of the flooding of Mologa during the construction of the Rybinsk reservoir. It seems that everything that can be said about the era of the great construction projects of communism has been said about the death of Mologa. Russian Atlantis, ghost town, dead city, the hidden page of Russian tragedy - no matter how Mologa is called in literature. Despite the wide popularity of this story, there are no clear assessments of the events of the first half of the twentieth century. And obviously it won't.
Story
In the local history monograph Peter of Crete“Our region. Yaroslavl province. The Experience of Rodnoverie,” published in 1907, tells the story of Mologa:
“As a populated place, Mologa was mentioned in the 13th century... Germans, Lithuanians, Greeks, Armenians, Persians, Italians came here to trade... Visiting traders exchanged their goods here for raw goods, mainly for furs. Also in late XVI centuries, the fair at the Serf City was considered the most important in Russia; later its value began to decline. IN early XVII centuries, the inhabitants of Mologa suffered a lot from the Cossacks, Poles and Lithuanians (especially in 1609 and 1617).”
The time of settlement of the area where the city of Mologa was located is unknown. In chronicles, mention of the Mologa River first appears in 1149, when the Grand Duke of Kiev Izyaslav Mstislavich, fighting with the Prince of Suzdal and Rostov Yuri Dolgoruky, burned all the villages along the Volga up to Mologa. In 1321, the Molozhsk Principality appeared, which during the reign of Ivan III became part of the Moscow Principality.
From the inventory compiled between 1676 and 1678 by steward Samarin and clerk Rusinov, it follows that Mologa was at that time a palace settlement, it had 125 households, including 12 belonging to fishermen who, together with the fishermen of Rybnaya Sloboda, fished in the Volga and Mologa red fish, delivering annually to the royal table three sturgeon, 10 white fish, and 100 sterlet.
At the end of the 1760s, Mologa belonged to the Uglich province of the Moscow province, had a town hall, two stone and one wooden parish churches, and 289 wooden houses. In 1777, the ancient palace settlement of Mologa received the status of a district town and was included in the Yaroslavl province. The coat of arms of the city of Mologa was approved on July 20, 1778. IN full meeting laws it is described as follows: “ Shield in a silver field; part three of this shield contains the coat of arms of the Yaroslavl governorship (on hind legs bear with an ax); in two parts of that shield, part of an earthen rampart is shown in an azure field; it is trimmed with a silver border or white stone».
At the end of the 19th century, Mologa was a small town that came to life during the loading of ships, and then plunged into the rather boring life of county towns. From Mologa began the Tikhvin water system, one of three connecting the Caspian and Baltic seas. More than 300 ships were loaded with grain and other goods annually at the city pier, and almost the same number of ships were unloaded.
There were 11 factories in Mologa, including a distillery, a bone mill, a glue and brick factory, and a plant for the production of berry extracts. There was a monastery, several churches, a treasury, a bank, a telegraph office, a post office and a cinema here.
There were three libraries in the city, nine educational institutions, two parish schools - one for boys, the other for girls, the Alexander Orphanage, one of the first gymnastics schools in Russia, which taught bowling, fencing, cycling, and carpentry.
Soviet power was established in the city on December 15, 1917. Supporters of the Provisional Government did not particularly resist, so no blood was shed.
In 1931, a machine and tractor station was organized in Mologa. The following year, a zonal seed-growing station and industrial plant were opened. In the 1930s, the city had more than 900 houses, about a hundred of them made of stone, and almost seven thousand people lived here.
The Mologans were announced about the upcoming resettlement in the fall of 1936. The authorities decided to resettle more than half of the city's residents and remove their homes by the end of the year. It was not possible to fulfill the plan - the resettlement of residents began in the spring of 1937 and lasted four years.
On the lands condemned to flooding, there were 408 collective farms, 46 rural hospitals, 224 schools, and 258 industrial enterprises.
According to official data, about 300 people refused to leave their homes during the resettlement. In the report of the head of the Mologsky department of the Volgolag camp camp, state security lieutenant Sklyarov: “In addition to the report I previously submitted, I report that the citizens who voluntarily wished to die with their belongings when filling the reservoir are 294 people...”
The city finally disappeared in 1947 when the filling of the Rybinsk Reservoir was completed.
On April 1, 1936, an interview with the head of Volgostroy was published in the newspaper “Severny Rabochiy” under the heading “Big Volga” Yakov Rapoport. The interview is accompanied by the following editorial introduction:
“There are no fortresses that the Bolsheviks could not take. How long ago did the construction of Dneprostroy, Kuznetskstroy, the Moscow metro and many other, no less grandiose problems seem like a dream? The dream has come true. Dozens of industrial giants have entered into operation at existing enterprises. Under the leadership of the great architect of socialism - Comrade Stalin - our country is solving enormous problems. One of these problems is the Big Volga.”
Rapoport explained what the Big Volga is: to connect the Volga route with the Dnieper through the Oka and tributaries of the Dnieper, to connect the Volga with the Black, Azov and Caspian seas: « Connecting rivers and seas, the Bolsheviks' hands reach the Arctic Ocean. The White Sea Canal plus the expanded Mariinskaya system, plus the Volga-Moscow Canal will make it possible to connect the White Sea and the Arctic Ocean with the southern seas».
Almost all of these promises were fulfilled. Rapoport kept silent about only one thing - that all this gigantic work was carried out by the labor of thousands of Gulag prisoners.
The most interesting thing in Rapoport’s interview is the information about the first option for building a power plant on the Volga near Yaroslavl, which included flooding the city of Uglich. The second option, with the flooding of Mologa, was sent by a group of young engineers personally to Stalin. By that time, all calculations for the Yaroslavl hydroelectric power station were completed, and construction had already begun. It is not difficult to imagine how the authors of the second option felt while waiting for a response from the Kremlin - at that time, such an initiative could easily have landed them in the category of enemies of the people. However, this time it happened differently. Here's how Rapoport talked about it:
"With the usual Comrade Stalin sensitivity, he was attentive to the project of young engineers. On his initiative, a secondary examination was carried out, which confirmed the validity and enormous advantage of the new project.”
