Krasnye Baki is a workers' settlement and the administrative center of Krasnobakovskiy District, Nizhny Novgorod Region.
The settlement in the past
The settlement of Krasnye Baki is only slightly younger than Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod, and hundreds of years older than Saint Petersburg, Odessa, Oryol… On the site of present-day Krasnye Baki, where Ovrazhnaya Street and Krasnaya Gorka Street meet the bank of the Vetluga River, there stood a Mari settlement. According to some sources, the Mari settlement was destroyed in 1374, when Novgorodian ushkuyniks (river pirates) swept through the Vetluga basin and, as an ancient chronicle records, "razed many villages along the Vetluga."
After the Kazan Tatar khanate was annexed by Moscow in 1552, two of the first Russian settlements were established to guard the crossing of the Vetluga River. They were named "Bochki Bolshiye" (Large Barrels) — on the territory of the settlement's present-day central square — and "Bochki Malyye" (Small Barrels) — at the far end of present-day Internatsionalnaya Street. As these settlements grew, they merged and formed the village of "Boki." This is recorded in a document dated 1617. The document was written by Moscow scribes who, owing to their "akanie" dialect (the tendency to pronounce unstressed "o" as "a"), distorted the settlement's name and wrote it as "the village of Baki." The village's name itself derived from the name of the Bokovka stream, though other versions of the name's origin also exist.
The village occupied an exceptionally important geographical and economic position. It was a crossroads of the most important waterway with the main trade roads running from Nizhny Novgorod to Vyatka and the Northern Dvina. Along the left bank of the Vetluga ran the famous Galichskaya Road, connecting the central part of the state with Kazan.
In 1636, the Vetluga estate passed to Prince Dmitry Lvov. The village of Boki grew as a manorial residence and a trading settlement. To lend greater prestige to the village, the prince built a church there, named the "Nikolskaya" church, which has unfortunately not survived to this day. The village acquired the double name "Nikolskoye-Baki," which it bore right up until 1917.
When Tsar Peter conceived the idea of building a Russian fleet, 350,000 desyatinas of shipbuilding timber were surveyed and set aside along the Vetluga. Craftsmen soon arrived, and they laid the foundations of wooden shipbuilding in the area. Particular fame was enjoyed by the so-called "belyany" — vessels of tremendous size, tonnage, and beauty, used for floating timber down the lower reaches of the Vetluga and onto the Volga River. It was the shipbuilders of Baki who, in 1937, fulfilled the prestigious commission to construct vessels for the filming of the movies Volga-Volga and Stepan Razin.
In 1865, a peasant school was established in the village of Boki, run by the local priest. Two years later the school was converted into a Zemstvo primary school, attended mainly by boys. It was housed in a private building near the site of the present-day district administration building. In 1872, with the assistance of Prince Trubetskoy, a purpose-built two-story school building was constructed in Baki — one without equal in the entire Varnavinsky district at the time. Later, a parish school, an adult school, and a library were also opened in Baki; the library was located on what is now Internatsionalnaya Street.
By the early 19th century, Baki ranked in population only behind the district towns of Vetluga and Varnavino.
In 1947, by a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the village of Baki was reclassified as a workers' settlement.
The settlement today
Today, the workers' settlement of Krasnye Baki is one of the largest district centers in the northern part of the Region, covering an area of 579 hectares and home to nearly 8,000 people — more than 30% of the district's population. In recent years, through the efforts of local authorities, enterprises, and organizations based in the settlement, its appearance has been gradually changing. Repairs to road surfaces and building facades have noticeably transformed the central square, and scheduled repairs to roads within the settlement are ongoing. The long-awaited connection to the gas supply network, which began in December 1997, will undoubtedly bring many more changes.
The district center is developing, and although the scale of construction today is not very large, private residential building is active and entrepreneurs are expanding the network of retail businesses.
The settlement's pride
- The Dendrological Park