In the article "The End of the Peasant War of Stepan Razin and the Fate of the Atamans" we talked about the defeat of the grandiose uprising led by this Ataman and the brutal repressions that befell the inhabitants of the rebellious regions. But how effective were these repressions, literally bleeding many cities and villages? Did they guarantee the stability of the tsarist regime, the loyalty of the Cossack Don and the quiet existence of the landowners in the localities? And could the tsarist government, counting on the fear sown among the people, continue the previous policy of large-scale oppression and enslavement of its subjects?
The answer to this question is given by the uprising of the Don Cossacks under the leadership of Kondraty Bulavin, in which not "fathers", but "children" took part. The new leader of the rebels at the time of Razin's execution was 11 years old. Representatives of the new generation knew very well about the cruelty of the Moscow authorities and remembered numerous executions and tortures, but this in no way prevented them from rising again against the injustice of the new tsar - Peter I, the son of Alexei Mikhailovich.
Who is Kondraty Bulavin
It is believed that Kondraty Afanasyevich Bulavin was born around 1660 in Tryokhizbyansky town (now an urban-type settlement Tryokhizbenka, Luhansk region). The version that Kondraty was born on the day of Razin's execution is legendary and has a later origin.
But there is another version, based on the testimony of Semyon Kulbaki, who said during the investigation that “Bulavin is a Saltovets, from the Russian people”, that is, a native of the town of Saltov of the “Kharkov Slobodsky Cossack Regiment”.
One way or another, in the town of Trekhizbyansky Kondraty Bulavin really lived, here he got married (his first wife was Lyubov Provotorova, who bore him two children - a son and a daughter).
His father was a peasant who fled to the Don, probably from the Livensky district (the territory of the modern Oryol region) - information about this family is available in the documents of the Local and Discharge orders. Afanasy participated in some campaigns of Stepan Razin, and later even a legend appeared that he was the keeper of the mace of this chieftain, and "Bulavin" is not a surname, but a nickname. Over time, he became the village chieftain, and during the tragic events of April 1670, he was probably on the side of the elders and the "homely Cossacks" who captured Stepan Razin.
Thus, Kondraty Bulavin on the Don was a sedate and quite respected person and faithfully served the Moscow authorities: as a marching chieftain he participated in the wars against the Tatars, in 1689 he went to the Crimean campaign of Prince Vasily Golitsyn, in 1696 - to the Second Azov campaign of Peter I. In 1704, Bulavin was put at the head of the Cossack village in Bakhmut (a city in modern Donetsk region, in Soviet times it was called Artyomovskiy).
Bakhmut was considered a Don stanitsa, however, suburban Cossacks, Cossacks and a number of fugitive peasants from the central provinces of Russia also lived in it and in the surrounding farms. There were salt pans - a strategic enterprise at that time: duty-free production and sale of salt was traditionally considered a privilege and one of the main sources of income for the Don Army.
But since 1700, the Great Northern War was going on in the country, and Peter I decided to replenish the state budget by introducing a state monopoly on the sale of salt, iron, wax, flax, bread, tobacco and some other goods. However, his omnipotent favorite, Alexander Menshikov, achieved a decree (dated October 13, 1704), according to which the proceeds from the Bakhmut saltworks were transferred to the Izyum Slobod Cossack Regiment, commanded by Brigadier Fyodor Shidlovsky, a good friend of Danilych: still own them, Izyumsky regiment foreman and the Cossacks."
Appreciate the elegance of the combination: "justice has been restored", the profits from the salt works are returned to the Cossacks, however, not to the former owners, but to the new ones - but to the Cossacks! Not the Turks and not the Crimean Tatars. And the Don Cossacks or the suburban ones - who is there, in Moscow or in St. Petersburg under construction, will begin to figure it out.
