Читать книгу The most detailed guide around Circum-Baikal Railroad: Irkutsk, Listvyanka, Slyudyanka, Shelekhov - - Страница 11

Further along the right side of Akademicheskaya Street, we pass the «Dom Kino» stop, where the East Siberian Newsreel Studio has been based since 1963 (Mukhinoy Str., 2A). Today it is the only venue in Irkutsk where you can see intellectual and auteur films on the screen, as well as meet directly with filmmakers. The storage funds contain more than 2 thousand film magazines «Eastern Siberia», about 400 documentaries, digitized and available to everyone.

East Siberian Newsreel Studio «Dom Kino»

Below us on the right hand remains the microdistrict Yubileiniy, founded in 1967 and named in honor of the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. Since 1986, the main attraction of this part of the city has been the Irkutsk Regional Clinical Hospital with a perinatal center and Orthodox parish in honor of the Nativity of John the Baptist (Yubileiniy mikrorayon, 100).

Church of John the Baptist in Yubileiny microdistrict

At the roundabout, we turn left onto Zakharova Street, which should lead us to the causer of the disappearance of the old Trans-Siberian Railway – the Irkutsk hydroelectric power station. In a small park on the right hand, one of the few churches on this bank of the Angara is hiding – the Church of Saint Alexander Nevsky, which was built in 2000 at the expense of the director and founder of the Folk Drama Theater M.G. Kornev (Yakobi Str., 3).

Church of Saint Alexander Nevsky

At the traffic light at the intersection with the street named after the Hero of Socialist Labor and the builder of the Irkutsk hydroelectric power station A.E. Bochkin, an alley goes up, planted by students of school number 64 in memory of the Great Victory. If you walk along it down to the Angara River, you can go to the only official beach in Irkutsk, named after the German physicist who made the first electric motor – B.S. Jacobi.

Before us appears the first serious hydroelectric power station in the history of Siberia. It is the least powerful (662.4 MW) in the most mighty hydropower complex in Russia – the Angarsk HPP cascade (Irkutskaya, Bratskaya, Ust-Ilimskaya, Boguchanskaya), whose total capacity is almost 12 thousand MW with an average annual output of 66 billion kWh (6% of the total consumption in the country). After the completion of the filling of the Irkutsk reservoir in 1959, the deepest (1642 m) and largest in terms of water volume (23,616 km³) reservoir in the world was formed. Perhaps that is why Irkutsk residents pay the least in Russia for 1 kW of energy (1.3 rubles for city dwellers and 0.91 for villagers).

Irkutsk Hydroelectric Dam

As a result of blocking the natural channel of the Angara River, the level of Baikal rose by 1.46 m, swallowing up all the islands between Irkutsk and the lake, as well as part of the Trans-Siberian Railway, for which a backup line had been built by that time. More than 200 settlements with 17 thousand people were in the flood zone.

On the right, at the en-trance to the dam, one of the three monuments to V.I. Lenin in Irkutsk, installed here in 1959 by the Moscow sculptor P.P. Yatsyno (author of the monument to the leader of the world proletariat at the park of Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy in Moscow). We will cross a dam along a 2.7 km long road, which is still unique for our country, because for the first time in world practice the construction was carried out from gravel and sand (almost 12 million m³), and the power plant building was combined with the body of the dam. From here, the main part of the water intake for the needs of the city is made.

Monument to V.I. Lenin at the hydroelectric power station, 1960s

At the end of the dam, the oldest metal icebreaker in the world – «Angara», froze on a concrete bed (Marshala Zhukova Prosp., 36A/1). It appeared on this site as a museum in the perpetual parking in 1990. This ship made its first voyage back in 1900 and since then has carried passengers of the Trans-Siberian Railway, participated in combat battles during the Civil War in Russia, ran aground three times, five times sank. Despite this, the engines of English assembly are still in excellent condition, and the ship is able to return to navigation, which was interrupted in 1963 only for moral reasons.

Icebreaker Angara, early 20th century