Sviyazhsk is a village on a peninsula (in 2008 a causeway was built to bring in tourist buses) in the Zelenodolsk district of Tatarstan, at the confluence of the Sviyaga River with the Volga, a former fortress and mustering point for troops storming Kazan.
The Sviyazhsk railway station is located 6 km west of the island, in the urban-type settlement of Nizhniye Vyazovyye, to which Sviyazhsk is connected by a road running along the causeway.
Founded on 24 May 1551. The old coat of arms of Sviyazhsk: on a blue field, a wooden town on vessels upon the Volga River, and fish in that river.
Founding of Sviyazhsk
The present-day village stands on the site of a fortress founded by Ivan the Terrible in 1551.
Retreating from Kazan in 1550 during one of his campaigns, Ivan the Terrible stopped on the right bank of the Volga and chose a site for the future fortress. In 1551 the fortress was assembled in four weeks from pieces prefabricated in the Uglich area and floated down the Volga:
"The Grand Prince ordered a town to be built with wooden walls, towers, and gates, like a real town; and all the beams and logs were numbered from top to bottom. This town was then dismantled, loaded onto rafts, and floated down the Volga, together with troops and heavy artillery. When it reached Kazan, he ordered the town to be erected and all [the fortifications] filled with earth; he himself returned to Moscow, while he garrisoned the town with Russian troops and artillery and named it Sviyazhsk."
The town, built soon afterward, became the base of Russian forces during the siege of Kazan in 1552. In the mid-16th century the Sviyazhsk fortress exceeded in the size of its defended territory the kremlins of Novgorod, Pskov, and even Moscow.
In 1719 the town became the center of Sviyazhsk Province within Kazan Governorate; in 1781 it became the county town of Sviyazhsky Uyezd of Kazan Vicegerency (again a governorate from 1796).
After the Revolution
From 1920 to 1927 the town was the center of Sviyazhsky Canton of the Tatar ASSR, and from 1927 to 1931 the center of Sviyazhsky District.
In 1918 Sviyazhsk became one of the first places in the country to see the "Red Terror" and Soviet political repression, when, on the order of the Bolshevik government's military commissar Trotsky, every tenth Red Army soldier of the units stationed on the island — which had failed to drive the White Czechs out of Kazan — was shot. Later a corrective-labor colony operated on the island, which also held victims of repression.
Recent history of Sviyazhsk
By a decree of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) of 1 February 1932, the town of Sviyazhsk was reclassified as a rural settlement.
In 1957, as a result of the filling of the Kuibyshev Reservoir, Sviyazhsk found itself on an island.
In 2008 a causeway with a road opened, connecting Sviyazhsk to the left bank of the Sviyaga and joining Sviyazhsk to the Tatarskaya Griva islands (these islands are separated from the shore by a channel and connected to the shore by a bridge).
Since 2009, every April, on the day commemorating Chaliapin, the annual Sviyazhsk Festival of Sacred Music, of nationwide significance, has been held.
Since 2010, the island-town has seen the large-scale implementation of the "Renaissance" (Vozrozhdenie) program of the republican Foundation for the Preservation and Development of Bolgar and Sviyazhsk, which includes the restoration and reconstruction of historic landmarks, the construction of new cultural and infrastructure facilities, and the renovation of Sviyazhsk residents' housing stock.
Since 2010, every July, the annual Open Tatarstan Tournament of nationwide significance in archery and crossbow shooting, the "Sviyazhsk Cup," has been held.
In May 2011 Sviyazhsk again became an island — the transport causeway was cut by a channel, across which a bridge was built.
In July 2011 a new river station building was completed, with an information center for the museum-reserve, a café, and a bus parking area.
The construction and opening are planned soon of a new hotel (in addition to the hotel set up in the reconstructed building of the former asylum for the blind), an observation deck, a museum of the Sviyaga River, a Memorial) to the victims of political repression, a replica of the boat on which Emperor Paul I visited Sviyazhsk, and other facilities.
The Sviyazhsk monument to Judas
Monument to Judas
There is conflicting testimony about the erection of monuments to Judas on the territory of the RSFSR (and, in particular, in Sviyazhsk) in the early years of Soviet rule.
In 1917-1923, several White Guard and émigré newspapers wrote about the erection of monuments to Judas in Soviet Russia. In July 1919 the newspaper Izvestia of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Red Army Deputies reprinted an excerpt from Kolchak's newspaper Velikaya Rossiya (Great Russia) (1919, No. 41) about the erection of a monument to Judas (in Tambov). No refutation of this information appears anywhere in that article of Izvestia of the Petrograd Soviet.
In the same years, the Danish diplomat Henning Kehler and the émigré writer A. Varaksin wrote in their memoirs about the erection of a monument to Judas in Sviyazhsk, claiming, according to their accounts, to have witnessed its installation in Sviyazhsk in August 1918. Excerpts from H. Kehler's book (about the monument to Judas in Sviyazhsk) were published in the 1920s in English and French newspapers — and neither Leon Trotsky, nor Vsevolod Vishnevsky, nor Demyan Bedny (who were in Sviyazhsk in August 1918) ever refuted these publications. Moreover, Demyan Bedny later wrote (and the newspaper Pravda published) the antireligious poem "The Flawless New Testament of the Evangelist Demyan," written in a mocking, derisive manner, in which he glorified Judas Iscariot precisely.
