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Primary penetration of Russians to the area happened in the 9th century, in the 13th century there appeared the first Slav settlements there. The most ancient Russian settlement is the Sloboda (village of) Lampozhnya which was known as a trading centre along the «through-the-rocks» route to Siberia. In the 15th century there appeared another sloboda (village) which was destined to become the administrative centre of the future Mezensky District – the falcon breeders’ village of the Okladnokovs (later it was called the Okladnikov’s Sloboda).
Russian came to the lands which had been already made habitable by the local tribes, gradually developing the lands. The Mezen Pomors were the first to explore the seas and they went as far as the Arctic. As early as in the 15th century they found the route to Grumant (The Spitsbergen Archipelago) and to Novaya Zemlya. In the 16th century they went by sea to the Pechora and Ob Rivers. At the beginning of the 17th century Russians moved to the east of the Urals ‘to meet the un’. The Pomors from Mezen took an active part in the process. Many Mezen natives – industrialists, traders and state clerks, land explorers and the Tsar Service men - entered their named into the history of the North and Central Siberia exploration.
By the time the Okladnikov’s Sloboda had become the centre of the Mezen area which was well known as a trading area of Russian and Siberian peoples. That was the time of triumph for Mezen, for the Mezen Pomors. Mezen was known in Siberia, in Moscow and abroad. In the middle of the 17th century the Tsar Ivan Mikhailovich who cared much about the Arkhangelsk port development, forbade foreigners the entrance to the mouth of the Mezen River, and it was the start of the Okladnikov Sloboda’s decline.
The importance of many of the sea businesses lessened by the end of the century. The Pomors’ experience in going to the arctic seas, their ability to survive in severe northern conditions have been in demand in research ever since – every research expedition to the Arctic and sub-arctic areas, from the Great Northern Expedition of 1733 and on, has been arranged with the Pomors’ participating in them. To honour the achievements of the Pomor people from Mezen nineteen geographic places in Arctic were named after them.
Mezen went down in history as a place of exile as early as in the 17th century. The archpriest Avvakum (Petrov) was sentenced to exile by the tsar court, a political figure Vasily Golitsyn, a diplomat Artamon Matveyev and many others served their sentences there. Later the political exiles were famous revolutionaries Petr Moiseyenko, Vasily Shelgunov, Inessa Armand, Kliment Voroshilov, writers-to-be Aleksandr Popov (Serafimovich), Valery Yazvitsky, Ivan Popov and others. These people remain in the history of Mezen not only because they agitated people against the ruling power but because they brought culture and knowledge to the land, they cured and taught local villages.
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