Kazakovo is a historical village in the Vachsky District of Nizhny Novgorod Region.
History
About 500 years ago, in place of the village there stood a dense forest that stretched all the way to Tashino Zavod (Pervomaysk). This area — the southern part of Nizhny Novgorod Governorate and the northern parts of Tambov and Penza Governorates — was called the "Wild Field". It was covered entirely with impassable dense forests, in which giant pines and spruces gave way in places to centuries-old oaks, lindens, birches and aspens, alternating with enormous expanses overgrown with hazel.
Our region looked like taiga, in which traces of man were almost invisible. Yet there were settlements here all the same, chiefly Finno-Ugric tribes called the MORDVA: Erzya, Moksha, Karatai (Turkhane). Information about the Mordva appears in Arab chronicles of the 10th century, where they are called the BURTAS. The chronicler Nestor of the Caves, listing the Finnic tribes, also speaks of the Mordva living next to the Merya between the Oka, Volga and Sura rivers. The Mordva were distinguished by their peaceableness. They took up arms out of necessity — to defend themselves from enemies, and even then preferred to hide in the forests rather than join battle.
The Mordva lived apart from the rest of the world, in free and open places where with the smallest labour one could obtain everything most necessary for life. They did not live in large settlements, but more often in single families, and hardly entered into relations with neighbouring peoples. And although Russian people had long had trading ties with the wealthy Volga Bulgars, who lived along the middle course of the Volga, the route to Bulgaria was preferred by water, along the Oka and the Volga, bypassing the Mordvin land with its impassable forests and swamps.
In the 15th century the main route of the southerners, of trading people from the Penza and Tambov Governorates, ran through this forest to Nizhny Novgorod, and then on to Arzamas. On such important trade arteries as the road to Nizhny Novgorod, in the difficult years of the struggle with the Mongol-Tatars, government guard cordons of Cossacks were established. One of these cordons stood on the site of the village of Kazakovo.
Kazakovo arose no later than the Arzamas hillfort. History records that in 1552 Russian regiments led by Ivan IV set out for Murom and, having crossed the Oka, entered the ancient "sakma" — the road into the Wild Field, observing precautions: with mobile outposts and a guard regiment in front. The first camp on Nizhny Novgorod land was made on the bank of the river Veletma, and then — near the Sakony hillfort on the river Tyosha on 24 July.
In the Ardatov Uyezd) an oral legend of the following content has survived: the tsar, having left the Sakony hillfort with his army, lost his way in the forests and veered to the right. A resident of Kuzhendeyevo, Ichalka (according to other accounts — Ardatka), undertook to guide the tsar through the forests. From Kuzhendeyevo they went through Nadezhino to Syreyevo, where the Aksha began. Then, going along the bed of the Aksha, they passed through the Kazakovo lands.
In the old days it was said that the tsar's army with its large mounted baggage train went through the Kazakovo meadows named Ozero, and people even pointed out the deep road ruts supposedly left by the wagon trains.
In the same Ardatov Uyezd yet another legend has survived, that on the way from Murom Ivan the Terrible left behind him small earthen mounds — kurgans, or Mary. Such mounds stood near Ichalovo, Onuchino and Postnikovo. Studying the microtoponyms of the village of Kazakovo, we too came across the name "mar" — so was called a hill in the grove two kilometres south of Kazakovo. This also indirectly supports the version that the tsar's warriors passed this way.
In the 15th century the Mordva were often subjected to raids by the Tatars, of whom many lived here. The Mordva even asked Ivan the Terrible to remove the Tatars from these lands. There are legends that Tatar settlements stood on the river Aksha. Eight versts north of Kazakovo the village of Isupovo still exists to this day, where Tatars lived; Ichalovo was Tatar as well.
In the forests that occupied the whole southern part of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast there were many small rivers. The "scribal books" say: "the village of Kazakovo on the river Velivyorsta and on the river Kovleya". Velivyorsta is a Mordvin name; in documents it was called Valday or Voldovan. The Valday took its beginning from the ravines of Postnikovo and Dardakovo, flowed along the Ichalovo ravine and joined, before the Kazakovo meadows named "Ozero", another river, the Kovleya or Kolovertka, which flowed into the Aksha. The Kolovertka began east of Kazakovo, in a valley called Molbishchi and in the ravine Druzhinnye Gory, passed through the oak wood at the foot of the village of Kazakovo and through the present-day New Pond until it flowed into the Valday.
