Pilninskiy District

Pilninsky District is a district in the southeast of Nizhny Novgorod Region, which since 2022 has borne the name of the Pilninsky Municipal Okrug. ^[1][4] It borders its neighbors Krasnooktyabrskiy, Sergachsky, Spassky, Vorotynsky and Sechenovskiy, and Chuvashia along the Sura River. ^[1][2] The administrative center is the urban-type settlement of Pilna on the left bank of the Pyana, 200 kilometers from Nizhny Novgorod. ^[1] The area is 1,313 square kilometers, with 72 settlements and 17,858 residents as of January 1, 2025. ^[2][5] Here steppe and forest meet, as do Orthodoxy and Islam, and on the harsh border river stands Kurmysh, the first Russian town of the Pasurye region, founded in 1372. ^[1][7]

The Land Between the Pyana and the Sura

The District lies in the southeast of the Region, where the forested Zavolzhye ends and the steppe-like Prisurye begins: "the district is unique in that steppe and forest meet here," says the official description. ^[1] The Sura flows through its territory for 135 kilometers and serves as the border with Chuvashia; the Pyana flows into it, and Pilna stands on the left bank of that river, with both road and rail connections to the regional capital. ^[1]

Besides the Pyana, the fullest-flowing of the local rivers — 15 to 35 meters wide and one to three meters deep — the Sura is fed here by the Urga and the Medyanka. ^[2] The climate is temperate continental, forest-steppe: the average annual temperature is +3.7 degrees Celsius, the coldest month is January with an average of −12.3, and the warmest is July with +22. ^[2]

The forests and fields are home to elk, wild boar, roe deer, wolf, fox, marten, stoat, mountain hare and brown hare, beaver and muskrat, black grouse and gray partridge; 39 species of fish are counted in the rivers, there is no commercial fishing — people fish with rods and winter jigs. ^[2] A special local attraction is the gray heron colony in the floodplain forest near Kurmysh: 38 hectares, a protected area since 1992, where more than two hundred birds gather during the nesting season; a second nesting site is known near Bortsurmany. ^[2]

Other protected natural sites include the park in Kurmysh and the Pushkin Garden, the park in Kamenka with its larches, an arboretum, and, on the bank of the Pyana, exposed geological cross-sections of Cretaceous clay. ^[2][12]

Kurmysh — the first Russian town on the Sura

In the 14th century, the Sura River and its left tributary, the Pyana, formed a border: the left bank belonged to the Nizhny Novgorod princes, and beyond the river lay foreign land. ^[11] In 1372, Prince Boris Konstantinovich of Gorodets built a town on a promontory where the Kurmyshka flows into the Sura and "named it Kurmysh." ^[11] In age it is surpassed in the Region only by Nizhny Novgorod and Gorodets, and it took its name from the languages of the indigenous peoples: in Chuvash, "kurmysh" means a khutor (an isolated farmstead). ^[7] Local historians also offer other interpretations — from a Finnic root meaning "village," and from the Muromian "kormuzh," "a handful," that is, "small." ^[11] According to another version, the fortress was built as early as 1342 by Prince Konstantin Vasilyevich, although the chronicle gives 1372. ^[8][11]

The fortress was built in earnest. According to a description from 1623–1626, it was a wooden stronghold with seven towers, a voivode's compound, and the Dormition Cathedral, with walls about 1.3 kilometers in perimeter. ^[10] The cadastral book of 1624–25 adds that the town was surrounded by a moat, "and in it a palisade is driven, two and a half sazhens deep, and the same across." ^[11] Outside the town, in the posad (the trading and craft quarter), stood the Streletskaya, Kazatskaya, and Yamskaya slobodas (settlements) and the sloboda of the zemstvo townspeople, and later the Invalidnaya sloboda. ^[11] Streletskaya and Kazachya streets have survived in the selo (a larger village) to this day, and two crossed golden bows appear on the town's coat of arms. ^[7]

In 1445, Kurmysh saw something Rus had never seen before: a head of state was held captive here. The Kazan khan Ulu Muhammad, having defeated Grand Prince Vasily II the Blind near Suzdal, brought his captive to Kurmysh on August 26 and released him only on October 1 — for a ransom enormous by the standards of the time. ^[7][10][11] Until the end of the 19th century, the foundations of the pillars of the building where the Muscovite prince was held were shown on the cathedral square. ^[8]