Looking ahead, let us say that such “business connections” did not bring Shydlovsky to good use. In 1711, he, in turn, decided to please the "Serene One": he arbitrarily seized several villages that were in the possession of the Polish king, and ranked them among the adjacent estates of Menshikov. He violated the state border between Russia and the Commonwealth - no more, no less”! He was arrested and deprived of all ranks and possessions. But, you yourself understand: who would have allowed him, with such and such connections, to sit under arrest for a very long time? Shydlovsky was released, the rank of major general was returned, but the estates that had gone to the state were not returned: as they say, what fell is lost.
The beginning of the confrontation between Kondraty Bulavin and the authorities
But let's go back a few years. In pursuance of the tsar's decree, Shidlovsky seized the Bakhmut saltworks, burned the village of the indignant Donets, and at the same time robbed the local church - so as not to walk twice. Then he raised the price of salt.
The newly appointed chieftain of Bakhmut, Kondraty Bulavin, regarded such actions as a raider seizure and recaptured the saltworks.
Shidlovsky did not calm down and called the clerk Gorchakov to "describe the disputed Bakhmut lands." Bulavin arrested the clerk and sent him under escort to Voronezh. At the same time, he tried his best to look loyal to Moscow and tried to explain that he was not rebelling - in no case: he was restoring justice and hoping for Moscow's understanding.
In 1707, Colonel Yuri Vladimirovich Dolgorukov was sent to the Don, who not only had to "find out about taxes and offenses that were repaired before the former Izyumsky regiment, Colonel and brigadier Fyodor Shchidlovsky", but also to demand the surrender of all fugitive peasants. And this already violated the old unwritten law, according to which "there is no extradition from the Don."
In 1674, the ataman Semyon Buyanko urged the Don people to “go to the Volga, to steal,” and then the rebels were called “thieves”. The ataman wanted to "raise the Volga", to call the people "to the ax" - just three years after the execution of Stepan Razin! The Cossacks did not follow Buyanko, but when the Moscow authorities demanded to extradite him, they answered:
"There is no such law to give the Don Cossacks, and under the former sovereigns it did not happen and now it is impossible to give it up, and if you give it, Buyanko, then bailiffs will be sent from Moscow and their last Cossack brother."
And the government was forced to retreat: no one wanted a new war on the Don then.
But the Don governor Peter Ivanovich Bolshoy Khovansky wrote to the Ambassadorial order in 1675:
“If the Don is not fortified with many towns, and the Don Cossacks are not inflicted by slaves, how we to the great sovereign involuntarily serve, there will be no truth from them in the future."
Pay attention: the prince who wants to make the Don Cossacks "slaves" considers himself a slave of the tsar, but sees nothing shameful in this.
At the beginning of the 18th century, the situation changed not for the better for the Don people, and in Moscow they were ready to recognize as Cossacks only those who came to the Don from the “internal” regions of Russia before 1695.
However, the Cossack foremen charged the fugitives for concealment, and bribes received from them constituted a considerable part of their income. And therefore the stewards Pushkin and Kologrivov, sent to the Don in 1703 to enumerate the fugitives, did not achieve much success.
Trying to curry favor, Dolgorukov acted in the most cruel way. His methods were preserved in the description of Bulavin (which was not questioned by either contemporaries or historians):
“The prince and the foremen, being in the towns, burned many villages with fire and beat many old-time Cossacks with a whip, cut their lips and noses, took their wives and girls on the bed forcibly and repaired all kinds of curses over them, and hanged our babies' children by the trees by their legs, chapels (probably the Old Believers) burned everything out."
So, truly, make … the "alternatively gifted" God to pray - he will break his forehead. And, okay, just myself. High-ranking corrupt officials, grabbers, blockheads and "Derzhimordy" diligently and purposefully pushed the Don Cossacks, completely loyal to Moscow, to revolt.
After all, Kondraty Bulavin was a man of a completely different kind from Razin. “Stenka” is a super-passionate leader of the “rebellious age”, subordinating to his will and his charm all those who happened to be near him. Standing in front of him, people felt an irresistible desire to kneel down, while Bulavin was just "the first among equals."
