Bogorodsky District is located in the central part of Nizhny Novgorod Region. The district borders the city of Dzerzhinsk, Volodarsky District, Pavlovsky District, Sosnovskiy District, Dalnekonstantinovsky District, and Kstovsky District Districts, as well as Nizhny Novgorod.
The administrative center of the district is Bogorodsk.
History of the district's development
The ancient history of Bogorodsky District has long attracted the attention of historians and local historians. One of the most important questions in this history concerns the district's original settlement.
In this connection, the question of Paleolithic-era humans on the territory of our district — a period that began 500,000 years ago — has always been studied. Unfortunately, no monuments left by people of that period have yet been found in our territory. However, discoveries of mammoth remains on the banks of the Oka (near the selo of Doskino, the villages of Olgino and Khabarskoe) and the Kudma River (near the villages of Komarovo and Burtsevo), as well as in a quarry near the village of Ubezhitsy, allow us to assert that our locality was not a lifeless wilderness during that epoch.
The Paleolithic was followed by the Neolithic, during which people learned to grind, drill, and saw stone. Crude clay pottery appeared for the first time. People of the Neolithic chose the banks of rivers and lakes as sites for their settlements. It has been established that the basin of the Oka and the valley of the Kudma River were inhabited 4,000–4,500 years ago by tribes that left behind an interesting but insufficiently studied culture. Ancient settlements of that era were discovered near the villages of Afanasyevo, Ushakovo, and Lukino. At the sites of these monuments, stone drilled axes, stone spears, arrowheads, scrapers, and fragments of ancient clay pottery were found.
The discovery of iron played an important, revolutionary role in the development of primitive society on the territory of Bogorodsky District. Bog iron ore lay at shallow depths or on the very surface in a number of places in the district, and served as a valuable material for making iron axes and ploughshares for farmers.
Data from linguistics and archaeology show that in the Iron Age, Mordva tribes lived on the territory of the district. This is evidenced by the names of rivers and populated places. For example, the name of the Kudma River derives from the Mordva word "kudo," meaning "river," while the village of Kileley takes its name from "kile" (birch) and "ley" (ravine). The district contains authenticated ancient Mordva monuments near Doskino (on Krasnaya Gora hill), Venets, Podvyazye, and Podyablonnoye. One of the most interesting ancient Mordva monuments is located near Khvoshchyovka on a high promontory called Kolenikha. When this gorodishche (a fortified ancient settlement) was discovered, bones of domestic and wild animals, fragments of ancient clay pottery, and various crafted objects were found. The Bogorodsk History Museum holds an old painting by an unknown artist depicting this hill.
In the village of Inyutino, ancient Mordva burial grounds were discovered in which ornaments, copper bracelets, plaques, rings, and beads were preserved on the skeletons.
The first Russian settlements in the district appeared approximately one thousand years ago, in the 9th–10th centuries. Initially they were sparse and situated on riverbanks at the water's edge. Traces of ancient Russian settlements have been found on a landslide of the Doskino mound in the backwater, in the selo of Podvyazye some 50–60 meters from the school building, three kilometers east of the village of Olenino on the high right bank of the Oka. Russians settled in the environs of Oranki very early. One of the hills at the site of present-day Oranki was called Slovenskaya (i.e., Slavic) Mountain, which was washed by the Rusa (i.e., Russian) River.
Near Slovenskaya Mountain lay the Oranskoye field, after which the selo of Oranki took its name. "Oranskoye field" means ploughed field. In Russian byliny (epic songs) and legends, a ploughman is sometimes called an oratay or oratayushka.
New settlers were drawn to the territory of our district by its generous and rich lands — and so the entire right bank of the Oka up to the Kudma was settled from the mid-14th century fairly quickly and exclusively by Russians. Even the names of settlements here, according to written records of the 15th and 16th centuries, derive from Russian words. It was chiefly peasant farmers, pushed out of their former places by boyars and princes, who came here first. Settling in this land, they built dwellings, established households and crops, engaged in fishing, and developed the forests and beekeeping grounds, and so on.
Later records (written documents) of the 16th–17th centuries show that by the beginning of the 17th century, 92 peasant settlements existed in this part of the district, the greater part of which retained their original names into the early 20th century. The largest share of major settlements lay along the post road from Murom to Nizhny Novgorod. These were Bogorodskoye, Pavlovo, Vorsma, Belavino, and others, which by the early 17th century already had commercial and trading significance and counted several households each.