With all his sympathy for the fate of Mologa, Sudarushkin believes that the flooding of Uglich would have had even more tragic consequences for the history and culture of Russia. But that’s not all - according to the first project, flooding threatened Rybinsk too! By at least, Rapoport spoke about this, having a good understanding of the situation at that time.
More real story the beginning of the construction of the Rybinsk reservoir, however, also without mentioning the thousands of Volgolag prisoners, presented in the book “ Man-made sea» Seraphim Tachalov, who personally participated in the construction of the Rybinsk hydroelectric complex: “I still remember how rafts of settlers floated along Mologa, Sheksna and Yana. On the rafts are household utensils, livestock, huts.” And then the author cites a conversation with a displaced woman: “After all, happiness, my dear, lives not only in the parental home. I think it won’t be any worse in the new place. Our place is unenviable - every spring there were floods. The underground is in water almost all the time, so there is nowhere to store supplies. If you need to go to the store, get on the boat. The cattle moo in povet. They didn’t take their eyes off the guys - they were about to drown... And the harvest itself was two or three, there wasn’t enough of our own bread until Easter. You fight and fight, but it’s of little use.”
Watery grave
In 1991, the Upper Volga book publishing house, where The Man-Made Sea appeared ten years earlier, published the book Yuri Nesterov « Mologa - memory and pain", in which the history of the Rybinsk Reservoir is presented in a tragic light.
On next year After the publication of the book, the author died; an obituary signed by the initiative group of the Mologa community was published in the newspaper “Rybinskiye Izvestia” on June 6, 1992, under the heading “Chronicle of the Mologa Region”. It said, in particular, that Yuri Aleksandrovich Nesterov was a career military man, a reserve colonel. “In 1985 I began to study the history of my hometown Mologa and the entire Mologo-Sheksninsky interfluve. He was especially interested in issues of resettlement, everyday life and life of Mologans in new places.”
Yuri Nesterov was one of the initiators of the creation of the Mologa Museum in Rybinsk. The book “Mologa - Memory and Pain” was published on the 50th anniversary of the flooding of his hometown by the Rybinsk Reservoir. It contains documents and the following figures: about 150 thousand Volgolag prisoners worked on the construction of the Rybinsk hydroelectric complex; one hundred people a day died from disease, hunger and “hellish” working conditions. “Today on the site of Mologa there is a huge watery grave,” wrote Yu.A. Nesterov. “But maybe, like the legendary Kitezh, it will reveal itself to people before the Last Judgment Seat of Christ?” After all Last Judgment has been going on for a long time, because our life is the Last Judgment itself. Nowadays, science often refutes the correctness of previous decisions, and if the low energy output of the Rybinsk cascade puts lowering the level of the reservoir or its descent on the agenda, then Mologa will indeed be able to rise out of the water again someday.”
On August 12, 1995, the museum of the city of Mologa was inaugurated in Rybinsk - a tiny island of the disappeared culture of Russian Atlantis.
Russian Pompeii
“Forest birds and animals are retreating step by step to higher places and hillocks. But water from the flanks and rear bypasses the fugitives. Mice, hedgehogs, stoats, foxes, hares and even moose are driven by the water to the tops of the hillocks and try to escape by swimming or on the floating logs, peaks and branches left from cutting down the forest.
Many forest giant moose more than once found themselves in spring floods and floods of Mologa and Sheksna and usually swam safely to the shores or stopped in shallow places until the flood waters subsided. But now the animals cannot overcome the flood of unprecedented size in the flooded area.
Many moose, having stopped trying to escape by swimming, stand up to their bellies in the water in shallower places and wait in vain for the usual decline in water. Some of the animals are saved on rafts and races prepared for rafting, living for several weeks. Hungry moose have eaten all the bark from the logs of the rafts and, realizing the hopelessness of their situation, allow people in boats to come within 10-15 steps..."
...As a result of the construction of the Rybinsk reservoir, 80 thousand hectares of floodplain meadows, 70 thousand hectares of arable land, more than 30 thousand hectares of highly productive pastures, and more than 250 thousand hectares of forests went under water. 633 villages and the ancient city of Mologa, the ancient estates of the Volkonskys, Kurakins, Azancheevs, Glebovs, the Ilovna estate, which belonged to the Musin-Pushkins, the Yugskaya Dorofeev Hermitage, three monasteries, and several dozen churches disappeared. Some churches were blown up before the flooding, others were abandoned, and they were gradually destroyed under the influence of water, ice and winds, serving as beacons for ships and a resting place for birds. The bell tower of the Church of St. John Chrysostom was the last to collapse in 1997.
130 thousand people were resettled from the area subject to flooding.
From the essay Vladimir Grechukhin « In the capital of Russian Atlantis»:
“We have been walking back for a long time through the dark sand and silt desert. We don’t talk much, it’s still to come. Each of us is still in Mologa. Both in thought and feeling. And the realization quietly comes that the meeting with the murdered City, it seems, not only enveloped him in misfortune, but also endowed him with a certain sad and proud strength. That there is something in these “Russian Pompeii” that stopped your thoughts at the last edge before bitter powerlessness, and enlightened your gaze and strengthened them, like a prayer. So what touched you so bitterly and beneficially in the murdered City? And you realize in shock that, probably, his Soul. That the City was killed, but the Soul seems to be alive. And, perhaps, in this place of conciliar Russian suffering, Russia has acquired one more Holy place Russian new martyrdom? And is it worth looking for more important holy places in the Yaroslavl region, if there is an amazing case when the whole city torn from your native life and without guilt punished with eternal exile? Is it not because of the awareness of the holiness of the deserted hills of Mologa that the feeling of high and proud sad strength does not leave me? Is it not from her that the soul becomes so passionately thoughtful? Isn’t it because of her that after the sermon you feel sadly bright?”