After the capture of Kazan in 1552, the town's importance as a fortress began to decline, and Kurmysh performed guard and patrol duty on a par with other frontier towns. ^[7][11] In 1648, under the voivode B. M. Khitrovo, more than 430 "unregistered" Kurmysh murzas and Tatars were resettled to the new town of Korsun to build the Simbirsk Abatis Line. ^[10] In 1670, the townspeople opened the gates to a detachment led by Maxim Osipov, who passed himself off as Tsarevich Nechay: the envoy of Stepan Razin was received by the voivode with honor. ^[10][11] A busy trade road to Makaryev ran through the town, and a customs house stood here. ^[11]

In 1745, the fortress burned to the ground. ^[7][10] Half a century later, its remains were examined by the traveler Ivan Lepyokhin, and the town was rebuilt on a regular plan, the geometry of which can still be read in the selo today. ^[7][11]

Kurmysh remained a district center from 1552 — at first under voivodes, and from 1708 under the zemstvo. ^[11] Its governorate affiliation changed almost every generation: Kazan Governorate in 1708–1714, 1717–1719, and 1779–1780; Nizhny Novgorod Governorate in 1714–1717, 1719–1779, and 1922–1923; Simbirsk Governorate in 1780–1922. ^[10] A coat of arms with two golden bows, "in token of the fact that the inhabitants of these parts employed this weapon with exceptional dexterity," was granted on October 15, 1780. ^[11]

In the second half of the 19th century, Kurmysh had five churches, seven shops, 326 houses, an inn, and a hospital. ^[7] Life in the district town was in full swing: it had a noblemen's assembly and a zemstvo assembly, a hospital with a maternity ward, a teachers' school, a gendarmerie that later became a prison for political prisoners, and a drying plant that produced potato chips and dried onions for export. ^[7][8]

Kurmysh lost its town status on July 6, 1925, remained the center of the district of the same name until 1957, and has been an ordinary selo (a larger village) ever since. ^[7][10] Even so, it counts sixteen cultural heritage sites — a rarity for a rural settlement; nearby lie a gorodishche (an ancient fortified settlement) dating from the 14th–17th centuries and five selishche (sites of former settlements) from the 14th–16th centuries. ^[7][12] The ensemble of historic buildings of the former district town is protected by the state as a single whole. ^[2] On the high bank, visitors are shown views of the Sura, from which, according to local historians, Isaac Levitan painted his landscapes. ^[8]

Pugachev at Kurmysh

In the summer of 1774, the army of Yemelyan Pugachev was advancing from Kazan, and Kurmysh turned out to be the first town in its path. ^[8] The day before, the detachment had camped on Ilyina Gora — across the Sura, on what is now the Chuvash side; a memorial stone still stands there, offering a panorama of the river and the village. ^[12]

The reprisals took place at Relskoye Lake — "reli" means gallows, and the lake has borne that name ever since. ^[7][8] Rumor still places the rebels' treasury at its bottom, and treasure hunters come here. ^[8] According to legend, only one landowner survived: he danced the barynya for Pugachev, and Pugachev let him go. ^[8]

The appearance of the impostor stirred up the entire uyezd. The serf actress Nastasya Khlopova assembled her own detachment and caught up with Pugachev's army near Kurmysh; a local priest married "the sovereign emperor Peter III and Princess Vladimirskaya." ^[7][11] The writer Vera Zhakova recounted how, under her command in Kurmysh Uyezd, five hundred peasant women from the villages of Lyakhovaya, Zhdanova, and Putilova, "armed with pitchforks and axes… killed a great multitude of noblemen." ^[7][11] After the rebels departed, gallows and breaking wheels were erected in the villages of the uyezd — in Roslovka, Maltsevo, Alisanovo, Yagodnoye, Ulyanovo, Kekino, Shokino, and Bolshoye Rtishchevo — and priests who had received Pugachev with honor began to have their ears cut off by order of Catherine II. ^[11] The day the impostor entered the town is itself described in Alexander Pushkin's "History of the Pugachev Rebellion." ^[9]

On July 20, Pugachev swam across the Sura near Kurmysh. The nobles and officials fled. The common folk met him on the bank with icons and bread.

