Shushenskoe

Shushenskoe 

an urban-type settlement and the administrative center of Shushenskoe Raion, Krasnoiarsk Krai, RSFSR. Shushenskoe is situated near the confluence of the Bol’shaia Shush’ and Enisei rivers, 60 km southeast of the Minusinsk railroad station on the Abakan-Taishet line. Industry is represented by a milk-canning combine, a brewery, a poultry farm, and a souvenir factory. The settlement has a sovkhoz-technicum.

Shushenskoe was founded by Russian cossacks in the first half of the 18th century. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was the administrative center of a volost (small rural district) in Minusinsk District, in Enisei Province, and had a population of 1,382. The tsarist regime used Shushenskoe as a place of political exile, and Decembrists, Polish revolutionaries, and Narodniki (Populists) were settled there. V. I. Lenin was in exile in Shushenskoe from May 8,1897, until Jan. 29,1900. On May 7,1898, he was joined by N. K. Krupskaia and her mother, E. V. Krup-skaia. While living in the settlement, Lenin wrote more than 30 works.

On Nov. 7,1930, a historical-revolutionary division of the Minusinsk Museum of Local Lore was opened in Shushenskoe. In 1938 the division was reorganized as an independent entity and was named the V. I. Lenin House-Museum. To mark the centennial of Lenin’s birth, the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR passed a resolution to reconstruct the settlement, and in 1970 the Memorial Museum-Preserve of the Siberian Exile of V. I. Lenin was opened in Shushenskoe. The museum includes two buildings in which Lenin and Krupskaia lived; 25 peasant usad’by (complexes of buildings), some of which contain documentary historical exhibits; and other buildings that have been restored to their former appearance.

The general plan for the reconstruction of Shushenskoe was drafted by the architects L. A. Petrov and K. M. Gubel’man. The plans for the reconstruction of the memorial houses were drawn up by the architects B. V. Gnedovskii (project head) and A. N. Klimanov, and the plans for the complexes of peasant houses were done by the architects M. N. Semenov, L. M. Shuliak, and E. A. Chernikov.

REFERENCES

Lenin, V. I. M. A. i M. I. Ul’ianovym. (Letter.) Poln. sobr, soch., 5th ed., vol. 55, pp. 46–49.
Beliaevskii, S. I. V. I. Lenin v. Shushenskom. Krasnoiarsk, 1970.
Shushenskii memorial’nyi muzei-zapovednik. [Krasnoiarsk, 1970.]
Bukshpan, P. Ia. Shushenskoe: Putevoditel’. Moscow, 1976.