A trip to Noginsk and what they don't tell you at the local history museum.

 Last September I decided to take some trips on my local elektrichka away from Moscow and further into the depths of the Pod Moskovian hinterland. My first trip was the town of Noginsk. On a rather wet afternoon I took the train and set off to walk around the town. My first stop was the local history (kraevedchesky) museum. It seemed to have had quite a makeover and they were keen for me to watch this classy video specially projected onto the walls before I walked around the museum - they'd obviously spent a great deal on making the museum 'contemporary'. I then walked through the rooms of the museum. It had a fair deal to look at but I realised that there was nothing about the revolutionary period of Russia's history. I was curious about the reason why. The custodian told me that nothing much happened - in Noginsk (or what was then called Bogorodsk) there was a peaceful handover of power. I left only half satisfied and then made my way through the town. The writer Boris Pilnyak had lived in the town- I went to look for his house and made my way through the town to the completely unmarked Lenin statue. This was also part of the reason I went to Noginsk - it had what was said to be the first ever Lenin statue in the world. In fact, it was inaugurated on the day that Lenin died (and the person unveiling had to inform the audience that Lenin had just died). This Lenin statue was rather hidden away, not signposted and seemingly not much of an 'attraction'. The statue itself doesn't hold much aesthetic value but surely historically Noginsk has something to boost about. 

Be that as it may it is also rather interesting that before finding the Lenin statue I stumbled upon a statue of Anatoly Zheleznyakov, a legendary revolutionary sailor who, while working with the Bolsheviks, was an anarchist. He died in 1919 apparently at the hands of Denikin's Whites (although I have read from a credible historian that his death is shrouded in mystery and could well have been a victim of the Bolshevik regime who were more keen on him when he was dead than when alive). In any case, his 'timely' death made him into a figure who could be lauded by the Bolshevik regime. Zheleznyakov is, surely, a historical figure well-worth delving into further. His image left traces in song (including in the work of Sergei Prokofiev) and film as well as a considerable amount of monuments. The curious interactions of Lenin and revolutionary sailors is a topic I hope I will broach in more detail at some point- it is a fascinating tale.  

In any case, today I came across an interesting reprint of an article on subsistence riots in World War One in Russia (it was tweeted by the excellent Working Class History twitter account). Little did I realise that Noginsk's history is much more revolutionary that the director of the kraevedchesky museum would have one believe. The American historian Barbara Engel uncovered this about the town in an article (Not by Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia During World War 1) of 1997 written for the Journal of Modern History:

On October 1, 1915, a market day, a rebellion broke out in the town of Bogorodsk.

"Located in Moscow’s hinterlands in Bogorodskii county, a longstanding center of textile manufacture, Bogorodsk was the site of the Morozov cotton mills, which employed about fifteen thousand workers. Thirty women workers had come to the market to purchase sugar, and when they learned that sugar had already sold out, they grew angry and began to accuse the local merchants of trading underhandedly (nedobrosovestnost’) and engaging in speculation. The police quickly appeared on the scene and forced the women away from the shops, but the women simply returned to the town square where they continued to rail against tradespeople, their numbers steadily growing until they reached several thousand people—primarily women and youths, but also workers as well as peasants who had come to the market from nearby villages. The people moved off to the shops to vent their anger. Members of the crowd hurled stones through a shop window, then broke into the shop and threw its goods into the street where others carried them off. Clearly outnumbered and unwilling to use weapons against women and youths, the local police proved helpless to stop them. In the following days the disorders spread as rioters targeted local grocery shops and purveyers of clothing and other manufactured goods, but the unrest came to a bloody halt on October 4 when Cossack forces arrived and fired into the crowd, killing two people and seriously injuring three more.

"By then, unrest had spilled over onto the nearby factory floor. On October 2, workers employed at the Morozov weaving mill left their stations, and over the next few days thousands of their workmates joined them, as did tens of thousands of other workers in the neighboring factory settlements of Pavlovsk, Obukhov, and Orekhovo. At the height of the unrest a total of approximately eighty thousand workers were out on strike, according to police reports. The workers’ primary demand was for higher wages to compensate for the increasing cost of living. They remained on strike until October 7, when they received a 20 percent raise. But discontent among women workers at the mill in Bogorodsk continued for several more weeks, finally erupting on October 30 in a strike initiated by about twelve thousand women workers that lasted for several weeks." 

My brief stay in Noginsk had indicated that the history of the town may have been rather more interesting than the rather sanitised version at the local history museum (though it is fair to note that some kraevedcheskie museums are real eye openers). Noginsk, then has many other stories worthy of writing about but that will be for another post...