The Sawmill Works: How Pilna Came to Be

Pilna is more than three centuries younger than Kurmysh and owes its birth to Peter I. In 1698, by his decree, two water-powered sawmills were built on the Pyana for the mass production of oak planking for ships, and the settlement of the people who worked at them was nicknamed the Sawmill Works (Pilovalenny Zavod). ^[1] Pilna grew out of the "Sawmill Works"; the name of the settlement points to a place of active logging and sawing of timber in the surrounding area. ^[12] The settlement has a Peter I Square (a small public garden). ^[26]

M. Kuroptev, in the 1870 "Simbirsk Collection," wrote that Pilna Volost consisted of two villages — the Sawmill Works (also known as Pilna) and Mozharovsky Maydan — with the latter being older than the former: in the charter of Tsar Fyodor Alekseyevich of 1680 and in the register of 1686, the Mordvin village of Mozharova is mentioned, while the Sawmill Works is not yet; both villages together are already named in the land survey book of 1782. ^[2]

Until 1922, Pilna was part of Kurmysh Uyezd — first of Nizhny Novgorod Governorate, then of Simbirsk Governorate; from 1922, Pilna Volost became part of Sergach Uyezd of Nizhny Novgorod Governorate. ^[2] The district was formed in 1929 with its center in Pilna. ^[1][2] The village's transformation into a district center was linked to the construction of the Moscow–Arzamas–Kazan railway line, which passed through Pilna in the early 20th century and continued on into Siberia. ^[1] Pilna received the status of an urban-type settlement in 1964. ^[12]

The present-day borders took shape after numerous reorganizations: in 1964, the Petryaksa and Kurmysh districts were transferred to Pilninsky District. ^[1] The Tatar Encyclopedia dates the district's formation to 1963 — that is, to the year of its consolidation rather than the first establishment of the district. ^[14]

The Kurmysh Uprising of 1918

Soviet power was established in Kurmysh in January 1918, and on September 2–6 of that same year an anti-Soviet revolt broke out in the town. ^[10] The district leaders, on learning that the town had been seized, left it with rifles and a machine gun, but were overtaken near the village of Ekaterinovka; Nikolay Andreyevich Martyanov, chairman of the district executive committee of the Council of Peasants' Deputies, was killed. ^[11] His mass grave beside the House of Culture and the building that housed the district Council of Peasants' Deputies are under state protection, and the central street of the selo — formerly Moskovskaya — bears Martyanov's name. ^[2][7][12]

The suppression was brutal: 109 people were shot beyond the Kurmyshka River. ^[7] On September 8, 1918, 34 peasants from the villages of Deyanovo and Maltsevo were shot in a ravine between the two. The ravine is called the Ubiyenny ("Slain") Ravine; Aleksandr Tyabin erected a cross there bearing the names of the dead and the words: "Let us bow our heads and be silent. Here people were cruelly killed." All of them have been rehabilitated. ^[12] In 2018 a memorial stone appeared in Kurmysh, inscribed "In memory of the victims of the tragic events of 1918 in Kurmysh Uyezd. Their names You Yourself know, O Lord"; the stone was brought by relatives of the zemstvo physician Nikolay Salishchev, who was shot in these parts. ^[12]

In Bortsurmany, a mourning cross stands in a ravine in memory of the victims of political repression, and in early September the Assumption Church holds a service in honor of the holy martyrs Mikhail Voskresensky and Stefan Nemkov. ^[12] Two years later, in 1920, a mass grave of those killed during a peasant uprising appeared in Pilna itself — it, too, is under protection as a historical monument. ^[2][12]

Tatar villages

The district is multiethnic: here the destinies of Russians, Mordvins, Tatars, and Chuvash intertwined, and village names echo one another across different dialects — Andosovo, Karachary, Ozyorki, Bokshandino, Mozharov Maydan, Mochalei, Petryaksy, Yagodnoye, Bolobonovo, Yumorga, Sokolikha, Medyana, Knyazhikha, Znamenskoye. ^[1] The Tatar population of the Prisurye region took shape early: in the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century, Tatars from Kadom and from Arzamassky Uyezd resettled in Kurmysh. ^[10] The district is biconfessional — its residents profess Orthodoxy and Islam. ^[1]

