Turukhan Memorial House-Museum of Y.M. Sverdlov and S.S. Spandaryan

Open daily, except Monday, from 11.00 to 18.00. Opened in 1938 as a memorial house-museum of Y.M. Sverdlov. In 1984, the House-Museum of Y.M. Sverdlov and the House-Museum of S.S. Spandaryan were merged into the House-Museum of Y.M. Sverdlov and S.S. Spandaryan, and in 1992 it was renamed the Museum “Political exile”. The Sverdlovs settled in a house belonging to the Irkutsk Meteorological Observatory, which was built in 1910, the wife of Y.M. Sverdlov was appointed the first head of the Turukhan Meteorological Station. Sverdlov’s house was a meeting place for political exiles. Here were I.V. Stalin, F.I. Goloshchekin, G.I. Petrovsky and others. The interior of the rooms where the Sverdlovs lived was restored in the house. The household exposition includes personal belongings of the Sverdlovs. The house in which one of the famous figures of the Communist Party, S.S. Spandaryan, lived during the period of exile from 1914 to 1916, is located 100 meters from the house-museum “Political exile”. In front of the house is a large bust of Spandarian. The house, built in 1912, was an outbuilding in the estate of the merchant Lukashevich. In it in 1914-1916, during the period of exile lived Suren Spandaryan (1882-1916), a professional revolutionary, member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP. Now many, probably, and have not heard this name, because Spandaryan did not live to revolution one year. He was one of the most brilliant revolutionaries. He studied at two universities, knew more than ten foreign languages. He was exiled to Turukhan region for eternal settlement for participation in the Prague Conference of 1912. He was the only one of the exiles who did not receive any money. His wife O. Adamovich and four children lived in Tiflis. I have never written about the conditions in which I live. I wrote to each child separately. Here he felled the forest, caught fish, made complaints and claims to the christians. He wrote a lot, but could not publish. Due to illness he went to Yeniseysk, and then to Krasnoyarsk, where he died. Buried at the Trinity Cemetery.

The museum was opened in this house in 1941. In the museum, the real things of that time are the clothes of deer skins, topchans, on which Stalin rested (he was allowed to come from Kureyka to the village of Monastyrskoe for mail twice a month), letters and photographs. The exposition also reflects the reference of the Soviet period. In 1949, in Turukhansk along the Yenisei, A.S. Efron, an interpreter, poet and artist, the daughter of Russian poetess M.I. Tsvetaeva, arrived for a lifetime settlement. Here she lived and worked until June 1955, until her full rehabilitation “for lack of corpus delicti”, and the first steamer left the Turukhansk Territory.