Vorotynets

Vorotynets is an urban-type settlement in the east of Nizhny Novgorod Region and the administrative center of Vorotynsky Municipal Okrug; until 2019 it was the center of Vorotynsky District ^[8]. It stands on the federal highway M-7 "Volga," which runs from Moscow to Kazan and then on to Ufa: from Nizhny Novgorod to the settlement is 143 kilometers by road — about two hours by car and two and a half by the Nizhny Novgorod–Cheboksary bus ^[7]; by the older reckoning, the distance east of the regional center was put at 154 kilometers ^[27]. The settlement takes its name from the The Princes Vorotynsky, who received the lands here in 1569 ^[2][27], while the saying "Vorotynets feeds everyone" comes from its grain markets, the largest in Nizhny Novgorod Governorate after the abolition of serfdom ^[1][4]. Vorotynets became an urban-type settlement on November 3, 1964 ^[18]; according to the 2020 census, 5,849 people lived there ^[5]. Other meanings of the word are collected on the page Vorotynets.

The Vorotynsky Question

The date of Vorotynets's founding — 1552 — has no documentary confirmation, but it holds firm: the official version states that "Vorotynets was founded in 1552 after the third victorious campaign of Tsar Ivan the Terrible against Kazan," and the settlement's founder is named as Mikhail Ivanovich Vorotynsky. The well-known Nizhny Novgorod historian and local scholar Professor N. F. Filatov insisted on this same date ^[27].

Documents found in the archives point to a different date — around 1620. In February 1569, Mikhail Ivanovich Vorotynsky added a postscript to his spiritual charter (will), from which it follows that the government had confiscated from him the lands of the Odoyev-Novosil Principality in the upper reaches of the Oka, granting in exchange Starodub Ryapolovsky with its uyezd (except for villages that lay within the holdings of other patrimonial landowners), the village of Moshok with its hamlets in the Murom uyezd, the village of Knyaginino in the Nizhny Novgorod Uyezd, and the Fokino selishche in the Vasilegorod uyezd ^[27].

A local history essay clarifies: Starodub Ryapolovsky is present-day Gorodok on the Klyazma, and the new settlement, named in memory of the lost ancestral town, arose on these lands in the first quarter of the 17th century ^[2].

In the 1621–1623 cadastral book of the Zakudemsky Stan by Dmitry Vasilyevich Lodygin, Vasily Ivanovich Poltev, and the clerk Dementy Obraztsov, the description of the holdings of Prince Ivan Mikhaylovich Vorotynsky contains the first documented mention of Vorotynets — "the village of Vorotynesk on a spring and on the little river Molvyazh." At that time the village had three households of the church clergy, twenty-three peasant households, and three bobyl households ^[2][27].

Local historians dispute one turn of phrase in the cadastral book. "Poselilos novo" is read by some as "settled anew," that is, on an old site that had lain waste for some time, and by others as "an entirely new settlement that had not existed before" ^[2]. Hence the two dates for the settlement's birth: by the officially accepted version, it was founded by Mikhail Ivanovich Vorotynsky in 1552; by the other, the village took shape in the first quarter of the 17th century, most likely between 1617 and 1623 ^[4][27].

The name changed before the scribes' very eyes. In the spiritual charter of Ivan Mikhaylovich Vorotynsky of 1626–1627 we find "selso Vorotynesk" ^[27], and in the census book of the Zakudemsky Stan of 1677–1678, "the village of Vorotynsk" in the patrimony of the boyar Prince Ivan Alekseyevich Vorotynsky ^[2]. The present form became established under the Golovins ^[1].

The side chapels of the first, wooden church explain the owners' genealogy. The holy Prince Michael of Chernigov was an ancestor of the Vorotynsky line, and Mikhail Ivanovich was baptized in his honor; in March 1610 a son was born to Ivan Mikhaylovich and baptized in honor of Alexis, the Man of God. In building the church, Ivan Mikhaylovich dedicated the side chapels to the heavenly patrons of his late father and his newborn son ^[2].

For his military service, Ivan IV granted him (Vorotynsky — Auth.) an extensive hereditary estate in the Nizhny Novgorod uyezd, where Mikhail Ivanovich established his administrative and economic centers: Vorotynets, Knyaginino, Boyarintsevo, and others

the selo of Vorotynesk on a spring and on the little river Moldyazh, newly settled in the forest, and in the selo is a church of the Not-Made-by-Hands Image of the Savior, wooden, of the "klet" type, with a side chapel of Alexei, the Man of God, and a side chapel of Prince Mikhail of Chernigov and his boyar Fyodor, and in the church are icons and candles and vestments and church vessels and books, and on the belfry bells, the construction of the patrimonial lord, boyar Prince Ivan Mikhailovich

Who Lived Here Before the Russian Villages

Russian settlers came to the Pri-Sura region late. In the first millennium AD, the Mordva and the Mari appeared here, followed by the ancestors of today's Chuvash; in the 12th–13th centuries the lands were under the rule of Volga Bulgaria. From the 1340s, Russians began to settle the territory between the Kudma and Sura rivers, which had passed to the Nizhny Novgorod–Suzdal grand princes: in 1372 Prince Boris Konstantinovich built the fortress of Kurmysh on the Sura, which then marked the border with the Golden Horde, and the local Russian villages grew out from it. After the Nizhny Novgorod Principality was incorporated into the unified Russian state, these lands came to be called the Zakudemsky Stan of the Nizhny Novgorod Uyezd ^[3][28].

The oldest selo in the area is considered to be Raznezhye — it is first mentioned in the Suzdal Chronicle under the year 1372; Vasilsursk was founded in 1523 ^[4]. The diversity of the local peoples remains a hallmark of the place: at the Vorotynets bus station, Russian, Chuvash, and Mari are still heard today ^[25].

Potash, Tar, and the Golovin Estate

Vorotynets's first wealth was not grain but ash. For a long time the main trade was the production of potash — potassium carbonate, obtained by burning deciduous and coniferous trees; the surrounding mixed forests were burned without mercy. The finished powder was packed into barrels and hauled via Vologda to Arkhangelsk, and from there mostly to England, where it was used for soap-making and leather tanning — one of the largest items of Russian export of its time. Tar was rendered on the spot from birch bark, and fields were plowed on the lands cleared of forest ^[1][7].

The Vorotynsky princely line died out in the male line at the end of the 17th century — in 1679 according to some sources ^[3], in 1680 according to others ^[1][27] — and the escheated patrimonial estates passed to the palace administration. In 1700, Tsar Peter I granted the Barma volost, on whose lands Vorotynesk stood, to his associate Count Fyodor Alekseyevich Golovin — a general-admiral and the first recipient of the Order of St. Andrew the First-Called ^[2][28].