The main Tatar village is Krasnaya Gorka, called Safajay in Tatar (its former documentary name was Sobachy Ostrov, "Dog Island"). ^[12][14] In 2026 the village marked its 575th anniversary, counting its history from 1451; before the Revolution there were eight mosques here, now there are five, and it has more than two thousand residents — a rarity for a Tatar village. ^[15] According to data from the early twentieth century, there were seven mosques each in Krasnaya Gorka and Petryaksy and five in Mochalei. ^[14]

Krasnaya Gorka is the birthplace of Khusain Faizkhanov (1823–1866), a theologian, orientalist, historian, and educator who taught the Turkic-Tatar and Arabic languages at the Faculty of Oriental Languages of Saint Petersburg University. ^[14][16] On July 7, 2023, for the 200th anniversary of his birth, a memorial was unveiled at the scholar's grave: the front of the stele is crowned with a tughra — a personal emblem bearing his name — while the basmala, the dates of his life according to the Hijri calendar, and epithets characterizing the scholar are written in Arabic and Tatar. ^[16] The Nizhny Novgorod Islamic Institute bears his name, and in the village itself a local history museum named after Faizkhanov has operated since 2004. ^[16][14]

Petryaksy (Tatar name: Batyrshakh) has been known since 1570. ^[12] From 1945 to 1957 the newspaper "Stalin Bayragy" was published here, and from 1955 "Kommunizm Bayragy." ^[14] There are no architectural monuments in the selo (a larger village), but local historians point out the post office building — the house of a prosperous peasant who was later repressed, Kalimulla Mukhametzhanovich Mukhametzhanov — a former nursery that was once a mosque, and the house where, when Petryaksy was the district center, the pretrial detention cell was located. ^[12]

From 1921 to 1923 a Tatar pedagogical technical school operated in Krasnaya Gorka; it was later moved to Nizhny Novgorod. ^[14] Today the Tatar language is taught as a subject in the school of the selo and in the Novomochaleyevo primary school, students win prizes at all-Russian and international olympiads, the sociocultural Tatar center "Nur" has been active since 2015, Sabantuy is held, and in Petryaksy the regional festival of Tatar folk art "Zhayge Ochrashulyar" takes place. ^[14] In total there are nine functioning mosques in the area; in 2015 there were 3,980 Tatars — roughly a fifth of the district's population. ^[14] The 1906 mosque in Krasnaya Gorka was designated a site of historical and cultural heritage. ^[12]

Pilninskaya Medyana is a Russian selo: the name comes from the Medyanka River, and tradition explains it either by the river's sheen and bends, which resemble a slow worm (medyanka), or by bee-tree beekeeping. From 1877 to 1921 the Medyana Pokrovsky Convent of nuns was active here. ^[12]

Churches, Estates, Shrines

Under state protection in the district stand thirty-two monuments of history and culture of local significance — village churches, noble estates with parks, the uyezd-era buildings of Kurmysh, and archaeological sites. ^[2][12]

The best-known of these places is Bortsurmany. The stone Assumption Church was built by the landowner Pyotr Petrovich Pazukhin; it has three altars — the main one in honor of the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos, and side chapels dedicated to Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker and John Chrysostom; together with the park, it forms the Pazukhin manor complex. ^[12] The priest Alexy Gneushev (1762–1848) served in this church until extreme old age. Tradition holds that the turning point of his life was a night when he refused to go to a dying peasant, then went anyway toward morning and found the man already dead, with an Angel beside him holding the Holy Chalice; from that day he kept the monastic rule. ^[13] He healed the sick — six-year-old Tatyana Rastrigina, who had never walked since birth, was brought to him, and the girl recovered — secretly helped victims of fires and orphans, and a merchant who recovered through his prayer covered the church floor with cast iron, three slabs of which have survived. ^[13] Nine years before his death, Father Alexy handed his post to Father Pavel Vigilyansky and shut himself away in a cell beside the church. ^[13] In 2000 he was glorified among the saints, and his relics rest in the Assumption Church. ^[13]

