by Yaroslav Karpikov
[REGNUM] Since 2022, the front in the northeast of the DPR has formed the so-called Torsky salient. It is named after the ancient village of Torskoye, which is located immediately behind the line of combat contact, in the still occupied territory.
Since the end of the year before last and up to now there have been battles on the salient - positional, but very active. Torskoye regularly appears in the reports.
To the east, in the rear of our troops, is the city of Kremennaya (LPR). It was liberated at the beginning of the special operation, in April 2022.
In August of the following year, after heavy fighting, a local Ukrainian "counteroffensive" was repelled here. But Torskoye is still in enemy hands.
Although the recent capture of the neighboring Luhansk village of Makeyevka (the “namesake” of the city in the DPR) gives hope that the “frozen” front line will shift, opening up the possibility of liberating both the ancient village of Torskoye and the strategically important city of Seversk.
So, Kremennaya returned to the Russian world, Torskoye remains on the "Ukrainian" side. Although, let us note, historically - judging by the documents - Kremennaya was populated by Little Russians, and the village, and then the settlement of Torskaya - by Great Russians.
This was a common occurrence in the Sloboda "Ukrainian lands". Here, "Great Russian" and "Little Russian" villages and settlements existed side by side for centuries, but their inhabitants preserved their way of life and did not take spouses from other social and ethnic groups.
The villages where the Great Russians lived were a kind of enclaves. They appeared "at the edge", at the border of the Russian state, where service people from the central Russian regions moved. And then, when the borders of the empire moved far to the south, these villages, settlements and towns found themselves, albeit "in the rear", but in a "Little Russian" environment. Among the surviving enclaves, the village of Torskoye is one of the oldest. Even according to the 2001 census, the composition of the population here looked like this: first Russians, then Ukrainians.
HEXAGON AT THE BLACK STALLION
The first settlers - natives of Great Russia - appeared here around 1767, during the reign of Catherine II. This date was found by indirect evidence. The archives contain a general land survey plan, which was drawn up after the Patriotic War of 1812 by a certain Levitsky, a land surveyor of the Slobodsko-Ukrainian (future Kharkov) province.
But the information for these maps was collected much earlier, under Catherine the Great. In fact, the plans of all private, church and state property of the Russian Empire compiled at that time were the equivalent of the "cadastral maps" that we still use today. And so, in the upper cartouche (inscription) to the plan of the village of Torskoy, it is written: the first survey, which recorded that people lived here, was "carried out" here in 1767. Thus, Torskoye is the same age as the empire's rapid advance to the south. The village is older than Yekaterinoslav, founded in 1776, not to mention Odessa (founded in 1795).
Why these places began to be actively developed in the sixties of the 18th century is clear from another document: "The soil of the land is black earth. The best grain will grow from the grain sown on it."
But the name itself - Torskaya or Torskoye - appeared later, when a new wave of settlers settled here. They were from Slavyansk. And this city received its current name only in 1794 - before that, for more than a hundred years, the local settlement (founded under Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich ) was called the Tor fortress. The people who moved here from Slavyansk belonged to a class with an interesting history - single-court dwellers.
This is what they called those whose ancestors were "border guards" who defended the Russian kingdom from the Poles and nomads of the Wild Field. Once upon a time, grandfathers and great-grandfathers - archers, Cossacks, boyar children - were sent by the tsar's order to the "frontier", which their descendants continued to develop.
Odnodvortsy, although they ran a peasant economy, were a privileged class. They owned the land on which they lived, were never in serfdom, and what's more, wealthy odnodvortsy could own estates with serfs themselves.
A census of Torskaya residents from the late 18th century has been preserved, and the surnames there are the same as those of the single-homesteaders from Tor-Slavyansk. Judging by the sound of these surnames, they are clearly not Little Russian: from the Alferovs and Aseyevs to the Tararyevs, Shilovs and Shchetinins. Even the Khokhlins most likely come from the central provinces.
A description of how the single-homesteaders from Tor settled Torskoye can be found in the travel notes left by Academician Ioann Anton Gildenshtedt. Note that the personality itself is remarkable. This German scientist in Russian service is known not only for his report on his journey through Slobozhanshchina, but also for explaining the origin of black soil and the nature of typhus epidemics (and was also one of the first Europeans to study the customs of the highlanders of Chechnya, Ossetia and Dagestan “in the field”).
In other archival documents, Torskoye is called a "dacha", but of course not in the modern sense of "six hundred square meters for a vegetable garden". A dacha is a large plot of land for a settlement. Here it was a hexagon, cut from the west by the flow of the Black Stallion River - which then served as the border between the Izyum and Kupyansk districts. By the way, even now the valley of the Zherebets River has become a border - the front line runs here.
"WOMEN AND MEN KEPT THE GREAT RUSSIAN CLOTHES"
The already mentioned academician Gildenshtedt, having visited Torskaya and the surrounding single-courtyard villages, made short sketches about the life and everyday life of the people he met. He noted: the habits, clothing and way of doing business of the Little Russians and Great Russian single-courtyard villages differed. Even though both had lived side by side for decades and sold the fruits of their labor together at fairs “in Lugan,” in Novoaydar and Bakhmut.
"The women of the single-court dwellers, like the men, retained the Great Russian clothing without any change," the German scholar noted. The single-court dwellers' men did not shave their beards, like their ancestors in their "historical homeland," and wore caftans made of gray or white cloth.