While in the Golovins' possession, Vorotynets was among the most developed and wealthy patrimonial estates in the Nizhny Novgorod area: a linen factory with two hundred looms and a small tannery operated here, staffed by serfs ^[2]. According to local-history descriptions of the Golovin estate, the tannery was established around 1750, and the linen factory with two hundred looms in 1764. It employed up to four hundred workers, who were gathered from across the whole estate: from fourteen settlements of Nizhny Novgorod Uyezd and two settlements of Semyonov Uyezd belonging to the Golovins.

According to the plan of the General Land Survey of the last quarter of the 18th century, a considerable part of Vorotynets was occupied by gardens, and the place where the manor buildings stood is still called the "Barsky Gory" (Lords' Hills). The Golovin estate is also remembered in literature: P. I. Melnikov-Pechersky, in his "Grandmother's Tales," writes of it as a marvel ^[2].

A description from 1808, based on survey materials, finds the selo in a period of prosperity: 260 households, a wooden church, a manor house, two formal gardens and greenhouses with lemon, orange, peach, and other citrus trees, a linen factory, and trading shops. Part of the linen cloth went to the Makaryev Yarmarka ^[2].

about wealthy Vorotynets, its gardens, landing stages, picture galleries, and the riches of the marvelous estate

The selo of Vorotynets is 11 versts from the district town, with 260 households; population according to the fifth revision of 1795: 601 men, 770 women. The property of Privy Councillor Nikolay Nikolayevich Golovin. The selo is located… on the great post road running from the town of Vasil to the town of Sergach. In the selo there is a wooden church dedicated to the Savior Not Made by Hands, with two side chapels: the first, on the south side, dedicated to Alexis, the Man of God; the second, on the north side, dedicated to the great martyrs Prince Michael and the boyar Fyodor, the wonderworkers of Chernigov; and a wooden manor house, with two formal gardens with fruit trees beside it, and in the greenhouses lemon, orange, peach, and citrus trees of various kinds. There is a manorial linen factory with 25 looms and wooden shops built for trade.

At that factory they produce coarse cloth and Russian linens, up to five thousand arshins a year, which are used for the peasants' own needs, while a considerable quantity is sent for sale to the yarmarka held in the town of Makaryev. In the selo, markets are held every week on Mondays in the small shops that were built, to which inhabitants of various settlements come with all sorts of small wares. The peasants pay quitrent and make their living by farming. Besides field work, the women occupy themselves with handicrafts, spinning flax and wool and weaving cloth and woolen fabric for themselves and for sale

A Month and a Half of Popular Rule

In the summer of 1774, the insurgent army of Yemelyan Pugachyov approached the borders of Nizhny Novgorod Governorate and on July 20 entered Kurmysh, where it was solemnly welcomed by the population. Unrest among the peasants of the Golovins' Vorotynets estate had begun even earlier: they were talking among themselves that Sovereign Peter III was granting the people freedom and land, calling on them to fight their oppressors, and would soon arrive in their region himself or send his emissaries.

On July 20, an assembly was held in Vorotynets, at which the peasant Vasily Chernov proposed recognizing "Sovereign Peter III." He was supported by the peasants Andrey Ananyin, Urusov, Filipp and Ivan Novosyolov, Mikhail Kireyev, Ivan Frolov, Grigory Soldatov, Fyodor Puzin, and others; the whole community resolved to recognize Peter III. At the same time, they decided to place under guard, and hand over to the "tsar's court" as oppressors and tormentors of the people, the estate manager Aleksey Teteyev, his wife Anastasia, the elected official Andrey Kireyev, as well as a Frenchman and a German who ran the factory and the tannery.

On July 22, a new assembly was held in the village, attended by up to forty peasants from Semyany and Berezovka. They declared that they had been in Kurmysh, had seen the tsar, and that he had ordered all the "estate despoilers" to be brought to him for judgment. The assembly decided to send the arrested administrators to Kurmysh and appointed as their escort Mikhail Romanov, Ivan Petrov, Ivan and Fyodor Burov, Nikita Savelyev, Mikhail Abramov, Andrey Klyuyev, Fyodor Bespalov, Mikhail Dolgov, Matvey Lazarev, Grigory Bryuzgin, Fyodor Odintsov, Pavel Bykov, Filipp Novozhenin, and others. By evening of that day, some of them had returned home and announced that all those sent for judgment had been hanged in Semyany on the orders of a tsarist colonel who had arrived there and who promised to come to Vorotynets.

It turned out that on July 22, a group of Pugachev's men led by Aristov had entered Semyany. He declared himself a colonel sent by Sovereign Peter III and told the peasants that if they had grievances against their superiors, they should bring them to be judged. At that moment, Semyany and Vorotynets peasants escorting the prisoners to Kurmysh arrived in the village. Aristov, on learning whom they were bringing, ordered them hanged on the spot. At the same time, the Semyany stewards Ivan Fadeyev and Pavel Kordyukov were hanged for oppressing the people.

On the morning of July 23, the population of Vorotynets and representatives from other settlements of the estate, led by the elder Chuyev and the elected officials Stepanov and Vasily Chernov, accompanied by priests and the church staff with icons and bread and salt, greeted Aristov. A trial then took place in the square of the estate manager's brother Ivan Teteyev and his son Vasily, who were accused of cruelty and violence. Aristov ordered them hanged on the gates of a peasant house, which was carried out by Nikita Denisov, Grigory Krivenkov, and others.

At Aristov's suggestion, many peasants and workers expressed their willingness to join the "sovereign's army" voluntarily. All the available stocks of linen, leather goods, flax, grain, and other provisions were distributed among the population. The equipment of the linen factory and the manor house were wrecked, and the tannery was burned; the Golovin estate was ravaged and burned so thoroughly that it was never rebuilt ^[1].

The next day, Aristov, taking the factory worker Pytov as a guide, set out for the estate of the Ural ironmaster Demidov, the village of Fokino. There, however, he was seized by the peasants and sent to Nizhny.

From Kurmysh, Pugachev began advancing with his army toward the Volga, but on learning that tsarist punitive forces were approaching, he turned toward Alatyr on July 23. Several insurgent detachments were sent out toward Yadrin, Lyskovo, and Arzamas. One of them, numbering up to three hundred men, with the participation of local peasants, including those from Kekino, Shokino, Trishkino, and other settlements, tried to take Yadrin but was repulsed.

The peasant unrest spread over a wide area. The governor of Nizhny Novgorod, Stupishin, to intimidate the population, ordered six captured Pugachev followers to be "hanged in the towns of Nizhny, Kurmysh, and in the villages of the Nizhny Novgorod District: Bogorodskoye, Pavlovo, Spasskoye, and Vorotynets."

