The rocks of freedom — Stolby's darker century

The word that won't wash off

On the Second Pillar there is a single Russian word — Свобода, Freedom — painted on the rock in 1899. It has been re-traced by hand, by strangers, for more than a century. It outlived the tsar whose police provoked it, the Soviet state that followed, and is now into a third Russian republic. Nobody is paid to maintain it. It is simply re-painted, the way you'd tend a grave you felt responsible for.

That inscription is the emblem of stolbizm, the homegrown Krasnoyarsk free-solo subculture explored in the reframe article. The scenic guides treat it as a charming detail. It is not charming. It is the visible tip of a hundred-year argument between a free-associating community on the rocks and a series of states that found that community inconvenient — and, repeatedly, treated it as a threat.

This is the history deep-cut: the dissent the rocks sheltered, the cabin communes the state destroyed, the people it imprisoned, and the deaths that hardened the climbing ethic into doctrine. Some of it is firmly documented. Some of it — specifically the mid-century gang violence — rests on a single long-form account, and is flagged as such throughout. Holding that line honestly is the point of the article.

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A space of dissent, from the start

The remoteness that made the rocks good for climbing also made them good for meeting unobserved. Tsarist police rarely climbed; political exiles and revolutionary students did. The taiga cabins became cover.

The earliest inscriptions record this directly. In 1897 someone painted «Социализм» — Socialism — in red on the base of the First Pillar, adding «будет достигнут» (will be achieved) the next year. In 1899, in protest at police harassment of the stolbisty, the word «Свобода» — Freedom — went up on the Second Pillar (Wikipedia (ru), "Столбизм"; Russia Beyond). During the revolution of 1905–1906, revolutionary assemblies were held on the rocks and youth linked to the RSDLP used the cabins as cover (ГНКК, "Столбизм — уникальное красноярское явление"; Wikipedia (ru)).

There is an irony worth naming. The stolbisty painted "Socialism" and "Freedom" in protest against a tsarist police that treated them as a sedition risk. Within two generations the socialist state they had wished for would treat the same community — the same cabins, the same free association on the same rocks — as its own kind of threat, and would destroy it far more thoroughly than the tsar ever managed.

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The izbushki: a society the state kept demolishing

Stolbizm was never only climbing. From 1892, when the first communal log cabin — an izbushka — was built under the Third Pillar, the stolbisty organized into named "companies" (компании) — Eagles, Wolves, and dozens more — each with its own cabin, bylaws, and logbooks (Knife.media, "Кровавые камни"; Wikipedia (ru)). The cabins were unlocked and communal. The rock came with a resident civilization.

That civilization was, from the authorities' point of view, a recurring problem: unregistered structures, unsupervised gatherings, on land that after 1925 was a strict nature reserve where, legally, nobody was supposed to be building anything. The result was a cycle that ran for most of the twentieth century — the community built cabins, the state destroyed them, the community rebuilt. The most violent phase of that cycle came with the Great Terror.

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1937: the director in the camps, the cabins razed

The single best-documented act of state violence against the Stolby community is the arrest of Aleksandr Yavorsky, the reserve's first director and one of the founders of its scientific and museum work.

In the Terror of 1937, Yavorsky was arrested on charges that read as pure fabrication: organizing a "terrorist organization" intended to assassinate Kremlin leadership and engineer Siberian separatism under Japanese protection. He served roughly seventeen years in the camps. The reserve's museum was closed, and more than thirty cabins were destroyed — some, according to the long-form Russian account, converted into NKVD checkpoints (Knife.media). The community rebuilt cabins after the Second World War, but the demolitions resumed in waves; by the late 1980s essentially all of them had been razed, and only about fourteen were reconstructed from the 1990s on as heritage.

The Yavorsky case is the spine of Stolby's darker century because it is corroborated and concrete: a named director, a documented sentence, a museum closure, a count of destroyed cabins. It is also the clearest statement of the relationship — a self-governing community on the rocks, and a state that periodically decided that self-government was the problem.

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1938: an Abalakov taken by the NKVD

The Terror reached the most famous product of Stolby too. Vitaly Abalakov — born in Krasnoyarsk, trained on these pillars, first Soviet ascensionist of Lenin Peak, inventor of the Abalakov thread (the "V-thread" ice anchor climbers still use by that name) and called the father of Soviet mountaineering — was arrested by the NKVD in 1938 and held until 1940. The charges were of a piece with the era's absurdity: propagandizing "Western" climbing technique and spying for Germany (Wikipedia, Vitaly Abalakov; American Alpine Club, obituary).

Read alongside the Yavorsky arrest, the Abalakov case shows the Terror hitting Stolby at both ends — the institution that protected the rocks and the individual the rocks had made world-class. His younger brother Yevgeny Abalakov, first to summit Communism Peak (7,495 m), the highest point in the USSR, in 1933, died in 1948 in disputed circumstances. The Abalakov story in full belongs to the reframe and to a climbing guide; here the relevant fact is narrow and grim — that the academy which fed the Soviet alpine machine was rewarded, in 1937–1938, with the camps.

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1925 and 2019: the two designations

Against that record of demolition sits something genuinely unusual, and worth stating plainly because it complicates any tidy "state versus community" reading.

