When civil war was raging in the country, prophets made predictions, and practical people hid money and silverware. The old houses of the Stavropol Territory still keep centuries-old treasures.
Stavropol Nostradamus
In 1917, few people in Russia understood the scale of the events. But even then there were people who foresaw when the power of the Bolsheviks would end. One such seer lived in the Stavropol Territory. We are talking about the writer Ilya Surguchev, whose literary fame resounded throughout the country before the revolution. At the end of the civil war, he went into exile. Surguchev was always interested in mysticism, read Nostradamus with enthusiasm and was generally not indifferent to any prophecy. Some surprisingly successful predictions came from his own pen. For example, about the time allotted to the Bolsheviks in Russia.
He touched on this topic in his first émigré play Rivers of Babylon, which tells the story of the fate of the Russian exiles. One of his heroes says that the new government is strong and will not shake now for at least two centuries. Another objects to him: “You say two hundred years? Count a thousand! The heroes of the play argue among themselves, and the author's opinion on this matter is included in the title of the play. The fact is that “Rivers of Babylon” is a reference to Psalm 136, where there are such words: “By the rivers of Babylon, we sat there and wept when we remembered Zion”. The verse refers to the events of the 6th century BC, when the Babylonians drove the Jews into slavery for 70 years. The prophet Jeremiah says about this: “And all this land will be desolation and terror; and these nations will serve the king of Babylon for seventy years”(Jer. 25:11). In a play first published in 1922,Surguchev predicted the same date for the Russian people, and his foresight came true with amazing accuracy.
Counterrevolutionary gold
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Surguchev recalled that, leaving his parental home in Stavropol, he buried a chest with manuscripts and documents, including letters from famous writers, in the garden. Many did this in those days. After the Bolsheviks attacked the prosperous south, the local rich had to hide their valuables wherever they could.
In 1972, on Lenin Street in Stavropol, one of the mansions of the Mesnyankins' merchants was destroyed. The foreman of the brigade, dismantling the oven, found more than 700 silver "Nikolaev" coins. A sawn-off shotgun was hidden with them. A few days later, sparkling royal chervonets fell from the excavator bucket along with the earth on the same object. The workers donated over 700 grams of pure gold to the state. They found treasures in Stavropol and on the former Pospelovskaya (now Gorky Street), where middle-class merchants once lived. Local historian German Belikov says that five years after the arrest of the owner of one of the houses, the police came there to dig a cesspool. They dug down to the brickwork, behind which was a rusted bucket full of gold jewelry.
Another merchant's house on the same street became a theater hostel. According to residents, in the late 1950s, a police outfit dismantled the stove there and found a cast iron sealed with wax, which, as residents believe, also contained gold. In many Stavropol families there are legends about how their ancestors hid values so that they would not find themselves among the "conquests of the revolution." So, some Polish nobles, as their great-grandchildren say, before the search threw table silver and jewelry in the cracks behind the plaster. The house was taken away from them at the same time, and they did not have time to take their wealth from there. It is possible that the walls of the old mansion in Stavropol still keep their jewelry.
Paper treasures
In those troubled times, people hid not only precious metals and jewelry, but also ordinary paper money. Apparently, they hoped for a quick revival of the old financial order. These banknotes, to the delight of bonists - collectors of banknotes, are still found.
Collective farm builders of the Stavropol village of Sablinsky, dismantling a dilapidated barn in 1977, stumbled upon a skillfully hidden leather bag filled to overflowing with credit notes of the 1889-1909 model. The treasure was considered the former property of the merchant Shamanov, who owned the building before nationalization. Ten years earlier, a pot of coins had already been found in his domain. Even earlier, in Stalin's times, schoolchildren of the village of Belomechetskaya also found a treasure of royal banknotes in an old house. And there were so many of them that all the students in the school got a few of them, and the teachers almost pasted over the walls in the stanitsa classes with the remains.
In later years, a similar story happened in the town of Izobilny, where children found a pile of old money in the attic of a pre-revolutionary building and presented it to the history teacher Valentina Petrichenko. And in 2007, in the city of Novoaleksandrovsk, workers, changing the roof of the military enlistment office, found between the ceilings a bundle of large bills wrapped in newspaper, old photographs and gold shoulder straps with the letter "M" under the crown. Someone remembered that earlier the house belonged to a wealthy merchant, whose sons served in the Cossack units. The newspaper immediately fell apart from dilapidation, so that no one had time to notice the date. But even without that, it is clear in what years and why this treasure was hidden. But we can only guess about the further fate of its owner.
Roman Nutrikhin