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Asino is a city (since 1952) in Russia, the administrative center of the Asinovsky district of the Tomsk region and the Asinovsky urban settlement. Population - 24 346 people. (2020).
Asino Local History Museum (Асиновский краеведческий музей)
Located at ul. Lenina 56, this is the primary cultural site. Opened in
1989 as a branch of the Tomsk Regional Museum of Local Lore, it holds
around 13,000 items. The core collection is ethnographic (“Ksenyevskaya
Starina”), showing traditional Russian settler life in Siberia at the
turn of the 20th century: tools, household objects, clothing, and
utensils. Other sections cover the local timber industry, geology and
archaeology of the Chulym area, the Civil War, and the 370th Rifle
Division (formed in the region and notable in WWII). There is also
material on writer Georgy Markov (a local native) and a collection of
birch-bark craft items. Entry is inexpensive (around 130 rubles).
Church of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin (Храм Покрова Пресвятой
Богородицы)
A modest wooden church built in 1982 at ul. Taganskaya
21. It has a simple, almost residential appearance typical of
late-Soviet-era Orthodox churches in small Siberian towns.
Memorial
Complex “Pobeda” (Victory Square)
The main WWII memorial, featuring
the Eternal Flame, a Motherland figure, and steles with names of local
residents who died in the Great Patriotic War. It serves as the site for
official commemorations and the Immortal Regiment marches.
Lenin
Monument
A standard Soviet-era statue on Lenin Square, near the
administrative buildings.
Chulym River Embankment and Town Park
A
recently improved riverside promenade offers views of the river that
historically supported timber floating. The central park (near Sadovaya
Street) hosts the annual “Golden Birch Bark” (Zolotaya Beresta)
festival, the town’s signature event celebrating the local birch-bark
craft tradition for which Asino is known.
Railway-related sites
The railway station area (Asino is on the Taiga–Tomsk–Asino–Bely Yar
line) includes a memorial to Civil War partisans and a locomotive
monument that symbolizes the town’s railway origins.
Other memorials
Monument to victims of political repression (1930s–1950s) at the
Voskresenskoye Cemetery, linked to the Tomasinlag camp system.
Stone
commemorating the first settlers.
Bust or memorials related to local
figures such as Georgy Markov.
Nearby Highlight (Strongly
Recommended)
Siberian Estate of N.A. Lampsakov (Сибирская усадьба
Н.А. Лампсакова)
Located in the village of Novo-Kuskovo, about 11 km
from Asino on the banks of the Sokoly River. This is the district’s most
significant tourist site. Built in 1903–1905 as a zemstvo hospital
complex by physician Nikolai Alexandrovich Lampsakov (a Tomsk University
graduate), the wooden buildings (doctor’s house, outpatient clinic,
wards, etc.) were unusually modern for rural Siberia, with running water
and sewage.
Today the restored complex (opened as a cultural-tourist
site in 2008) includes:
Memorial exhibition on Lampsakov and the life
of a zemstvo doctor
Civil War museum (the doctor treated both Reds
and Whites; an underground passage was used for sheltering people)
Birch-bark museum (the first of its kind in Tomsk Oblast)
Open-air
ethnographic elements
The estate also offers limited guest rooms,
bike rental, and a peaceful setting under old pines and firs. It is the
best place near Asino to experience early-20th-century Siberian rural
architecture and history.
The city of Asino emerged as a resettlement settlement at the end
of the 19th century. In the summer of 1895, walkers from 48 peasant
farms in the villages of Lobanova and Kolbina, Petropavlovsk volost,
Kirillovsky district, Novgorod province, examined the lands of the
Surgundat resettlement area and obtained an agreement from the
Novokuskovsky volost government.
In the summer of 1896, the
first ten families arrived from the Novgorod province to a new place
of residence. The new village quickly populated. In 1898, 117 male
souls were settled here, in 1899 - another 19 souls. By September
1901, in the documents of the Tomsk provincial government, in the
reports of peasant chiefs, the words “completely filled” appear in
the column “Ksenevsky village”. The site was inhabited by people
from the non-chernozem provinces of the European part of Russia
(Novgorod, Vilna, Vyatka, Kaluga, Kostroma, Smolensk).
In the
first year of its existence, the new settlement remained nameless.
In the documents of that time, it was still called the Surgundatsky
resettlement area. This is due to the fact that, on the basis of the
highest command of July 13, 1889, separate rural societies could be
formed in new villages with at least 40 male souls in them, and
receive an official name. The required population was reached by the
summer of 1897. The provincial presence for peasant affairs assigned
the status of a separate rural society with the name "settlement
Ksenevsky" after the sister of Emperor Nicholas II - Xenia.
