There is an area of primordial Russia, outlined by three rivers - the Dnieper, Irpen and Stugnaya, crossed from north to south by a ridge of outlier hills, which have long been known in our country as mountains. Green steep mountains run from Vyshgorod to Tripillya, recalling the time when a glacier was moving here with a monstrous plow, plowing the Dnieper bed … Along the banks of Troyorechye from immemorial, almost glacial times, local and alien tribes sat down, smashed their settlements; fortified castles were built on the hills, they were fenced off from the predatory nomadic Steppe with continuous embankments. Nobody knows the true names of the tribes: the Greeks christened them Scythians, that is, angry, gloomy; archaeologists of the new centuries, without further ado, named after the place where the first settlement was found: Zarubintsy, Chernyakhovites … In comparison with the age of many local cultures, Kiev, which became a capital city quite late,could be called Novgorod. Other modest villages, Pidhirtsi or the same Tripolye, are anciently equal to Rome, or even Uru of the Chaldees …
Throughout the Three Rivers, going out and beyond its limits, mighty embankments, rounded by time, wind. Sometimes they stretch for many kilometers without interruption. Unless the plowing will nullify the dilapidated link of the rampart, or the local brick factory will excavate it, or the ravines will be eaten. And if it survives, it rises in some places almost vertical, covered with turf and wildflowers, a wall as tall as a two-story house. Yes, there is still a ditch in front of him …
These are the Long or Serpent's Shafts, fanned with many myths and just rumors.
They got their second, better known name thanks to the legend. Once upon a time, a huge Serpent-dragon attacked the Slavic lands - he ate the peasants, burned the hailstones with fire from his mouth. But there were two strong blacksmiths, Kuzma and Demyan, who caught the Serpent, harnessed him to a giant, forged plow and forced him to plow a furrow around the entire Russian land and its capital Kiev. The soil turned out of the furrow formed high and long embankments, and the furrow itself became a deep impassable ditch. Exhausted from hard work and thirst, the Serpent pulled the plow to the river (in other versions of the tale - to the sea), and there he collapsed and began to drink water until he died … Young Alexei Tolstoy wrote the poem "Serpent Shaft" about this.
And the serpent went, and the dust of the steppe
A cloud rose from the reins …
The blacksmith beat him on the ribs …
The ocean is scarlet
Promotional video:
Buzzed. And the serpent, bending the sacrum, I fell to salty water …
And he drank, stirring up a wave with sand, It swelled above the mountains …
And burst …
Sometimes the fairy tale assigns the role of a snake-fighter to the famous Nikita (or Cyril) Kozhemyaka. Regarding one of the ramparts near the Ros, there is a local legend about how the blacksmith Ulas, grabbing the Serpent by the tongue with tongs and leading him, forced the monster with a plow to plow the rampart, "like a church, high," and a ditch, "like a deep cellar." Another Ukrainian legend is connected with the same theme: having crawled to the river, the Serpent stagnated (groaned) and died; since that time the river is called Stugna …
Our most prominent archaeologist, academician Boris Aleksandrovich Rybakov, wrote that the blacksmiths Kozma and Demyan are late characters, already in the Christian era. In general, the dragon-fighting epic, including the plot of a dragon caught and harnessed to a plow, originated almost in the Stone Age. Although, in fact, the custom of the tribes, which needed defense, to enclose themselves with ramparts and ditches is also incredibly ancient. Perhaps such fortifications were made by representatives of the Trypillian culture, and certainly the Chernolis culture, which existed about three thousand years ago. These shafts, although not as grandiose as the Zmievs, stretch along the Tyasmin River in the Cherkasy region. Probably, the Black Forest farmers built them against predatory newcomers from the East, called the Cimmerians. There were wars in our past, no less bloody than the duel between Russia and the Tatar-Mongols;epochs of foreign enslavement, longer and more brutal than the yoke of the Horde. Only there are no documents about those times …
The Serpent Ramparts, grouped in the forest-steppe south and south-west of Kiev, between the Dnieper and Teterev to the Ros and to its western tributaries on the Right Bank, as well as the rampart along the left bank of the Dnieper and the lower reaches of the Sula, have a total length of over 950 kilometers.
