[2] Historically the area served as a site of exile, to which individuals such as Ariadna Èfron (1949-1955) were banished.

One center of such imprisonments was the gulag at Yermakovo, Krasnoyarsk Krai, built 1949 under the orders of Joseph Stalin, who himself had spent 1913 to 1917 exiled in the area.

Later, the Central Siberia Nature Reserve was established in a sector of the district in 1985 as a protected area of the East Siberian taiga ecoregion.

Nowadays, most of people still speaking Ket live in just three localities: Kellog, Surgutikha, and Maduyka, all of which are situated in Turukhansky District.

[11] Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the district was predominantly made up of Lithuanians, Germans, Russians, Tatars and Poles.