A military detachment with cannon was sent into Kurmysh District. Along the way, the punitive troops occupied Vorotynets and carried out the governor's order: they hanged an "accomplice of Pugachev" in the village square, seized Chernov and other participants in the uprising and sent them to Nizhny, and punished some with the knout. This punitive detachment subsequently defeated the insurgents near Yadrin and Kurmysh.

In Nizhny, the participants in the Vorotynets uprising were subjected to torture. One of the leaders, the Vorotynets peasant Vasily Fyodorovich Chernov, showed himself to be a courageous and convinced man, as is evident from the record of his interrogation.

Chernov was sentenced to death; the sentence was subject to confirmation by the Kazan Secret Commission. It confirmed it, proposing that Chernov be hanged "in the place where he committed his villainies — in Vorotynets." However, the governor of Nizhny Novgorod, without waiting for the sentence to be confirmed, hanged Chernov in Nizhny, on the bank of the Oka. The unrest on Count Golovin's estate — in the villages of Vorotynets, Semyany, and Belavka and the hamlets of Opaikha and Berezovka — lasted more than a month; seventy peasants were brought to trial and investigation, and many were punished with lashes ^[26].

Afterward, in all likelihood, most of the participants were sentenced to penal servitude. Aristov was hanged in Kazan. By tsarist decree, all governors were instructed to set up "gallows, signposts, and wheels" along the main roads in all towns and settlements whose inhabitants, during Pugachev's uprising, had "dared to rebel and to depart from their due subject obedience, both to the offices and authorities and to obedience to their landowners."

Popular rule lasted in Vorotynets for a month and a half. In August 1774, the sovereign's punitive detachments arrived; the peasant leader Chernov was hanged, gallows were erected throughout the uyezd to intimidate the population, and public floggings were carried out. Museum staff cite both discontent with the landowner and the large number of outside "workers" from the tannery and linen factories who had come to Vorotynets as causes of the revolt: those uprooted from the land had nothing to lose ^[1].

• Within the territory of the district, instruments of execution were set up in eight settlements: Vorotynets, Semyany, Belavka, Akhpayevka, Berezovka (Berezov-Maydan), Kekino, Shokino, and Dorodino (Trishkino)
• In the surrounding area, gallows were erected in Kurmysh, Spasskoye, Knyaginino, Troitskoye, and many other settlements

passing through various settlements, and scattering into many bands, across the Kurmysh, Yadrin, Alatyr, and in part the Nizhny Novgorod and Arzamas uyezds, he drove the landowners', palace, and economic peasants into great agitation and disobedience toward their landowners and superiors

During this interrogation, under cruel torture, Chernov for the entire long duration persisted in refusing to call Pugachev a villain, regarding him as bearing the name of the sovereign Peter III; however, in the end, not out of pangs of conscience but from unbearable torment, he called him a villain

who will not only be frightened by the execution themselves but will also tell others that Pugachev's accomplices do not escape deserved punishment for the villainy they commit... And the peasants of the selo of Vorotynets, of whom up to seventy were in Nizhny at that time for investigation of the villainies they had committed, saw the execution carried out on Chernov, and many of them were punished with whips beneath the gallows

The Selo Raffled Off in a Lottery

Nikolay Nikolayevich Golovin became the last owner of Vorotynets. The entire life of this dandy and spendthrift, famous throughout the country, passed in ceaseless entertainments and pleasures, and after the count's death his estate gained nationwide "notoriety." His relatives refused to accept the inheritance so as not to pay the enormous debts to creditors, and the government "devised" a way to satisfy them. For a whole year, an announcement was printed in the "Senate Gazette" (Senatskiye Vedomosti) of an upcoming grand government lottery, in which the prizes would be the Nizhny Novgorod selos of Vorotynets, Semyany, and Belavka, a number of villages in Oryol Governorate, as well as houses in various towns and more ^[2].

The decision to raffle off all the Golovin lands in the country's first nationwide state lottery was made by Alexander I ^[1]. The drawing took place in 1823. The selo of Vorotynets went to five residents of the city of Odessa: the physician Stubbe, the official Zakrevsky, the merchant Serato, the merchant's widow Tryumina, and the non-commissioned officer Kirillov. All five, not knowing what to do with a huge estate located a thousand versts from where they lived, immediately ceded their "landowner" rights to the Appanage Department, which paid each of them 200,000 rubles ^[2].

Vorotynets belonged to the Golovins and their descendants from 1700 to 1822; in 1822–1823 the selo, together with its serf population of five thousand, was raffled off, and in 1823 it became an appanage selo of Vasilsursk Uyezd ^[18].

The Vorotynets Appanage Prikaz (administrative office) was established and managed all affairs until the abolition of serfdom in the state village in 1863 ^[2]. The appanage office in Nizhny Novgorod was for some time headed by Vladimir Ivanovich Dal — the compiler of the "Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language" visited Vorotynets ^[1].

Along with farming and gardening, the appanage peasants of Vorotynets engaged in trade. Entire dynasties of local merchants appeared in the selo (a larger village): the Yalovitsyns, Simonovs, and Ryabovs ^[2].

"Vorotynets Feeds Everyone"

After the abolition of serfdom, the largest grain markets in Nizhny Novgorod Governorate began operating in the selo. The division from its neighbors was clear: in Lyskovo they traded "noble" grain from the estates, while in Vorotynets they traded "peasant" grain, grown by the toilers themselves. The markets provided earnings for a huge number of people, from loaders to cooks — hence the saying that became the settlement's nickname in the second half of the 19th century ^[1][7].

From the early 1860s, the grain trade took off. Before that, the grain trade in the eastern part of the governorate was concentrated in Lyskovo: when boats on the Volga were hauled by barge haulers with towing straps, it was more profitable to take grain from the villages there, since Vorotynets lies 50 versts downstream of Lyskovo, and this difference cost an extra ten kopecks per pood of grain. With the arrival of steam navigation on the Volga, the freight rate to Rybinsk became the same from Vorotynets as from Lyskovo.

Before the peasant reform of 1861, landowners brought grain to Lyskovo even from distant places, since their carters — serf peasants — were free labor for the landowners. Now the landowners had to pay for horse-drawn transport, and they chose a nearer landing. For these two reasons, from the 1880s Vorotynets became a strong competitor to Lyskovo in the grain trade, especially in spring crops.

All winter, grain was brought to Vorotynets from the Kurmyshsky, Yadrinsky, Kozmodemyansky, Yaransky, Vasilsky, and partly from the Sergachsky and Knyagininsky uyezds (counties) — both peasant grain and landowners' grain.