It was in the land between the Kovleya and the Velivyorsta that Ivan the Terrible left a Cossack guard cordon. The geographical name Druzhinnye Gory (Druzhinny Ravine) has survived; it may be connected with the camp of a Cossack druzhina.
The first owners of these places were men of Tatar descent — the Sheysupov boyars. It is to this time that history assigns the appearance of the Mishar Tatars. On receiving lands, the service nobility carried out wide-scale colonization: the population was attracted by various privileges or was resettled from other places at the will of the owners.
These lands were rich in building timber, furs and honey. The Sheysupovs apparently bought peasants for removal here, from central Russia, since their dialect is marked by "akanye" and "yekanye". Of the Cossacks, most likely, only the name remained, because free Cossacks would hardly have wished to live under a landowner, all the more since these were the sovereign's servicemen.
Investigating the microtoponyms of the village, we came to the conclusion that in distant times the chief occupation of the population was not farming, as it is now, since among the names of the farmlands there is not a single "Tatar" root. This is understandable, for the locality was wooded, and therefore the main occupations of the inhabitants were hunting, fishing and wild bee-keeping.
Sheysupov's wife Agafya, after her husband's death, married the Mordvin landowner Boris Lykov.
In the Pomestny Prikaz, over the signature of the clerk Bazhen Stepanov, in a document relating to the year 7134 (1626 by the new reckoning), it is said that the lands of his wife, the widow Agafya Sheysupova — ancient patrimonies "and in that same village of Kazakovo by mortgage deeds and by record" — are secured to the boyar Boris Mikhaylovich Lykov. Taking into account the expression "ancient patrimonies", one must suppose that Kazakovo arose no later than the Arzamas hillfort.
The micro-oikonyms of the microregion under study allow us to form an idea of its demography. Of the three settlements — Dardakovo, Koshkaryovo, Kazakovo — only the last has streets. Consequently, Kazakovo was the largest of them. The names of the three streets have a history going back into the distant past, that is, Kazakovo arose earlier than the other villages and surpassed them in population.
For their buildings the masters chose the best spot. The houses were originally built of wood. They were five-walled, with yard buildings and stables for the livestock. The street where the Lykovs and their descendants lived is still called Lykovshchina. Marriages between the masters and the serf peasants were forbidden. Gradually the Sheysupov-Lykov family grew, and one street became too cramped for them. Another was laid out, a little further off, beyond the first street, and it was named Zaulok. The serf peasants were settled apart from the gentry. Their houses crowded behind the masters' yards, and the street was called Zadvorki. It was the most densely populated, and most of the houses were kelyi, that is, without yard buildings.
Before the emancipation almost all the peasant huts were heated "black", without chimneys; they were small, with two little windows and single window frames. When the peasants had settled in a little and acquired livestock, in wintertime the animals spent the night together with the people in the house. In the morning the manure was scraped out with scrapers — damp, stench and half-darkness reigned even by day. The peasant houses were roofed with straw. Straw served as bedding for the livestock and as a bed for the grown-ups. They slept everywhere: on the floor, on the benches, on the sleeping platforms; the old people and the children — on the stove. The entryways and yards were woven of brushwood. In front of the huts stood cellars; by the edge of the village — a yard and a hay shed; on the outskirts — barns for grain; on the threshing floors — drying barns and threshing sheds.
Later, around the 19th century, when it became the fashion to separate from one's parents, one more street appeared — Kozy Poryadok (Goat Row). There houses were built by young families, who were most often given goats as a dowry.
At 50 men were considered old, since they neither cut their hair nor shaved their beards, and almost all of them smoked clay pipes.
In wintertime they wore zipuns of coarse homespun cloth; those who were better off put on sheepskin coats, and for the road there was also a chapan. Footwear — exclusively bast shoes. Children up to 12-13 years of age most often had no clothes of their own except the cast-offs of their elders. Women wore homespun clothing, and in summer put on their feet something like boots, which were called chakpury.
Farming was for a long time not the chief occupation of the people of Kazakovo. Old people lament that "they were foolish in the old days, they planted nothing in the garden but potatoes, to say nothing of apple trees".
Investigating the micro-oronyms, one can say that the relief of this locality has long been somewhat elevated, hilly and heavily cut by ravines. The sides of the ravines are sandy and clayey, and there is both red and white clay. This gave the inhabitants the chance to take up the handicraft of pottery. Confirmation of this we find in the Pomestny Prikaz record of the clerk Bazhen Stepanov of 1626, where the peasants Ivashka Gonchar and Kuprya the pot-maker are named. Pottery was the chief craft in the village right up to the revolution. Old residents relate that Kazakovo pots were famed at the market for their strength and the variety of their shapes.