This story has a sequel. A descendant of the righteous Alexy turned out to be the Moscow journalist and writer Alexandrina Vigilyanskaya; the charitable foundation of the Holy Righteous Alexy of Bortsurmany, which she heads, has undertaken the restoration of the churches of Kurmysh — the Church of the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos, which housed a House of Culture until 2017, and the abandoned Church of Tikhon of Zadonsk, where services resumed after a 79-year break. ^[7] With funds from a presidential grant, the village is getting a map of cultural heritage sites and information stands, a cross on the site of the destroyed Assumption Cathedral, and plaques with the historical names of its streets: Lenin Street — formerly Rozhdestvenskaya, Martyanov Street — Moskovskaya, Trudovaya Street — Kazanskaya. ^[7]

The Trinity Church in Zhdanovo is one of the few rotunda-style churches in the Region: it was built by the landowner Alexey Alexandrovich Pashkov as a copy of the Church of the Ascension on Gorokhovoye Pole in Moscow, designed by Matvey Kazakov. ^[12] By its altar are the crypt and gravestone of retired Major General Stepan Stepanovich Andreevsky, a hero of the Patriotic War of 1812 and the campaigns abroad, who became the owner of the village after marrying Pashkov's daughter. ^[12][1] In Kamenka, the Church of John the Theologian was built by the landowner Alexander Ivanovich Levashyov, and the church together with its park forms the Levashyov estate; in Deyanovo, the Trinity Church was built by parishioners and the landowner Pyotr Alexandrovich Shipilov, and during the 2009 restoration what is presumed to be the Shipilov family burial vault was found there. ^[12]

In Starinskoye stood the Priklonsky estate; the Priklonskys headed the nobility of Sergach Uyezd. In the local Kazan Church, Lev Anatolyevich Pushkin, the poet's grandnephew, married Alexandra Nikolaevna, daughter of N. I. Priklonsky: in 1898 his father-in-law bought out the Pushkin portion of Boldino and gave it as her dowry, saving it from debts. ^[12] In Yazykovo there was the Pantusov estate, and in Tenekayevo, the estate of the Obolensky-Volkovs and a stone chapel from the 19th century. ^[2][12] Local tradition links the very name Yazykovo to Ivan the Terrible's campaign against Kazan: a "tongue" (yazyk, a captive taken for questioning) was supposedly captured here. ^[12]

Here is a laborer who, though he has taken no monastic vows, stands higher than many monks

People of the Prisurye

The village of Bolobonovo is the ancestral nest of the Shipilov family, to which the Lyapunov and Kasyanov families are connected. ^[21] The composer Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Kasyanov (1891–1982), People's Artist of the USSR, was born here; he was the author of the operas Stepan Razin, Foma Gordeev, and Yermak, of music for more than two hundred theatrical productions, seven piano sonatas, and a great many romances. ^[22][12] His mother, Nadezhda Vasilyevna, was a first cousin of the Lyapunov brothers, and the composer's relatives included the Sechenovs, Demidovs, Dahls, Annenkovs, Muravyov-Apostols, Filatovs, and Krylovs. ^[22][12] He spent his childhood on the family estates of Bolobonovo and Maloye Lebedevo; during the Revolution, the house in Bolobonovo was burned down along with all its contents. ^[22]

Three versts from Bolobonovo stood Pletnikha, the Lyapunov family estate and birthplace of the astronomer Mikhail Vasilyevich Lyapunov, father of the mathematician Aleksandr, the philologist Boris, and the composer Sergey. ^[12] The Slavic philologist Boris Mikhaylovich Lyapunov was born in Bolobonovo. ^[12] The childhood years of Sergey Mikhaylovich Lyapunov were also spent here: after Yaroslavl, the family moved to their estates in the Prisurye, and in his grandfather's Bolobonovo, where Aleksandr Petrovich Shipilov kept household painters and music teachers, the first teacher of the composer's mother was Ivan Semyonovich Smolyak, who directed the church choir. ^[21] According to some sources, Sergey lived in these parts until the age of eleven; according to the St. Petersburg Conservatory, the family moved to Nizhny Novgorod in 1868, after his father's death. ^[27]