Market days in Vorotynets were Mondays, and on the eve, on Sundays, there were the so-called "podtorzhya" (pre-markets). During the best markets, around winter St. Nicholas Day, up to 1,500 wagons of grain gathered in Vorotynets. The markets took place on Bazarnaya Square, which after 1917 was renamed Sovetskaya Square ^[19].

The purchased grain required bast-matting sacks. The matting was brought from various places, including Lipovka and Akhpaevka: a hundred mats cost from 7 rubles and more, while Vetluga matting, the best, reached a price of 30 rubles per hundred. Bast fiber for sewing up the sacks was bought in Kurmysh and Yadrin at 60–80 kopecks per pood, and the sacks themselves were sewn by Vorotynets women at home for one and a half to two kopecks per sack.

Special workers served as "podsevaly" (grain sifters) — there were about seventy of them. They filled the matting sacks with rye or wheat and sewed the sacks shut with bast fiber; the "podsevaly" were paid 2–3 kopecks for every 10 poods of grain packed, "with their own sieve." Their work was done at night, from eleven in the evening until seven in the morning, and so all winter the "podsevaly" turned night into their day and day into their night. In the morning carters awaited them to haul the sacked grain to the granaries; there were seventy carters in the selo with 450 horses.

In Vorotynets itself there were 332 small grain granaries, but the largest 45 granaries stood on the bank of the Volga at the so-called "Starochugunskaya" landing, 6.5 versts from Vorotynets.

With the opening of navigation, the busy season began at the landing. Grain was brought from the granaries and loaded onto barges; between 600 and 800 loaders (krYuchniki) gathered — people from Osinki, Otary, Semyany, Barmino, Ognev-Maydan, and Vorotynets itself. Near the landing, hundreds of loaders formed an entire temporary settlement, since they needed somewhere to sleep and eat. Loaders were paid 3–3.5 kopecks per sack (5.5 poods).

During the navigation season, three shipments went from Vorotynets upstream along the Volga: the first, in spring, went to Rybinsk, and the other two, in summer, to the Nizhny Novgorod Yarmarka. The water freight from Vorotynets to Rybinsk cost 5–6 kopecks, and to Nizhny Novgorod 2.5–3 kopecks.

Large lots of grain in Vorotynets were purchased by out-of-town "upriver" traders from Nizhny Novgorod, Tver, Petersburg, and Yaroslavl. These traders did not live in Vorotynets themselves, and sometimes never even visited; the Vorotynets locals called them "sumaleys." The large traders — the "sums" — kept their clerks in Vorotynets on salaries of 70–90 rubles for the winter and also paid for their lodging and the rental of granaries, which came to as much as 300 rubles depending on the granaries' capacity and on where they stood — in the selo or at the landing.

But there were also poor sellers of their own grain in Vorotynets: out of stinginess, they looked in the selo not for lodging but only for a "place to sleep" with cabbage soup for 5–6 kopecks.

In the ten years from 1860 to 1870, winter grain purchases in Vorotynets grew from 780 thousand poods to 1,320 thousand and came close to the turnover of the famous Lyskovo grain trade. Later, the development of railways, in particular the Romanovo and Moscow–Kazan lines, wiped out the former trading importance of both Lyskovo and Vorotynets: Nizhny Novgorod and Rybinsk became the centers of the grain trade on the Upper Volga.

The second source of income was apples. In the second half of the 19th century, the local peasants grew them for export in enormous quantities, and they planted the trees not in the "backyards" of their houses but on the "neudobitsy" (unusable land) — along the slopes of ravines and on the outskirts. The splendid orchards stood until the unprecedentedly cold winter of 1941 ^[1][7].

Cut-offs and Redemption

Under the reform of 1863, the appanage peasants were removed from the jurisdiction of the Department of Appanages and placed under the general state administration, becoming ordinary citizens of Russia, while the appanage system of administration was abolished: the appanage offices became volost offices. The status of temporarily obligated peasants did not apply to the appanage peasants; for them, the redemption of allotments was mandatory from the outset.

By June 1864 the charters of settlement had been drawn up, but putting them into effect dragged on until 1871, and the formalization of the land-demarcation documents took even longer. The former appanage peasants received no additions to their allotments — on the contrary, the land cut-offs in the Nizhny Novgorod appanage villages were quite substantial.

The trouble lay not only in the quantity of land cut off. "Protecting the interests of the Appanage," its officials tried to carve out of the peasant allotments the best parcels, those located near the villages, and a complicated patchwork of peasant and appanage lands resulted. The case of the peasants of the village of Akhpaevka in the Vorotynets office is telling: four times they appealed to the Department of Appanages, literally begging for the return of the fields of the former communal plowland, offering other land in exchange, but the appanage office had already sold these plots to well-off peasants, and the manager of the Nizhny Novgorod appanage estate openly boasted that he had squeezed out a price for them that was "unprecedented" for the uyezd.

According to the calculations of the Nizhny Novgorod historian Professor A. V. Sedov, the total size of the land cut-offs in the appanage villages of the Nizhny Novgorod Governorate came to about 27 thousand desyatinas — up to 20% of peasant land. This exceeded the cut-offs of the landlords' peasants, which amounted to 18% and are considered the highest in the governorate — and yet the appanage peasants were the most land-poor of all.

The peasants of the Vorotynets office suffered more than others: they had not only the largest land cut-offs but also the highest redemption payments exacted. Of the 27,500 desyatinas the peasants held before the reform, 7,000 were cut off.

Appanage peasants were granted an installment plan for the redemption payment spread over 49 years, and over that period they had to repay not only the state loan but also the interest on it, which tripled the payments. Under this calculation, a desyatina of land cost the appanage peasants of the Vorotynsk prikaz 65 rubles. The peasants were not satisfied with these terms, and many of them refused to sign the charter deeds (ustavnye gramoty), the basic documents of the reform: in the Vorotynsk prikaz, officials managed to obtain peasant signatures on only four of the fifteen charter deeds.

With the abolition of serfdom, the Vorotynsk appanage prikaz was broken up into volosts: Vorotynskaya, Barmino-Venetskaya, and Prosetskaya, while Shumets was transferred to the Yurinskaya volost.

Spassky Church

By the early 19th century, the wooden three-altar church in honor of the Image of the Savior Not Made by Hands, built back in the time of the Vorotynskys, had fallen into disrepair: in 1804 the Nizhny Novgorod Spiritual Consistory authorized repairs to the sheathing of its domes. In 1810 a great fire broke out in Vorotynets, destroying the church, the landowner's manor, the estate administration, the houses of the clergy, and most of the peasant households ^[2].

The stone church was built in 1812–1814 on the same site, with funds from Count Nikolay Nikolayevich Golovin and donations from parishioners; two altars were consecrated — the main one and a side chapel in the name of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker ^[2].

