Nevertheless, it is not difficult to find a small, two-block-long, inconspicuous Maurice Thorez Street in Tula, since two notable landmarks are located nearby - a prison and a cemetery.
The street along with these objects appeared on the outskirts of the city back in the 19th century and was originally called Polevaya.
The development of the street is connected with the Kievskaya Zastava, the obelisks of which were located just above the modern intersection of Lenin Ave. and Leo Tolstoy St. The outpost consisted of a complex of buildings, which included a guardhouse.
It was a remote area of the city where small artisans, retired military men of lower ranks and other poor people lived. Impassable mud, rickety wooden houses, a cemetery surrounded until the beginning of the 20th century only by an earthen rampart, which was easily overcome by cattle grazing right in the churchyard.
However, the twentieth century has arrived, and with it the changes associated with the growth of Tula in the south.The Pishchevik Stadium, now Arsenal, was built on the site of the wasteland or field that gave the street its original name. Since about the 1930s, the street began to be called Komvuzovskaya, since it was here that the construction of the academic buildings of the mining and mechanical institutes was planned, but then these facilities were built a little further south.
Here is what A.V. Alekseev, who lived on Komvuzovskaya Street since 1928, recalled:
"I was born on March 2, 1924 in Rostov-on-Don, but my father, a mining engineer, lived and worked with his whole family in the mining village of Shterovka in the Donetsk coal basin. The first years of my life were spent there. In 1928, his father joined the Tulaugol Trust of the Moscow Coal basin, and the family moved to the city of Tula. This move and a number of happy circumstances connected with it played a crucial role in my entire subsequent life. On the edge of the city, on a street very accurately named Polevaya (later Komvuzovskaya), the father receives a small plot with a garden, on which a small one-story log house is being built. The street is one-sided, with 9 houses at the back end.
The front part of the street is formed by the boundary of a large wasteland separating its houses from the multi-storey buildings of the city. The wasteland is covered with lush and diverse grassy vegetation, teeming with insects and other invertebrates.
A dirt road runs through the middle of the street, and on the opposite side of the houses is a high brick wall of the old part of the cemetery, overgrown with tall old trees and shrubs, from where the incessant voices of birds can be heard.
Swallows hunting mosquitoes are constantly scurrying in the shadow of the wall, above the path passing here, and hawthorn flies fly in flocks all over the street, which boys knock down with caps and pile up in heaps, competing who will catch the most."
The main changes to the street took place in the 1950s, when it was paved over, and private houses began to give way to new five-story houses.
Since 1965, the street has been named after Maurice Thorez (1900-1964), a prominent French politician. He was a great friend of the Soviet Union, traveled a lot around the country, visited Tula and Yasnaya Polyana– the Museum Estate of Leo Tolstoy. After the death of Maurice Thorez, in the year of his 65th birthday, the Tula City Executive Committee decided to perpetuate his name in the name of the street.
The even-numbered side of M. Torez Street begins with house No. 59/2, which was built in 1926-27. Interestingly, the stone Church of the Nativity of the Virgin was built on this site in the 1910s. It was never completed, it was dismantled, and house 59/2, apparently, inherited its foundation. This is followed by several five-story buildings, behind which is the park of the Tula Heroes of the Soviet Union, demolished in 1967. Above it is the Stalinok quarter, built in the 1950s. The houses facing Pervomaiskaya Street were built according to the design of the famous Tula architect Ivan Porfirievich Gryzlov. This is followed by house No. 8, built in the 1930s for the workers of the Tula Arms Factory. There were private houses on the site of houses No. 10, 12, 14 until the 1950s,
In the 1960s, the prison building, previously viewed from all sides, disappeared behind the five-story buildings of M. Torez Street, only part of the facade was still visible from Lenin Avenue until the 70s, until it was finally closed by the building of the Federal Penitentiary Service (Directorate of the Federal Penitentiary Service), built for the Moscow Olympics-80 .
