Barabinsk, Russia

History

The town of Barabinsk is named after Baraba Tatars, the indigenous inhabitants of the Baraba steppe. During the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the swampy terrain forced the railway line to be laid away from the town of Kainsk. The Kainsk-Tomsky railway station (opened in 1896) was built at the point closest to the town, and a settlement for railway employees sprang up around it.

The settlement developed rapidly, and in 1911 a project was proposed to create a town called Alexeyevsk based on the station settlement, whose population had already reached 4,000 by that time. At a meeting of the provincial board for peasant affairs held on 18 March 1911, it was resolved that "the settlement at Kainsk station is to be recognised as subject to conversion into a non-district town with simplified administration"; however, for reasons that are not entirely clear, the change in status did not occur. It was only towards the end of 1916 that the settlement at Kainsk station became a non-district town of Tomsk Governorate, named Barabinsk after its location on the Baraba Lowland.

In 1920, the first issue of the newspaper Barabinsky Vestnik was published, then called Izvestiya of the Barabinsk Revolutionary Committee.

From the History section of Barabinsk on Wikipedia, under CC BY-SA 4.0.