Initially, in Russia, as in other European countries, residents did not have surnames. In the annals, when mentioning any Rusich, you can find only his name and an indication of whose son he is or from what land he comes from. However, the population grew and the situation changed. By the end of the 14th century, Russians began to endow their families with surnames themselves.
Why did you need surnames?
Nicknames that were given to soldiers and were used along with their name are found in the ancient Novgorod chronicles of the 13th century. But they were not yet surnames, because they did not pass from father to son. For a long time, peasants in all the expanses of Russia did not need surnames with the help of which they could somehow identify and distinguish their family. After all, no one was interested in the origin of people from the lower class, moreover, they could not transfer any benefits by inheritance. But for the princes and boyars, documentary confirmation of their nobility very soon became necessary. This was the only way to secure for oneself and one's heirs an ancient and noble origin, kinship with high-ranking officials, and also claim lands that, due to constant military conflicts, were either lost or returned to the country's borders.
With the development of statehood, more and more "posts" began to appear at the court of the Grand Duke, and often they served until death, trying to transfer a favorable place to their offspring. Then the state chronicles came into use - lists containing information about which prince or boyar, where he served and what he did, and the name alone was clearly not enough here. It was urgently necessary to somehow name their family, so that in the future even a relative unknown at court could apply for a similar court position. Therefore, the first surnames in Russia were acquired by the Moscow nobles - princes and boyars.
Noble dynasties
The Russian principality, as an originally military estate, basically secured the ancestral lands for its family, once conquered by their ancestors. This is how the Shuiskys, Tversky, Vorotynsky, Vyazemsky appeared. Boyars who were in the public service often had nicknames that were well known at court, so they were changed into surnames. Lyka, Skryaba, Mare, Gagara became well-born boyars Lykovs, Scriabin, Kobylins, Gagarins. And if a representative of one surname, derived from a nickname, married and became related to another dynasty that had a surname containing information about the land ownership of the clan, then the heir kept both surnames for himself, for example, Lobanov-Rostovsky or Strigin-Obolensky. The nobles also took a double surname, created on the basis of nicknames, if it was related to famous dynasties, for example, Koshka-Kobylin.
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And when a certain representative stood out from a very famous family, he often renamed the dynasty by his own name. So, for example, the Romanovs arose, whose ancestors previously bore the boyar surnames Koshkins, Kobylins, Yurievs. Surnames and noble Tatar warriors - Yusup, Akhmat or Kara-Murza - received their own names in Russia. They became princes Yusupov, Akhmatov, Karamzin. Later, according to the same principle, they were transformed into foreign Russian surnames. For example, the Fonvizins descended from the German nobleman von Wiesen, and the Lermontovs from the English aristocrat Learmonth, who served at the Russian court.
The euphony of the clergy
The names of the Russian clergy were compiled in an interesting way in the middle of the 18th century. Initially, parish priests also had only names, for example, Father Vladimir or Father Andrei. Their children in the village were often called priests, and if the son of a priest did not receive ordination, then later he and his children remained Popovs. But when priests began to take surnames for various, first of all, church documents, they formed them from the names of their parishes - Preobrazhensky, Pokrovsky, Troitsky, Blagoveshchensky, Kosmodemyansky.
When the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy was established in 1687, its graduates also needed surnames - for the register of the educational institution. And often the students themselves chose euphonious surnames (for example, Tikhomirov) or invented them - using the Greek or Latin language they encrypted their personal qualities in them: Liperovsky (from the Greek word "sad"), Gilyarovsky (from the Latin root meaning "cheerful").
Peasant surnames
Before the abolition of serfdom, the peasants did not need surnames, the only exception was free people. Often the surname of a person of the lower class was formed on behalf of the father - Alekseev, Timokhin, Vanin. The basis for the surnames was also the characteristic features of a person (Smirnov, Ozornov, Razzevaev), occupation (Kuznetsov, Rybakov, Konyukhov), again nicknames (Bykov, Sokolov, Samoyedov). Sometimes the nickname hinted at the criminal activities of its owner - Kozyrev, Korolev or, for example, Razuvaev.
Often in remote Russian villages, boys, in addition to the baptismal name, received a name-amulet from the local witch. For example, in order for a fool to grow up smart, they called him Dur, a terrible baby, to become a handsome man, they called Nekras, and the son of the last beggar, so that he was always full, - Hunger. Subsequently, surnames were created from these protective names - Nekrasov, Durov, Golodov.
New Citizens
In Soviet times, due to the First World War, and then the Civil War, there were a lot of orphans who ended up in orphanages and received new names and surnames there, sometimes unusual. In the 1920s-1930s, citizens with the "ideological" surnames of Traktorov, Republican, Oktyabrsky, Pyatiletkin, Krasnoflotsky, Pervomaisky, appeared in the USSR.
In the modern world, new surnames also take place, but so far these are only pseudonyms of art workers, which have become a kind of speaking surnames that have migrated to the passport. For example, the playwright Grigory Gorin was born Offstein, the satirist writer Arkady Arkanov was Steinbuk before his stage career, and the actor Semyon Farada, before he got to the cinema, bore the surname Ferdman.
Perhaps in the future we will hear such speaking surnames as Spamin or Viruses, Hackers or Kryshuevs, and this will be in the order of things.
Svetlana Koroleva
