Rentereya and the top of Pryamskoy Vzvoz

A two-story building spans the top of Pryamskoy Vzvoz. One of its arches lets the stairway pass through; the other is bricked up. Metal hinges on which the fortress gates once hung remain in the masonry. This was where the main ascent from the lower town to the Tobolsk Kremlin was locked.

At the end of the seventeenth century, Semyon Remezov, Tobolsk's draftsman and head of stone construction, was assigned to fortify this passage. He conceived gates of three or four tiers: a passageway below, chambers above it, and above them a tall tower with a tented roof and a double-headed eagle. The tower was to greet everyone climbing to the Kremlin and protect the posad at the foot of the hill.

Construction began only under the first governor of Siberia, Matvei Gagarin. He pressed for the continuation of Tobolsk's large stone-building project and gathered people for it even after stone construction was banned everywhere except Saint Petersburg in seventeen fourteen. Gagarin transferred prisoners of war from the Swedish Army here from factories in the Urals. These soldiers and officers ended up in Siberia after battles of the Great Northern War and wanted to survive captivity without losing the right to return home.

Most of them worked here as laborers: they dug foundation pits and carried water, lime, clay, and bricks. The work was supervised by a captured sailor from the Swedish Navy, whom Russian documents called “architect Yagan.” A private was entitled to one kopeck a day and about thirty-nine liters of rye flour a month; work was paid for separately. Pyotr I explicitly required that the prisoners work for this maintenance.

By seventeen seventeen, they had built two heavy arches and chambers above them. The upper tower with its tented roof was never built. The chambers began to store renta—quitrent collected from peasants—so the building was called the Rentereya. Yasak was also brought here: furs and other valuables received from the Indigenous peoples of Siberia and intended to be sent to Moscow. The narrow entrance was both a gate and a treasury.

In seventeen eighteen, Gagarin was recalled for an investigation into abuses involving state property. Three years later, he was executed. After his departure, as a representative of the prisoners complained, privates stopped receiving payment for their work.

In the autumn of that same year, seventeen twenty-one, news of peace with Sweden reached Tobolsk. Officers with their families were sent home first; then, in winter, groups of privates left one after another. Many had lived in Siberia for more than ten years. The brick retaining walls farther down the vzvoz appeared later, in the eighteenth century. Other builders erected them. The Swedish trace remained above the very top step: the unfinished gates are still called the Swedish Chamber.