The church's style is defined in different ways: a local-history essay classes it as "provincial Classicism," while an old description calls it Empire style. It was a stone structure with a dome on a large drum, four small decorative domes at the corners, a single-apse altar, a refectory, and a tiered bell tower over the western entrance; on the north and south were porticoes with Ionic columns and triangular pediments with stucco ornament. Measurements taken from archival drawings give the height of the bell tower, with spire and cross, as 25 meters (of which the spire is 6 meters), the diameter of the large dome as 7 meters, and ten windows and eighteen columns on the porches ^[2].

The austere exterior was set off by an interior with stucco decoration: between the windows stood Ionic half-columns, six of which survive in the altar to this day; the vault of the narthex and the pendentives under the dome were adorned with paintings, the space was completed by a carved wooden iconostasis, and above the western entrance was a choir balcony. The church was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence on a brick base and a churchyard with a cemetery dating from the 17th to the early 20th century ^[2].

After the fire of 1810, some of the holy objects of the old church survived and were moved to the new stone church: gifts of the Golovins — the icons "Quench My Sorrows" (1793), Our Lady of Smolensk (1767), the Image of the Savior Not Made by Hands (1753), and Our Lady of Vladimir (1752), all in gilded silver frames, as well as two altar Gospels of 1748 and 1755 ^[2].

In 1888 the parish comprised 3,037 parishioners from Vorotynets and the neighboring village of Elvashka, and the church held 53 desyatinas of land; in 1904 the parish numbered 1,720 men and 1,893 women, with Priest Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Ruvimov serving as rector. In 1930 the founders of the Orthodox community submitted an application for its registration on behalf of 1,150 people ^[2].

The fates of the clergy in the 1930s were grim: Deacon Pyotr Vasilyevich Kuznetsov-Dertev was arrested in December 1932 and sentenced to five years in the camps; Deacon Pyotr Pavlovich Drozdov, in February 1933, to three years of exile in the Northern Territory; and Priest Ivan Ivanovich Drozdov, who had served in the Vorotynets church from 1922 to 1930, was arrested on July 30, 1937, and shot on November 4 of that year ^[2].

In 1937 the church was closed, and the building was used as a warehouse for the local kolkhoz, and later for the district consumer cooperative union (raypotrebsoyuz). In the late 1950s and early 1960s it underwent major alterations: the domes were removed, the bell tower and western porch were demolished, a second floor was added with windows cut into it, and an annex appeared in place of the western porch. In 1967 the district House of Culture opened here ^[2].

On Great Wednesday of Holy Week, April 19, 1995, the church was consecrated anew and the first service was held; some of the icons preserved by believers returned to its walls. For the first decade the rector of the revived church was Priest Sergiy Telnov, followed by Priests Boris Matveyev (2005–2006), Vasiliy Lyutyansky (2006–2007), and, from July 2007, Andrey Samsonov. A charitable foundation has been established in Vorotynets to restore the church to its former appearance, and, as usually happens, the effort comes down to money ^[2].

Simultaneously with the Vorotynets church, very similar churches were built from "model" designs in Vasilsursk (1828) and Spasskoye (1840) ^[2]; the oldest church in the district is considered to be the Kazan Church in Vasilsursk, dating from 1708 ^[4]. Details are in the article Church of the Image of Christ Not Made by Hands in Vorotynets.

From Volost to District

On January 16–17 (February 3–4), 1918, Soviet Power was established in Vasilsursk Uyezd, and a few days later the Vorotynets Volost Council of Peasants' Deputies was created ^[18].

Vorotynets became a district seat in 1929, when districts were carved out across the whole country in place of uyezds: the new Vorotynsky District was split off from the abolished Lyskovo Uyezd, with the selo designated as its center ^[3][4][28]. That same year the "Harvest Day" kolkhoz was formed here, headed by Mikhail Grigoryevich Vershinin; in 1936 two more kolkhozes split off from it, "Soviet Power" and "Defense of the Country" ^[18].

Vorotynets received the status of a workers' settlement on November 3, 1964 ^[18][3][28]. Major improvements began only in the mid-1960s: at that time residents were all but forced to plant trees near their houses ^[1].

By Nizhny Novgorod Region Law No. 30-Z of April 2, 2019, the urban-type settlements of Vorotynets and Vasilsursk, together with the rural settlements of the district, were merged into the Vorotynsky urban okrug ^[8]; today it is the Vorotynsky municipal okrug — two urban localities and fifty-six rural ones ^[3]. The Administration and the Council of Deputies are based in Vorotynets at 6 Sovetskaya Square ^[17].

By the district's ninetieth anniversary, the count stood as follows: 58 localities, including two urban-type settlements and seventeen selos (larger villages); an area of 1,935.81 square kilometers; as of January 1, 2019, the district had 18,025 residents; 46 historical and cultural monuments, seven of them of federal significance ^[24]. Together with natural monuments, about 85 sites in the okrug are under state protection ^[4].

The okrug's history is also told by its coat of arms: a black crowned eagle, a sign of the Vorotynskys' descent from the Princes of Chernigov; the base of a ship's stern, taken from the coat of arms of the district town of Vasil (Vasilsursk), granted to it on August 16, 1781 "in token that the finest shipbuilding timber is harvested in the environs of this town"; and an azure wavy base indicating that the okrug lies on both banks of the Volga at the confluence of the Sura. The idea for the coat of arms belongs to Aleksandr Dyuzhakov of Vorotynets ^[3].

How the settlement grew, and how many people its markets fed, can be seen from documents of different years.

Streets and the Square

Vorotynets has more than forty streets, and the main one is Gorky Street, the longest, which runs from south to north. Before the 1917 revolution it was called Bolshaya ("Great") Street and was so large that it was divided into three parts: Verkhny Konets ("Upper End"), Birzha ("the Exchange"), and Nizhny Konets ("Lower End"). The Upper End had houses on one side only; there was no row of houses along the ravine, and behind the houses lay large gardens ^[20][30]. The street was named in honor of Alexey Maksimovich Gorky, who in 1899 vacationed in Vasilsursk with his wife and six-year-old son ^[20][30].

Sovetskaya Square was called Bazarnaya ("Market") Square, or the Exchange, until 1917. Svobody Street (formerly Sloboda), Demyana Bednogo Street (formerly Kokuska), and Zubova Street (formerly Sodomnaya) radiate from it in various directions, while Gorky Street runs parallel to the square ^[19].

