What is this Wild Field? Description of the territory is found at Gogol. Here is how he describes the lands on which he traveled with his sons Taras Bulba to the Zaporizhzhya Sich:
The farther the steppe became more beautiful ... the plow never passed through the unmeasured waves of wild plants. Only horses hid in them, as in a forest, trampled them. Nothing in nature could be better. The entire surface of the earth was represented by a green-golden ocean, over which millions of different colors sprinkled ... Damn you, steppes, how good you are!
Location
The name was given to the deserted Azov steppes and the Black Sea. The Wild Field has never had clearly defined, non-controversial borders. Antique authors mentioned the Black Sea coast (among the Greeks - the Pontic Sea) as lands belonging to the Scythians. The small number of the population living there and the lack of protected borders led to constant raids by nomadic steppe peoples: Sarmatians, Pechenegs and Polovtsy. The latter created a state in these territories, known as the Polovtsian steppe.
Attempts to defend oneself
The wild field is a region of Slavic colonization, part of the Pereyaslavsky and Chernihiv-Seversky principalities in the X-XIII centuries. Russian princes tried to defend themselves against nomads by organizing their own campaigns. Vladimir Monomakh, who ruled Russia at the end of the 11th - the beginning of the 12th centuries, undertook several such campaigns in the steppes of the Wild Field. The result was rich prey: horses, cattle, prisoners. At the beginning of the XIII century (1223), the troops of Genghis Khan passed through these territories of the Old Russian state. Two decades later, his son Batu included the Wild Field in the Golden Horde.
The invasion of the Mongol-Tatars in the middle of the XIII century led to the destruction of the local population. For a long time the land remained uninhabited. A wild field is steppe soils suitable for farming and cattle breeding, but nomads constantly crossing them did not allow the population to settle. Until the end of the 16th century, the Polovtsian steppe was just a constant place of battles between Russia, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Horde.
Stripe Construction
The construction of protective structures began in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, in 1550 ditches were dug, ramparts poured, watchtowers were erected, obstacles were created from fallen trees (notches). The fortification building stretched from Kharkov to the Volga region and was called the Great Stripe Strip. The development of new territories required an influx of people, so the government developed a number of incentive measures. Migrants were granted land plots free of charge, as well as the right to duty free distilleries and salt mining. In addition, those who arrived at their permanent place of residence were exempted from taxes and allowed to create their own self-government bodies.
Moscow conquered the Wild Field not because of a lack of land. The only reason for the construction of protective structures was the need to defend themselves against the Crimean threat, to protect the population from hijacking. The construction of the notch line became part of a large state program to create a defensive line.
Settlement of territories
Wild field - this is the territory gradually annexed to the Russian Empire during the wars with the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire, which were called New Russia.
The first to arrive were the soldiers. In order not to pay them "bread salary", the settlers were obliged to engage in agriculture. So the odnodorytsi of the south of Russia appeared - servants having one yard, an estate. In the XVIII century, with the increase in the occupied territories of the Wild Field and the emergence of cities, outposts changed cities. The classmates were canceled tax exemptions, they began to pay first the courtyard, and later the poll tax. Don Cossacks, who founded the cities of Kharkov, Belgorod, Sumy, Chuguev and others, helped the settlement of the steppe territories; as well as Polish gentry, who founded Oleshnya and Akhtyrka. At the head of local government was the voivode appointed by Moscow.
The region formed between the borders of three states, Russia, the Crimean Khanate and the Commonwealth, in the XVII-XVIII centuries, was called Sloboda Ukraine, or Slobozhanshchina. The local population had certain liberties here. Mostly they were Ukrainians, hence the name came from.
Runaway population growth
During the period of the final enslavement of the peasants and the church schism, the peasants fled en masse to the outskirts of the Russian state, where serfdom was absent. The number of runaways increased due to the threat of punishment during the Time of Troubles, the Copper Riot, after the armed uprisings of Stepan Razin and Kondraty Bulavin.
Currently
Interestingly, despite the complete absence of the Russian population for hundreds of years, the Slavic names of cities and rivers remained. So, for example, the cities of Zmeyev and Donets, burned by the Tatars in the XII century, are mentioned for the first time in the Word about Igor's regiment (XII century), the second time in the Ipatiev Chronicle (XVII century). The Kharkov River is also mentioned in written sources of the XII and XVII centuries.
At present, the territory of the Wild Field is:
- Saratov, Voronezh, Penza, Lipetsk, Tambov, Belgorod, Volgograd and Rostov regions of Russia.
- Officially unrecognized Lugansk and Donetsk republics.
- Transnistria.
- Odessa, Poltava, Kharkov, Sumy, Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Kirovograd and Nikolaev regions of Ukraine.
Now you know what the Wild Field is.