Kuzma Alekseyev (in the criminal case documents — Kozma Alekseyev) was a serf from the village of Bolshoye Syoskino in Teryushevskaya Volost, Nizhny Novgorod Uyezd, and from 1808 to 1810 led a religious movement among the Teryukhan Mordva. He preached the imminent end of the age and the return of the Mordva faith, was convicted by the Nizhny Novgorod Criminal Court Chamber, and exiled to Irkutsk Governorate; in the Teryukhan villages he was remembered as Kuzka-bog ("Kuzka the God").[1][2]
A Serf Potash Worker
Bolshoye Syoskino stood in Teryushevskaya Volost, on the lands of what is now Dalnekonstantinovsky District, and belonged to Countess Saint-Priest, daughter of Prince Georgy Gruzinskiy. Kuzma Alekseyev was forty-five years old at the beginning of the 19th century; he kept a large family, worked in the fields for his mistress, and spent his free time making potash.[1]
He stood out from his fellow villagers in no way: he prayed to his own gods and attended the Orthodox church for appearances' sake. The Teryukhans, the northern group of the Mordva, had been baptized half a century before, in the mid-18th century, and the old faith persisted among them alongside the new one.[1][3]
The Prophecy
Word spread through the Teryushevo villages that Kuzma had heard the voice of God. The text recorded in the case speaks of the house of David descending upon the spring of Rakhleyka, of judgment according to the old faith, and of the Mordva faith becoming universal. Mentioned separately are the Mordva ladles used at prayer gatherings and confiscated during baptism: they are kept in the basement of the cathedral in Nizhny and "are simply waiting for the laws of David."[1]
The last ages are coming. And upon the spring of Rakhleyka, by God's judgment, the House of David shall descend, with a golden pillar of fire from earth to heaven… All people will be of the Mordva faith, and will go about in Mordva dress; the Mordva will be the foremost people and will not belong to lords. And then there will be righteous judgment: twelve thunderclaps will strike at once, and the age will end.[1]
The Preaching
He preached sitting in a tree in a Mordva sacred grove. The Erzya had no churches of their own: prayers were held in fields, forests, and beside venerated trees, and rites were performed at the keremet near Maloye Seskino.[1][3][4]
Mordva from the surrounding villages gathered to hear him, and then crowds came from across the southern part of the district. On the pretext of the imminent end of the world, many abandoned their work, explaining that they needed to pray and seek salvation.[1]
The demand voiced in the preaching was not purely religious: the Mordva must not belong to lords and must not pay quitrent. It was precisely this part that decided the matter.[1][3]
The Denunciation, the Trial, and Exile
The denunciation was filed by peasants from Beryozovka, Romanikha, Kurilovo, Bogoyavleniye, Kazhelayka, and Migalikha. Alekseyev was put in irons and sent to the estate prison of Prince Gruzinskiy in Lyskovo. At Easter 1809 he was released and returned to his home village: he began attending church again, but in the sacred grove he continued to speak of the end of the world. He was then arrested a second time.[1]
The archival case is dated 16 September 1809 and is headed "Case concerning the report of His Excellency the Actual State Councillor Prince Turubetskoy regarding the false prophet — the peasant Kuzma Alekseyev."[1]
The Nizhny Novgorod Criminal Court chamber charged Alekseyev and six of his associates from the village of Kuzhutka with "spreading among the newly baptized of the Mordva sedition against the Christian religion." The sentence was flogging and resettlement in Irkutsk Governorate; for two of them, exile was commuted to conscription as recruits.[1]
On 7 March 1810, Nizhny Novgorod Governor Andrey Runovsky received a dispatch from Interior Minister Prince Aleksey Kurakin: Emperor Alexander I had ordered the sentence to be carried out, waiving only the corporal punishment.[1]
Background
The Teryushevo volost had seen this before. The Teryushevo Uprising of 1743 began when a Mordva cemetery near the selo of Uspenskoye was burned on the orders of Bishop Dimitry (Sechenov); the alarm had been raised among the neighbors by a resident of that same Bolshoye Seskin — a newly baptized man named Nesmeyan Vasilyev, known as Krivoy (the One-Eyed). Pacifying the volost took nearly two years.[5][6]
By the early nineteenth century, the Teryukhans were the most Russified part of the Mordva: Pavel Melnikov-Pechersky, who gathered ethnographic material in Nizhny Novgorod Governorate, wrote that the language had by then been almost entirely forgotten there, and Mordva dress was preserved only by the women of a handful of villages.[4]
Kuzka-god
In the memory of the Teryukhan villages, Alekseyev was remembered under the name Kuzka-god. Ethnographers of the Nizhny Novgorod Museum-Reserve describe this figure as a folkloric image of a historical person — the instigator of the eschatological movement among the Mordva-Teryukhans in the early nineteenth century.[2]
In 1898, P. M. Krasovsky's novella "Kuzka — the Mordva God: A Tale from the History of the Mordva People" was published; today it is considered a bibliographic rarity, and one copy is held in the scholarly library of the museum-reserve. Another copy was in the collection of the schoolteacher of the selo of Bolshoye Teryushevo, Zhukov Mikhail Vasilyevich, who led schoolchildren on hikes to sites associated with Kuzka-god.[2]
From 29 July to 2 August 2019, a folklore and ethnographic expedition from the museum-reserve worked in Dalnekonstantinovsky District, gathering material about these places and about Zhukov himself.[2]
Course of events
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. 1808 | Kuzma Alekseyev begins preaching in the sacred grove near Bolshoye Seskinо.[1] |
| 1809 | a denunciation by six villages, arrest, and imprisonment in Prince Gruzinsky's manorial jail in Lyskovo.[1] |
| Easter 1809 | release and return to the village; preaching continues.[1] |
| 16 September 1809 | date of the archival case "concerning the false prophet — peasant Kozma Alekseyev."[1] |
| 1810 | verdict of the Nizhny Novgorod Criminal Court Chamber: flogging and exile to Irkutsk Governorate for Alekseyev and six accomplices.[1] |
| 7 March 1810 | dispatch from the Minister of Internal Affairs to the Governor: the verdict is confirmed, corporal punishment rescinded.[1] |
| 1898 | publication of P. M. Krasovsky's novella "Kuzka — the Mordva God."[2] |
| 2019 | an expedition by the museum-reserve to [2]Dalnekonstantinovsky District. |
Sources
- nn.aif.ru — AiF — Nizhny Novgorod — Dmitry Karabelnikov. Several original versions of the "end of the world" exist in Nizhny Novgorod Region, December 17, 2012 (archive)
- ngiamz.ru — Nizhny Novgorod Museum-Reserve — A. V. Sorokina. "His position was — good deeds." Mikhail Vasilyevich Zhukov (materials from the 2019 expedition) (archive)
- museum.unn.ru — Lobachevsky University Museum — Exhibition "Mordva-Teryukhane: Evidence of the Past," June 30, 2017 (archive)
- opentextnn.ru — Otkrytyy Tekst — Melnikov-Pechersky. Sketches of the Mordva, Chapter I (archive)
- vostlit.info — Russkoye Obozreniye — A. Titov. The Teryushevsky Revolt. No. 8, 1893 (archive)
- vostlit.info — Russkoye Obozreniye — A. Titov. The Teryushevsky Revolt. No. 9, 1893: interrogation records from the 1743 case (archive)