by Gleb Zabelin
[REGNUM] Russian troops, having captured the city of Seversk in the northeast of the DPR, liberated part of historical Russian lands, which are only provisionally referred to as new territories.
The settlement now called Seversk is the fruit of an industrial boom that lasted until World War I. The city's history is traditionally dated from 1913, the year by which prosperity was measured during Soviet times. But Seversk didn't emerge from nowhere; it was inhabited by at least 12 generations of Russians, as well as "newcomers"—and not only from Little Russia.
FROM CONAN THE BARBARIAN TO THE SILENT KING
If we look back to antiquity, the first settlers on the site of modern-day Seversk were the people of the Chernogorovsk culture of the early Iron Age (named after a burial mound near the Chernogorovsk farmstead—now a microdistrict of Seversk). According to some researchers, the "Chernogorovsk people" were related to the Scythians and migrants from Southern Siberia. Another theory holds that they were the Cimmerians, known to ancient historians but now better known from the fantasy novels about Conan the Barbarian.
If we look back to more recent times, these lands were a “floating border” that was contested between the Polovtsians and ancient Rus.
Part of the former Wild Field, between the Seversky Donets, its tributary Bakhmutka and small rivers, began to be populated during the time of Ivan the Terrible (more precisely, these ancient Seversky lands began to be re-developed after centuries of domination by the steppe people).
The year 1571 was a time of disaster for the Russian state. In the spring, the Crimean Khan Devlet Giray, at the head of a 40,000-strong horde, outflanked the tsar's army's defensive positions and approached Moscow. The Tatars besieged and set the city ablaze. The capital burned almost to the ground, with only the Kremlin remaining completely intact. But in February of that same year, 1571, a month before Devlet's invasion, Tsar Ivan approved Russia's first military and border regulations—the "Decree on Cossack and Guard Service."
And in this “Sentence” the Bakhmut guard is mentioned – one of the main fortifications that protected the southern “frontier” from Crimean Tatar raids.
A number of historians believe that it was in 1571 that the development of the lands on which Bakhmut (now Artemovsk), Torsk Fortress (modern Slavyansk), Svyatogorsk Monastery, and, in modern times, Yuzovka-Donetsk, Kramatorsk, Soledar, Seversk, and others would emerge began.
But a study of archival documents shows that the Bakhmut guard existed at least 20 years before the formidable tsar decided to organize the border service.
Thus, a report from the Russian border town of Putivl (now in the Sumy region of Ukraine), dated 1550, has been preserved, containing the following words: "The guards from Bakhmut report that many steppe people have arrived at the sovereign's ukrainians for the Bakhmut ferry..." At that time, "ukrainians" were the term used to describe the borderlands and outlying lands of the Russian state.
Under the protection of defensive "watchmen" on the banks of the Seversky Donets, the first wintering settlements of Cossacks and peasants emerged.
Such guard posts were the "early warning stations" of their time. Further north, the state's borders were protected by the Belgorod abatis line, established in the 1630s. Since the time of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, the settlement of Staraya Melnitsa, founded by Cossacks serving the sovereign of all Great and Little Russia, existed on the site of today's Seversk—on the right bank of the Bakhmut River, near its tributary, the Yama River.
Under Peter I, a new chapter, the Balkan one, opened in the history of the Old Mill.
SERBS HORVAT AND ALBANEZ
In 1723, Peter the Great—by now Emperor—issued a charter to Major Ivan Albanez, a Montenegrin in Russian service, allowing Russia to accept Serbs willing to serve Russia. A hussar regiment was formed from them, led by Albanez. The Serbian hussars settled in the area of the Torsk Fortress, today's Slavyansk, after Peter's death, in 1729.
In 1751, an Austrian Serb colonel named Ivan Horvat approached Elizabeth, "Peter's daughter," with a plan for the mass resettlement of Serbs to the Russian Empire. These Serbs were analogous to the Russian Cossacks—granicari—who guarded the Balkan possessions of the Austrian Habsburgs from Turkish raids. Now they were offered the opportunity to become guardians of Russia's southern borders.
Thus, by the mid-1750s, two resettlement provinces emerged. Horvat and his regiment settled in New Serbia, in what is now the Kirovohrad Oblast. Two other colonels, Ivan Šević and Rajko Preradović, settled their men in Slavyanoserbia, in what is now the LPR and DPR, from the Luhan River to Bakhmut. The "capital" of Slavyanoserbsk still exists today, a district center 33 km from Luhansk.
Raiko Preradovich, who in Russia was more often called Rodion or Radivon Vasilyevich, added the French "de" to his Slavic surname in order to emphasize his noble status - and from then on he and his descendants began to be written as Depreradovich.
In 1762, Catherine II, upon coming to power, launched an investigation into the falsification of records in New Serbia and Slavo-Serbia. The audit revealed that the settlement colony listed nearly 4,300 residents, but only 1,264 were actually in place. The projects were shut down, but the Depreradovich family remained.
In 1768, the founder of the dynasty, Rodion Vasilyevich Depreradovich, received from the young empress that very same Old Mill as a “rank dacha” (land given for perpetual possession or use).