Razin in other circumstances could have become the new Yermak, or he could have become the second violent archpriest Avvakum. In other countries and at other times, he would have had a chance to repeat the exploits of Chrolf the Pedestrian, who "squeezed" from Charles III Upper Normandy, Brittany, Caen and Er, the hero of the Reconquista Sid Campeador, Hernan Cortes, Jan Zizka, and even Napoleon Bonaparte. Bulavin found himself in the role of the leader of the new rebellion quite by accident, leading a protest against obvious injustice. After the beginning of active hostilities, when Prince Yu. Dolgoruky and the military ataman Lukyan Maksimov were killed, and Bulavin occupied Cherkassk and was elected there as a new military ataman, he tried to enter into negotiations with Moscow, asking only for a return to the previous order. Having received no answer, he proclaimed the goals of the "liberation war": "To destroy those who do lies and live as a unanimous Cossack brotherhood" (it was assumed that there are "good" bosses and boyars, and even Tsar Peter, having figured it out, "does not order to destroy the Don towns and kill the Cossacks "). A folk song has survived, which emphasizes the "social" character of his performance:
I didn’t fiddle around, good fellow, I did not rob on a dark night, And with my nakedness I am now
I walked along the steppes, but I walked, Yes, he smashed the boyars, the king's governor.
And for this, here are the honest people
Only one thing will say thank you to me.
That is, not the robber ataman Kondraty Bulavin, but the people's defender.
Another song speaks of the hero's courage and prowess:
On Aydar on the river, in Shulgin town
Our daring Bulavin appeared by chance, Bulavin is not a simpleton, he is a dashing Don Cossack, A brave warrior and Donetsk, he is a father to everyone.
He went to Turchin, beat many infidels.
Ignat Nekrasov and Semyon Drany were no less passionate than Bulavin, but Kondraty was more educated, smarter and "more flexible", and therefore it was he who went down in history as the famous "thieves' Don chieftain", becoming, in some way, the heir of Stepan Razin. SM Solovyov even called him "the new Razin", GV Plekhanov - "the titan of the people's revolutionary struggle." And historians will speak of Bulavin's uprising as the "Third Peasant War."
Battle campaign of autumn 1707
But back to Yuri Dolgorukov: the self-confident prince then divided his detachment into four groups. The first operated from Cherkassk to Panshin, the second - along Khopr, the third - along Buzuluk and Medveditsa. For himself, Dolgorukov chose the area of the Seversky Donets. In total, 3,000 fugitive peasants were "found" (about the same number managed to escape), and many "old-time Cossacks" were declared as such. This already, as they say, “did not fit into any gate” and angered everyone to the extreme. It was then that Kondraty "had enough" Yuri Dolgorukov.
In early October 1707, the ataman of the Bakhmut town Bulavin gathered the Cossack elders in Orekhovy Buerak for the "Army Council, General for All Rivers", which decided to engage in battle with the punishers of Prince Dolgorukov.
Late in the evening on October 9, 1707, in the town of Shulgin (now the village of Shulginka in the Starobelsk district of the Luhansk region), Dolgorukov's dragoons and Cossacks were massacred during a sudden dashing attack, and Bulavin personally cut off the prince's head:
On Aydar on the river, in Shulgin town
Our daring Bulavin appeared by chance.
Now do you understand what events the above-quoted folk song is hinting at?
According to another version, Kondraty "grabbed" the prince and his subordinates while crossing the Aydar River.
This is how the well-known phraseological unit appeared, which is now more often pronounced as "enough kondrashka."
Other tsarist detachments were almost completely exterminated, copying the "fugitive lackeys" along the Don, Khopr, Medveditsa and Buzuluk.
Military foremen I. Kvasha, V. Ivanov, F. Safonov, village chieftains F. Dmitriev and P. Nikiforov were killed for helping punitive troops.