The study of these gigantic earthworks, begun in the first half of the 19th century, until relatively recently was limited to the description and mapping of their remains. However, this task was not fully resolved. The shafts have a huge length and, moreover, are rather difficult to access: they cross fields, vegetable gardens, wastelands, forests, swamps, rivers … Before the advent of aerial and space photography, their visual inspection, measurements and drawing up plans were almost impossible. Basically, scientists examined relatively small sections of the ramparts located closer to Kiev. The work was made more difficult by the fact that in many areas the embankments were no longer preserved.
The first brief information about the unusually long ancient shafts near the Ros River was published in 1844 by a full member of the Odessa Society of History and Antiquities of Tetbu de Marigny, who, judging by the text, did not examine these shafts himself. However, the earliest plan of artificial heights in the Dnieper-Ros interfluve was made even earlier, in 1837. This is an engraving on copper, and it is stored in Kiev, in the Central Scientific Library. The author of the plan is unknown.
In 1848, a very serious and thoughtful book was published - "Review of the graves, ramparts and settlements of the Kiev province." It was written by a man who left a considerable mark in the history of the Ukrainian capital, a Greek by origin, a historian and archaeologist by preferences, the Governor of Kiev Ivan Ivanovich Fundukley. (Recall that the current street Bogdan Khmelnitsky, more recently - Lenin, before the revolution was called Fundukleevskaya.) Along with other categories of antiquities, the author describes the location and appearance of many Serpent Shafts.
The primary mapping and description of the ramparts in the "Kiev triangle" - between the Dnieper, Irpen and Stugnaya - ended with the work of several scientists at the beginning of the last century, including such a diligent and gifted researcher as archaeologist Vasily Grigorievich Lyaskoronsky.
But the expeditions of the Kiev enthusiast-amateur Arkady Silvestrovich Bugai became truly milestone for the entire history of the study of the "Old Russian Wall". The author had the good fortune to walk with him tens of kilometers along the ancient embankments … A mathematician by profession, already quite elderly, Arkady Silvestrovich personally examined almost all sections of the ramparts in the Middle Dnieper, both preserved and destroyed, but still visible on the surface.
Already at the beginning of his tireless wanderings, in the 1960s, Bugay discovered cases of inconsistency between the old schemes and the actual location of the shafts. But, alas, the truly heroic seeker-walker failed to clarify these schemes. And on his plans, the lines of the embankments are drawn approximately, according to the location of the settlements near which they pass; the extensions of individual shafts are missed, or structures of a different nature are taken for their remains. Nevertheless, this is the first summary diagram of the swells of the Middle Dnieper region, depicting the results of their direct inspection on the ground.
On it, in fact, the period of the shafts mapping feasible for local historians ended. The time has come to decide the main questions: who, when and for what purpose turned over millions of tons of soil, having carried out work that far surpasses the construction of the great pyramids of Giza and is comparable only with the construction of the Great Wall of China?..
There was simply no specific data to determine the age of the shafts. The same Funduklei, relying on the data on the construction of the so-called Trajan's ramparts in the Dniester and Danube regions by the Roman emperor Trajan (1st - 2nd centuries), attributed the emergence of the embankments of the Middle Dnieper to Roman times.
They are mentioned several times in Russian chronicles: under 1093 - two ramparts south of the lower reaches of the Stugna beyond Trepolye (the modern village of Tripolye), at 1095 and 1149 - a pair of ramparts at Pereyaslav, under 1151 - a rampart south of Vasilev (modern city of Vasilkov). But the chronicle does not give answers to questions about the time of construction and the purpose of the shafts. They are only mentioned in the description of military actions both by the Russians against the Polovtsy and between the Russian princes themselves: the troops "proidoshaval", "which became the borderline", "izidosha striltsi from the shaft", the squad "ide for the shaft", "came to the valovi and does not pass through the shaft "… In a word, in the same way, for reference, some hills or lakes could be mentioned.
In the chronicle under 1223, it is said about the appearance in the southern Russian steppes of the hordes of Genghis Khan, who passed through the Polovtsian possessions and "came near Russia, where the Polovtsian shaft is called." Also, frankly speaking, there is not enough information …
So after all, when and in connection with what did the shafts arise? Some researchers considered them ancient Russian, erected to protect the Middle Dnieper region from nomads; others - attributed to an earlier time and considered as defensive structures of a wider purpose.