The State Nature Reserve "Stolby" was created on 30 June 1925 by decree of the Yenisei Provincial Revolutionary Committee — and, uniquely in Russian history, at the initiative of local residents, principally the museum director Arkady Tugarinov and the artist Dmitry Karatanov, to protect the syenite outcrops and their surrounding landscape. It is the oldest citizen-initiated reserve in Russia and marked its centenary in June 2025 (rodina-history.ru, centenary coverage; krsk.aif.ru). So the same community the state would later demolish is the community that talked the state into protecting the place to begin with. Roughly 3.5% of the territory was opened to visitors; the rest was a strict protected core.

Decades later the designation changed again. By Russian government decree of 28 November 2019, effective 4 December 2019, the strict zapovednik was reclassified as the National Park "Krasnoyarsk Stolby" (Russian Ministry of Natural Resources, 2019). The official rationale was that the reserve had in practice operated as a national park since the late 1980s, hosting roughly a million visitors a year — activity legal for a national park but illegal under the stricter reserve regime. The conversion kept the boundaries and area unchanged.

On the "controversy." Parts of the stolbist community and regional commentary read the 2019 reclassification as a step toward commercialization — a fear that a free, self-governed civic space would become a managed tourist product, with paid entry and infrastructure to follow. It is worth being precise about the status of that claim: the commercialization concern is well-attested as community sentiment in regional press, but it is not a documented legal dispute, and the decree itself preserved free access and the existing boundaries. Treat the "controversy" as sentiment about a direction of travel, not as a settled fact about a specific access conflict.

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The deaths that hardened the creed

Stolbizm's defining rule — no ropes, no protection, a route counts only if soloed clean — was not arrived at in the abstract. It was paid for.

The first officially documented death on the Stolby was in August 1897 (newslab.ru, "Кровь и камни"). Accidents have spiked ever since in the spring and autumn school seasons, when student crowds flood the rocks and the typical cause is the same: an unprepared visitor in the wrong footwear slipping on wet or icing syenite. Among the deaths that entered local memory: the stolbist legend Lyudmila Zvereva, who has hard khody named after her, died on the Second Pillar in 1991, aged 74; and the experienced climber Vladimir Popchenko, who fell from the Second Pillar on 27 December 2009 (prmira.ru, "Смерти на Столбах"; newslab.ru).

These deaths did not soften the no-rope ethic; they hardened it into doctrine. The community's safety teaching is carried in proverbs, not regulations — "Никогда не переоценивай свои силы" (never overestimate your strength), "Риск имеет границы, за ними — глупость" (risk has limits; beyond them lies stupidity). The reading is consistent across a culture that refused protection: the answer to a fatal fall was not a bolt, it was a sharper respect for the line between competence and folly.

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The contested thread: the crime wars

There is a darker mid-century chapter that English readers almost never encounter, and it has to be handled differently from everything above — because the bulk of its specifics rest on a single long-form Russian account (Knife.media, "Кровавые камни"), with only partial corroboration in regional press.

According to that single account, from roughly the late 1950s into the 1980s the rocks were drawn into a low-level war. The first recorded murder is placed in 1959. Urban gangs from working-class districts of Krasnoyarsk pushed into the Stolby; the authorities responded with Komsomol-militia squads. An organized faction is described as extorting tribute from climbers, with violence said to peak around 1972 (stabbings, a homemade grenade) and again around 1980 (a fatal beating and the arson of cabins). The same source places the last unsolved Stolby murder in 2009.

That is as far as it is honest to go. The named gangs, the individual killings, the grenade and arson incidents, and the dates attached to them come largely from one source; the well-corroborated record (the inscriptions, the 1925 and 2019 designations, Yavorsky, the Abalakovs, the documented deaths) does not depend on it. The fatality count is partly corroborated by rescue-service data — the Krasnoyarsk rescue service records more than a thousand call-outs since 2017, with deaths in the single digits per multi-year span (newslab.ru) — but that is operational accident data, not confirmation of the gang-war narrative. The crime-wars thread is included here because it is part of how Krasnoyarsk remembers the rocks; it is presented as a clearly-flagged secondary thread, and contested specifics are not stated as established fact.

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Timeline

A compressed timeline of the darker century, with an explicit confidence column. "High" means corroborated across independent sources or a primary record; "Medium" means a single secondary source with partial corroboration; "Symbolic" means a traditional date rather than a documented event.

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What's verified vs what's contested

A short honesty note, because the value of this history is only as good as the line it draws.

Well-corroborated (treat as established): the 1897 and 1899 inscriptions; the 1905–06 revolutionary assemblies; the 1925 citizen-initiated reserve and the people behind it; Yavorsky's arrest and long imprisonment; Vitaly Abalakov's 1938 NKVD arrest; the documented deaths of 1897, 1991 and 2009; the 2019 national-park reclassification and its dates. These rest on independent sources or primary records.

Contested or symbolic (handle with care): the 1851 founding date is traditional, not documented. The 2019 "controversy" is community sentiment in regional press, not a documented legal dispute, and the decree preserved free access and boundaries. And the mid-century crime-wars narrative — gang names, individual murders, the grenade and arson incidents and their dates — rests largely on a single long-form Russian account; the count of cabins destroyed in 1937 and the NKVD-checkpoint detail come from that same source. None of those specifics should be repeated as settled fact.

The honest version of Stolby's darker century needs no embellishment. A community painted "Freedom" on a rock in 1899; the states that came after found that community inconvenient and tried, more than once, to erase it; it kept re-painting the word. That much is documented — and it is enough.