To this day the nickname "gorshechniki" (pot-makers) has stuck to the people of Kazakovo. Besides that, there were in Kazakovo several workshops producing red brick from the local clay and sand. The foundations of these "brickworks" remain noticeable to this day outside the village. Thirty-nine houses in the village are of old masonry, thick-walled with cellars, four of them two-storeyed. The Kazakovo brickmakers went far from home for the summer work: from Nizhny Novgorod to Temnikov and Saransk. They earned 80-100 roubles a season, no more. Only two of them — P. S. Tyurin and M. S. Voronin — grew rich at this trade and opened their own brick factories in Nizhny Novgorod.
From November work began at home. They made korchagas, stove pipes, pots, dishes, milk jugs and flower pots. By 1910 there were 20 kilns for firing in Kazakovo, and up to 200 people were engaged in the potter's craft. Trade was carried on mainly not for money but by barter: for grain, for lentils. The goods were carried "beyond the forest", that is, past Tashino Zavod to Lukoyanov, Temnikov, into the Mordva country. They returned with 18-20 poods of grain, and the surplus was sold at the market.
By 1600 there were two wooden churches in Kazakovo, whose log frames of klet type were built by Danila Sheysupov and Boris Lykov. One of them stood on Lykovshchina, the other — on the hill, near the manor house. "And in it (that is, in Kazakovo) there is a church of the Most Holy Mother of God with an altar of the great martyrs Florus and Laurus, and another church of the great passion-bearer of Christ George." A new stone church of the Kazan Mother of God was founded around 1875 by the Middle Pond. It was built over 10 years on voluntary donations by the whole community. There were two holy wells in the village: one not far from the New Pond — the Holy Well; the other was in the Pakhomovskaya valley in the Parubka grove.
Over the Holy Well a large tent-roofed chapel was set up, furnished inside with ancient icons. In the new church of the Kazan Mother of God, alongside the icons, there were three carved figures of Christ: one was called "Christ in Prison", the second — "The Crucifixion of Christ", the third — a figure of Christ carved from wood down to the waist. Most of the icons were painted in oils on wooden boards. Some of the icons have survived to this day in the houses of the inhabitants. They strike the eye with the brightness and richness of their colours; the hand of a master can be felt in them.
It is possible that they were painted by artists of the Stupin school. The walls of the church were covered with frescoes. In 1960 the upper part of the church was destroyed, only the walls remained, but the frescoes can still be made out even now. There were two bell towers in the village: at the old church, on the hill, visible for 25 versts (pulled down in 1896), and at the new church.
Twice a year — in winter from the Orsha Monastery and in summer from the Ponetayevka Monastery — monks came with an icon, went from house to house and served a moleben. At Easter a procession of the cross was held. Two patronal feasts were marked in the village: that of the Kazan Mother of God — 8 July, and that of Saint George — 3 November. While the summer Kazan feast came to be celebrated after the building of the new church, Yegory (as it is called in Kazakovo) has been kept since the time of Prince Sheysupov. On this feast weddings were held. The number of couples married sometimes reached 25.
The inhabitants of Kazakovo were all baptized, but the feasts were evidently celebrated both as Orthodox and as pagan ones. This is reflected in the name of a relief feature — Molbishchi. Old residents of the village say that their grandmothers recalled the words of their own grandmothers, that people once went there to pray. Evidently some kind of cult rites were performed there. Paganism had strong roots beneath it. To this day belief in magical powers and in sorcery is strong in Kazakovo. And in the old days it was said that a sorcerer lived in every third house. This is confirmed by the presence of a very rare microphytonym — the Priyutinsky Elm.
By the pond in the Priyutinsky field there grew a huge elm. The most terrible superstitions were bound up with it: here, it was said, in Passion Week at "untimely" hours sorcerers gathered from all the country round for a "sabbath". The most inveterate sorcerer of the 1950s-1980s was held to be Pyotr Nikiforovich Kozlyachkov. Legends about him went around Kazakovo and go around still.
The peasants were illiterate to a man. Only the church servants and a rare few among the well-to-do could write after a fashion.