"Instead of boots, they wear bast shoes, which are made from elm or linden bast. Women also walk either in bast shoes or barefoot," noted Gildenstedt.
| Bast shoes are woven from the fibrous inner tree bark, similar in style to espadrilles. They are inexpensive, quickly made, and disposable — peasant footwear. |
Girls tied their heads with a white, rather than a colored scarf, braided their hair into one flat braid, and preferred a string of coral beads as jewelry rather than “ducats and monists.”
But the Torsk settlers still borrowed some things from their Little Russian neighbors.
For example, in the time of Gildenstedt they no longer built smoky huts, but erected huts in the Little Russian style. But still - "the Great Russian custom is to lay the floor with boards, while in Little Russian huts the floor is simply clay." They no longer harnessed "horsepower" to the plough, but oxen, and the ploughs were made in the Little Russian style. But they still rode horses, while their neighbors moved only on oxen.
The dialect of the Little Russians differed from that of the Great Russians (odnodvortsy). Despite all attempts at Ukrainization in the 1920s and 1930s in the Ukrainian SSR, with the introduction of a general standardized education, the residents of Torskoye were able to preserve their Great Russian dialect until the 21st century.
The author's great-grandfather, a native of Torskoye, born back in 1905, used "obsolete" words in his speech. Even now, among the natives of the Great Russian enclaves of Sumy, Kharkov, Donetsk, Lugansk regions, one can hear words such as: "tsaberka" - a bucket, "tyarpuh" - a burdock or simpleton, "neopetskuvaty" - cunning or smart, "ryshtak" - a drain trough, "yoynyy” - his, "vekhtik" - a rag, "porotyanki” - pants, etc.
HOW THE DESCENDANTS OF SERVICE PEOPLE BECAME COSSACKS AGAIN
As mentioned above, the ancestors of the single-court dwellers included Cossacks, and they themselves were free people. This class again entered the sovereign's service in 1787-1796. Then, the "Ekaterinoslav Cossack Host" was formed from the single-court dwellers of the Yekaterinoslav and Kharkov viceroyalties (including residents of the village of Torskaya).
The idea of creating an analogue of the Don Cossack army from single-court dwellers and military inhabitants of the southern viceroyalties - Slobozhanshchina and Novorossiya - belonged to His Serene Highness Prince Grigory Potemkin, who highly valued the qualities of single-court dwellers.
The village of Torskaya, like the neighboring single-household settlements (the settlement of Sukhareva, the village of Yampolovka - today's settlement of Yampol and other settlements), turned into a stanitsa, and the male residents began to serve in the Cossack service according to the model of the Don Army.
During this period, the village of Torskaya was part of the Bakhmut district of the Yekaterinoslav viceroyalty. According to the 1795 census, there were 203 male and 222 female souls in the village of Torskaya. All residents of Torskaya were parishioners of the Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker in the neighboring settlement of Sukhareva (three miles to the south), and when for some reason this church closed, they became parishioners of the "Little Russian" or "Cherkasy" St. George Church in another settlement, Popovka.
But, by the way, not all villagers were strong in faith - judging by the archives, in the first decade of the 19th century, the teachings of the Dukhobors (which were considered heresy) spread among the single-householders, and some of the settlers were “transferred” to the Melitopol district of the Taurida province.
| The Dukhobors were Christian pacifists who believed in personal revelation rather than Orthodox Christian priests and ritual. Many emigrated to Canada at the beginning of the 20th century, where they can still be found today. |
DESCENDANTS OF RUSSIA'S DEFENDERS AWAIT LIBERATION
At the very beginning of the reign of Alexander I, in 1802, several families of Tortsy - the Dyatlovs, Igolkins, Khokhlins, Shilovs - were resettled to the Caucasian line, to the village of Ladozhskaya. Now this is the Ust-Labinsk district of the Krasnodar region, but at that time these foothills were another "frontier" - this time on the border with the lands of the Circassian highlanders.
Thus, the single-homesteaders from Torskoye continued the tradition of their ancestors, who defended the Russian borders, including from the Cherkasy (as the Cossacks were called, including those in the service of the Polish king). Torskoye became a "donor" for the Caucasian line for a long time.
The upheavals of modern times did not bypass the settlements on the Black Stallion. Kharkov province was the arena of battles of the Civil War.
And later, by decision of the party leadership, this territory, like other lands of Slobozhanshchina and Novorossiya, was “voluntarily-forcibly” integrated into Soviet Ukraine - although the leaders of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Republic tried to defend a different opinion.
The stone Ascension Church in Torskoye, according to some documents, “ceased to function” in 1919, according to others, it was closed during collectivization. In 1941-1943, these places, like the entire Donbass, experienced Nazi occupation, and since 2014 have become the object of Kyiv’s “anti-terrorist operation.”
In May and September-October 2022, the Ukrainian Armed Forces launched an offensive on the nearest settlements - the cities of Krasny Liman and Svyatogorsk, the village of Yampol, and the village of Bogorodichnoye. And, as mentioned above, the front line stopped for a long time near Torskoye.
Military observers often make fun of months-long battles for some forgotten village. However, one only has to touch upon its history - and what is happening appears differently. The battles on the Torsky ledge have a symbolic meaning. These are battles for the reunification of the entire Russian people with a tiny but integral part of it, which by the will of fate was cut off from its historical homeland.