44 Lenin Avenue

A researcher's journey to Siberia

The afterlife of Nikolai Klyuev

Filed under: Stalinist repression — Wilson Bell at 2:11 pm on Wednesday, April 1, 2020  Tagged , ,

As I delve a bit deeper into the life of Nikolai Klyuev (Kliuev), I’ve become fascinated by his afterlife, the way his life and death became used, politically. Yesterday, I came across a newspaper (Za rodinu) in the on-line St. Petersburg archives from Pskov in 1943 (Nazi occupied territory), that discusses Kliuev as a new […]

Klyuev in Tomsk: A story worth exploring?

Filed under: Late-Soviet Period,NKVD,Stalinist repression,Tomsk Memorial NKVD Remand Prison Museum — Wilson Bell at 4:36 pm on Wednesday, February 19, 2020  Tagged , , , , ,

One of the more interesting stories in Tomsk in the 1930s was that of poet Nikolai Kliuev (sometimes spelled Klyuev), discussed earlier in this blog. While I’m still not fully committed to a focus on Kliuev, he draws together some interesting threads from other subjects I’ve been working on in the 44 Lenin Avenue project. […]

Poem about Klyuev

Filed under: Tomsk Memorial NKVD Remand Prison Museum — Wilson Bell at 5:46 pm on Tuesday, November 5, 2019  Tagged , , ,

Vasilii Khanevich and the staff at the Memorial Museum: NKVD Remand Prison in Tomsk (44 Lenin Avenue) are constantly adding information and material to the museum’s website. While browsing, today, I came across this video of Tomsk singer Pavel Evgrafov singing a poem by Mikhail Andreev about the 1937 execution of Nikolai Klyuev. Evgrafov is […]

Finding Compelling Stories

Filed under: Methodology,NKVD — Wilson Bell at 8:12 pm on Monday, February 27, 2017  Tagged , , , , , ,

As touched on in several earlier posts (e.g. here and here), the building at 44 Lenin Avenue, from its humble beginnings as a church-parish school to its role as local NKVD headquarters to its transformation into commercial and commemorative space itself provides a compelling story. This story runs parallel to many of the main trends […]