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Settleing in the Pinega Land dates back into the dark past. On the Yavronga, the tributary of the Yula which runs into the Pinega, the archeologists have found a Mesolithic site of ancient people of the 9th - 7th centuries B.C. Later the Pinega Land was inhabited by the tribes that had come here from the south, from the Volga-Oka Rivers country, they were collectively named ‘Chud beloglazaya’ (White-Eyed Chud). It was not just a name or a nickname. There is some information that the Chud peoples had a rare natural peculiarity – their irises were white and melted into the eye whites. People used to say the Chud people were good hunters and shots, they killed squirrels into their eyes not to spoil the fur. Rumours of the fairy-tale richness in furs and fish of ‘night countries’ as the North was called in ancient times used to attract the Novrgorod industrious people.
It was not easy for the first Russian explorers to get to the northern parts. Dense forests, bogs, numerous rivers stood in their way, ‘the route is impassable for the precipices, snow and forest’, the ancient Nestor’s chronicles say. Nevertheless, since the 11th century the Novgorod people come to the Pinega Land. The opening up of new lands in the Pinega area had taken many decades, even centuries. Though we do not have exact information, but there are legends that the Chud tribes opposed them vehemently. Today the archeologists find arrow ends, spears, axes near the settlement of Pinega, the villages of Nemnyuga, Kevrola, Sura. It is considered that the Novgorod invaders had come from the mouth of the River Pinega but they had not reached its sources, as somewhere in the area of Viya and Pinezhka tributaries ‘Chud beloglazaya’ was living later, then the tribes assimilated with the Moscow settlers who had come to Pinega from the south.
In the 12th century (in 1137) the Ustav (Charter) of the Prince Svyatoslav Olgovich lists the Pinega settlements of Kevrol and Pinega as the Novgorod possessions. Thus, by the 12th century the River of Pinega, its mouth and middle parts, were administrated by the Great Novgorod and were populated by the Russians from Novgorod.
In the 15th century (1471) Novgorod ceded the Pinega Lands to Moscow. The Pinega Voevode (governor), though, did not surrender to the Moscow princes. The legend says that in the vicinity of the Uyezd (district) town of Kevrol there were several battles in which the Novgorod forces were defeated; as a result the Pinega Land became part of the Russian state. The population was Listed as ‘black peasantry’ and paid quitrent for the land to the state. There were no ‘boyars’ (nobles’) ownership of land as well as later there were no landowners. It genetically resulted in freedom loving of the northerners.
In 1616 the Kevrol Uyezd (district) was organized which occupied the whole territory of the Pinega and its tributaries’ basin. The centre of it was the town of Kevrol, which originally was in the place of present-day village of Nemnyuga, situated on a high bank of the Pinega. Gradually the spring waters made a new course for the Pinega River; Kevrol turned out to be farther off the main transportation route. This was the reason why the centre of the Pinega Land was moved. By the Order of Catherine II in 1780 the Pinega Uyezd was arranged with the centre in Pinega (lately the Pinega Pogost). Under the tsarist rule the Pinega land was the place to exile people who were out of favour of the powerful rulers. Here Prince Vasily Vasilyevich Golitsyn , a favourite of the Tsarevna Sofia, spent his last years of life (he was buried in the Krasnogorsky Monastery). K.Ye.Voroshilov, A.I.Rykov, a writer-to be Serafimovich and many other revolutionaries served their sentences in exile here.
On July 15, 1929, when the Severnyi Krai was divided into districts, the territories of Sura, Karpogory and Pinega ‘volosti’ were reorganized into two districts – the Karpogory and the Pinezhsky Districts. In 30 years, in 1959, they were again reunited into the Pinezhsky District with the centre in the settlement of Karpogory.
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