The formation of peasant farms in Siberia was fraught with great
difficulties, associated primarily with the natural conditions of
the territory being developed, a more severe climate, and remoteness
from inhabited places. Natural difficulties were aggravated by the
fact that even on the best lands there was an acute need for
agricultural implements. Many, especially in the first years of life
in Siberia, were poor. So, in the autumn in the village of
Ksenievka, 23 yards were horseless, about 20 families did not have
their own housing. And yet, many new settlers managed to create a
stronger economy in the new place compared to the one they had in
the previous place.
New settlers contributed to the
development of the productive forces of the Siberian countryside,
expanded the area under crops. Sowed mainly rye, oats, which in the
conditions of the Chulym region gave more or less stable crops.
Already in the first years of life in a new place, the peasants
of the village of Ksenevsky took care of the literacy of their
children. In 1904, a one-class rural school of the Ministry of
Public Education was opened in the village, and in 1906 a school
building was built. The first teacher in the village was Mikhail
Dmitrievich Burtsev, who by that time had fifteen years of work
experience.
Like the whole country, the village survived the
hardships of the First World War, and then the Civil War. The
village of Ksenievka becomes the center of the partisan movement in
the Chulym region. In the autumn of 1918, in order to create a
partisan detachment and organize an armed uprising against the
Kolchak government, an underground organization was created in the
village of Ksenyevka. It consisted of: Semyon Ilyich Krovelschikov,
his sons Ivan and Roman, Konstantin Nikanorovich Kurochkin, Ilya
Gorenkov, brothers Vitaly and Ilya Avdeev, Vasily Branevsky, Fedor
Makarenko and others. At the beginning of 1919, Goncharov and Sergey
Zvorykin arrived in the Novo-Kuskovskaya volost in the direction of
the Tomsk underground organization to create a partisan detachment.
On April 28, 1919, in the village of Ksenievka, an uprising of
peasants took place against the Kolchak regime. In a matter of days,
the uprising swept 6 volosts. The rebels' plans included joining up
with P. Lubkov's detachment, which was operating on the territory of
the Zyryansk volost, and sending their forces to Tomsk. The Kolchak
leadership, alarmed by the scope of the armed uprising, took hasty
measures to suppress it. A detachment under the command of Captain
Surov V.A. was sent to meet the rebels. It consisted of 32 officers,
46 horsemen, 291 infantrymen with three machine guns, as well as
mounted and foot police.
A poorly armed, poorly trained
partisan detachment could not resist a detachment of punishers.
Moreover, the help promised by the Tomsk underground never came. The
reprisal against the rebels was brutal. In the area of the
Novo-Kuskovskaya volost, on the orders of Captain Surov, villages
were burned: Kulyary, Tatars, a number of houses in Novo-Kuskovo,
Ksenyevka. All residents of the village of Ksenievka were subjected
to total torture. Several people, as well as S.I. Roofers, K.N.
Kurochkin, I. Gorenkov and others were executed.
Soviet power was restored in January 1920. At this time, the Siberian
village is experiencing a period of prosperity. The provision with
working cattle is high compared to the all-Russian indicators, and
social stratification is low. The peasants attached great importance to
the honesty of their fellow villagers and deprived the right to vote of
people involved in criminal offenses. The communal order, when the honor
of the family was not an empty phrase even for ordinary peasants, when
public opinion was listened to, opposed the moral decay of the
peasantry. This period of prosperity did not last long.
The
collectivization process begins. In 1929 in Ksenievka, the commune
"Smychka" was organized, headed by F.I. Ivanov. In the early 1930s, two
collective farms appeared in the village: "Down with the boundary" and
"Trud". In 1932 both collective farms merge into one - "Memory of Lenin"
by the chairman of this collective farm, Andrey Zakharovich Trunov.
Later, the collective farms were disaggregated and the collective farm
"Krasny Chulym" and "Memory of Lenin" appeared in the village. During
the period of collectivization, many villagers were declared kulaks and
sent to settle in more remote northern regions.
A new page in the
history of the village of Ksenievsky is connected with the construction
of a timber processing plant and the Tomsk-Yenisei railway. The
construction of a timber mill and a railroad began in the late 1920s. By
1929, in the village of Ksenievsky at the mouth of the Kurya River, a
sleeper plant began its work, and at the same time, other workshops of
the plant were being built.
In connection with the construction
of the railway, the development of the timber industry, the population
of the village is growing rapidly, and since 1931, a number of regional
institutions and organizations have been transferred from the regional
center of the village of Novo-Kuskovo to the village of Ksenyevka at the
Asino railway station. Officially, the regional center was approved in
the village of Ksenvka by a decree of the Central Executive Committee of
the USSR of June 3, 1933, and on June 7, 1933, the village of
Ksenyevskoye was renamed the village of Asino, and the district was
named Asinovsky.
By the mid-30s, the construction of the railway
was mothballed. There were not enough workers, equipment, rails. Since
1933, rapid construction has been going on in the village of Asino,
houses of dispossessed peasants have been transported from the nearest
villages, which are used for the construction of new buildings.