On the square stands the store of the Yalovitsyn brothers — it now houses the Teremok hardware store ^[30]. In the early 1900s a wooden building with a brick basement floor, owned by the merchant's wife Vorobyova, was built opposite: it held a tea house, in the 1920s–1960s the left wing housed the village club, and in the right wing from 1949 to 1950 was the district library; afterward the building was occupied by a lace-embroidery factory ^[19].

Behind the club a park was laid out with flower beds, paths, and swings. In the 1970s–1980s the park was cut down, and in its place were built the building of the settlement administration, a new department store, a restaurant, a café, and shops. The monument to fallen soldiers with an eternal flame and the monument to V. I. Lenin, which had stood on the square, were later moved to the building of the district administration; the fenced-off part of the square served as the site of May Day and November demonstrations ^[19].

On August 7, 2003, a monument was unveiled in the public garden on the square to the soldiers of Vorotynsky District who died in the line of military duty since 1946, and in 2009 a chapel was installed in place of the monument ^[19].

Ladeynov Street is named after Private Andrey Aleksandrovich Ladeynov, a native of the selo (a larger village) of Mikhaylovskoye. He took part in twenty combat operations in Afghanistan; on February 20, 1983, on the approach to a kishlak (an Afghan village) along the Lashkargah–Girishk route, the column came under fire, the APC driver was seriously wounded, and Ladeynov gave him aid, took his place, and began to pull the vehicle out of the fire, but the APC hit a mine, and two days later Ladeynov died of his mortal wound. He was posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Star and is buried in Vorotynets ^[23].

Merchant Houses

The architectural appearance of Vorotynets is constantly changing, but its foundation consists of buildings of the 19th and early 20th centuries. For the most part these are the houses of merchants and well-to-do peasants — "half-houses" (poludomki) or stone houses on storerooms.

Merchant houses that sprang up here after the grain trade began are still standing, and almost all of them are occupied by public institutions — the settlement library, a newspaper editorial office, the House of Children's Creativity, and a police station ^[4]. Some of them can be visited: in houses a century and a half old, the historic interiors have survived down to the door handles, and peasant houses of the 19th century with "blind" carving have also survived around the settlement ^[1].

The most beautiful of the old buildings is the house of the merchant Ryabov, Vorotynets's chief grain trader. A large brick house with carved brick window frames and kokoshniks (decorative gable arches) looks like an elegant jewelry box; a carefully designed supply ventilation system kept it cool even in thirty-degree heat, the ceilings of the second floor are about four meters high, and from the days of candlelight there survive graceful ceiling rosettes for chandeliers, a different one in each room. During the Revolution Ryabov did not argue with the new authorities, gave up his house voluntarily, built himself a small house by the upper pond, and lived in it until his death ^[21].

In 1917 the building housed the Council of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, and a room on the first floor was set aside for a library and reading room. At various times it held a school, where the upper grades studied, and the District Council; in the 1950s an annex repeating the architecture of the main building was added to the house, and the neighboring house of the merchant's brother, Aleksey Ryabov, was joined to it and given a second brick story. In the early 1970s the Central Library returned here, and the central children's library was placed in the right wing ^[21].

The library itself was opened in 1898 by order of the Nizhny Novgorod governor, Lieutenant General N. M. Baranov, as a free library and reading room under the Society for the Spread of Primary Education; the children's library traces its history to 1952 ^[4].

The mansion of the first-guild merchant Ivan Stepanovich Ryabov was defended by the "Chroniclers" team of Vorotynets Secondary School at the regional online competition "Symbols of the Nizhny Novgorod Land," and the team also held a drawing contest, "Merchant Houses of the Settlement of Vorotynets" ^[4]; the school's collection of antiquities is described in the article Museum of Vorotynets Secondary School. The editorial office of the Vorotynskaya Gazeta occupies a house at 91 Maxim Gorky Street ^[12][30].

The library also runs local history projects: the website "Literary Map of Vorotynsky District" with a section on local poets, poetry festivals and meetings of amateur authors called "Living Spring," an ecological page about the settlement, and the blog "Vorotynsk Land," which collects essays about the streets, houses, and people of Vorotynets ^[25][29][31].

District Newspaper

Vorotynets has had its own newspaper since October 1931: by decision of the Nizhny Novgorod Governorate Committee, "Kolkhozny Rupor" ("Collective Farm Mouthpiece") was founded here as the organ of the District Committee and the District Council of Deputies. In 1958 the publication was renamed "Leninsky Put" ("Lenin's Path"), and in 1994 "Vorotynskaya Gazeta" ("Vorotynets Newspaper"). Since 2006 it has come out on Thursdays at sixteen pages; the editorial office is a municipal autonomous institution, and the editor-in-chief is Zhanna Vladimirovna Moskvina. Editors over the years have included F. G. Zheleznov, A. P. Gorevanova, V. P. Lezhnin, L. N. Pankratova, F. A. Talalaev, V. G. Strakhov, P. S. Ryabov, Yu. N. Yakunin, A. I. Antonov, S. I. Bolshakov, M. I. Eryomin, V. Ya. Moskvin, and A. M. Dyuzhakov ^[12].

Monument to Prince Vorotynsky

On September 20, 2008, a ceremony to unveil and consecrate a monument to Prince Vorotynsky was held in the urban-type settlement of Vorotynets — the first monument in Russia to a representative of the family of Russian military commanders, diplomats, and statesmen ^[11][22]. Mikhail Ivanovich Vorotynsky was the first private owner of the local lands (from 1569), an outstanding military commander of the 16th century, a hero of the storming of Kazan (1552) and the Battle of Molodi (1572), and the author of Russia's first Border Service Charter — the "Boyar Sentence on Stanitsa and Guard Service" (1571). His son Ivan Mikhailovich Vorotynsky was a prominent statesman of the Time of Troubles in the early 17th century.

The monument stands at the entrance to the settlement, at the fork of M. Gorky and Zubov streets. The sculpture on a granite pedestal depicts the prince receiving the tsar's charter granting him lands in the Nizhny Novgorod Volga Region: he wears a tall hat, and his fur coat falls to the floor ^[11]. The height of the figure is given differently — about four meters ^[22] and five meters ^[11].

No portraits of the prince have survived, and the author took as his basis the prince's figure from the "Millennium of Russia" monument in Veliky Novgorod ^[22].

The sculpture's author is Vladimir Porfiryevich Nagornov, Honored Artist of the Russian Federation and laureate of the State Prize of the Chuvash Republic. This master's works include the monument "Mother-Protectress," one of the symbols of the Chuvash Republic, as well as monuments to the ophthalmologist Svyatoslav Fyodorov in Cheboksary and to the educator Ivan Yakovlev in Ulyanovsk ^[11][22].

The area in front of the monument has been paved with tiles and planted with flowers, which local schoolchildren tend; visitors to the settlement and newlyweds like to have their photographs taken here ^[22].

