Pavlovo (Pavlovo-na-Oke) is a town on the right bank of the Oka, the center of Pavlovsky District in Nizhny Novgorod Region, 71 kilometers southwest of Nizhny Novgorod as the crow flies and 80 by road. It is a town of the metalworking trade and the birthplace of the PAZ buses; since 1993 it has been a historic settlement of federal significance, where 56 monuments are under protection.[1][2]
An ostrog at the Oka crossing
The founding of Pavlovo is dated to 1566, the time of Ivan the Terrible: a wooden fortress, or ostrog, was built on the high bank of the Oka to guard the crossing on the road from Nizhny Novgorod to Murom and Moscow. The garrison consisted of fifty streltsy (musketeers) under a sotnik (commander of a hundred), and in early documents the settlement is recorded simply as Pavlov Ostrog.[1][3]
The village was a palace village, that is, a tsarist estate, then passed to the Princes Cherkassky, and in 1743 to the Counts Sheremetev.[1][3]
Locks, knives, scissors
Forges appeared here in the sixteenth century, and by the seventeenth Pavlovo was already a place of gunsmiths and lockmakers: eleven forges and, by 1677, forty shops. Competition with the Tula and Ural factories moved Pavlovo's craftsmen from weapons to peaceful metalwork — padlocks, knives, and scissors. In 1820 the entrepreneur Terebin opened the first steel factory here.[4][3]
The nineteenth century was a golden age: the division of labor made it possible to produce folding knives, penknives, and multi-tool knives, forks with handles of mother-of-pearl, bone, and ebony, daggers, and razors. The manufacturer Fyodor Varypaev, a purveyor to the imperial court, was granted the right to place the state coat of arms on his products three times — in 1865, 1882, and 1896; in 1896 the same right was awarded for the fifth time to the partnership of L. and A. Zavyalov from neighboring Vorsma. By the early twentieth century, Pavlovo's range had grown to a hundred and fifty types of locks.[4]
Miniatures earned particular fame: pea-sized padlocks were made so small that three hundred and twenty of them weighed no more than one zolotnik — a little over four grams — and the tiniest weighed seven tenths of a gram.[4]
Who does not know Pavlovo's wares? Nearly every one of us dines with a Pavlovo knife and fork, mends a quill with a Pavlovo penknife, wears clothes cut with Pavlovo scissors, locks up our belongings with a Pavlovo padlock; and for some time now we have begun to shave with Pavlovo razors[4]
Lemons, Geese, and Canaries
The indoor lemon was brought to Pavlovo from Turkey in the 1860s by the merchant Karachistov, and cuttings spread to the craftsmen's homes; they were sold at the Nizhny Novgorod yarmarkas. In the 1930s the town set up an experimental demonstration citrus farm, and in the 2000s a monument to the lemon was erected on Bazarnaya Square.[1][3]
The second local passion is goose fighting. The fights are held on the first Sunday of the second half of March; tradition traces this entertainment back to the time of Peter I, to whom it was shown and who was pleased with it.[1][3]
Pavlovo was also home to singing canaries: the birds were taught a trill and sent to the capital, to the court of Nicholas II.[3]
The Bus Town
Pavlovo received the status of a district town in 1918, when the district center was moved here from Gorbatov; the railway arrived in 1927, and in 1929 the town became a district center.[2][3]
In 1932, construction of the Auto-Tractor Tool Plant was completed — it supplied the Gorky Automobile Plant with jacks, wrenches, and body hardware. In 1952 the enterprise was retooled to produce small and medium-sized buses and renamed the Pavlovo Bus Plant; that August the first five hooded (cab-forward-less, "bonneted") GZA-651 vehicles rolled out of its gates, becoming the forebears of a whole family of "boxes." Their blueprints spread to dozens of repair plants across the Soviet Union.[5][3]
In 1968 the PAZ-672 went into series production, remaining on the assembly line until 1989; in the early 1990s it was replaced by the PAZ-3205, which is still produced today in dozens of variants. In 2022 the plant marked its ninetieth anniversary; it is part of the GAZ Group and remains the country's leading manufacturer of small-class buses.[5]
Besides the bus plant, the town is home to an art metalwork plant dating back to 1890, a plant producing locksmith and assembly tools, and the Mekhinstrument association.[2]
| Year | Residents, thousands |
|---|---|
| 1897 | 12.4 |
| 1939 | 32.4 |
| 1959 | 47.9 |
| 1970 | 63.2 |
| 1989 | 71.5 |
| 2010 | 61.1 |
| 2025 | 55.3 |
Museum in the Gomulin Estate
The Pavlovo Historical Museum occupies the estate of the merchant V. I. Gomulin, built in 1885 — the most prominent monument of the town's architecture.[6]
The centerpiece of the collection is its locks: from a giant weighing more than fifty kilograms to a micro-lock of nine hundredths of a gram with a working key. Nearby stands a mechanical flea, shod with tiny platinum bast shoes, and some of the items in the museum's collection once appeared at world's fairs in Paris, London, and Chicago. A separate section is devoted to the Pavlovo lemon.[6]
See also
Sources
- nn-obl.ru — The History of the Town of Pavlovo. — Nizhny Novgorod and Nizhny Novgorod Region. (archived)
- mojgorod.ru — My Town — Pavlovo. Population and Economy (archived)
- In the City of N — Pavlovo in Nizhny Novgorod Region: History and Archive Photos of the Bus Town (archived)
- arzamas.academy — Folding Spoons, Bird-Shaped Gingerbread, Houses with Mermaids: Stories of Nizhny Novgorod Crafts • Arzamas (archived)
- autozavod.media — Avtozavodets — One for All: How the Pavlovo Plant Became a Bus Plant (archived)
- музей-павлово.рф — Pavlovo Historical Museum (Municipal Autonomous Cultural Institution) — Home (archived)