However, Cherkassk, Zakotny town, Osinova Luka, Stary Aydar, Koban town and Krasnyanskaya stanitsa did not support this performance. A small circle of Cossack elders in Cherkassk instructed the military chieftain Lukyan Maksimov to "torture" the Bulavinians - in order to avoid the invasion of the Don by new regular units of Russian troops. The Kalmyk prince Batyr also took part in the campaign against the rebels.
On October 18, 1707, Bulavin was defeated on the Aydar River near the Zakotnensky town, ten esauls and centurions were hanged from trees by their feet, 130 Cossacks were “cut off”, many were sent “to other Ukrainian cities”.
After that, a report was sent to Moscow that “the theft of Kondrat Bulavin had been eradicated and it had become a matter of peace in all Cossack townships”.
In response, the government sent the Don foremen 10,000 rubles, and Prince Batyr - 200.
But Kondraty Bulavin was not killed or taken prisoner. At the end of November 1707, with 13 Cossacks loyal to him, he reached the Zaporozhye Sich. On December 20, on his initiative, a Rada was convened, at which Bulavin asked the Sichs to join "the indignation of the revolt in the Great Russian cities." At the same time, the koshevoy ataman Taras Finenko read out the tsar's letter, in which Peter I demanded to hand over the "Don rebel".
The Zaporozhian Cossacks replied to the Tsar that in their army "this never happened, so that such people, rebels or robbers, would be betrayed." What other response could you expect from the robbers and pirates?
But the atamans of the Cossacks at that time were interested in good relations with the Russian authorities, and Finenko persuaded everyone to postpone the decision on helping the Don until spring - "when the roads dry up."
Bulavin and his supporters did not wait for spring, and in February 1708 organized a new Rada, which Finenko "retired", but nevertheless did not dare to enter into confrontation with Russia, limiting herself to allowing the Cossacks to go to the Don, who themselves wish it …
Return to Don
In March 1708, Kondraty Bulavin organized a new Cossack Circle in the Pristanskiy town on Khopr. Among others, Colonels Leonty Khokhlach, Ignat Nekrasov, Nikita Goliy and the ataman of the Old Aidar town Semyon Drany came to him - it was his opponents who were most afraid of others. It was decided to go to Cherkassk in order to interrupt the "bad elders" who "sold the river".
Already on April 8, Semyon Drany captured the Lugansk town without a fight. And the military ataman Lukyan Maksimov, meanwhile, gathered a detachment of grassroots Cossacks, to which the Kalmyks joined, and, joining up with the detachment of the Azov colonel Vasilyev, went to meet the rebels - to the Liskovatka River. Here on April 9, 1708, a battle took place near the city of Panshin, during which many of Maximov's Cossacks went over to the side of Bulavin. The rest fled, leaving 4 guns, a wagon train and a military treasury in the amount of 8 thousand rubles.
On April 26, 1708, Bulavin approached Cherkassk. It was a fairly strong fortress, located on an island formed by the Don River, Protoka and Tankin Erik, and a ditch was dug on the fourth side. There were over 40 cannons on its walls.
However, the chieftains of five of the six villages of Cherkasy Island took the side of the rebels, the city was surrendered. At the Army Circle on May 6, it was decided to execute Ataman Maksimov and four foremen, their supporters were “put into the water” (Ludwig Fabricius describes this execution as follows: “they tied a shirt over their heads, poured sand there and threw it into the water like that”).
Kondraty Bulavin was elected the new military chieftain. One of his first orders were orders to confiscate the church treasury and reduce the price of bread.