Vorotynets Procession of the Cross

Every year on August 29, the day of the parish patronal feast, a procession of the cross with the icon of the Image of the Savior Not Made by Hands passes through the streets of Vorotynets. During the festive procession, molebens and litiyas are served at the monument to Prince Vorotynsky, at the old cemetery, at the chapel on the central square, at the Holy Well, and on the hospital grounds.

To conclude the procession, bread from the new harvest is blessed on the church porch — in folk tradition this day is called the third Savior Feast, the Bread Savior (Khlebny Spas). Fresh, appetizingly fragrant rolls are handed out to all the walkers who have covered more than five kilometers.

District Day and festivals

On the third Saturday of September, Vorotynets holds the District Day celebration and the agricultural fair "Hospitable Vorotynets" ^[33]. Its program is vivid, rich, and festive, yet at the same time cozy and homelike: the people of Vorotynets show their love and respect for the history and traditions of their native land and the unbreakable bond between generations.

Agricultural enterprises, farms, owners of private household plots, schools, and private entrepreneurs from Vorotynsky and neighboring districts offer buyers a huge selection of goods: vegetables, fruit, seedlings, home preserves, meat, dairy, and fish products, compound feed, fertilizers, domestic animals and poultry, and souvenirs. Street cafés are open, where visitors can have a bite of shashlik and baked goods and drink hot tea and coffee ^[33]. On the central square there is a children's amusement park, and the district museum and the school's excursion bureau run tours of the district center.

The day is timed to coincide with the presentation of letters of gratitude from the Government and the Legislative Assembly of Nizhny Novgorod Region to residents, as well as the awarding of the "Honorary Citizen of Vorotynsky District" badge and honorary pennants. Throughout the day, the "Volga Autumn" competitions in mini-football, hockey, swimming, volleyball, and basketball are held at the Volga sports and fitness complex ^[33], with teams from Vorotynsky and other districts of the Region, from Chuvashia, and from Mari El.

Creative ensembles from cultural institutions present the concert program "Our Vorotynsky District Is Rich in Talent," and performances by guests have become a tradition. The festivities continue with an evening show on the central square, and the celebration ends with the "Autumn Starfall" fireworks. The motto of the celebration is "My Love and My Destiny Is the Vorotynsky Land" ^[33].

On September 15, 2026, the sixth "Interethnic Round Dance of Traditions" festival was held here in honor of District Day, bringing together representatives of eight municipalities — the Vorotynsky, Spassky, and Sergachsky districts, Lyskovo, Lukoyanov, Bolshoe Murashkino, Dalnee Konstantinovo, and Pilna. It was opened by Vorotynets's "Lyubava" ensemble with the composition "Protect the Shores of Russia" and the "Impuls" dance group, and at the fair the district treated guests to Chuvash dishes: shirtan, a meat dish resembling sausage; khuplu pie with potatoes and meat; cheesecakes with farmer's cheese and onion; and Chuvash cheese chykyt ^[9].

The second major holiday is the interregional festival of Chuvash culture "Pitrav Pukhkhi," the "Peter's Day Festivities." It grew out of the village day in the settlement of Lysaya Gora, where Chuvash people have lived since time immemorial, and became a district-wide event; the 16th festival took place on July 11, 2026, at the district House of Culture at 40 Zubova Street, with sixteen performing groups and thirteen masters of decorative and applied arts from Vorotynets, Arzamas, Knyaginino, Gagino, Sarov, Dzerzhinsk, Chuvashia, and Mari El ^[10].

We are locals, from the Chuvash diaspora, but our group is international — there are Russians too. In general, a great many nationalities live in the Vorotynsky District

What the Settlement Lives On

The district remains agrarian: grain, milk, meat. The farms are scattered across the villages around Vorotynets, and for them the settlement is the office, the market, and the road ^[13].

For many years the main budget-generating enterprise in the district was the Chugunovsky distillery in the settlement of Yuzhny — one of the oldest enterprises in Russia's spirits industry, founded in 1913. It produced "Extra" and "Lux" grade spirit from grain grown mostly in Nizhny Novgorod fields ^[14].

To a visitor, Vorotynets is known above all for its fish market at 9 Kazanskoye Highway, next to the bus station: the Region's tourism portal directly calls Volga fish the settlement's main attraction, and the vendors insist that any fish will survive even a long journey. Nearby are the café "Knyazhskaya Votchina" at 8 Sovetskaya Square and "Solnyshko" at 2 Kazanskoye Highway; a daily bus between Nizhny Novgorod and Cheboksary passes through the settlement ^[7].

The history of the area is on display at the local history museum at 2 Sovetskaya Square: archaeology, photographs of the former district town, paintings by local artists ^[7]. Its director, Aleksandr Dyuzhakov, is also the author of the idea for the district's coat of arms ^[3] and was at various times one of the editors of the district newspaper ^[12]. Sports in the settlement center on the "Volga" fitness and recreation complex ^[15].

In the spring of 2022, residents of Ladeynov Street — which had been built up only about ten years earlier — complained of a smell. On the neighboring field, where an open ditch had for centuries carried runoff away from the settlement, an asphalt plant had gone up; the ditch had been dug up during construction, and the sewage had spread across the field a couple of hundred meters from the cemetery, while the Chugunka River, a left tributary of the Sura ^[32], which carries its water to the Volga, began to bloom with algae. The administration had sold the 6.2-hectare plot for 170,000 rubles as agricultural land ^[15]. In May 2023, the district administration reported that residents' complaints were being reviewed by Rosprirodnadzor and Rospotrebnadzor, and that the Vorotynsky District prosecutor's office had filed a lawsuit in the Sormovsky District Court of Nizhny Novgorod seeking to ban the use of the plot for purposes other than its designated one and to restore the land ^[16].

I think that in Vorotynets the modern landscaping has fit very well into the historical context of the settlement

Around the settlement

Vorotynets is the gateway to the surrounding area, which is what people come here for. Vasilsursk, founded in 1523, is on the list of Russia's historic towns; Ivan Shishkin (1861) and Isaak Levitan (1887) came here to work, Maxim Gorky was a guest, and before the town was founded, the site was the residence of the Mari rulers — the town of Tsepel — and Mari gorodishches (fortified settlements) with sacred groves have survived in the surrounding area ^[4][7]. It is reached by ferry from Lysaya Gora ^[7].

Bykovka is the ancestral seat of the Demidovs, with a family necropolis, two 19th-century churches, and the fame of being the lilac capital of the Region: at the end of May the "Demidov Lilac" festival is held there, and since 2006 the "Demidov Local History Readings" have been held in memory of Nikolay Aleksandrovich Demidov (1859–1891), author of the "Historical Sketch of the Vasilsursk Uyezd of the Nizhny Novgorod Governorate" (1884) ^[4][7].

