Mariinsk is a city (since 1856) in the Kemerovo region of Russia,
the administrative center of the Mariinsky district, forms the
Mariinsky urban settlement.
By the order of the Government of
the Russian Federation of July 29, 2014 No. 1398-r "On approval of
the list of single-industry towns", the Mariinsky urban settlement
was included in the category "Single-industry municipalities of the
Russian Federation (single-industry towns) in which there are risks
of deterioration of the socio-economic situation."
The city is located on the left bank of the Kiya River (tributary of the Chulym, Ob basin), 178 km from Kemerovo. The relief of the city is mostly flat. The average annual temperature in Mariinsk is -0.1 °, the climate is sharply continental.
The city of Mariinsk, like the entire Kemerovo region,
is located in the time zone MSK + 4. The time offset from UTC is +7:
00.
On September 14, 2009, the Government of the Russian
Federation adopted a resolution on the application of the time of
the fifth time zone - Omsk time - on the territory of the Kemerovo
region. The transition to a new time zone in the region took place
on March 28, 2010, when the planned transition to daylight saving
time was carried out in Russia. As a result, the time difference
between the Mariinsk and Moscow was reduced from four to three
hours.
On July 1, 2014, the State Duma adopted a resolution
on the use of the sixth time zone, Krasnoyarsk time, on the
territory of the Kemerovo Region, with the planned transition to
winter time. As a result, the time difference between the Mariinsk
and Moscow increased again from three to four hours.
Before the appearance of Russian settlements, Turkic-speaking Chulym
Tatars lived in the Mariinsk region. The local more ancient Samoyed
and Ket substratum components played an important role in their
ethnogenesis.
One of the interpretations of the name of the
river Kii takes the hydronym to the Selkup word "ky", which means
"river". According to another version, the word "kiya" is of Turkic
origin and means "rocky slope, cliff".
After Novokuznetsk,
Mariinsk is considered the oldest city in Kuzbass. The Russian
village of Kiiskoye was founded in 1698. It was located on the main
postal Moscow highway. The settlement received the status of a city
in 1856, but throughout the next year retained the name "Kiyskoye".
In 1857 it was renamed in honor of the namesake of Empress Maria
Alexandrovna (1824-1880), wife of Alexander II. Her name day was
celebrated on August 4 (July 22, Old Style), the day of the memory
of Mary Magdalene. In the summer of 1891, during the construction of
the Trans-Siberian Railway in the Tomsk province, Nicholas II, then
still Tsarevich, visited Mariinsk.
The Mariinsky District was
formed mainly at the expense of peasants resettled to Siberia from
Central Russia, Ukraine, Transbaikalia during the period of
repression. Most of them continued to engage in agriculture; other
types of activity of the local population were trade, small-scale
production, carriage, gold mining. In 1858 the population of the
city was 3671 people, in 1897 - about 8.5 thousand, and in 1913 -
more than 14 thousand. For the late XIX - early XX centuries.
Mariinsk was considered a fairly large city, trade and transport
hub. Near Mariinsk, engineer E.K. Knorre built a railway bridge
across Kia (1895), and a railway station was opened. At the end of
the 19th century, there were factories in Mariinsk: 4 brick,
pottery, brewing, 2 soap and 3 tanneries with a total turnover of no
more than 20 thousand rubles.
The fact that the city was a
"lively" place is evidenced, in particular, by the fact that it had
temples of various confessions - two Orthodox churches (the
Cathedral of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker and a wooden cemetery
church), a Catholic church and a synagogue. (Most of these temples
were demolished after 1917).
The Siberian "gold rush" was
also involved in Mariinsk. Small amounts of loose gold were mined
along the banks of the Kiya. Until 1897, up to 2800 poods were
reclaimed within 70 years.
In 1829, the famous transit prison
was built in Mariinsk, where V. Lenin, and K. Rokossovsky, and L.
Gumilyov, and L. Ruslanova, and even the actor S. Mishulin, visited
as prisoners. The new prison building, opened in September 1917, has
survived. Now there is a pre-trial detention center.
On
September 18, 1984, 50 km south-west of Mariinsk, a nuclear
explosion "Quartz-4" with a capacity of 10 kilotons was made for the
purpose of seismic sounding in the framework of peaceful nuclear
explosions in the USSR (secret program "Program No. 7").
Urban settlement
The Mariinsky urban settlement of the
Mariinsky municipal district was formed by January 1, 2006 in
accordance with the Law of the Kemerovo Region on December 17, 2004
No. 104-OZ.
By order of the Government of the Russian
Federation of July 29, 2014 No. 1398-r "On the approval of the list
of single-industry towns", the urban settlement was included in the
category "Single-industry municipalities of the Russian Federation
(single-industry towns) in which there are risks of deterioration of
the socio-economic situation."
Revolt of 1905
A soldier
riot, called a revolutionary uprising by Soviet historiography, took
place in Mariinsk at the end of November 1905. At the end of
November, soldiers (warriors of the 12th squad who did not surrender
their weapons) began to show dissatisfaction with their command and
demand payment of fodder money. At 12 noon on November 25, a crowd
of soldiers, some of whom were armed, gathered in the bazaar and
attacked the shops of local merchants and traders (mostly Jews).
During the clashes, the petty bourgeois Petrov was killed, and
another shop owner (Jew Edelstein) was seriously wounded. After the
procession organized by the local authorities and priests, some of
the soldiers voluntarily surrendered their weapons, but refused to
part with the looted things. Only at 9 pm did most of the soldiers
disperse to their barracks and houses. For several more days, the
situation in the city was rather tense, but open clashes did not
occur anymore: the only case of robbery occurred on the night of
November 29, when a woman was beaten and robbed by warriors (now the
22nd squad). After these events, the city council decided to
strengthen the local police. About a year later, in the fall of
1906, rumors about last year's events began to spread in the city:
people, including police officials, said that the pogroms of Jewish
shops had occurred with the knowledge (and even under the direct
leadership) of the mayor, Joseph Trifonovich Savelyev - this
merchant allegedly took advantage of the situation and with the help
of soldiers caused significant damage to competitors in the trading
business.
The city has a local history museum, a birch bark museum and a
house-museum of the writer V. A. Chivilikhin.
On September
15, 2007, a monument to Empress Maria Alexandrovna, whose name the
city bears, was unveiled in Mariinsk by Leonty Usov.
On
October 23, 2009, a monument to Emperor Alexander II was unveiled in
Mariinsk, which is a bronze bust on a pedestal. Recreated according
to the historical model of the bust of the Emperor, installed in
Mariinsk in 1914, the original of which is now kept in the Tomsk
Museum of Local Lore.
There is a memorial to the victims of
Siblag.