Veliky Ustyug

Veliky Ustyug stands 450 kilometres north-east of Vologda, on the left bank of the Sukhona at its confluence with the Yug river forming the Northern Dvina — on the shipping lines of all three rivers. A stronghold of the Slavic colonisation of the Russian North since the eleventh century, the town took the epithet 'Great' in the sixteenth century: Ivan the Terrible included it among the oprichnina towns that paid money 'for the sovereign's needs' — a mark of the trade weight Ustyug had accumulated by then. The first campaign of the Novgorodians into these lands recorded by the chronicles took place in 1032: one Uleb went with a band to the upper Vychegda but failed. The town's fame was later made by people. Semyon Dezhnev passed the strait between Asia and America eighty years before Bering; Vladimir Atlasov annexed Kamchatka; Vasily Shilov was the discoverer of the Aleutian Islands and first compiler of their chart; Mikhail Buldakov was head director of the Russian-American Company. Yerofey Khabarov was born in a village up the Sukhona, where a memorial cross stands for him. Ustyug's streets bear the names of its native explorers — Dezhnev, Atlasov, Buldakov, Nevodchikov, Shalaurov, Bakov — and the town map reads like a map of Pacific expeditions. The historic centre is the Sobornoye dvorishche with the Dormition cathedral: an ensemble of churches above the steep bank with a view of the river confluence; nearby stands the cathedral of Prokopiy of Ustyug, the righteous patron of the town. Merchant houses and dozens of churches survive — Ustyug escaped industrial rebuilding and reads as a complete northern town. Since 1999 the town has been officially declared the home of Ded Moroz — a tourist superstructure worth taking with irony and walking past, to the Sobornoye dvorishche. Ustyug's true great story is in stone, in the names of its natives and in the three rivers meeting at its walls; the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin was by his father from here and sat exams at the local gymnasium — one more line in the biography of a town that had enough history for all at once.