001:Bakunina. Last known address: Bakunina Street, Tomsk

Bakunina Street is one of the first streets in the city of Tomsk, founded in 1604. It is formed by houses along the road that connected the Tomsk Fortress with Yurtochnaya Hill in the 17th and 18th centuries, and later, Voskresenskaya Hill with the city center.

According to an inventory from the late 1870s, it consisted of 20 buildings and was subsequently virtually unchanged, with no changes to the building numbers. The street received its current name in 1925 in memory of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin (1814–1876), a theorist of anarchism, one of the ideologists of revolutionary populism, and an active opponent of Karl Marx, who lived on this street in house number 14 during his exile in 1858–1859.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the street (Bakunina No. 3) housed a police station and a fire station with a watchtower. At No. 4, a Catholic church (catholic church) was built in 1833 by exiled Poles. It was the first stone Catholic church beyond the Urals, and after a long hiatus (from 1937 to 1990), it still functions for its intended purpose. Its history is a separate topic.

At the end of the street is house number 26, which is called the "Radishchev House" because it is believed that the disgraced Russian writer, author of the famous work "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow" Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749-1802), stayed in this house on his way to Ilimsk exile in August 1791 and on his return from it in March 1797.

During the Soviet era, the theme of political repression in the lives of residents of this street continued to be a theme, as evidenced by the three-volume publication "Human Pain"—a book of remembrance for residents of the Tomsk region who were repressed in the 1920s–early 1950s. Along with the personal information of those arrested and sentenced, some also list their addresses of residence before their arrest.

An analysis of the publication revealed the fates of 43 people who lived on Bakunina Street between the 1920s and early 1950s. Of these 43, 24 were executed, the rest were sentenced to varying prison terms. Only three were released from custody "due to insufficient evidence."

Who they were, where they lived, and what their “Last Free Address” was for most of them is in our table.