Buildings are being built: the district executive committee, the House
of Culture, a secondary school, a department store, a police station, a
printing house. In 1935, the construction of a power plant and a radio
center began.
In 1937 in Asino appears TomAsin camp of the NKVD.
This camp was created to exploit the Chulym forests. With the advent of
the camp, the construction of the railway resumed. In December 1937, the
construction of the road was completed, the first freight trains went
from Tomsk to Asin, the road was officially accepted on November 1,
1939.
A sawmill is being built, a sleeper plant is expanding, the
population of the village is increasing, in 1940 documents appear about
changing the status of the village about its transformation into a
working settlement, however, the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War
pushed back the transformation dates for several years. Since the
beginning of the war, due to the fact that the village of Asino had a
railway connection with the city of Tomsk, it becomes one of the centers
for the formation of military formations. The first military echelon
left Asin on June 24, 1941, on the same day nursing courses are opened
in the regional center, 50 girls study at them in the direction of the
district committee of the Komsomol.
On the basis of the directive
of the People's Defense Committee of the USSR of August 28, 1941, from
September 24, the formation of the 370th rifle division has been going
on in Asino. On November 19, 1941, the first echelons with the soldiers
of this division begin to be redeployed to the front. Of the 9,000
people, 2,000 were residents of the Asinovsky district.
On
February 28, 1942, the division entered the disposal of the 34th Army of
the North-Western Front, took over the combat sector in the area south
of the Pola station in the Novgorod region. The soldiers of the 370th
division liberated the city of Starya Russa, Belarus, Poland, took part
in the Berlin operation. For exemplary performance of combat operations,
for valor and courage, the division was awarded the Order of Kutuzov
11th degree, the Order of the Red Banner. For the invasion of the
Brandenburg province, she was given the honorary name "Brandenburg". 8
commanders and soldiers of the division were awarded the title of Hero
of the Soviet Union, 30 soldiers and sergeants became full cavaliers of
the soldier's Order of Glory. Including our fellow countryman, senior
sergeant, commander of the department of the 657th separate engineer
battalion Vasiliev Alexander Karpovich.
In April - May 1942,
echelons with soldiers of the 149th separate rifle brigade left Ashina
for the front. This brigade was created from cadets of military schools
and volunteers, girls who studied at nursing courses left for the front
with it. Our countrymen became the defenders of the Stalingrad Tractor
Plant and its villages. After the Battle of Stalingrad, the soldiers of
the 149th brigade continued their combat path as part of the 92nd Guards
Red Banner Krivoy Rog Rifle Division. 6 soldiers of 149 OSB became
Heroes of the Soviet Union.
In January-February, the Asino military infantry school was created.
According to its profile, it trained command personnel capable of
competently, taking into account the requirements of modern combat, to
lead military units. The school had 5 battalions: machine-gun, mortar
and 3 rifle. During the period of its existence (closed in December
1945), 10,729 commanders were trained here, including 1,302 officers.
The cadets of the school were sent to replenish more than 30 divisions
of the active Army. On the territory of the AVPU, in the military camp
(Sosnovka district), the 15th district sniper school of the Siberian
Military District, military unit 425 was located.
A native of the
village of Asina, Anatoly Mikhailovich Denisov was awarded the title of
Hero of the Soviet Union, Vasilyev Alexander Karpovich became a full
holder of the soldier's Order of Glory, Suslov Ivan Mikhailovich was
awarded the highest order of Italy - "for military prowess". The
inhabitants of Asin honor the memory of fellow countrymen who defended
the freedom and independence of our Motherland. Many did not return
home, and in memory of the dead a memorial arose in the center of the
city, on May 9, 1976, a sculptural monument was opened, an eternal flame
was lit.
The great feat, without which the Victory was
unthinkable, was accomplished by the home front workers. During the war
years, agriculture uninterruptedly supplied the army and the population
with food. During the four war years, 1 ml. 114,000 poods of bread,
34,158 poods of potatoes, 61,272 poods of meat and other products. The
Asinovites made a significant contribution to the defense fund from
their personal savings. In 1943 alone, the inhabitants of the district
collected more than two million rubles for the defense fund.
With
hard work and at the cost of huge losses, the spring of 1945 came to us.
The population of the village of Asina has increased over the years, in
the village there were operating and developing: a sawmill, a sleeper
plant, a timber transshipment plant, a rafting office, a flax mill, and
local industry enterprises. The population reached 10,000 people. On
December 12, 1945, the village of Asino became a workers' settlement. In
the post-war years, the village of Asino continued to develop. On March
31, 1952, the working settlement of Asino, on the basis of the Decree of
the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, acquired the status of
a city of regional subordination, and the settlement Council became the
city Council of Workers' Deputies.