November 6 at 17.20 on Channel One - premiere of a film about mysterious story the flooded Russian city of Mologa
In an area rich in water, at the confluence of the Mologa River and the Volga. The width of Mologa opposite the city was 277 m, the depth was from 3 to 11 m. The width of the Volga was up to 530 m, the depth was from 2 to 9 m. The city itself was located on a fairly significant and flat hill and stretched along the right bank of Mologa and along the left bank Volga. Before the railway communications, from which Mologa remained aloof, the busy St. Petersburg postal route ran here.
Since the 17th century, the settlement has been classified as a city Epsom salt(named after the river flowing nearby), located 13 km up the Mologa River from the city. Immediately outside the city there began a swamp and then a lake (about 2.5 km in diameter), called Saints. A small stream flowed from it into the Mologa River, bearing the name Kop.
Middle Ages
The time of the initial settlement of the area where the city of Mologa stood is unknown. In the chronicles, the name of the Mologa River appears for the first time in 1149, when the Grand Duke of Kiev Izyaslav Mstislavich, fighting with Yuri Dolgoruky, the prince of Suzdal and Rostov, burned all the villages along the Volga all the way to Mologa. This happened in the spring, and the war had to stop, as the water in the rivers rose. It was believed that the spring flood caught the combatants exactly where the city of Mologa stood. In all likelihood, there has long been a settlement here that belonged to the princes of Rostov.
From the inventory compiled between 1676 and 1678 by the steward M.F. Samarin and the clerk Rusinov, it is clear that Mologa at that time was a palace settlement, that there were then 125 households in it, including 12 belonging to fishermen, that these latter, together with the fishermen of Rybnaya Sloboda, they caught red fish in the Volga and Mologa, delivering 3 sturgeon, 10 white fish and 100 sterlets each year to the royal court. It is unknown when the residents of Mologa stopped paying this tax. In 1682 there were 1281 houses in Mologa.
The coat of arms of the city of Mologa was Supremely approved on August 31 (September 11), 1778 by Empress Catherine II along with other coats of arms of the cities of the Yaroslavl governorship (PSZ, 1778, Law No. 14765). Law No. 14765 in the Complete Collection of Laws Russian Empire dated June 20, 1778, but on the drawings of coats of arms attached to it, the date of approval of the coats of arms is indicated - August 31, 1778. In the complete collection of laws it is described as follows: “a shield in a silver field; part three of this shield contains the coat of arms of the Yaroslavl governorship (on the hind legs there is a bear with an ax); in two parts of that shield, part of an earthen rampart is shown in an azure field; it is trimmed with a silver border or white stone.” ). The coat of arms was created by a fellow herald, collegiate advisor I. I. von Enden.
The reason for the city's prosperity was discovered by chance. At the opening of the city duma, the residents passed a secret public verdict of the following content: since the established duma can only dispose of the income specified in the law, and for purposes also determined by law, under the control of the highest authorities, they decided to maintain the previous public administration under the supervision of the same city mayor and the same members of the Duma and at the disposal of this management to provide special capital, formed according to a general layout. Thus, from 1786 to 1847, there were actually two city governments in Mologa: one official, with 4 thousand rubles of income; another secret, but essentially real, with an income of 20 thousand rubles. The city flourished until the state accidentally learned the secrets; The head was put on trial, the illegal capital was transferred to the government and as a result, as I. S. Aksakov, who audited the city administration of the Yaroslavl province in 1849, wrote, “the city fell into decay and quite quickly.”
In 1862, it was announced in Mologa that there were 1 merchant capital for the 2nd guild and 56 for the 3rd guild. Of those who took guild certificates, 43 were engaged in trade in the city itself, and the rest - on the side. In addition to the merchants, 23 more peasants traded here at that time. Among the trading establishments in Mologa at that time there were 3 shops, 86 shops, 4 hotels and 10 inns.
On May 28, 1864, a terrible fire occurred, destroying to the ground the best and largest part of the city. Within 12 hours, more than 200 houses, a guest courtyard, shops and public buildings burned down. The loss was then calculated at over 1 million rubles. Traces of this fire were visible for about 20 years.
In 1889, Mologa owned 8.3 thousand hectares of land (first place among the cities of the province), including 350 hectares within the city limits; stone residential buildings 34, wooden 659 and non-residential stone buildings 58, wooden 51. All residents in the city were about 7032, including 3115 men and 3917 women. Except for 4 Jews, all were Orthodox. By class, the population was divided as follows (men and women): hereditary nobles 50 and 55, personal 95 and 134, white clergy with their families 47 and 45, monastics - 165 women, personal honorary citizens 4 and 3, merchants 73 and 98, burghers 2595 and 3168, peasants 51 and 88, regular troops 68 men, reserves 88 men, retired soldiers with families 94 and 161. By January 1, 1896, there were 7064 residents (3436 men and 3628 women).
There were 3 fairs in Mologa at that time: Afanasyevskaya - on January 17 and 18, Sredokrestnaya - on Wednesday and Thursday of the 4th week of Lent and Ilyinskaya - on July 20. The cost of bringing goods to the first place was up to 20,000 rubles, and the sale was up to 15,000 rubles; the rest of the fairs were not much different from ordinary bazaars; weekly trading days on Saturdays were quite lively only in the summer. Crafts in the city were poorly developed. In 1888, there were 42 craftsmen in Mologa, 58 workers and 18 apprentices, in addition, about 30 people were engaged in the construction of barges; factories and factories: 2 distilleries, 3 gingerbread-bakery-pretzel factories, a cereal factory, an oil press factory, 2 brick factories, a malt factory, a candle and tallow factory, a windmill - 1-20 people worked at them.