In the village of Zhdanovo, in the family of a parish priest, Konstantin Vasilyevich Rozov (1874–1923) was born — the only "grand archdeacon" in the entire history of the Russian Church: he was presented with this title on September 19, 1921, on the 25th anniversary of his service. ^[23][1] He studied at the Alatyr Theological School and the Simbirsk Seminary and served in the Dormition Cathedral of the Kremlin and in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and Moscow called him "Uncle Kostya"; listeners brought a tuning fork to the cathedral to check whether the protodeacon had gone off pitch, and wrote to him: "In performance and voice, you are a second Chaliapin." ^[23]

The military glory of the district consists of Major General Stepan Stepanovich Andreevsky, a holder of many orders and a hero of 1812; ten Heroes of the Soviet Union — A. U. Abbasov, V. A. Antonov, F. T. Blokhin, P. F. Gavrilin, G. V. Galanov, N. S. Davydov, V. M. Kurmanin, N. A. Marushin, B. S. Okrestin, L. V. Sheronov; and seven Heroes of Socialist Labor — Kh. Kh. Bakeeva, I. I. Borbuzanov, N. S. Zakirov, A. A. Skvortsov, M. N. Tarlykova, M. E. Tarnorudov, P. N. Fedoseev. ^[1]

Abdulikhat Umarovich Abbasov (1929–1996) was born in the selo (a larger village) of Novy Mochaley. From December 1962 he commanded the nuclear-powered submarine K-123, then under construction — a unique high-speed titanium submarine with a liquid-metal-cooled reactor; in 1979 he took it out on its first combat patrol, and in 1981 he was awarded the Gold Star for testing and mastering the new technology. ^[19] The ground-attack pilot Boris Semyonovich Okrestin had flown 381 combat sorties by the end of December 1943, destroyed more than forty tanks and two aircraft, and on July 6, 1944, directed his burning aircraft into a concentration of enemy troops twenty kilometers southeast of Minsk; a school in the Pilna District village of Saranka bears his name. ^[20]

The Pilna land also produced religious figures: Metropolitan Pavel I of Nizhny Novgorod and Alatyr, Father Alexey, a priest of the Dormition Church in the selo of Bortsurmany who was canonized as a saint, the patriarchal archdeacon Konstantin Rozov, and the Islamic scholar Khusain Faizkhanov. ^[1]

Economy

The leading sector is agriculture, specializing in dairy farming and the production of grain and sugar beets; twenty-one agricultural production cooperatives were operating in the sector. ^[2] The district has retained its dairy herd and its fattening livestock, the land is being cultivated, and for its results in agricultural production the district received the Governor's standard nineteen times. ^[1]

Industry is concentrated in Pilna. It includes the optical-mechanical plant (CJSC Pilna OMZ), a dairy plant — JSC Albumin, later Molochnoe Delo — Pilna, the garment enterprise JSC Nadezhda, a bakery and the Khlebokombinat branch of the district consumer cooperative, a catering complex with a sausage workshop, LLC Garant and LLC Yuzhny Khleb, the district consumer cooperative itself, the Pilna printing house, and road and construction organizations. ^[2]

A new chapter opened in 2025: a hemp-processing enterprise worth 1.2 billion rubles is being created in Pilna, built with the participation of partners from Belarus; at its design capacity it will be able to process up to 20,000 tons of industrial hemp and flax per year. The plant has received its first samples of finished products, and the supply of raw materials for it is being worked out together with the regional Ministry of Agriculture. ^[17]

The district's transport backbone is Pilna station on the Moscow–Kazan line of the Gorky Railway. ^[12][1] The second key link is a floating pontoon bridge across the Sura on the "Mameshevo–Navaty–Shumerlya–Chuvash Republic border" road: a crossing 156 meters long, made up of 47 pontoons and two twelve-meter ramp approaches, it cuts the route to Chuvashia from 120 kilometers to 50; traffic over it opened on May 8, 2026. ^[18] Personnel for the rural area are trained by the Pilna Agro-Industrial Technical College. ^[26]