With the transformation into a
city, the growth of the population, the development of industry,
conditions are created for the development of housing and communal and
cultural construction. Already in 1953, the construction of the House of
Culture, an ambulance station, a polyclinic, a secondary school, and a
hotel began. Housing construction begins, without which the city could
not exist. By 1973 the city had become a major industrial center of the
Tomsk region. Woodworking was carried out at the Asinovsky LPDK,
tractors were repaired at the TRZ, a meat processing plant and a brick
factory, and construction organizations were working. For ten years from
1963 to 1973, multi-storey brick houses appeared in Asino, two medium
three-storey schools for 960 children each, a branch of the forest
technical school, three kindergartens for 560 children, a bathhouse, a
department store, a printing house, Vostok and Avangard cinemas.
On December 27, 1973, by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme
Soviet of the RSFSR, the city of Asino was classified as a city of
regional subordination. Since that time, the city of Asino received the
status of regional significance with the administrative subordination of
eight village councils and the Baturinsky council.
Location and Coordinates
Approximate coordinates: 57°00′N
86°08–09′E.
Elevation of the town center: about 109 m (358 ft)
above sea level.
The town occupies a modest area (around 90 km²)
within the broader Asinovsky District of 5,943 km².
It sits in
the southeastern part of Tomsk Oblast on the West Siberian Plain,
specifically within the Chulym inclined plain. The district borders
Zyryansky, Tomsky, Molchanovsky, and Pervomaysky districts.
Asino
functions as a local transport node with a railway station (on the
line connecting toward Tomsk and Bely Yar, with links to the
Trans-Siberian) and a river port on the Chulym.
Topography
and Terrain
The landscape belongs to the flat to gently
undulating lowlands of the West Siberian Plain. Relief is subdued,
with only modest elevation changes: within a few kilometers of the
town the variation is typically under 30–40 m, and even within tens
of kilometers it remains relatively gentle (district elevations
generally range from roughly 100–190 m).
Interfluves are often
swampy or boggy, with peat accumulations and occasional relic
thermokarst depressions. Near the river the terrain includes a
developed floodplain. Overall the area lacks significant hills or
ridges; the dominant impression is of level taiga plains interrupted
by wetlands and river valleys. Land cover near the town includes a
mix of grassland, cropland, and forest; farther out, forests and
wetlands predominate.
Hydrology
The Chulym River is the
defining water feature. It is one of the longer tributaries of the
Ob (length 1,799 km; basin area about 134,000 km²). Near Asino the
river has already transitioned from its upper, more constrained
course into a lowland regime: a broad floodplain (locally up to
several kilometers wide), meanders, multiple channels, oxbow lakes
(staritsas), and numerous small lakes. Average discharge in the
lower reaches is on the order of 785–793 m³/s. The river is
navigable for a long stretch from its mouth and has historically
supported timber rafting and local shipping; Asino has a port.
The Itatka joins near the town. Other notable watercourses in the
district include the Yaya and smaller tributaries. The network
density is moderate, and wetlands (including sphagnum bogs with peat
depths often 1–5 m) cover substantial portions of the interfluves.
The Chulym typically freezes in early November and opens in late
April to early May; ice jams can occur in spring. Flooding and high
water are seasonal features of the floodplain.
Climate
Asino has a humid continental climate (Köppen Dfb) with cold, long
winters and relatively mild, short summers. Precipitation is
moderate and fairly evenly distributed, with rain possible even in
drier months.
Approximate averages (based on available climate
data for the town):
Annual mean temperature: about 0.4°C.
Annual precipitation: around 537 mm.
January: average near −18°C
(typical daily range roughly −22°C to −14°C).
July: average near
19°C (typical daily range roughly 13°C to 25°C).
The growing
season is short, lasting roughly 4 months (commonly from mid-to-late
May into late September). Extremes can reach well below −40°C in
winter and above +30°C in summer. The continental character produces
large seasonal temperature swings, and the surrounding forests and
wetlands moderate local conditions to some degree while also
contributing to high humidity in summer.
Vegetation, Soils,
and Natural Features
The region lies in the southern taiga
subzone. Forest cover in the district is high (often cited around
60–72%), dominated by conifers—pine, fir, spruce, Siberian cedar
(pine), and some larch—together with birch and aspen, especially in
secondary stands after disturbance. Mixed forests and light pine
woods (bor) are common.
Extensive peat bogs and wetlands occupy
level watersheds and floodplain margins. These support specialized
bog vegetation and contribute to the region’s character as part of
the broader West Siberian wetland–taiga complex. Near the town and
in clearer areas, grassland and limited cropland appear.
Soils
are typical of the taiga and bog landscapes of the plain (podzolic
types under forest, peat soils in wetlands). Mineral resources in
the vicinity include peat, sand, and clay. Timber has long been the
primary natural resource shaping the local landscape and economy.