Minusinsk city transformation at the beginning of the XX century: ideas and reality of development

The paper considers the stages and features of socio-economic trans-formations of the small, historically formed Siberian city of Minusinsk at the beginning of the 20th century. Research demonstrates the activities for the implementation in Southern Siberia of the idea of a garden city, which originated in the world urban planning at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries. The primary tasks of the Soviet government in the field of transforming the communal economy of Russia included, in particular, measures to build rational-type dwellings on the principles of garden cities and cultural settlements. Archival documents are presented, testifying to the measures taken by Siberian scientists, central and local authorities for the development of horticultural activities in the country and in Minusinsk in the 1910s – 1930s. The studied materials contain information about the preparation of events for the Day of the Forest in Minusinsk (1928), which became a kind of continuation of the pre-revolutionary traditions associated with the spring holiday of tree planting. The unique archival texts reveal little-known information characterizing the development of collective and individual gardening and vegetable growing in Siberian cities in the pre-war period. The main tasks of this activity were the encouragement and development of gardening for the general improvement of populated areas by converting abandoned wastelands and urban outskirts into cultural land plots. The considered archival documents give a clear idea of one of the short, but bright stages of the transformation of Minusinsk, associated with the search for new social and economic forms of arrangement of the Siberian city in the difficult conditions of Soviet reality in the pre-war years.