The district newspaper is Selskaya Tribuna ("Rural Tribune"); its articles were reprinted by the Pilna Information Portal, pilna.ru, with a forum and photo gallery, which operated in the early 2010s. ^[24] The district administration's former website, admpilna.ru, has given way to the current pilna.nobl.ru. ^[25][1]

Population

Like all of the Region's rural hinterland, the district is losing residents: about a fifth over a decade and a half. ^[2][5] As of the beginning of 2025, 17,858 people lived in the district, of whom 6,392 were in urban areas (the urban-type settlement of Pilna) and 11,466 in rural areas. ^[5] For comparison, all of Nizhny Novgorod Region had 3,039,421 residents on the same date. ^[5]

Before the 2022 reform, the district comprised twelve municipal entities — the urban settlement "Pilna urban-type settlement" and eleven rural councils, on whose territory 72 settlements are located. ^[2]

The Okrug Today

On April 28, 2022, the Legislative Assembly of Nizhny Novgorod Region passed in two readings the bills transforming thirteen municipal districts, including Pilninsky, into municipal okrugs. The transformation was justified by the consolidation of financial and human resources and a reduction in administrative costs; as the chair of the relevant committee, Vladimir Pakov, noted, the population and local representative bodies supported it, and the boundaries of settlements and of the districts themselves did not change. ^[4]

The head of the district's local self-government is Dmitry Nikolayevich Tsapin, and the Council of Deputies is chaired by Artyom Vladimirovich Shpenkov. ^[3] Before the reform, the district's representative body was called the Zemskoye Assembly — a name inherited from the uyezd zemstvo. ^[25]

On the district's coat of arms, the shield is divided in two: in the upper half, on a silver field, walks a red deer with six tines on its antlers — a sign of belonging to the Nizhny Novgorod land; in the lower half, on a light lilac field, is a ripe ear of wheat, above it half the outline of a deciduous tree and half of a golden circular saw blade — a memory of the sawmill that gave Pilna its name. ^[3][1]

Recent developments: at the end of 2025, a model library opened in the settlement of Krasnaya Gorka, and a new modular feldsher-midwife station opened in the selo of Ozyorki. ^[3]

What to See

Most of the landmarks are concentrated in Kurmysh, but the district center itself also has things worth a look. ^[7][26]

• Ensemble of the historic buildings of the district town of Kurmysh: the district police administration, merchant estates and shops, the fire watchtower, the zemstvo hospital, the higher primary school ^[2][12]
• Pilna District Local History Museum, 8 Tarlykov Street ^[26][12]
• Kuzmichev-Pushkin House, 15 2nd Embankment Street ^[26]
• Memorial of Glory on Tarlykov Street ^[26]
• Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker in Pilna, built to replace the destroyed one and replicating the design of the Church of the Archangel Michael in Sergach ^[26][12]
• Peter I Square and the "40 Years of October" Park ^[26]
• Holy Nifont Well ^[26]
• Pilna Railway Station ^[26]
• Dormition Church with the relics of the righteous Alexius in Bortsurmany ^[13][12]
• Grey heron colony near Kurmysh and Pushkin Garden ^[2][12]

Antiquities

The most ancient history of the district can be read through its finds. Among the archaeological finds in the area are coins from the Golden Horde period, coins from the era of Vasily the Dark, who was held captive in Kurmysh, and from the time of Ivan the Terrible: this land along the Pyana and the Sura the tsar gave to his son Ivan. ^[2]

A separate page of antiquities is the Pilna ground burial site in the valley of the Anda River, near the settlement. The site became known in 2009, when items seized on the black market in antiquities were handed over to the State Historical Museum: helmets, chain mail, double-edged swords, single-edged broadswords, spears, darts, and pieces of horse gear, direct analogies for which were found among the Pyany Bor–Andreyevka-type sites of the Middle Volga Region of the 1st–2nd centuries. ^[28] Systematic excavations began in 2023, carried out by the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Samara University, and the Kazan-based A. Kh. Khalikov Institute of Archaeology: across 350 square meters, five burials from two eras were uncovered, from the 5th–4th centuries BC and the 1st–2nd centuries AD. ^[28] In the summer of 2026, a find was made here that confirmed the hypothesis of human sacrifice; this is described in the 2026 excavations. ^[28]

