Krasnobakovskiy District is located 150 kilometres from Nizhny Novgorod. It borders Urenskiy District, Tonkinskiy District, Voskresensky District, Semyonovsky District, and Varnavinskiy District Districts of Nizhny Novgorod Region. The administrative center of the district is the Urban-type settlement of Krasnye Baki.
History of founding
The first written mention of Krasnye Baki dates to 1617. Following the annexation of the Kazan Tatar Khanate by Moscow in 1552, two early Russian settlements were established to guard the crossing over the Vetluga River. They were called "Bochki Bolshiye" and "Bochki Malyye" ("Large Barrels" and "Small Barrels"). As the settlements grew, they merged and formed the village of "Boki." This was recorded in a document dated 1617. The entry was made by Moscow scribes, and owing to their "akan'ye" dialect — in which the unstressed "o" is pronounced as "a" — they distorted the settlement's name and wrote it as "the village of Baki." The village's own name derived from the name of the Bokovka stream, though other theories about the name's origin also exist. In 1636, a church dedicated to Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker was built in the village of Baki, and from that point Baki became a selo (a larger village) with the double name "Nikolskoye-Baki." The settlement bore this name until 1917.
Over the course of several centuries, new villages and selos were founded, local crafts developed, but the main occupation of the people living here became the harvesting and transportation of timber — the primary wealth of this harsh and sparsely populated region. With the growth of industrial production and increasing demand for goods supplied from Russia's outlying territories, construction began on the railway line from Nizhny Novgorod to Kotelnych, and in 1912 the first building foundations for railway workers were laid on the left bank of the Vetluga. This was how Vetluzhskaya station came into being, which later grew into a large settlement.
In 1923, Varnavinsky and Voskresensky districts were merged, and Baki became the new district center, receiving the revolutionary designation "District Center Krasnye Baki." In 1947, by a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the selo of Baki was reclassified as an urban-type settlement (rabochiy posyolok).