On the Date of Foundation of Tsarevo Gorodishche Settlement on the Tobol River

The formation of an authentic image of the process of settlement and development of Siberia by Russians requires a detailed area-based analysis. A clear indication of this process is the time of foundation of settlements or the relative subsequence of their occurrence. It is the date of foundation of a settlement that is crucially important for the understanding of the specificities of settling a certain territory. Regarding the XVII century, to determine the exact date of foundation of a settlement is not always possible. This is the case for one of the major trans-Ural settlements - Tsarevo Gorodishcshe sloboda (later the city of Kurgan). For nearly a two hudred -year period, various researchers have been referring to the issue of the settlement's foundation, though mostly by indicating a specific date without specifying any sources andgiving any evidence. In the middle of the twentieth century researchers dealing with the problem in question, stopped arbitrarily indicating the date of foundation of the settlement and tried to somehow justify or at least indicate the sources for reference. First researchers who decided to finally solve this problem were Kurgan historians A.A. Kondrashenkov and N.A. Lapin. At the beginning of the 1960s they tried to justify the most appropriate date of foundation. According to them, it was the year of 1662. In 1995, in thevolume 1 of the "History of the Kurgan Region," V.V. Menshchikov expressed doubts about the rightness of the conclusions drawn by A.A. Kondrashenkov and N.A. Lapin. Based on a more detailed source-related analysis, the author suggested that the settlement was founded not earlier than 1673and by no later than1680. Due to the fact that the most important document the "nakaznaya" charter for the foundation of the settlement is missing, we had to find the first real reference to the settlement, as well as through indirect information to create an internally consistent and coherent picture of the origin of the settlement Tsarevo Gorodishcshe. The proposed by the Soviet historians A.A. Kondrashenkov and N.A. Lapin date (1662) was the result of unjustified identification of the settlement with the other same-name one on Iset River which later disappeared. The analysis of indirect evidence dated from the earlier time does not give a satisfactory answer to the existence of the settlement Tsarevo Gorodishcshe on Tobol River before 1680. Our research allows usconsider the most probable year of foundation of the settlement Tsarevo Gorodishcshe to be 1679. At the end of the XVII century, the sloboda became an important outpost for Russian settlements in the region, especially in the circumstances of the ever increasing pressure on the part of Kirghiz-Kaysaks (Kazakhs) in the south since the 1690s. In 1680 Ikovskaya and Utyatskaya settlements emerged nearby. Thus, a whole agglomeration of sloboda was formed in the middle course of the Tobol river, and it was Tsarevo Gorodishcshe that later became the centre of the agglomeration and subsequently the town and district center of the Tobolsk province.

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