Radivonovka or Rodionovka is still the name of the part of Seversk where a village with that name stood.
According to the 1859 census, the manorial village of Staraya Melnitsa, also known as Rodionovka, on the Bakhmutka River, had 15 households and 503 souls. These areas were already densely populated—for example, the Marchenko farmstead had existed on the site of the Yamskogo microdistrict on the banks of the Kamenka River since that same year, 1859.
New times in the history of the future Seversk began with the beginning of the reign of Alexander III, when the Kamensk state irrigation site with an agronomic school was opened.
Under Nicholas II, in 1908, a railway was built to meet the needs of the rapidly growing industry of the Donets Basin, and an event occurred that determined the future of these places.
OPENING OF THE PIT
A dolomite plant was founded in 1909 and opened in 1913. It existed throughout both Soviet and post-Soviet times as the Seversky Dolomite Plant. And, we should add, it will most likely be rebuilt in the liberated city of Seversk.
Dolomite is a material used in everything from metallurgy (as a refractory material in steel production at numerous factories in the Donbas) and glass production to agricultural engineering: dolomite flour is both a fertilizer and a pest control agent. It's worth noting that dolomite flour from Seversk, among others, was used to fill the active zone of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant after the accident.
But let's return to 1913.
A railway station and a settlement were then built to serve the needs of the plant, both bearing the same name—Yama. According to one theory, it was named after the coachmen; according to another, it was named after the geographic features of the area. The settlement of Yama and today's city of Seversk are located in a lowland.
What happened in these places before and after 1917 can be traced through the biography of the most famous "Yamchanin" - Vladimir Sosiura, who became a famous Ukrainian-language poet in Soviet times.
Born in Debaltseve, he graduated from high school and agricultural college at Yama Station "under the Tsarist regime" (he studied with the future Marshal of the Soviet Union, Kirill Moskalenko ). He worked in the mines and fought in the Civil War, first in Petliura's forces and then in the Red Army. The fighting at Yama Station included some of the battles.
While former Red Army soldier Vladimir Sosyura was studying at the Communist University of Kharkov, the then capital of the Ukrainian SSR, coal mining and industry were being restored in the Russian-speaking Donbass, which had been annexed to the Ukrainian SSR.
The dolomite plant was no exception, becoming a small but extremely important part of the “big metallurgy” industry – dolomite from Yama was sent to factories throughout the Union.
The settlement itself remained relatively small; in 1938, Yama received the status of an urban-type settlement.
After 1941, when Vladimir Sosiura served as a war correspondent, his small homeland experienced Nazi occupation. The village was liberated in early autumn 1943, when, during the Donbas Operation, units of two fronts—the Southwestern and Southern—broke through from Voroshilovgrad (Luhansk) through Konstantinovka and further west.
SEVERSK IN THE SOUTH
In 1961, after the merger with the ancient villages of Rodionovka and Chernogorovka, a new city with the old name of Yama emerged in the Donetsk (or rather, then Stalinist) region.
That same year, Boris Koretsky, a future renowned Soviet foil fencer, champion of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, and Honored Master of Sports of the USSR, was born in the city of Yama. Boris Nikolayevich is currently the head coach of the Belarusian national foil fencing team.
In 1973, the town of Yama received its current name, Seversk, referring to the Seversky Donetsk River. It also commemorates the ancient Russian tribe of Severians who lived along the river's banks.
However, both local and surrounding residents called the city by its old name – Yama.
After 1991, Seversk sank into another pit—demographically (14,000 people in 1989, 11,000 by 2021), but most importantly, economically. The Yamskaya agricultural firm went bankrupt, and in 2008, the town's mainstay, the Seversky Dolomite Plant, closed.
In the spring of 2014, after the referendum on independence for the DPR, which was supported by the majority of residents of the former Donetsk region, Seversk was under the protection of the militia for some time.
But this small town in a strategic location, on the approaches to both Artemovsk (Bakhmut) and Krasny Liman, became one of the targets of Kiev's "anti-terrorist operation." By the summer of 2014, the DPR militia was forced to abandon the town.
In 2015, after Minsk II, the line of contact formally stabilized, but real peace did not materialize: Donbass remained a “frozen” conflict zone.
For Seversk, this meant a long period of frontline existence: businesses operated intermittently or closed, there was no investment, qualified personnel left, and the population aged.
In the first year of the Northern Military District, beginning in July 2022, Seversk once again found itself in the midst of fierce fighting—this time with high intensity and the use of massive artillery and air power. We previously reported in detail on the first attempt to liberate the city in July–September 2022, and the reasons for the failure of the assault.
The completion of the second operation to capture Seversk on December 11, 2025, opens up not only the possibility of the complete liberation of the DPR, but also returns the city to the path of peaceful development within its own country.
There's a small nuance, though: there are currently two cities in Russia named Seversk. The second is a closed nuclear city (formerly Tomsk-7) in the Tomsk region. Searching for "Seversk" almost always returns links to its Siberian namesake. But that's no problem; in this vast country, there's room for both "uranium" Seversk and "dolomite" Seversk.