In 1830 Prince Golitsyn, who at the end of the 18th century had bought up these lands, established a school for boys in Kazakovo. To interest the parents, he promised that on finishing the school the children would be exempted from conscription. Once the book of the Psalter had been gone through, the schooling ended. In 1880 a zemstvo school was opened in the village. The course lasted three years with three divisions: junior, middle and senior. All of them studied in one room. The first teacher was Serafima Alekseyevna Vvedenskaya, daughter of an Arzamas priest. By the end of the third year of study only 7-8 of the 40 pupils remained, since the parents considered study an empty waste of time and took their children out of school. On finishing the local school it was possible, in exceptional cases (special giftedness and the parents' wish), to enter the Grigoryevo agricultural school.
There was no library in the village. In the peasant houses there were no books at all apart from "commemoration books" and, occasionally, a small calendar. In 1903 a two-class college was opened in the village of Panovo.
In 1899 the old school in the village was demolished, and a new one was put up at Zadvorki opposite the priest's house. From 1896 the teacher was the brother of S. A. Vvedenskaya, Pyotr Alekseevich, and later two women teachers arrived: Tatyana Grigoryevna Sharonova and Alexandra Fyodorovna Gromova. They supplied books to the literate young people. In 1904 a Sunday School) opened in the village, but it lasted less than a single winter. In 1913, through the efforts of Fyodor Stepanovich Korchagin, a library was opened; it burned down in 1921 together with the school. In the hungry 1920s the teachers were a brother and sister named Nechaev. Hunger had driven them out of Nizhny Novgorod, while teaching in the village earned them a ration, and the people fed them as well. A new school was built only in 1926, when a wooden building was moved there from the monastery farmstead near the village of Ratmanovo. That school was in use until 1978. In 1978, next to the old wooden building, a new two-storey brick one was built.
In 1889 Golitsyn sold the estate at Kazakovo to a certain Petrov. This was assisted (for a certain bribe) by the steward, who wrote to the prince that "the peasants are running riot, cutting the forest, letting cattle onto the meadows" and so on. Petrov bought up 12500 dessiatinas of land and forest in the surrounding area in all, and handed it over to the Ponetaevka Convent. From 1901 the convent's steward at Kazakovo was Alexander Avksentyevich Morozov, a resident of the village of Uspenskoye, who fell out with the village community and began playing all sorts of dirty tricks on the inhabitants. In reply, the men burned the haystacks that winter and broke down the fence of the manor garden.
In 1903 the zemstvo chief sent a clerk to the village, Alexey Yakovlevich Saburov. He subscribed to the newspaper Russkoye Slovo for the village and explained to the peasants the reports of military operations in the Russo-Japanese War. In the winter of 1903-1904 young lads from Nizhny Novgorod were gilding the icons in the church. They brought proclamations and revolutionary pamphlets with them. A circle of young people, five or six of them, formed in the village.
The revolutionary wave of 1905 stirred up Kazakovo too. On one dark autumn night the ricks of grain in front of steward Morozov's window went up in flames, and a few days later every window in his house was smashed. Two guards were sent to protect the estate, but they were afraid to go outside at night. The teachers T. G. Sharonova and A. F. Gromova also joined the revolutionary activity, and speakers came from Arzamas. On 2 November 1905 a "Verdict-Mandate" was drawn up for submission to the State Duma. It was later published in the Nizhegorodskaya Zemskaya Gazeta. From 10 November the pillaging of the forest began in the Lipovy and Kolesev ravines.
On 15 November a mounted detachment of guards and constables headed by the assistant police officer arrived in Kazakovo. One villager, who had allegedly rushed at the assistant police officer with an axe, was arrested and exiled for three years to Yaransk; both teachers were also arrested, but were released two months later. The other participants in the forest pillaging were fined 20 kopecks for each cartload of logs.
The last steward at Kazakovo, from 1906, was Andrey Mikhailovich Oreshkov. He was one of the liberals, courteous and unassuming, but greedy for money and strict, and let nobody off.
In 1911 a Credit Association appeared in the village. The peasants were in great need, and the local moneylenders took advantage of this, practically fleecing them. By the end of 1913 the Association had more than 700 members; besides the people of Kazakovo, residents of Panovo, Alferyevo and Svoroboyarskoye joined it. In this way the inhabitants got rid of the moneylenders, the Kislyakovs, the Bochkarevs and their like.
On 1 July 1913 a Consumers' Society opened in the village. Before it there had been 7 grocery shops trading in shoddy goods. The Consumers' Society brought in a large profit and soon squeezed out the grocers. In 1916 people came here for goods even from Vyezdnoye, Novy Usad and other villages. In 1918 the old cooperative system was liquidated. The time of the NEP came. Private traders appeared, who after the NEP became cooperative workers: these were I. V. Kudakov and S. F. Tuzhilkin.