In the settlement of Krasnaya Gorka stands the ruined estate of the Obolensky family: horses were bred there, fruit trees grew, and its owner was the first in these parts to have a car ^[7]. In the selo of Somovka, on September 23, 2014, the first monument to a catfish in Russia and the second in the world was unveiled — local fishermen caught fish weighing up to 74 kilograms in the Volga; the idea was supported by the sculptor Vladimir Sidorov, author of the Goat on Bolshaya Pokrovskaya in Nizhny Novgorod, and the fish itself was carved from wood ^[4]. Routes around the area are collected in the article The Silver Ring of the Vorotynsky Land.

The way to the settlement is long, the bus station hums: They speak Chuvash, Mari, and Russian

Sources

1. nn.aif.ru — "AiF — Nizhny Novgorod," interview with Alexander Dyuzhakov, director of the Vorotynets District Local History Museum, September 17, 2020 — Vorotynets (archive)
2. web.archive.org — A. M. Dyuzhakov, A. V. Alexandrov, local history essay based on documents from RGADA, TsANO, and RGIA, on the Vorotynsky District portal, copy in the web archive — The Village of Vorotynets and Its Spasskaya Church (archive)
3. vorotynets.nobl.ru — Portal of the local government bodies of the Vorotynsky municipal okrug: history of the okrug and rationale for the coat of arms symbolism — About the Okrug
4. ngounb.ru — Lenin Nizhny Novgorod State Regional Universal Scientific Library, project "Facets of Nizhny Novgorod Culture" — Vorotynsky District (archive)
5. rosstat.gov.ru — Rosstat, results of the 2020 All-Russian Population Census, volume 1, "Population Size and Distribution" (archive)
6. 52.rosstat.gov.ru — Nizhegorodstat, estimate of the permanent population by municipal and urban okrugs as of January 1, 2025 — Population (archive)
7. nn-tourist.ru — Tourist portal of Nizhny Novgorod Region (Nizhny Novgorod Region Hospitality Agency, autonomous nonprofit organization) — Vorotynets (archive)
8. garant.ru — GARANT.RU, review of regional legislation
9. nobl.ru — Government of Nizhny Novgorod Region, September 15, 2026 — The Sixth "Interethnic Round Dance of Traditions" Festival Held in Vorotynets
10. nobl.ru — Government of Nizhny Novgorod Region, July 7, 2026 — The Traditional Chuvash Culture Festival "Pitrav Pukhkhi" to Be Held in Vorotynsky Okrug
11. autotravel-nn.ru — "Sights of Nizhny Novgorod Region": description of the monument, address and coordinates, biography of the prince — Monument to Prince Vorotynsky (archive)
12. vorotynskayagazeta.ru — Official website of the print publication of Vorotynsky municipal okrug — "Vorotynskaya Gazeta" — About Us
13. web.archive.org — Agricultural Department of the Vorotynsky District administration, list of farms, copy in the web archive — Agricultural Enterprises of the District (archive)
14. web.archive.org — Website of OAO "Chugunovsky Distillery" (settlement of Yuzhny, Vorotynsky District), copy in the web archive — Chugunovsky Distillery: About the Plant (archive)
15. NN.RU — report from Vorotynets, June 6, 2022 — Strangling Vorotynets: How a Major Nizhny Novgorod Businessman Made Life Unbearable in an Ancient Settlement in a Few Months (archive)
16. GIPERNN — GiperNN, May 31, 2023 — Illegally Built Asphalt Plant in Vorotynets Could Be Closed Through the Courts (archive)
17. nobl.ru — Government of Nizhny Novgorod Region, municipality page: address, leadership, coat of arms — Vorotynsky Municipal Okrug (archive)
18. zem-vorot.blogspot.com — "Zemlya Vorotynskaya," local history blog of the Vorotynets Central Library, November 1, 2014 — Seltso, Selo, Settlement (archive)
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20. zem-vorot.blogspot.com — "Zemlya Vorotynskaya," local history blog of the Vorotynets Central Library, June 23, 2014 — The Main Street of Vorotynets (archive)
21. zem-vorot.blogspot.com — "Zemlya Vorotynskaya," local history blog of the Vorotynets Central Library, October 15, 2013 — The Most Beautiful House (archive)
22. zem-vorot.blogspot.com — "Zemlya Vorotynskaya," local history blog of the Vorotynets Central Library, October 20, 2014 — The Calling Card of Vorotynets (archive)
23. zem-vorot.blogspot.com — "Zemlya Vorotynskaya," local history blog of the Vorotynets Central Library, February 15, 2016 — A Hero Fell, Fell in Afghanistan... (archive)
24. zem-vorot.blogspot.com — "Zemlya Vorotynskaya," local history blog of the Vorotynets Central Library, August 21, 2019 — On the 90th Anniversary of the Founding of Vorotynsky District (archive)
25. zem-vorot.blogspot.com — "Zemlya Vorotynskaya," local history blog of the Vorotynets Central Library, poems by Lidia Pavlovna Vasina, October 24, 2013 — The Corner Dearest to Every Heart (archive)
26. nn-obl.ru — Local history portal "Nizhny Novgorod and Nizhny Novgorod Region," essay on the course of the uprising in the governorate — The Uprising of Yemelyan Pugachev in the Nizhny Novgorod Territory (archive)
27. web.archive.org — A. A. Davydova (NIP "Etnos," Nizhny Novgorod) and M. A. Yurishchev, local history study based on RGADA documents, published March 20, 2008 on the unofficial Vorotynets website… (archive)
28. web.archive.org — Official portal of the local government body of Vorotynsky District, "General Information" section, copy in the web archive — History of the Territory (archive)
29. vorot-litmap.jimdo.com — Municipal budgetary cultural institution "Intersettlement Centralized Library System" of Vorotynsky District, local history project of the Vorotynets Central Library, copy in the web archive
30. web.archive.org — "Literary Map of Vorotynsky District," MBUK MTsBS of Vorotynsky District: essay on the main street of the settlement and its houses, copy in the web archive — A. M. Gorky Street (archive)
31. eco-vorotpage.jimdo.com — "Vorotynets" ecological page of the Vorotynets Central Library (MBUK MTsBS of Vorotynsky District), copy in the web archive — Through the Book to Nature
32. web.archive.org — "Vorotynets" ecological page, MBUK MTsBS of Vorotynsky District, "Rivers of the District" section, copy in the web archive — The Chugunka River (archive)
33. Vremya N — "Vremya N" news agency, September 19, 2011, based on a report from the Vorotynsky District administration: program of the District Day celebration