Supporters of the first opinion, as a rule, referred to the testimony of Archbishop Brunon, who traveled through Kiev to the Pechenegs in 1008 to preach Christianity. In a letter to the German emperor Henry II, Brunon reported that Vladimir Svyatoslavich accompanied him with his retinue for two days to the border of his state, which the Grand Duke surrounded (circumklausit), defending himself from a wandering (nomadic) enemy (vagum hostem), very powerful and very long (firmissima et longissima) fence (sepe). The Latin term sepe is translated as "cuttings, rubble", and as "palisade", and as "hedge", and as "fence, wooden fence". An analogue of the structure described by Brunon, in the opinion of most experts, can only be the Zmiyev shaft with a wooden wall at the top.
Vasily Lyaskoronsky dated the ramparts according to the mounds and ancient settlements-Maidans included in their line. He noted that objects were found in the long mounds, apparently related to a very distant era. So, in the thickness of one rampart on Sula, "human bones, painted in red, pieces of shards of an ancient type" were found. But after all, bones and fragments of earthenware could well have fallen into the rampart during its construction, for example, from burial mounds on the way. The latter could well have been dug up, and the earth used for a new embankment …
When Academician Rybakov examined the Bolshoi Pereyaslavsky shaft in 1947, local residents informed him of the findings near the shaft of arrowheads, apparently from the early Iron Age. The archaeologist supposedly dated the mound to the Scythian time. It was later established that the Pereyaslavl ramparts, forming a semicircle in plan, are indeed the remains of a large Scythian settlement. Another rampart, horseshoe-shaped, in the Kruglik tract on the Vita River, scientists also consider a memory of the Scythians.
However, the historian Mikhail Yulianovich Braichevsky in 1952 spoke out against the dating of all the Serpent Shafts by Scythian time. Some may be that age, but not the system as a whole. Braichevsky noted that the existence of such ramparts in the conditions of a communal system, in the absence of a single centralized power and a single military organization, is devoid of any sense. And who would have rounded up the labor army needed to build them?..
Arkady Bugai believed that the Zmievy Shafts arose long before Kievan Rus and served as borders between the tribal princes that defended their lands from a common enemy. What is it? Probably Avars, Huns …
Even before the revolution, the Poltava historian L. V. Padalka put forward a completely paradoxical idea, the echoes of which were found in the press many decades later. Padalka believed that the shafts, consisting of fragile soil - sand and sandy loam, could not be used for defensive purposes, they could be easily swept to the ground. Therefore, he was convinced that the ancient inhabitants of the Dnieper region erected … fences for grazing and protecting livestock! The lover of paradoxes did not know what modern archaeologists were convinced of: the ramparts are not only made of earth. Most of them have wooden structures inside. Moreover, a fair part of the Serpent's Shafts can generally be called log cabins with earthen filling!..
However, the vast majority of the log frames of the shafts were found burnt. The reason for this was explained in different ways. According to Bugai, huge bonfires were deliberately made on the embankment in order to give the sintered soil greater strength. Arkady Silvestrovich also claimed that a forest was burned along the route of the rampart under construction - and for some reason the earth was poured onto the still burning remains of trees. Also, according to Bugai, our ancestors could blurt out young shoots that grew over the years on the shaft.
At the suggestion of the Institute of Archeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR and the Ukrainian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, in 1974-1976 and 1979, the first tests of a serious archaeological study of the ramparts were carried out. The excavations were headed by a remarkable Ukrainian scientist, a true ascetic Mikhail Petrovich Kuchera.
To obtain information about the structure of the ramparts and ditches, as a rule, laid next to them, archaeologists made cross-sections - trenches a meter wide, 15-20 meters long. Where traces of fire were found, excavations were laid for horizontal clearing of charred structures.
Finally, the ancient Russian origin of the shafts was unambiguously confirmed. The mounds of earlier times, the same Scythian ones, simply entered the later defensive system.
Excavations in Kiev and Cherkasy regions were followed by work in Zhytomyr and Poltava. Shafts were surveyed on both banks of the Dnieper, along the Sula, Bobritsa, Ros, Irpen, Stugna rivers, in the interfluves of the Stugna - Pliska, Irpen - Unava, Dnieper - Teterev, Rosi - Guyva … The number of trench openings reached a hundred; excavations multiplied. Archaeologists worked hard on the ramparts every summer until 1985.