The townspeople mainly found their means of living locally, although there were also absences. Residents of the Gorkaya Sol settlement, free from field work At the time, they were hired to raft barges. Some of the residents of Mologa were engaged in agricultural work, renting arable and meadow lands from the city for this purpose. In addition, there was a huge meadow opposite the city; all the inhabitants who signed up for the unit used the good and plentiful hay from this meadow. The mowers were hired by the city, and the hay was raked by the shareholders themselves.
In terms of income, Mologa, among other cities of the Yaroslavl province, ranked fourth in 1887, and in terms of expenses - fifth. Thus, city revenues in 1895 amounted to 45,775 rubles, expenses - 44,250 rubles. In 1866, a bank was opened in the city - it was based on money collected by residents for emergencies since the 1830s; by 1895 its capital reached 48,000 rubles.
At the end of the 19th century, Mologa was a small, narrow, long city, taking on a lively appearance during the load of ships, which lasted very briefly, and then plunged into the usual sleepy life of most of the county towns. From Mologa began the Tikhvin water system, one of three connecting the Caspian Sea with the Baltic Sea. Despite the fact that out of about 4.5 thousand ships passing through, only a few stopped here, their movement could not but affect the well-being of the residents, opening up the opportunity for them to supply the ship workers with food supplies and other necessary items. In addition to the passage of the mentioned ships, more than 300 ships were annually loaded at the Mologskaya pier with grain and other goods worth up to 650,000 rubles, and almost the same number of ships were unloaded here. In addition, up to 200 forest rafts were brought to Mologa. The total value of unloaded goods reached 500,000 rubles.
In 1895 there were 11 factories (distillery, bone-milling, glue-making and brick factories, a plant for the production of berry extracts, etc.), 58 workers, the amount of production was 38,230 rubles. Merchant certificates were issued: 1 guild, 1 guild, 2 guild 68, for petty trading 1191. The treasury, bank, telegraph, post office, and cinema functioned.
There was a monastery and several churches in the city.
- Afanasyevsky Monastery(from the 15th century - male, from 1795 - female) was located 500 m outside the city. Had 4 churches: cold (1840) and 3 warm (1788, 1826, 1890). The main relic was the miraculous icon of the Tikhvin Mother of God from the early 14th century.
- Resurrection Cathedral was built in 1767 in the Naryshkin style and restored by the merchant P. M. Podosenov in 1881-1886. The cathedral church had 5 altars - the main one of the Resurrection of Christ and the side altars - the Prophet Elijah, Nicholas the Wonderworker, the Dormition of the Mother of God and Saints Athanasius and Cyril. The bell tower of three decreasing octagons is built like the Uglich bell towers. Separately from this temple (cold) built in 1882 in the Russian-Byzantine style, warm Epiphany Cathedral, which had three thrones - Epiphany, the Protection of the Mother of God and St. Nicholas the Wonderworker. The same P. M. Podosenov, together with the merchant N. S. Utin, took the main part in the construction of this cathedral. Attached to the cathedral was also a wooden structure, plastered on both sides, the former cemetery Church of the Exaltation of the Cross, built in 1778.
- Ascension Parish Church built in 1756; it contains three thrones: the Ascension, the holy princes Boris and Gleb and the Archangel Michael. Baroque elements were used in the design of its facades.
- All Saints Cemetery Church, built in 1805, with two altars - in the name of All Saints and John the Baptist.
- Church in the village of Gorkaya Sol, built in 1828 by the same F.K. Bushkov. She had 2 thrones - the Apostle Thomas and the Kazan Mother of God.
There were 3 libraries and 9 educational institutions: a city three-class men's school, the Alexander two-class women's school, two parish schools - one for boys, the other for girls; Alexandrovsky orphanage; “Podosenovskaya” (named after the founder of the merchant P. M. Podosenov) gymnastics school - one of the first in Russia; bowling, cycling, fencing were taught; training was carried out carpentry, marching and rifle techniques, the school also had a stage and stalls for staging performances.
There was a zemstvo hospital with 30 beds, a city hospital for incoming patients and with it a warehouse of books on popular medicine, available for reading for free; city disinfection chamber; private eye clinic of Dr. Rudnev (6,500 visits per year). The city, at its own expense, supported a doctor, a nurse-midwife and two nurses to care for the sick at home. There were 6 doctors in Mologa (1 of them was a woman), 5 paramedics, 3 paramedics, 3 midwives, 1 pharmacy. For walks on the banks of the Volga, a small public garden was built. The climate was characterized as dry and healthy, and it was believed that it helped Mologa avoid epidemics of such terrible diseases as plague and cholera.
Charity for the poor was staged beautifully in Mologa. There were 5 charitable institutions: including the water rescue society, guardianship for the poor of the city of Mologa (since 1872), 2 almshouses - Bakhirevskaya and Podosenovskaya. Owning enough timber, the city came to the aid of the poor, distributing it to them for fuel. The guardianship of the poor divided the entire city into sections, and each section was in charge of a special trustee. In 1895, the trusteeship spent 1,769 rubles; there was a canteen for the poor. It was very rare to meet a beggar in the city.
Soviet power in the city was established on December 15 (28), 1917, not without some resistance from supporters of the Provisional Government, but without any bloodshed. During the Civil War, there was a food shortage, especially acute at the beginning of 1918.
In 1929-1940, Mologa was the center of the district of the same name.
In 1931, a machine and tractor station for seed production was organized in Mologa; its tractor fleet, however, numbered only 54 units in 1933. In the same year, an elevator for seeds of grassland grasses was built, and a seed-growing collective farm and technical school were organized. In 1932, a zonal seed production station was opened. In the same year, an industrial complex arose in the city, combining a power plant, a mill, an oil mill, a starch and syrup plant, and a bathhouse.
In the 1930s, there were more than 900 houses in the city, about a hundred of which were made of stone, and there were 200 shops and stores in and around the shopping area. The population did not exceed 7 thousand people.
