Where did the Volga Cossacks come from?

According to the historian, one of the reasons caused appearance of Russian Cossacks at the beginning of the 16th century was disintegration of the Golden Horde.

“Desolation of former nomads camps created a wide, hundreds of kilometers, strip of no one’s land in the forest-steppes between the Moscow State and the fragments of the Horde (the Crimean, Kazan, Astrakhan khanates and the Nogai Horde). Neither Moscow voivodes nor the Horde khans ruled this land. People who later became the basis of the future Cossacks fled from feudal oppression to these relatively deserted areas”, he told.

In the first half of the 16th century, significant part of the Cossacks of the Field (The Field was the name for the steppe nomadic space at that time.) were the Crimean, Nogai, and Kazan people who broke away from their hordes. The terms “cossack”, “yesaul”, “ataman” themselves are Turkic in origin.

Since the 1550s, the stream of fugitives from the north began to flow to the Volga, and soon most of the Cossacks turned out to be natives of Russia. On the banks of the Don, Volga, Ural (Yaik), Terek and their tributaries, riverine, and not steppe, freemen society intensively develops.

“Russian” Cossacks very rarely mounted a horse. Eduard Dubman noted that in the first mounted battle with the nomads, they would have been defeated.

“Main means of transportation for them were riverboats, and key communication routes ran along rivers. Cossack stanitsas (villages) hid on river islands and inaccessible wooded headlands. Cossacks could not engage in agriculture because of constant threat of attacking by nomads. They fished, hunted, as well as raided nomads and robbed trade caravans, for surviving in those extreme conditions of the frontier”, he said.

In 1604, Ishterek, the biy of the Great Nogai Horde, wrote to Boris Godunov that the Cossacks were ravaging the Nogai people: “And it is impossible to protect yourself from the Cossacks by any custom, because there are many Cossacks. And they come through different channels”.

The first communities

The first Cossack communities consisted of only men. However, bachelor life gradually ceased to be obligatory for them, and since the 17th century families began to appear in Cossack communities.

“In pre-revolutionary literature, the Cossack of the 16th-17th centuries was depicted as an anarchic character striving for revelry, robbery and violence. But this is hardly true. Cossacks could not live without cooperation with representatives of the local administration, without receiving “bread, lead, potions” from Moscow.
Cossacks have been in public service almost from the very beginning, although covertly”, told us Eduard Dubman.

Already at the end of the 16th – beginning of the 17th centuries, Cossacks were divided into two groups. One group were free Cossacks (at least 8-10 thousand people), another group were chosen servitors (5-6 thousand people). In the second half of the 16th century, there was still no division into the Don, Volga and Yaik Cossacks. Connected by a network of drags, the Volga, Don and Yaik river systems within the steppe and forest-steppe became the cradle of the single Cossack community.

Only at the very end of the 16th century, when, by decision of the Moscow government, which concerned about clashes and robbing on the Volga, the fortress towns of Samara, Tsaritsyn and Saratov were constructed in its middle and lower reaches, in order to forcibly tear apart the Cossack community.

Its wings on the Don and the Yaik developed separately, and on the Volga, free Cossacks ceased to exist. But still for long, Cossacks from different stanitsas visited each other, and the Volga attracted loot seekers.

The town made of the constructor

The idea of constructing Russian fortresses on the Volga River between Kazan and Astrakhan appeared immediately after joining the region to the Russian state, when the Volga became a key trade route of the country.

The Great Volga Route had to be secured by building fortresses in the interfluve of the Volga, the Kama and the Belaya. This idea began to be realized in 1584-1585, after Fyodor Ioannovich ascended the Moscow throne in March.

Painting “Trading Among the Eastern Slavs”, artist Sergey Ivanov

How were fortresses built in the Moscow State? The construction proposal was developed in the Razryadny Prikaz. After its approval by the Boyar Duma or the sovereign, the service class people drew up a terrain plan and calculated the required amount of materials and funds, and experienced clerical “gorododelschiki” (town-builders) prepared the drawing and the estimate.