Bulavin also tried to enter into negotiations with Moscow, asking that "everything be as before." If the authorities entered into negotiations with him, this would probably be the end of it: the new military chieftain would lead the Cossacks against the Tatars and Turks, send the "stanitsa" to the Ambassadorial Prikaz, asked to issue more lead and gunpowder to the Don, wrote replies to the demand issuing fugitives - everything is as usual. But it was decided to correct the greed and stupidity of government officials with the cruelty of the military. The authorities responded to Don's letter with the formation of an invasion army, which was led by the younger brother of Yuri Dolgorukov, who was killed by Bulavin, Vasily. The order, given to Dolgorukov personally by Peter I on April 12, 1708, read:
"To walk around those Cossack towns and villages that will stick to theft, and burn them without a trace, and chop people, and breeders - on wheels and stakes, for this saryn (rabble), except for obvious cruelty, cannot be quiet."
And without this order on the Don it was clear to everyone by what methods this prince would act. Therefore, already at the end of May 1708, Bulavin, under pain of death, spoke about bringing guilt to Peter I.
Sometimes we have to read that Bulavin was an "accomplice" of Hetman Mazepa, who had long thought of betraying. Even Pushkin writes about this in the poem "Poltava":
Poison is secretly sown everywhere
His sent servants:
There are Cossack circles on the Don
He and Bulavin are stirring up.
However, we remember that the Zaporozhye atamans abandoned the war with Moscow, while Mazepa was still completely loyal to Peter I, moreover, he then allocated two Cossack regiments to help Dolgoruky.
Mazepa's betrayal was described in the article "Russian campaign" by Charles XII, recall that the hetman made the final decision to go over to the side of the Swedish king only in October 1708, having learned about the movement of his army to Ukraine, this decision was very difficult for him, and regretted he was about him long before Poltava.
Preparing for war, Bulavin, like many of his predecessors, sent out "lovely letters" in which he wrote:
"A son for a father, a brother for a brother, for each other, and die for one thing … and who, a bad man and a prince and boyars and a profit-maker and a German, would not be silent for their evil deed."
Don Cossack area at the beginning of the 18th century
The situation of the rebels was unenviable. Even during the reign of Tsar Boris Godunov, the construction of fortresses began, covering the lands of the Don Army from all sides. Gradually, from Voronezh to Astrakhan, a system of fortress cities appeared, dividing the territory of the Don Army and the Yaitsky (Ural) Army. And the fortresses built from Bryansk and Belgorod to the upper reaches of the Medveditsa River made it possible to control the communication of the Don with the Zaporozhye Sich.
The last link in this chain appeared in 1696 - it was the Russian fortress of Azov, for which the Cossacks themselves fought the Ottomans for 15 years (from 1637 to 1641). Its importance was so high that in 1702 the Cossacks were forbidden to fish from this fortress to the mouth of the Northern Donets, as well as “on the Azov Sea and along the rivers behind it”. The possible consequences of the thoughtless implementation of this decree were clear even to government officials, who quietly worked it out: the severity and cruelty of Russian laws was once again compensated by the non-binding nature of their implementation.
In February 1706, another tsarist decree was issued: the Cossacks were forbidden to occupy "empty" lands in the upper reaches of the Don: state peasants began to settle here. Also, plots of this land began to be rented by Russian landowners, who brought their serfs.
Now in the north of the Don Cossack area were the Russian troops of the steward I. Telyashov and the lieutenant colonel V. Rykman. In the east, near the Volga, was the corps of Prince P. I. The Kalmyk detachment of Khan Ayuki joined his troops. The mouth of the Don was locked by the fortress of Azov with a strong garrison commanded by I. A. Tolstoy, brother-in-law of Tsar Fyodor Alekseevich (elder brother of Peter I), great-great-great-grandfather of F. I. Tyutchev. The twenty thousandth army of Vasily Vladimirovich Dolgorukov was advancing from the west.
On the way to Dolgoruky's army, 400 dragoons from Voronezh and the suburban Cossacks of the Akhtyrsky and Sumy regiments, led by the Izyum colonel Shidlovsky, already familiar to us, also joined. Thus, by the time hostilities began, the total number of Dolgorukov's troops alone reached 30-32 thousand people. In the army of the rebels there were 20 thousand.