Nowadays, the Zmievy swells of the Middle Dnieper region are divided by scientists into the following thirteen groups: Vitiansko-Bobrytsky in the interfluve of the Dnieper - Irpen; ramparts on the left bank of the Stugna and in the interfluve of the Stugna - Irpen; shafts in the interfluve Irpen - Teterev; Doroginsky rampart in the interfluve of Unava - Irpen; ramparts on the right bank of the Stugna; Fastovsko-Zhitomirsky swell along the upper reaches of the Unava and Irpen; shafts in the interfluve of the Dnieper - Krasnaya - Rotka - Kamenka, along the left bank of the Ros, in the upper reaches of the Unava, south and west of the upper reaches of the Ros; Dnieper left bank shaft; shaft along Sule; Pereyaslavl shafts in the interfluve of the Dnieper - Trubezh - Supoy.
The systems of embankments protecting Kiev from the south are formed into three powerful echelons, and if you generalize to the limit, into a colossal triple "horseshoe" open to the capital of Russia. The Vityansko-Bobritsky shaft, 25 kilometers long, lies farthest to the north and closer to Kiev. The middle defensive line, along the Stugna, is 34 kilometers long. The southernmost outposts include Bila Tserkva and almost reach Boguslav. On the left bank, the Dnieper itself was echeloned by ramparts, as if they cut off the great river from the dangerous at that time, belonging to the nomads of the northeastern steppes. A separate mighty branch of the ramparts stretches north along the Sula.
Each embankment is a very serious engineering structure, which speaks of the high level of serf works in ancient Russia, the presence of local "cadres", and therefore, the development of mathematics, geometry, geodesy, fortification … There must have been good maps of the area, and something like schools or courses where experienced mentors taught future builders. Who were these mentors? Aren't they the ones who are usually called the Magi?..
The line of the same Vitiansko-Bobrytsky swell along its entire length takes into account all terrain differences; it is very well "inscribed" into natural elevations; the ditch is usually located on a scarped ledge below the rampart. In several places the embankment crosses the ravines, sometimes going down to their very bottom. A parapet is seen here and there on the shaft …
… For the author of these lines, the ancient ramparts of the Kiev region are of particular importance. Having walked more than one kilometer along a hot, dusty lane along an endless winding embankment, your humble servant climbed its slope, storming the fragrant tangle of yellow gorse, tansy, bindweed and hard white yarrow. Above, where once a sharp-eyed Slavic archer was waiting for the steppe dwellers behind the parapet, trees grew. One old, gnarled wild pear was especially good. It grows to this day … In the shade of a squat crown, on soft grass, the author unfolded a bag of food. Rusty grain skins, greyish-green brushstrokes of cabbage ridges, forest shelters piled up to the horizon. Only emphasizing the enveloping silence, the grasshoppers busily rattled, a heavy bumblebee bellowed, and somewhere under the motionless sky a hay mower rumbled. The author anointed the radishes with wet matted salt,chewed a roll of ham and, drinking it all down with warm lemonade from the neck, thought: aren't these minutes, not muddied by any vanity, the best moments in his, the author's life?..
Thirty years have passed since then. The minutes were really the best …
I must also say how accurately, with what ability to foresee military situations, the places for the embankments were selected. After all, many sections of the Zmiyev Shafts were used in 1941 by Soviet troops who met the Germans on the outskirts of Kiev. A large artillery pillbox was cut into the shaft near the village of Kruglik; on another site there is a memorial sign with the image of the Order of the Patriotic War …
Fight again. The plains are enchanted.
The sun in the sky is like an eternal banner.
Again the carnations are strange, terry
Will grow on enemy bones …
All Zmiyevy Shafts are perfectly combined with protective features of the relief, but the choice of such features is subordinated to the general direction of the defensive line. For riverside shafts, the river serves as a guide; the builders tried to bypass the lowlands, erecting an embankment along the line of the maximum height difference or along the edge of the floodplain. This made it possible to build a ditch much below the rampart; achieved an increase in the height of the shaft in relation to the bottom of the ditch.
