Trubetskoy House Museum

The surname on the museum sign promises the house of Sergey Trubetskoy. Yet according to the museum’s current official version, the Decembrist did not live within these walls. It was this very mistake that brought the museum here.

Sergey Trubetskoy was a Guards colonel and one of the leaders of the secret society that prepared the uprising of eighteen twenty-five. After his trial, he went through penal servitude and settlement. In eighteen forty-five, the family was allowed to move to Irkutsk for the children’s education. The Trubetskoys settled beyond the Ushakovka River, near Znamensky Monastery. Their spacious house was bought with the money of Ekaterina Trubetskaya’s mother; the couple’s own children and several wards lived there. That house burned down in nineteen oh eight.

On what was then Main Arsenal Street (now Dzerzhinsky Street), another wooden mansion remained. Old residents associated it with the Trubetskoys. Perhaps memory preserved a real but indirect connection: according to one archival version, Anna Mishtoft, a ward of the Trubetskoy family, settled here. There is also an assumption that the couple intended to arrange this house for one of their married daughters. Researchers found no evidence that the estate belonged to Sergey Trubetskoy.

In nineteen thirty-six, the city council trusted oral accounts and put a cast-iron plaque on the façade. It stated that Trubetskoy lived here from eighteen forty-five to eighteen fifty-six. Within a few years, the name “Trubetskoy House” was already seen as an established fact.

In the nineteen sixties, Nikolai Salatsky, chairman of the Irkutsk City Executive Committee, sought to open a separate museum of the Decembrists. At the time, the genuine Volkonsky house contained more than twenty communal apartments, while this one had five. Officials chose the less populated mansion with its ready-made memorial name. For five years, architect-restorer Galina Oranskaya restored its historical appearance. On December twenty-ninth, nineteen seventy, the exhibition “Decembrists in Irkutsk” opened here—the first hall of the future Irkutsk Museum of the Decembrists.

There are now no preserved rooms inside where Sergey Trubetskoy and Ekaterina Trubetskaya lived. The furnishings recreate a noble home of the mid-nineteenth century, while authentic letters, books, and personal belongings attest to the family history. The Trubetskoy surname remains on the sign; the museum no longer repeats the claim from the old cast-iron plaque.