The final draft with proposals for the candidacy of the builder was sent back to the Boyar Duma. The draft decree with the basic requirements for the future town was approved there.

“And having estimated and described those places and all sorts of fortresses, and how many people were to live in that town, and how to arrange them, having described everything in detail, they immediately sent the description to the sovereign. And based on that, the sovereign would order the decree to be executed...” witnessed the contemporaries.

Prince Grigory Osipovich Zasekin was commissioned to build a fortress at the mouth of the Samara River and garrison it. Alatyr, where he served as voivode since 1583, was one of the key border points in the Volga region.

The preparatory work lasted a year or two. In the winter of 1585-1586, the decree and necessary funds for its execution were delivered to Alatyr. Zasekin’s expedition arrived to the mouth of Samara around the middle of May.

Prince Grigory and his assistant Fyodor Elizarovich Yelchaninov began to build the town in the place that was rather far from the Volga – on the right high bank of the Samara River, where it divided into two distributaries. From here, the garrison could successfully track movements of nomadic hordes in the Volga region, close the road to Cossacks from the Yaik to the Volga spaces and control the waters of the Volga.

“According to the hypothesis of the Samara local historian Yemelyan Filimonovich Guriyanov, in the middle of the 17th century, the Volga has made new watercourse for itself, its riverbed has shifted to the east, under the city walls. It was then that the foresight and accuracy of choosing the place for the fortress were fully revealed”, noted Eduard Dubman.

Early years of Samara

The Samara Fortress was a rectangle of 213 by 245 m in plan, its area hardly exceeded 5 ha. The methods of accelerated construction had already been mastered by Russian engineers. At first, the fortress was built using previously harvested forest, above the planned location along the river. Then it was disassembled into logs, the logs were marked and lowered down the river on strugs and other vessels to the right place, where people quickly built a new town out of them, as if out of the constructor. It took from two weeks to two months.

Inside the Kremlin, the estates for the voivode and other superiors, custody facilities, prison, siege yards, warehouses, granaries, etc., were built. Military people had to arrange their yards outside the fortress walls, in the suburbs. The town’s visual dominant was the cathedral church of the Most Holy and Life-Giving Trinity. It is no coincidence that Samara’s official foundation day is believed to be the Feast of the Trinity, which in 1586 fell on May 22, old style (June 1, new style).

Most of the fortress dwellers first were “godovalshchiki”, that is, military men sent for a year from other garrisons. There were 300-400 of them. The permanent military population of Samara, living here together with their families, appeared only by the early 1590s.

The first news of the growing fortress appeared at the end of the summer of 1586, and in early September the town already hosted ambassadors, streltsy and the retinue of the Crimean prince. At first, the Nogais protested against construction of a new town, but Prince Grigory Zasekin managed to convince the Nogai chiefs that it was built for their benefit. In the spring of 1587, Samara received recognition from the Urus-biy and Mirzas, and the Nogais began to serve Russia.

“The first Russian fortress towns of Samara and Ufa provided serious pressure on stubborn Nogai hordes. The fortresses seemed to hang over the summer nomads, not allowing the Horde to feel unpunished, and their garrisons guarded fords and stiles from nomads, preventing their long-distance campaigns over the Russian outskirts. Samara voivodes established themselves as generally recognized guarantors of security in the Middle Volga region”, stressed Eduard Dubman.

Since the construction of Samara, the free Cossacks have lost control over the Volga, which passed to the garrison of the Russian fortress. Part of Cossacks left the Middle Volga for the Don, the other went to the Yaik (Ural), where the town was founded, in which the Ural army grew. Since that time on, Cossacks could no longer arrange a community on the Volga, similar to the Don or Ural army.

The article has been prepared by the portal “Russian Cossacks”.