During the First World War 200 men left the village in the very first mobilization, and then more and more... During the war 15 refugee families lived in Kazakovo. If in the Russo-Japanese War only one man from Kazakovo was killed, Pyotr Kaloshkin, then in the First World War more than 40 died.
On 3-4 March 1917 news of the creation of the Provisional Government reached Kazakovo. A rally sprang up spontaneously. The people came out in a demonstration with flags. The village went on holding meetings right up to the time of going out into the fields. By the autumn of 1917 the pillaging of noble estates and monastery properties had begun. The people of Kazakovo carried out a raid at Pushkarka. One of the organizers of the raid, M. Ya. Smetanin, was arrested; three others, I. A. Sychenkov, D. S. Kudakov and E. M. Voronin, fled the village.
In the summer of 1917 men began returning from the front. New talk came from them: "Down with the war! Down with Kerensky!" The division of the monastery land was carried out in the spring of 1918. All the inhabitants received land according to the number of mouths in the family. In 1919-20 six families from Kazakovo moved onto the land of the Alferyevo farmstead and formed a commune. These were four Kulakov families, D. S. Kudakov and Andrey Shurygin. Then more than 20 families separated off and settled at Krasnaya Gorka (so called because the hill looked red from a distance owing to the red clay). The commune did not last long, but at Krasnaya Gorka a small settlement did take shape. The whole village was divided into three communities: two at Zadvorki and one made up of all the other streets.
The Civil War began, and with it the campaign to recruit into the Red Guard. Many did not want to go to war again. The village assembly decided to let nobody into the army. The kulaks took advantage of this. They armed the most active of the men and supplied them with provisions. This revolt lasted 3 days, until the food ran out, as the kulaks refused to replenish the supplies. On 11 July 1918 the Decree on the organization of committees of the poor in the villages was issued. At that time the men of Kazakovo were away earning money in the brickmaking trade. Returning home in the autumn, having already heard a great deal about the work of the committees of the poor, they set one up in their own village.
The initiative was taken by I. A. Sychenkov, a barely literate man but one very fond of power. He gathered about 20 poor men around him. They went after speculators, but often abused their power as well: they slaughtered livestock and poultry for themselves, taking it from the peasants. With the committee's assistance a building for the school was brought out from the monastery farmstead near the village of Ratmanovo. The committee helped with sowing the land and providing fuel. With the introduction of the NEP the members of the committee of the poor passed into history without leaving any monument to themselves.
The chairmen of the village soviets in Kazakovo changed often, since none of the peasants would take the post. Those who shouted loudest at the meetings were elected. Food requisitioning did not pass the village by either. The authorized agent was Alexander Nikolaevich Sher, an old Bolshevik. He carried out his work skilfully, did not wrong anyone without cause, but allowed no laxity either.
Life in the village went on without any particular incidents. But between 1920 and 1926 four occurred at once, one of them even involving murder. The culprit in all of them was a local resident, A. M. Vasilyev. After his arrest and later his execution, relative calm returned. Before that, the most terrible year for Kazakovo had been 1910, when in 2-3 hours 75 houses with their yards and up to 200 various farm buildings burned down.
There were two local craftsmen in the village. Timofey Grigoryevich Sorokin assembled a hand mill and an oil press. And Pavel Terentyevich Klyuyev received a Certificate of Merit at the exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896 for a gravestone monument made of clay. The men liked fist fights on holidays. Such fights were held between streets and even between villages.
The women, as everywhere, wove, spun, crocheted and knitted, and later took up embroidery on tambour frames and openwork on cloth.
The villagers were no strangers to various games either: lapta, knucklebones, cards, orlyanka; on the spring holidays they rolled eggs, in winter they slid down the hills on ice-boards and benches, and at Shrovetide they set up swings.
By 1912 every place in the village was taken up by houses and yards; there were already 320 houses.
- In Kazakovo by 1914 there were:
windmills - 13; grain hullers - 2; millet hullers - 2; wool-carding shops - 1; fulling mills - 1; oil presses - 2; smithies - 2.
- In 1891 the people of Kazakovo were seized by "gold fever". Many left for the gold mines in Siberia.
- Matches appeared in the village in the 1880s. Before that people used a fire-steel, flint and tinder. At the same time kerosene, or "gas" as it was called here, appeared in the village, and lamps along with it.
- The nails used were four-sided and handmade.
- Before 1900 wall clocks were a rarity. Time was told by the crowing of the cocks and by the sun.
- Goods sold by weight were weighed on a steelyard.