Sources

1. pilna.nobl.ru — Administration of Pilna Municipal Okrug — official website — About the Okrug: Symbols and History of the Okrug (archive)
2. pilna.nobl.ru — Administration of Pilna Municipal Okrug — reference on the Okrug — Pilna District: Borders, Area, Climate, Nature, Economy, Monuments (archive)
3. nobl.ru — Government of Nizhny Novgorod Region — section on local self-government — Pilna Municipal Okrug (archive)
4. NIA "Nizhny Novgorod" — All Municipal Districts of Nizhny Novgorod Region to Be Transformed into Municipal Okrugs (archive)
5. 52.rosstat.gov.ru — Nizhegorodstat — Territorial Office of Rosstat for Nizhny Novgorod Region (archive)
6. 52.rosstat.gov.ru — Nizhegorodstat — Results of the 2020 All-Russian Population Census — Size and Distribution of the Population of Nizhny Novgorod Region as of October 1, 2021 (archive)
7. Nizhegorodskaya Pravda — regional newspaper — 10 Facts About Kurmysh, the First Russian Town on the Sura River (archive)
8. nn.aif.ru — AiF — Nizhny Novgorod — Treasures of Kurmysh: Where Does Yemelyan Pugachev's Treasury Lie? (archive)
9. wolgadeutsche.net — wolgadeutsche.net Electronic Library — publication of the text of "The History of the Pugachev Rebellion" — A. S. Pushkin. The History of the Pugachev Rebellion. Part I, Chapter VIII (archive)
10. w.histrf.ru — "History.RF" portal of the Russian Military Historical Society — Kurmysh (archive)
11. bortsurmany.ru — "Bortsurmany" — local history website of the selo (a larger village), the book "On Four Hills" — Kurmysh and Its Historical Significance (archive)
12. gttp.ru — "Places of Memory" — local history project by Galina Filimonova and Vladimir Bakunin — Pilna District on the Map of "Places of Memory" of Nizhny Novgorod Region (archive)
13. radiovera.ru — Radio VERA — Bortsurmany (Aleksy of Bortsurmany) (archive)
14. tatarica.org — "Tatarica" — Tatar Encyclopedia of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan — Pilna District (archive)
15. dumrf.ru — Spiritual Administration of Muslims of the Russian Federation — official website — Safajai at 575: The Homeland of Husain Faizkhanov Celebrates Its Anniversary
16. nobl.ru — Government of Nizhny Novgorod Region — Memorial to Husain Faizkhanov Opens in the Selo of Safajai, Pilna District
17. nobl.ru — Government of Nizhny Novgorod Region — Gleb Nikitin Visits New Industrial Enterprises in Kulebaki and Pilna (archive)
18. nobl.ru — Government of Nizhny Novgorod Region — Traffic Opens on the Pontoon Bridge Across the Sura in Pilna Municipal Okrug (archive)
19. warheroes.ru — "Heroes of the Country" — biographical reference — Hero of the Soviet Union Abdulikhat Umarovich Abbasov (archive)
20. warheroes.ru — "Heroes of the Country" — biographical reference — Hero of the Soviet Union Boris Semyonovich Okrestin (archive)
21. mus.academy — "Music Academy" — scholarly music journal — Sergey Lyapunov's "Memoirs": "Bright Pages Read in Life" (archive)
22. cheloveknauka.com — Abstract of a dissertation in art studies — The Creative Personality of A. A. Kasyanov in Biographical and Source-Study Aspects (archive)
23. foma.ru — Orthodox magazine "Foma" — The Great Archdeacon: The Man Who Made Fire Tremble (archive)
24. web.archive.org — "Pilna Information Portal" pilna.ru (saved copy from 2014) — Pilna District. Pilna (archive)
25. web.archive.org — Administration of Pilna Municipal District — former website admpilna.ru (saved copy from 2016) (archive)
26. pilna.nobl.ru — Administration of Pilna Municipal Okrug — official website — Sights of the Okrug (archive)
27. conservatory.ru — N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov Saint Petersburg State Conservatory — encyclopedia — Lyapunov, Sergey Mikhailovich (1859–1924) (archive)
28. archaeolog.ru — Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences — Studies of the Pilna Burial Ground (archive)