Usually the slope of the rampart passes directly into a ditch, but sometimes the ditch and the embankment are separated by an interval, the so-called berm, several meters wide.
The Zmievs sometimes mistakenly included not only the ramparts of more ancient settlements included in them, but also medieval ("Cossack") fortifications, and the defensive lines of the 18th century, and forest digging, and traces of agricultural work, and earthworks of the Great Patriotic War. And the southern rampart between the Stugna and Krasnaya rivers turned out to be … the remains of an old railway embankment!
Features of the layout, location and other properties of the Serpent Shafts make it possible to single them out as a separate group of our historical monuments. Here are their main features: great length; smooth bends of arcuate lines laid along the course of rivers or between rivers; usually latitudinal direction. Shafts are arranged in several rows, but each of them is single, with a large ditch from the outside, often with another, small ditch or with a chain of grooves on the inside.
Most of the embankments have died over the centuries from plowing or housing construction, but some areas, especially in forests and on land unsuitable for cultivation, have remained almost intact. Survived, in total, about one fourth of the Serpent Shafts.
Today, archaeologists distinguish 23 ramparts in the Dnieper region, not counting two small transverse ramparts at Stugna and Zdvizh. Almost all of them are included in nine main defensive lines: from west to east - from Teterev to Sula, from north to south - from the southern outskirts of Kiev to Korsun-Shevchenkovsky. In fact, it is a colossal "fan" of arcs; his "handle" is Kiev.
Radiocarbon analysis assists archaeologists in determining the age of the shafts, but its data are not always accurate, the amplitude of discrepancies is very wide. The first samples of coal from the burnt frameworks were handed over to the laboratory by Bugai, however, the results turned out to be very dubious … Neither dendrochronology nor the paleomagnetic method can provide accurate data.
Various analyzes of the shafts, carried out in 1974-1975 and 1983, give a "spread" from the 7th to the 14th centuries AD. e.; and studies carried out in 1981-1982 indicate that the embankments were built … from the XXIV century BC. e. to the II century AD! Such figures cannot even be averaged …
Of course, it would be absolutely naive to assume that the ramparts that some people began to fill in the days of Ancient Egypt were completed … three and a half thousand years later! So slowly built, section by section, no one needs defense lines. They will not contain the enemy. For the "fan" to play its role as an impregnable bastion of Russia, it should have been erected in a few years! In extreme cases, for one or two dozen … What years are these?
Although very ancient ceramics and other objects from cultures that preceded the Slavic were found in the soil of the embankments, such finds were in a minority. Their presence was explained by the fact that the ramparts during the laying could "crush" earlier monuments - for example, fortified settlements or settlements. Most of the things found, undoubtedly, belonged to our Russian ancestors. The discovery of the Old Russian cultural layer directly in the thickness of the ramparts, the presence of many settlements along the defensive lines during the heyday of Kievan Rus - all this gave scientists the right to assert that the grandiose system began at the end of the 10th century and was mainly completed in the first half of the 11th. Times of Vladimir and Yaroslav; the highest rise of Kievan Rus, the most powerful centralized state in Europe, where city streets were paved,unlike the city of Paris, buried in the mud, and the inhabitants are literate, unlike the completely ignorant Anglo-Normans!..
We have already said that the internal structure of the shafts is quite complicated. These are not just "big heaps of earth". In river valleys, embankments consist of sand, on watersheds - of sand or loam, less often, on elevations - of clay. But always in the thickness of the shafts there are wooden structures that fastened the mass of the soil, gave it the necessary height, steepness, stability and durability. And after all, they did: not some sections of millennial trains still cannot be entered by a rider on a horse! We have to dismount …
So, the frame of the shaft. What was it made of? Mainly made of oak, "the king of trees", extremely durable and hardy. Less often the embankment was “stuffed” with pine logs. But the latter have survived to this day better! The reason is simple: the frames were burning everywhere (why, we'll talk later) - and the oak burns out more completely than the pine …
In several large shafts, the so-called log structures have been opened - rows of four-walled log cabins, placed along the embankment and filled with soil inside. There were log cabins with double walls. Chains of separate log cabins are known, but rows of interconnected ones were also built. Quite often, a powerful log fence was erected with support on the tops of wooden "wells" - a fence.