Flooded City
Most of the Mologans were settled near Rybinsk in the village of Slip, which for some time was called Novaya Mologa. Some ended up in neighboring regions and cities, in Yaroslavl, Moscow and Leningrad.
The first meetings of Mologans date back to the 1960s. Since 1972, every second Saturday in August, Mologans gather in Rybinsk to commemorate their lost city. Currently, on the day of the meeting, a trip by boat to the Mologa region is usually arranged.
In 1992-1993, the level of the Rybinsk reservoir dropped by more than 1.5 meters, allowing local historians to organize an expedition to the exposed part of the flooded city (paved streets, contours of foundations, forged gratings and gravestones in the cemetery were visible). During the expedition they collected interesting materials for the future Mologa Museum and an amateur film was made.
In 1995, the Museum of the Mologsky Region was created in Rybinsk. In June 2003, on the initiative of the public organization “Communityhood of Mologans”, the Administration Yaroslavl region was organized Round table“Problems of the Mologa region and ways to solve them,” in which V.I. Lukyanenko first put forward the idea of creating the Mologa National Park in memory of the flooded city.
In August 2014, the region experienced low water, the water receded and entire streets were exposed: the foundations of houses, the walls of churches and other city buildings are visible. Former residents of the city come to the banks of the reservoir to watch unusual phenomenon. The children and grandchildren of the Mologans sailed on the motor ship “Moskovsky-7” to the ruins of the city to set foot on their “native land”.
see also
Notes
- Now flooded.
- Trinity. History of the Mologa country, p. 39. - Gorodsk. settlements in Russia. empires. T. V, part 2. St. Petersburg. 1866 vol., p. 463.
Mologa, now resting at the bottom of the Rybinsk reservoir ten kilometers from the nearest shore, is not the only one and not the first in the sad list of cities flooded by hydroelectric power plants, but it is certainly the most famous. It is identified either with Atlantis or with Kitezh, and in part it is a symbol of the whole “Russia that we lost” - because we lost fully, Mologa hardly changed in the 1920-30s and no longer saw the war, the space age, developed socialism, perestroika... Rarely, once every 10-20 years, the Rybinsk Reservoir becomes so shallow by the end of summer that flat islands dotted with broken bricks appear above the surface. One of these “emergences” occurred in the summer of 2014 and prompted us to sasha_kalkaev for this trip... but we were late: in the fall Mologa surfaces quite often, but in the fall it is much more difficult to approach it by boat due to the wind and waves, and it is better for an unprepared person not to try. I talked about the Rybinsk hydroelectric power station that destroyed Mologa and the unsuccessful search for a boat on the “Rybinsk seaside”, and now about Mologa itself, its sunken past and fragments of the present above the water level.
While talking about , I mentioned "one interesting object"in Preobrazhensky Lane, which begins directly opposite the local Red Square. Here it is, in fact, this object - the Tikhvin Chapel (1869-71) in the courtyard of the Mologsky Afanasyevsky Monastery, since 1995 occupied by the Museum of the Mologsky Region (probably a unique case of opening a museum in church after the collapse of the USSR), the creation of which began during Perestroika on the initiative of the Mologa community:
Behind the gate is a fragment of a fence that was raised in the summer during the last ascent in 1992. Inside the museum it is quiet and patriarchal, we were the only visitors - the summer excitement around the “ascent” was already behind us, and even the boatman, to whom the museum workers sent those wishing to visit the remains of Mologa in the summer (he charged 3,600 rubles), had already retired for the winter:
Mologa stood 32 kilometers from Rybinsk, at the mouth of the river of the same name, and was then the northernmost city on the Volga, which made a sharp turn not at Rybinsk, but right next to it. The city at this place was first mentioned in 1149, when the Kiev prince Izyaslav Mstislavich, during a campaign against Yuri Dolgoruky, was caught here by a flood that stopped his advance - it turns out that in history Mologa seemed to come out of Big water and eventually went into it. In the years 1321-1475, there was the Molozhsky principality, which emerged as an appanage principality from Yaroslavl and was absorbed under Ivan III of Moscow. Up the river there was a place with the strange name Serf Town (according to beautiful legend, these are the wives of the Novgorod warriors, while they were on a campaign, sinned with the slaves, and when the latter met the soldiers with weapons in their hands, the soldiers lowered their swords and took out whips, at the sight of which the slaves fled, eventually settling in the Molozhsk forests), where the fair was held - almost the first of such fairs that gathered people from the surrounding lands, a prototype of the giant fairs of the Russian Empire such as Makaryevskaya or Irbitskaya. By decree of Ivan III, Yarmak moved, like Makaryevskaya to Nizhny Novgorod, from the Serf town to Mologa, and people flocked there, to the junction of waterways, from Prussia to Persia - I have more than once jokingly called the medieval Volga “the great route from the Latins in the Basurman.” According to some sources, the Molozhskaya fair was the only one in Russia at that time where Tatars were allowed. But its time also passed: Mologa was destroyed during the Time of Troubles and was no longer able to rise, turning into a posad (analogous to a village) on the royal fishing grounds, which by 1777 had grown into a county town in the Yaroslavl province. And although the Tikhvin waterway from the Volga to St. Petersburg passed through Mologa, it remained a small town (7 thousand inhabitants in 1897) and deeply secondary, although, as some write, it was very prosperous and civilized. By the time of its flooding, Mologa was a town stretched along the river of the same name from the bank of the Volga, several blocks wide, cut into three settlements by streams and officially also including a settlement with the sonorous name of Bitter Salt, 12 kilometers up the river.
And this is what’s left of all this... “Walk” around the disappeared city, using archival photos, not the first time for me - he once told me about the disappeared Koenigsberg in three parts, but the scales are still not comparable here. The Yaroslavl outback, of course, cannot be compared with one of the main cities of pre-war Germany in terms of quantity and diversity historical photos, but there will be enough photos for half a post. IN in this case Some of the photos were retaken in the museum (from that stand in the frame above, where they are attached to the map), some - from postcards purchased there, some - from the Internet, and which ones are where, I’m honestly too lazy to clarify.
