Early Period
Of all the problems surrounding the earliest period of Nizhny Novgorod's history, local historians and regional scholars have long been preoccupied with, perhaps, just one question — the time at which the city arose at the mouth of the Oka. The answer offered by the Old Russian chronicles seems obvious: 1221. Yet it immediately raises a further question: was the founding of "Novgorod at the mouth of the Oka" preceded by some urban settlement that appeared even earlier?
At first glance, Nizhny Novgorod has been luckier in history than many other cities of Vladimir-Suzdal Rus. Above all, chronicle sources have preserved a record of the laying of "Novgorod at the mouth of the Oka" in 1221 by Yuri Vsevolodovich. Thanks to that entry, the city's founding does not have to be dated by its first mention in the chronicles — which is exactly how things stand, for example, with Rostov, Murom, Suzdal, and Gorodets: the chronicle entry for the year 6729 (1221) names precisely the year, the place, and the founder. For cities of ancient Rus, such precision is still relatively rare. The "good fortune" continued thereafter: Nizhny Novgorod, founded considerably later than Rostov, Suzdal, and Murom, did not fall into decay over the centuries or sink into provincial obscurity; on the contrary, it became a major commercial and industrial center, the administrative capital of the Volga Region, and one of the largest and most beautiful cities in Russia.
In historical scholarship, Nizhny — "this royally situated city" — has been less fortunate than, say, its northern namesake Novgorod the Great. Fundamental historical studies of the history of "Novgorod at the mouth of the Oka," based on a comprehensive examination of all available written and archaeological sources, are lacking. Their absence is obviously not filled by the popular-science publication City of Gorky, issued to mark the city's 750th anniversary and long since morally obsolete (beginning with its title). The early period of Nizhny's history — from the city's founding (1221) to the Mongol-Tatar invasion (1237) — is inevitably treated briefly there, and in keeping with the book's aims it was reduced to a retelling of the first chronicle references to the city. Much the same approach — with greater or lesser detail — is taken to these events in general courses on Russian history. In N. M. Karamzin's History of the Russian State, the events of the earliest period of Nizhny Novgorod's existence occupy in total barely more than a page, while in S. M. Solovyov's History of Russia from the Earliest Times they fit into three pages. In essence, the authors of the Essays on the History of the USSR in the Feudal Period adopted the same approach to the early history of the city. The founding of Nizhny Novgorod is described there as follows: "Consolidating his position in the Volga Region and the Oka basin, Yuri Vsevolodovich in 1221 established the city of Nizhny Novgorod, whose founding was of great progressive significance for the history of the Mordva [?! — B.P.]"; this is followed by a list of years of military clashes between the princes of Vladimir-Suzdal Rus and the Mordva, who had been thus "blessed" with the construction of Nizhny. The same reports are cited just as briefly in the work of I. A. Kiryanov devoted to the ancient Russian fortresses of the Nizhny Novgorod region, and retold (in a somewhat fictionalized form) in various regional-studies publications of the 19th and 20th centuries. In specialized works devoted to various aspects of the history of Vladimir-Suzdal Rus, the references to Nizhny Novgorod for the period 1221–1237 were examined in the context of the problems that interested their respective authors. Thus, V. A. Kuchkin's attention is focused on the process by which Russian influence spread eastward from the Volga-Oka interfluve and new territories were settled; Russo-Mordva and Russo-Bulgarian relations as part of the foreign policy of the grand princes of Vladimir are analyzed by Yu. A. Limonov. But while the first of these works devotes one paragraph to the founding of Nizhny and the events that followed, the second does not even mention the emergence of a Russian city at the mouth of the Oka.
It thus turns out that the study of the early period of the history of Nizhny Novgorod suffers from the same deficiencies as the history of Gorodets. There is no comparative textological analysis of the chronicle records about the region for the second and third decades of the 13th century; consequently, the original core of those records has not been identified, nor has its development in subsequent chronicle compilations been traced — work that would make it possible to assess the reliability of the information conveyed. There is no analysis of the context of the chronicle records for this period; their "convoy" (the "literary environment" within an annual entry) has not been analyzed; the chroniclers' "silences" have not been identified. As a result, it is difficult to study the historical circumstances that led to the emergence of Nizhny Novgorod, to determine the status of the new settlement, and to identify the preconditions — both objective and subjective — that subsequently drove its rapid development.
Of all the problems surrounding the earliest period of Nizhny Novgorod's history, local historians and regional scholars have long been preoccupied with, perhaps, just one question — the time at which the city arose at the mouth of the Oka. The answer offered by the Old Russian chronicles seems obvious: 1221. Yet it immediately raises a further question: was the founding of "Novgorod at the mouth of the Oka" preceded by some urban settlement that appeared even earlier? And from there the questions arise one after another. Was this predecessor city (usually referred to in the scholarly literature as "Stary Gorodok," the Old Town) a Russian, Bulgarian, or Mordva settlement? Who founded this city, and under what circumstances? What evidence exists for the existence of "Stary Gorodok" before the beginning of the 13th century, and can this be confirmed by written and archaeological sources? And, finally, the most important question: how reliable are the chronicle accounts that allow us to regard 1221 as the year of Nizhny Novgorod's founding and Yuri Vsevolodovich as its founder?
Works defending the theory of a Forerunner of Nizhny Novgorod are not very numerous, nor are the critical responses to them. Yet a survey of the historiography of this question makes it possible not only to decide whether there are grounds for revising the traditional date of Nizhny Novgorod's founding, but also to draw interesting observations of a historiographical nature.