Other shafts had a transfer structure: long longitudinal logs were laid in the form of decks on transverse logs. But the log structure has a prehistory in the East Slavic defensive architecture of earlier times, say, in the ramparts of fortifications. There they even left rows of empty log cabins, where, during the hostilities, civilians sat out, as if in "bomb shelters". It is not for nothing that such buildings are called everywhere “Russian-type ramparts” … But the reversible structure is a Western invention! It was used by the Germans, calling it "Rostkonstruktsiya", and our neighbors, the Poles. Where did it come from in the Dnieper region? Archaeologist Yevgeny Gorokhovsky, who once led the author along the ramparts, said that the southernmost (passing through the White Church) arc of fortifications was built by the Grand Duke Yaroslav the Wise; this system is the latest, and it is for it thatas the Poles say, "psheklad". So, it is quite possible that Yaroslav used his own Polish prisoners taken on the battlefield for gigantic construction work. It was they who applied the method characteristic of the Western Slavs and Germany …
However, no matter what "skeletons" were in the thickness of the ramparts, almost all of them burned down.
The hypothesis that wood was burned for sintering and soil compaction was not confirmed. Another assumption did not stand up to criticism: the logs were deliberately charred so that they would not rot later. According to Mikhail Kuchera, sunburns could occur when the frame was already dilapidated and cracks formed in the embankment, giving air access to the logs. Pal could have gone from lightning, from a forgotten fire … Most likely, fires started from above, with fences open to fire. Over a thousand years, often dry and sultry, there were probably a lot of cases of fire …
And the main culprits of the fires were, no doubt, the enemies, against whom the ramparts were built.
Of course, neither Vladimir Svyatoslavich nor Yaroslav Vladimirovich would have enough squads to set up guards along all 950 kilometers of the embankments. There were only flying detachments, troops of "rapid reaction", which could, on orders from above, arrive in some threatened area. It is these military units, presumably, and stood in the hailstones along the lines of the ramparts. Observers could be on duty at the huge ancient mounds. It is not excluded that the fire and smoke "telegraph" from bonfires may be used at the hour of alarm …
But it turns out that the “Great Russian Wall”, unlike the ramparts of the fortifications, was not intended for active hostilities! These were powerful stationary fortifications, like the previously mentioned Great Wall of China, designed only to detain nomadic cavalry in their attempts to break through to Kiev and other important centers of the Dnieper region.
Both the Pechenegs and the Polovtsians who later came to Russia did not have any experience of serf sieges or assaults. Their raids took the form of lightning raids; striking, showered the enemy with a cloud of arrows, seizing prey and captives, the steppe army rolled back just as quickly. One Byzantine writer characterized the nomads as follows: "Their raid is a thunderbolt, their retreat is hard and easy at the same time: hard from the multitude of prey, easy from the speed of flight." If it was not possible to rob, the steppe dwellers would turn their way back even faster, lightly …
The Polovtsy or Pechenegs simply did not have the strength and resources to overcome the shafts. They could still subject the city to "obsession", that is, surround them and, condemning the inhabitants to hunger and thirst, force them to surrender. With the Serpent Ramparts, such a model was not suitable precisely because there were no permanent garrisons on them. All that remained was to set fire to the log walls. This is what the nomads probably did - but, most likely, not attacking, but returning from unsuccessful raids. Judge for yourself: the fence could burn for a long time, and fire and smoke could attract a Russian guard detachment. But even if it was possible to burn down the barrier with impunity and wait for the coals to cool down, what was the use? There remained a steep rampart and a deep ditch with steep walls in front of it …
Probably, going to Kiev, the nomads tried to bypass the echelons of the ramparts, to find gaps for the passage. But at the same time, since the "fan" is very wide, their cavalry was forced to deviate far to the east or west; the campaign was lengthened, which could not but affect the fighting efficiency of the soldiers. Finally, bypassing or crossing one line of ramparts, the steppe dwellers immediately found themselves in front of the second, then before the third … But between the main embankments, as we see, for example, on the Ros' or in the interfluve of the Irpen-Teterev rivers, there were also transverse embankments, various branches ! In a word, a whole labyrinth is death for light cavalry without large convoys with supplies …
And now, after rigorous historical and archaeological studies, let's return to the initial myth about the brothers-smiths and the Serpent they defeated. The snake in medieval symbolism is the accepted image of warlike nomads. Often the steppe tribes themselves chose a formidable, fast, unnoticeable reptile in the grass as their sacred sign … What if the actual situation is captured in the myth? The sedentary people of blacksmiths and farmers defeats the steppe army, takes in a multitude of nomadic warriors … and forces them to work, building fortifications! "Serpent" erects endlessly long embankments with "furrows" - ditches. Could the Poles have done this under Yaroslav - why could not the Pechenegs under Vladimir?.. By the way, about the latter. The "fan" of ramparts around Kiev was basically completed in the first half of the 11th century. Isn't that why the construction stopped developing in breadth,that the Pechenegs have ceased to be dangerous for Russia? Indeed, in 1036, the Grand Duke Yaroslav actually destroyed their tribal union …
According to Mikhail Kuchera's calculations, the entire system of the Zmiyev Shafts was built for about 19 years, and up to 3,500 people worked at the construction site at a time. These, of course, could have been prisoners.