The railway did not reach Mologa, the main roads ran along the right bank, and behind lay the wilderness - Myshkin, which escaped flooding, is located in a similar way, where one now gets either by a strong detour or through a crossing. So in Mologa, the “gate” was the river pier just above the confluence of the Mologa River with the Volga:
In the frame there are two main churches - the Resurrection (1767) and the Epiphany (1881-82) cathedrals, forming a dual system - the old temple was a summer one, the new one was a winter one, and the builder of the latter was the merchant Pavel Podosenov - as often happens in merchant cities, here on each corner has the same surname, and we will encounter the fruits of Podosenov’s activity more than once. The Resurrection Cathedral was very beautiful (especially the bell tower), but not a masterpiece, the Epiphany Cathedral was a completely dull “clone of the XX century”.
A block away, on former cemetery, at the end of the 18th century, taken out of town, stood a simple, but wooden Church of the Exaltation of the Cross (1778) characteristic of Central Russia tiered type.
The new cemetery on the outskirts was marked by the Church of All Saints (1805) with touching Baroque domes near the Empire dome. On the left is the chapel in the cemetery fence, in the perspective of the Resurrection Cathedral street:
Significantly higher along Mologa there was also the Ascension Church (1756) with a high bell tower - in fact, the city was divided into Voskresensky and Voznesensky Posads (as well as Verkhny Posad, which disappeared in the 19th century), and the center was precisely the first one, located closer to the mouth - the city, as it were, gradually slid towards the Volga. There was also a Kazan-Fominsk Church (1828) in Gorkaya Sol, but I didn’t find any photographs of it. In general, there were unexpectedly few churches in Mologa (only 5 - against two and a half dozen in a comparable size!), and not a single one of them (!) was destroyed until the liquidation of the city:
The center of Voskresensky Posad was Sennaya, or Bazarnaya Square, with shopping arcades typical of the Middle Zone of the early 19th century (among which an unidentified chapel is visible) and a fire station (1870), and its wooden tower was renovated somewhere at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries , I don’t know under what circumstances:
Views from the Epiphany Cathedral - on the top in the distance is the Resurrection Cathedral, on the bottom is the Church of All Saints, which, it turns out, also had an impressively tall bell tower. The white house on the left in the top frame is the city hall. As you can see, the town was small and provincial; in trade it could not compete with Rybinsk, remaining only intermediate the routes to St. Petersburg - after all, the shoals - the "overkills" that qualitatively changed the conditions of Volga shipping - were just above Rybinsk.
In a sense, quiet patriarchal Mologa was the antipode of noisy capitalist Rybinsk. For example, it was famous throughout the province for its charitable institutions, which were maintained mainly by merchants, primarily the same Podosenov. Here on the left is the Podosenovskaya almshouse, on the upper right is the people's canteen, below is the Aleksandrovsky orphanage for minors, and that's not all. If Rybinsk was a city of port poverty, then in Mologa it was considered a rarity to meet a beggar on the street.
Educational institutions - at the bottom is the Alexandrovskaya women's gymnasium, at the top is the Vocational School, which shortly before the flooding managed to grow into a technical school:
A couple more public buildings. Below is a local cinematograph (1912) against the backdrop of the Resurrection Cathedral, and at the top is something more interesting: the Podosenov gymnastics school, one of the first in the Russian Empire, and judging by the fact that Podosenov died in 1891, founded no later than the 1880s. Or rather, this is her Manege - in modern terms, a gym. They taught various disciplines there, including fencing and bowling, and for a quiet provincial town this was a lot (the question arises - does this happen in our time? Sometimes it happens - for example, Bashkir was distinguished by its computer school back in the 1990s) . The features of the “lost paradise” that the authors of posts about this city sometimes try to find are mainly the merit of Podosenov.
Here in the frame above is the Zemstvo, in the frame below is the hospital. But in general, just views of Mologa streets - Cherepovetskaya, Peterburgsko-Unkovskaya, Voskresensky Lane and others... These streets did not see Khrushchev-era buildings.
The most beautiful civil building in Mologa turned out to be, oddly enough, a correctional and educational shelter (1901), and in the frame below is a distillery (1912) on the outskirts of the city. There was also a mill somewhere - there was small-scale production here too, although of course Mologa could not compete with Rybinsk.
It seems that most of the buildings shown above would have every chance of surviving to this day. On Lenin Square (formerly Sennaya) there would be a district committee, the Khrushchev-era building of the Mologa Hotel, the anniversary Ilyich, the City House of Culture and a department store with a service center. The distillery would most likely have kept the chimney, but a concrete building would have been built for it and most likely something else would have been located there, for example a boiler room, or maybe some kind of machine-building or food factory. The cinema would have burned down, and instead of it, but again, the cinema "Pioneer" or "October" would have appeared on the square. A bridge would appear across the Mologa River, but it’s unlikely before years so 1960s. One of the churches, most likely the Epiphany Cathedral, would probably have been demolished under Khrushchov - otherwise it’s a mess, how is it possible that not a single church can be demolished in the entire city? But All Saints at the cemetery might never have been closed or closed for 5-7 years before the war. The Church of the Exaltation of the Cross would probably have survived the USSR, but it burned down in our time due to mismanagement. In one of the almshouses or in the zemstvo, the Mologsky regional museum of local lore named after some local Bolshevik could be opened, to which in the 1990s the public would return the name of Podosenov or Musin-Pushkin (more on the latter later), and thanks to the collections of the surrounding estates, it would be listed "a pearl in the outback." The building of the correctional shelter would most likely be given to the Mologa Regional Agricultural College and a dormitory would be set up in it. There would have been no meaningful use for the gymnastics school's arena; it would have stood there, stood there, and would have burned down on the eve of Perestroika. Gymnasiums would be used for their intended purpose. The population would have grown to 11-12 thousand (the peak, 16 thousand, would have been in 1989), and in post-Soviet times almost nothing would have changed - a number of tacky shops and cottages would have been built, several public buildings would have been abandoned, and in general That's all.
