The museum has preserved an authentic petition of Prokopiy Sokolnikov, the first Yakut doctor who had a specialized higher education.

Prokopiy Sokolnikov was born in Tattinsky ulus into a family of peasants in 1865. He finished school in Churapcha, later entered the Yakutsk progymnasium and the theological seminary. At the age of 26, Prokopiy left for Tomsk, where later he entered the medical faculty of Tomsk University.

In 1896, the All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition opened in Nizhny Novgorod, where the Siberian department was headed by the scientist, geographer and traveler Pyotr Semenov-Tyan-Shansky. He helped Sokolnikov to get an offer to move from Tomsk to Nizhny Novgorod to work as a tour guide. Soon, Prokopiy Sokolnikov was transferred from Tomsk University to Moscow University. He studied there under the natural scientist and physiologist Ivan Sechenov, the physician and founder of the Russian pediatric school Nil Filatov, and the surgeon, military doctor, scientist and innovator Nikolay Sklifosovsky and other professors. In the fall of 1898, Prokopiy successfully passed the state examinations and received a diploma of a doctor.

One of the political prisoners, who was serving his sentence in exile in Yakutia, introduced Prokopiy Sokolnikov to the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. Sokolnikov’s personal meeting with the author of “War and Peace” took place in Moscow, in the writer’s estate in Khamovnichesky Lane.

Leo Tolstoy was concerned about the fate of the Dukhobors, an ethno-sectarian group of Russians who had been exiled by the government for refusing to perform military service in the tsarist army. They were first sent to the Caucasus, and later, to the Yakutsk region. Leo Tolstoy received Prokopiy Sokolnikov at his home in Moscow and asked him to accompany the wives and children of the Dukhobors. Sokolnikov, as a native of Yakutia and as a doctor, could be useful to them on their long journey. The young doctor agreed. For more than two months on the road, he provided medical care and collected donations from the population.

In 1899, seven issues of the Irkutsk newspaper “Vostochnoe Obozrenie” published Prokopiy Sokolnikov’s travel notes “Wives and Children of the Dukhobors”. The publication was edited by Ivan Popov, a former political prisoner and an acquaintance of Sokolnikov from the Nizhny Novgorod exhibition.

In 1902, Sokolnikov came to visit Leo Tolstoy again in Yasnaya Polyana. The writer gave him a photograph of himself as a token of gratitude.