Contemporaries hostile to Soviet rule considered the reports of monuments to Judas quite plausible (after all, Lenin had wanted to erect a monument to Brutus in Moscow). Bunin remarked in 1924:
The planetary villain, overshadowed by a banner with a mocking call to liberty, fraternity, and equality, sat high upon the neck of the Russian savage and called on the whole world to trample conscience, shame, love, and mercy into the mud, to smash the tablets of Moses and Christ to dust, to erect monuments to Judas and Cain, to teach the "Seven Commandments of Lenin"
In the new Russia, publications about the monuments to Judas from those years began to appear from the mid-1990s, and especially many in the 2000s.
Critics consider all the publications about the monuments to Judas dubious, since, in their view, they either contain no references to primary sources at all, or, according to the critics, everything comes down to the single reference to H. Kehler's book about the erection of the monument to Judas in Sviyazhsk, and this source, in the critics' view, is highly dubious and unreliable.
Critics point out that the book The Red Garden by the little-known Danish writer Henning Kehler contains numerous errors. For instance, according to Kehler the events supposedly took place in a town called Sviagorod, which commentators identified with Sviyazhsk. Some émigré journals and newspapers carried on a polemic about Kehler's book.
Modern critics of Kehler's book also cite a paper by the Kazan local historian Lev Zharzhevsky at an expert council of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISI), "Leon Trotsky and the Monument to Judas in Sviyazhsk: Myth and Reality," which allegedly proved that "the author of The Red Garden was never in either Sviyazhsk or Kazan, and simply invented the story of the monument to Judas.". However, shortly after the RISI expert council session, the "Third Sviyazhsk Readings" were held in June 2012, at which S. P. Sanachin, chief architect of projects at the Center for Developing Kazan's General Plan, effectively opposed Zharzhevsky in his own paper and, according to one participant in the readings, "presented a huge amount of information about the events of 1918 in Kazan and made a fairly well-argued case for the possibility that Henning Kehler was in Kazan in the spring and summer of 1918 and witnessed the events he describes in his book, although, in Sanachin's own words, the question of the monument to Judas remained open."
In 2000 a second source about the monument to Judas in Sviyazhsk was published — in the journal Kazan — excerpts from the pamphlet (Along the Roads of the Russian Time of Troubles) by the émigré writer A. Varaksin, published in Berlin in 1923, who also described the erection of the monument to Judas in Sviyazhsk. Varaksin's description contains some details absent from Kehler's book. For instance, Varaksin describes the monument's base (which Kehler does not mention) as a wooden pedestal boarded over and painted with red lead. Varaksin also mentions among the participants of the rally the army commander Pyotr Slaven, who later took part in the Bolsheviks' capture of Kazan.
This episode in Sviyazhsk is also mentioned (as a curiosity in the course of implementing the plan for monumental propaganda) in the modern popular-science encyclopedia Krugosvet, in the article "The Plan for Monumental Propaganda."
Critics of the publications about the erection of the monument to Judas in Sviyazhsk have also put forward the hypothesis that the myth of the monument to Judas in Sviyazhsk may have arisen among poorly literate local residents after the erection in this town of a monument to Brigade Commander Yan Yudin, who died near Kazan on 12 August 1918. However, this monument still stood in 1961, and until 1997, as attested by decrees of the Council of Ministers of the Tatar ASSR and the Cabinet of Ministers of the Republic of Tatarstan on the protection of monuments. And elderly local Sviyazhsk women were still alive at the time who told of the monument to Judas and of how it had been torn down soon after its erection.
On 30 July 1918 Lenin signed a decree of the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom, the government) on the erection in Soviet Russia of "monuments to great figures of socialism, the revolution, and so on."
Lenin's plan of monumental propaganda was supplemented by Proletkult, which added to the list of new monuments one to Judas as a "fighter against Christianity." The Bolsheviks began erecting revolutionary monuments in August 1918 in accordance with this Sovnarkom decree and plan. The monument to Judas Iscariot in Sviyazhsk was erected, if Kehler and Varaksin are to be believed, on 11 August 1918 — twelve days after Lenin signed this Sovnarkom decree, and the day after the Bolsheviks murdered the abbot of the Sviyazhsk Dormition Monastery, the holy martyr Bishop Amvrosy (V. I. Gudko).
Landmarks
Sviyazhsk is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Tatarstan, with a whole complex of landmarks:
- Bogoroditse-Uspensky Monastery (Monastery of the Dormition of the Mother of God)
- Assumption Cathedral (1556—1561)
- Bell tower of St. Nicholas Church (1556)
- Sviyazhsk Convent of St. John the Baptist (Ioanno-Predtechensky Convent)
- Cathedral of Our Lady of All Who Sorrow Rejoice (1898—1906)
- Church of St. Sergius (late 16th — early 17th century)[
- Sviyazhsk Trinity-Sergius Monastery (no longer active)
- Wooden Trinity Church (1551)
- Church of Constantine and Helena (16th—18th centuries)
- Makaryevskaya Pustyn Monastery of the Sviyazhsk Reserve, on the other bank of the Volga
Also operating is the State Budgetary Cultural Institution of the Republic of Tatarstan, the State Historical-Architectural and Art Museum "Ostrov-Grad Sviyazhsk" (Island-Town of Sviyazhsk).
Interesting facts
- In the mid-16th century the Sviyazhsk fortress exceeded in the size of its defended territory the kremlins of Novgorod, Pskov, and even Moscow.
- In Tatar the settlement is called Zöya.
- The lead ship of the Project 21631 small missile ship series was named Grad Sviyazhsk in honor of Sviyazhsk in 2010.