In addition to Mologa, three monasteries fell into the flood zone. Mologsky Kirillo-Afanasyevsky Monastery was located 3 kilometers away north of the city on the road to Bitter Salt, known since 1509, and most likely originated in the 14th century with the formation of the Molozhsky principality. The miraculous Tikhvin icon was kept in the monastery, which was most likely brought here during the division of the Yaroslavl land by the first Youth prince Makhail Davidovich. The cathedrals visible in the frame are the winter Trinity Cathedral (1788, with onion domes) and the summer Descent of the Holy Spirit (1840), the bell tower of the 19th century, the Assumption Church (1826) with the cell building and the Beheading of John the Baptist (1791) in the cemetery behind the fence are not visible, but still, what is most memorable about the appearance of the monastery is the corner towers with empire-style domes.
It was closed back in 1930, transferring the buildings to the state farm, and they probably would have broken something even without the flooding, but they might not have broken anything. Moreover, the explosions failed to completely destroy the monastery and it still stuck out of the water for quite a long time.
Halfway to Rybinsk, on the right tributary of the Volga, the Yuga River, there was a much larger Yugskaya Dorofeev Hermitage, founded in 1615 by the monk of the Pskov-Pechersky Monastery, a native of the local villages Dorotheus, to whom the Mother of God appeared in the Pskov region, handed him an icon and ordered him to go with her to his native place. . The Yuga icon was considered miraculous and religious processions were held with it in different directions from Uglich to Poshekhonye - now a copy of it is kept in the Assumption Church in the village of Balobanovo, which I showed from afar in the last part. In the first half of the 19th century, the monastery grew into a powerful ensemble with the Trinity Cathedral (1793, in the frame above in the center, had the chapels of the Yug Icon and Dorotheus with the corresponding shrines), a tall bell tower (1849-51), and the Church of the Molchanskaya Mother of God (1828, apparently five-domed ), Nikolskaya (1842) and Uspenskaya (1846) - the last two apparently stand symmetrically on the top frame. In general, the empire-style “towers” in the corners, which in half the cases are temples, are some kind of purely local feature:
Trinity Cathedral. In general, the monastery was impressive, clearly worthy of a separate visit:
In the 1920s, in the Yugskaya Dorofey desert there was a children's camp-commune, since 1935 - the administration of Volgolag, which was building the Uglich and Rybinsk hydroelectric power stations, which also flooded it. In the very center of Rybinsk, at the corner of Krestovaya and Stoyalaya streets, the chapel of the Yuga-Dorofeevsky monastery (1797-98) has been preserved, but the monastery itself disappeared under the water near Yurshinsky Island, and the Yuga River turned into a strait:
The third was the Leushinsky St. John the Baptist Monastery on Sheksna - it was located several tens of kilometers from Mologa, closer to Cherepovets, but in the same way it ended up under water. It began in 1875 as a women's community on the country estate of the St. Petersburg merchant Pelageya Maximova and in ten years grew into a full-fledged monastery, which was then extremely lucky with its personalities: patron (John of Kronstadt), abbess (Abbess Taisiya), photographer (Prokudin-Gorsky). It was a monastery on the level of Diveevo and Shamordino - these three monasteries were unofficially called “women’s laurels” at the beginning of the twentieth century:
Other photographers were there too, their photographs were of terrible quality, but they captured the entire Cathedral of the Praise of the Virgin Mary (1891, bottom left) and the Igumensky building with the house church:
But the Trinity Church (1905, all three monasteries had one!) was better photographed again by Prokudin-Gorsky - a rather strange building, which is difficult to classify even by style (something from Romanesque, something from classicism, something from Renaissance), and in general most similar to the churches of the 1990s in some Cossack village Krasnodar region or oil town of the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug:
Abbot Corps and Taisiya herself:
Another wooden church (more like modern temple in the station village), possibly included in this collection by mistake. What's surprising is Soviet authority The Leushinsky monastery was not touched until the adoption of the Rybinsk hydroelectric power station project.
In addition to monasteries, estates were also in the flood zone. And since the Mologo-Sheksninskaya floodplain was distinguished by its unique fertility for the Non-Black Earth Region (after all, the bottom ancient lake), these estates were the richest in the Yaroslavl province, and they were owned by very serious families like the Volkonskys. I was able to find photographs of only the most beautiful Borisoglebskoye estate, near the village of Ilovna on the site of the ancient Kholopye town, fifty kilometers above Mologa along the Mologa River. Since 1710, it was owned by the Musins-Pushkins, one of the most distinguished noble families, and the third owner was Alexey Ivanovich, a famous Yaroslavl bibliophile who discovered “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” (there is even a version that he wrote it, passing it off as a find, but it seems as it has been proven that the historiography of that time did not yet know many of the details of the poem) and collected a huge collection of paintings and books. The collection under the Soviets was taken to Rybinsk, where it became the basis of an art museum, but the palace and Alekseevskaya Church, founded in last years The life of Alexei Musin-Pushkin (died in 1817), of course, could not be preserved.
If they had not been flooded, most likely the Mologa Monastery would have been the first to come to life, and now it would almost have gotten rid of traces of desolation, although the thin black chimney of the boiler room would certainly have remained one of the verticals. The Southern Dorofeev Hermitage, which would probably have lost some of its churches, would have been occupied by the zone after Volgolag’s departure, and brought back to believers in the 1990s, from perfect condition he would still be far away. Things would probably have gone worst of all in Leushin - a distant monastery with huge churches would still lie in ruins to this day, although a small and possibly male monastic community would slowly put the building and the Trinity Church in order. The Musin-Pushkin estate would probably now be quietly decaying and crumbling, and some sad nursing home would live in it; perhaps it would have burned out even earlier; in short, its appearance would hardly have given reasons for optimism. I won’t say about the fate of other estates, but some would probably have housed a boarding house, and most would also be in disrepair...