It remains only to admire the perfection of the grand-ducal state organization that provided these works. After all, it was not enough to calculate, plan, create unique architectural projects without a single modern tool. It was also necessary to organize the whole cycle of colossal work: felling wood, making hundreds of thousands of logs of different lengths and thicknesses, and other wooden parts; to supply the army of diggers and carpenters with food, tools of labor, probably means for maintaining health; take care of at least a primitive arrangement of their housing and everyday life … And the maintenance of order at the immense "construction site of the century"? It is very likely that the prisoners were only laborers, and all qualified operations were performed by the Slavs, the subjects of Kiev. Just in time for the construction of the ramparts - probablyin connection with the military activation of the Steppe - Vladimir began to populate the Dnieper region with natives of northern tribes - Novgorod Slovenes, Krivichi, Chudyu, Vyatichi, Radimichi, Dregovichi. The construction of a unified defense system of Russia could become the main feudal duty for visitors, among whom there were many good masters …
The fact that long embankments with fences remained the best means of protection from nomads even after Vladimir and Yaroslav is confirmed by the events of the next century. In the XII century on the Left Bank, between the Romna and the Seim rivers, a branch of new ramparts was hastily erected. But it was then that the incursions of the Polovtsy became more frequent, so disastrous for Russia, if you believe the "Lay of Igor's Regiment" …
Is such a grandiose and well-thought-out wooden-earth defense system lonely in the world? Yes and no.
Long shafts are known along the Dniester and Prut in the Khmelnytsky and Chernivtsi regions, in the basin of the Southern Bug, in the Cherkasy region, even in the Odessa region. The common name of Trajanovs was fixed for the ramparts of the South, and most researchers attribute them to ancient times.
There are such structures in the south of Moldova, and in the basin of the lower Danube. Their origin is indicated by one Old Bulgarian source of the 11th century: the walls were built by the Bulgarian Khan Asparukh in order to create "a great obstacle between the Danube and the Black Sea." Therefore, the beginning of construction is the 7th century. It is interesting that the Bulgarians built such embankments in their ancestral home, in the Volga region, to protect them from the Caspian steppe dwellers. (Presumably, everyone remembers that the Volga is the "Bolga", the river of Bulgarians; in turn, the inhabitants of medieval Europe called the Bulgarians Volgers.) The remains of these buildings were preserved in Chuvashia and Tatarstan.
Tradition associates huge ramparts in southwestern Poland with the name of King Boleslaw the Brave and the times of the founding of the Polish state, i.e., with the 11th century. These are the "peers" of the Zmievs.
All the mentioned systems of fortifications stood up as an obstacle to the tribes of the Black Sea steppes, who from the earliest times made their forays into the northern and western lands inhabited by settled, agricultural peoples.
But neither in ancient times, nor in the Middle Ages, nor in a time when the governments of Anna and Catherine laid the "Ukrainian" and "Dnieper" fortress lines against the Crimeans and Turks, nor in modern times, with its concrete-clad fortifications bristling with artillery, - such a well-coordinated, thoughtful and, moreover, a large-scale plan for the defense of an entire country has never been implemented. By the way, a defense that has not been broken by anyone!
The Mongols came from the other, unprotected side …
Andrey Dmitruk