Thus, the "Tax Register of Palace Seloes and Villages of Nizhny Novgorod Uyezd, 1608" states: "In the selo of Bogorodskoye, of non-farming peasants in residence, 11 households, tribute and duties from them: one ruble, 5 altyn, 3 dengi." Bogorodskoye grew rapidly, and during the period when the Minins owned it, it was already "…a very large-courtyard selo, spread across four separate homestead clusters on the sides of a deep pond fed by cold springs. Above the pond and dam, in the center of the selo, rose a hewn tent-roofed (unheated) church and a cabin-style (heated) church, near which stood 9 households of their clergy and 18 small cells of the poor. Nearby stood the yard of the steward Pyotr Grigoryev and 3 'servants' yards.' In 92 peasant households and 25 bobyl (landless peasant) households lived 161 men. Among them were a cooper and a button-maker, a blacksmith and a silversmith, as well as a skomorokh (itinerant entertainer) named Onkudinko Ivanov. In all, the selo counted 153 inhabited households in 1621."
By the mid-17th century, when the selo was the estate of Prince Yakov Kudenetovich Cherkassky, the crafts practiced by peasants there were expanding. At that time Bogorodskoye had 7 households of "potters," 2 of "silversmiths," 3 of "blacksmiths," just one "tanner's" household and 1 "carpenter's" household. The owners of 5 households were engaged in making wort and malt. Among the households' residents were a "cap-maker," "tailor-craftsmen," a "cobbler," and a "wool-carder."
The growth of artisan and craft activity among the peasants spurred the development of trade.
People from a wide area of the district, as well as traders from other places, came to the markets in Bogorodskoye, bringing grain, livestock, and poultry for sale; hunters from beyond the Kudma brought furs, honey, and game; fish arrived from the Oka. Bogorodskoye craftsmen offered their own goods and purchased wares brought by merchants from other places. With the expansion of trade, a second fair — also lasting three days and called "Semik" — arose in our selo alongside the autumn three-day fair that had long existed.
All of this created favorable conditions for the development and growth of the selo. During the census of 1678, when Mikhail Yakovlevich Cherkassky was the owner of Bogorodskoye, it recorded 228 peasant households (862 persons) and 385 bobyl households (1,085 persons). As is evident, in the 1670s, the selo of Bogorodskoye was one of the largest settlements in the Beryozopolsky Stan of Nizhny Novgorod Uyezd.
In 1712, the selo passed into the ownership of M.Ya. Cherkassky's daughter, Princess Praskovya Mikhailovna, who in 1714 married Colonel Vasily Petrovich Sheremetev. The selo of Bogorodskoye passed to the latter as part of P.M. Cherkaskaya's dowry.
The 18th century entered the history of Russia as the time when the enserfment of peasants reached its furthest extremes.
A series of royal decrees granted landlords exclusive rights over their enserfed peasants. The decree of 1714 on equalizing the rights of pomeshchiki (estate-owning nobility) and votchinniki (hereditary landowners) to own land and peasants gave landlords the right to freely buy and sell peasants; the decree of 1760 permitted landlords to exile peasants to settlements.
There were further decrees as well — among them, from 1767, peasants were forbidden to file complaints against their landlords. Thus the peasant became the slave of the landlord.
Having become the owner of the selo of Bogorodskoye and five villages attached to it, Sheremetev acquired, in a comparatively short time and by various means, 16 settlements in the district from minor nobility, and by the time serfdom was abolished, this family owned one quarter of the district's population, or 5,000 "serf souls."
In the Sheremetev settlements, the quitrent system predominated at a rate of 20 silver rubles per tiaglo (a unit of household labor obligation) or 10 rubles per revision soul. In addition, peasants were obliged to perform three days of communal or collective labor for the landlord per year.
Given the low crop yields in the district, a serf peasant could not pay the landlord's quitrent through farming alone, nor feed his family. All of this compelled him to seek additional craft occupations. Therefore, in all settlements of the district, craft activity served as a supplement to peasant farming — with the exception of the selo of Bogorodskoye, where peasants began to live exclusively from crafts, abandoning farming altogether. On this matter, the "Economic Notes to the General Land Survey of 1796" states of the selo of Bogorodskoye: "The peasants are on quitrent, and for the most part occupy themselves with making various goods, and also dress sheepskins, and for this trade go to distant provinces and cities. The land throughout the entire allotment they give over to peasants of neighboring villages. And although some portion they work themselves, it is only by hired laborers. The women occupy themselves with needlework, spin flax and wool, weave linen and Russian broadcloth for themselves and for sale."
By the end of the 18th century, the population of the selo had reached 5,073 persons. Here we see the transformation of the formerly agricultural selo of Bogorodskoye into a significant craft center.
The landlords had a keen interest in the development of crafts, for many of them understood well that it allowed them to increase their quitrents and the exploitation of the peasants.
The Sheremetevs — the district's first landlords — understood this sooner and better than anyone else. Thanks to the development of craft occupations in their settlements, they were able to increase and collect quitrents from the peasants of just one selo, Bogorodskoye, amounting to several thousand rubles a year. Thus, according to the tax register for 1836, the total sum of quitrent and communal levies from permanently residing peasants and those "living away" amounted to 91,000 assignat rubles. By the early 19th century, Bogorodsky District had acquired the character of a craft district, in which leather crafts came to occupy first place in terms of the number of people employed and the value of goods produced.