The Soviet government did not have time to calculate the entire gigantic territory of the reservoir - and this in itself is scary: in an area several times larger than Moscow, it was necessary to destroy EVERYTHING - demolish all the buildings (something was used as learning goals For military aviation), cut down all the trees... The unfinished trunks stuck out of the water for a long time:
As well as unbroken churches, gradually destroyed by ice drifts - mostly they completely collapsed in the 1960-70s, the last one to fall was the bell tower of the village of Roya (below) - almost in 1995. That is, those who sailed along Rybinka on cruise ships in Soviet times could probably have seen something of this.
A lot has been written about Mologa and other settlements of the flooded region that surfaced in the summer this year; for some time I came across posts about them several times a month. Here, for example, are beautiful and revealing photographs from there (at the end of the link to other posts of the same trip along the RusHydro line): in general, there was nothing particularly spectacular in the pop-up Mologa - islands slightly protruding from the water, where broken bricks are mixed and disgusting-looking river silt, and among them every now and then some rusty piece of antiquity will flash. There were other reports about all sorts of flooded churches, villages, cemeteries - but everywhere there was only the same silt and bricks, among which were fragments of the past, sometimes even human skulls looking out of the mud... Alas, I can’t find these posts, if anyone has Links - drop them in the comments, I'll put them in the post. Well, we ourselves, as mentioned in the last part, were unable to find the boat due to a strong wave (so, at the level of theoretical readiness, we found as many as three places), and therefore we limited ourselves to riding along the exposed bottom near Legkova. On the horizon are the outskirts of Rybinsk:
There are fragments of something on the sand, forming a clearly visible “spot”. There was probably a village church, a manor, a small factory, or even just a stone hut:
Then there is only continuous dried silt, and the lying pieces of iron most likely ended up here already when the water came. On the horizon, beyond the natural bed of the Volga - Shumarovsky Island, a former hill above the village with the ruins of a temple (at high water sometimes sticks out from the waves that the Three Brothers rocks are on Far East) and the remains of a washed-out cemetery:
The stones are covered with shells, the water has left here quite recently, and the wooden stick has some kind of historical look:
The impression from all this is strange and gloomy... And Mologa is somewhere there:
Nevertheless, you can walk along the streets of Mologa in any season. There were 745 in the flood zone settlements with a population of 130 thousand people, and 663 villages and hamlets were completely withdrawn from there - in the sense of not only people, but also wooden houses, in total more than 27 thousand buildings.
Like most cities in this part of Russia, Mologa was 9/10 wooden during its lifetime, and entire blocks of its wooden houses were transported to Rybinsk. Basically, they were collected in two places - on Skomorokhovoy Gora (where they were destroyed already in the late USSR for the construction of a multi-storey microdistrict) and, away from the already built-up coast. Remember when I talked about some “interesting feature” of the private sector there? This is what it is - many streets of the Rybinsk Trans-Volga region are actually Mologa streets:
It’s difficult to say how much their relative position corresponds to the historical one; I think they are very much mixed up here. Quite a few houses that might even be from Molozhsk are located on other streets, and I’m also not sure about the houses shown in the post about the Volga region - they are relatives or transported:
Most of the former Mologans are in Rybinsk and St. Petersburg, although mostly, as you might guess, they are old people. I didn't have a chance to communicate with them.
Mologa is far from the only victim of hydraulic construction. Korcheva (2.1 thousand inhabitants, a district town of the Tver province, flooded in 1937 by the Ivankovo hydroelectric station, Konakovo is considered its successor), Novogeorgievsk (Alexandria district of the Kherson province, then the regional center of the Kirovograd region of Ukraine, flooded in 1961 by the Kremenchug hydroelectric station) also completely went under water. ), Balagansk (district city of the Irkutsk province; flooded in the 1960s, formally - moved 45 kilometers with the same name) and (a provincial city of the Kirensky district of the Irkutsk province, flooded in 1975 by the Ust-Ilimsk hydroelectric station, successor to Zheleznogorsk-Ilimsky) . Actually, I already wrote about the Siberian Atlantis (the last two links above), and it is no less dramatic and large-scale than the Volga Atlantis - its most important monuments were taken to the “scansen” and the tragedy of the doomed lands is heartfeltly described by Valentin Rasputin in “Farewell with Matera,” and most importantly, all this continues there: the filling of the Boguchansky reservoir, under the water of which the Ilimsk arable land will go (the same “fertility anomaly” as the Mologo-Sheksninskaya floodplain), began in 2012.
a selection of flooded buildings in different corners Lands - Italy, Brazil, India, the Balkans... (the text, however, is clearly translated, and it was translated by a poor student: let's say, Krokino is actually Krokhino). But still, in Russia, with our legends about the country of Belovodye, where universal justice reigns, and about the holy city of Kitezh, which went under water from the Mongol invasion, such disasters are somehow especially acute and at the same time understandable.
And you know, a blasphemous thought haunts me: if Mologa had not been flooded, it would have been an order of magnitude less famous than it is now. There were no outstanding attractions in the city itself, the location is not the most convenient, in general it would now be a provincial regional center, not included in popular tourist routes and sometimes visited by lovers of antiquity (but the Yugskaya Dorofeeva Hermitage and Ilovna would most likely have some kind of popularity) . That is, of course, anything can happen, there is the example of Myshkin, who got promoted on just one name, but in our realities this is an exception. Most likely, Mologa would be a town of the same order as some Poshekhonye.
. Around the hydroelectric station.
Mologa and its traces.
Poshekhonye.
Tutaev. Romanov.
Tutaev. Kremlin, crossing, shore.
Tutaev. Borisoglebsk and Konstantinovsky.
Kurba.
