Origin of the surname
Be proud of your mind when you were young, and your surname from childhood
Surely, there will not be a single person on Earth who is not interested in the history of his kind, his family. And in every backward tribe of the Amazon, and in developed European countries and the USA, people with the same trepidation bit by bit collect facts about their distant and close ancestors, compiling genealogical trees, rummaging through archives, asking the old people, and all this has one goal - to find out, find out who are they, where are they from, where are their roots.
However, the archive might not have survived, burned, or got lost. Old people are also unreliable storytellers, human memory is bizarre, it is capable of not preserving or distorting any information to such an extent that, instead of relatively accurate data, the world will learn a legend, a tale, a fairy tale, in which there will not be even a particle of truth.
And yet, there is one fairly accurate and proven way to get truthful information about your roots, and this way is simple: you just have to think carefully, look at your surname, be able to recognize its origins, its origin.
The surname, as if in cryptograms, contains encrypted information, both about our distant ancestors, and what they did, and sometimes about those great or tragic events that happened to them.
Surname is not a Russian word
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Yes, in fact, the word "surname" in Russian appeared only in the 18th century, after the reforms of Peter I. It came from the Latin familia, which at first meant not even spouses with their children, but only all slaves belonging to some family.
The fact that the very word "surname" appeared during the reign of Peter does not mean at all that there were no surnames in Russia in the pre-Petrine era. There were, of course, there were, but they were called differently - nicknames, nicknames. For example, in our time, the Ukrainian language, in which many ancient Russian words have been preserved, and now instead of the word "surname" they use the word "surname".
Thus, it becomes clear that most of the modern Russian surnames come from the nicknames of their ancestors. How are surnames different from nicknames? The first is that it does not apply to a specific person, but to all of his descendants.
Another important point - nicknames always answer the questions: “who? what? " - Siskin, Wind, Fish, Black, Ryzhukha, and the names - to the question: "whose?" - Chizhov, Vetrov, Rybin, Chernov, Ryzhukhin, etc.
The transition from a nickname to a surname in Russia was quite long, it took, according to experts, from 300 to 700 years. But already from the chronicle of the XIV century, we know that together with Senka Sin, a peasant of the Borovitsky churchyard, and Ionka Fox, an Ivangorod merchant, Klen Prokofiev, a landowner from Ryazan, and a serviceman Bozhenko Fedorov, lived in Russia, that is, together with nicknames in everyday life there were also surnames.
As we know, there are no rules without exceptions. A number of old, and it should be noted, purely Russian surnames, still answer the question "which one?" instead of "whose?" We are talking about the princely surnames, given by the geographical name of the estates - Meschera, Khovanshchina, Vyazma. Hence the names - Meshchersky, Khovansky, Vyazemsky. Surnames of this kind should not be confused with Polish ones. These are primordially Russian, princely surnames, which, nevertheless, answer the question "which one?"
How Russian surnames were distorted
Because the nobles always prided themselves on the antiquity of their kind, and often it was not possible to prove whose family was ancient - the necessary papers were not preserved, in the 18th century an absolutely special fashion appeared in Russia: the nobles began to derive their surnames from supposedly foreign eminent ancestors.
So, the first herald master of Peter I, Count Kolychev, whose ancestor was recorded in the annals as a Mare, began to assert that a mistake had occurred due to the carelessness of careless scribes, but in reality it was necessary to write - "Compilla", since the count's ancestor allegedly arrived from Italy, where was, neither give nor take, a prince.
The family of the famous noble family Bestuzhevs at about the same time suddenly "discovered" that their surname did not come from the Old Russian nickname Bestuzh, which in translation means a shameless man, ohalnik, but from the English surname Best. They came up with a whole legend about a certain Englishman Gabriel Best, who was invited by almost Tsar Vasily the Dark to serve. Of course, it was not without the count's roots - the Bestuzhevs said that Gabriel Best came from a very noble family, but in his homeland, and England, he was persecuted, and he had to flee to Russia.
There are many examples of this kind. The Kozodavlevs, for example, received their, frankly, not quite euphonious surname from a certain Livonian ancestor Kos von Dalen, and the mysterious metamorphosis that happened with a foreign name was attributed to the same careless scribes.
What is curious is that along with these pompous lies of high society fanfare among the Russian nobility, in reality there are a number of surnames, the founders of which are foreigners. You won't have to go far for an example, the ancestor of Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov was a Scot Lermont, by the way, he really had to flee from his homeland because of persecution.
Russian or not Russian surname?
The widespread opinion is that a purely Russian surname is one that ends with - ov. It would be harmful for all the others - in - in - sky, - in, - this is Ukrainian, Polish, Belarusian, Jewish and God knows what surname.
In reality, this is not the case. We have already said about Russian princely surnames, derived from geographical names. Also, a purely Russian surname in Nansky is the one that originated from the church holiday: Assumption, Epiphany, Rozhdestvensky, Preobrazhensky. Nowadays, the bearers of these surnames can say with absolute certainty that their ancestors were priests, and their "divine" surnames were given to them according to the name of the parish in which they served.
A number of rather ancient noble surnames ending in - go are also considered natively Russian: Khitrovo, Durnovo, Mertvago, Chernago, Sukhovo, Blagovo, Ryzhago, etc. Such surnames, by the way, also answer the question "whose?", but they retained an older form of declension.
Now let's talk about surnames in - in. For some reason, they believe that Voronov is a Russian surname, and Voronin is a “Russified” Ukrainian. In fact, surnames on - s originated from nicknames that end in a consonant letter: Raven - Voronov, Pond - Prudov, Oak - Dubov, and surnames on - in - from nicknames ending in a vowel: Vorona - Voronin, Bereza - Berezin, Mukha - Mukhin, Shaika - Shaikin, etc. And all these, of course, are primordially Russian surnames.
Ivanov, Petrov, … Schmidt!
For a long time in Russia there was a saying: "The whole Russian land holds on to the Ivanovs, Petrovs and Sidorovs!"
As it turned out, this is not entirely true. In general, two-thirds of modern Russian surnames come from the calendar names of Orthodox saints. Already in the 18th century, these surnames greatly supplanted nickname and artificial surnames. Since that time, the picture has practically not changed, and today the most common Russian surname is actually Ivanov. Then, contrary to the generally accepted opinion, Vasiliev comes, but Petrov only gets the honorable third place.
The fourth most common Russian surname, Smirnov, is not related to the calendar Orthodox, but originated from the nickname Smiren, Smyrn. This traditional peasant old Russian name was very popular 5-7 centuries ago.
Smirnov is followed by Mikhailov and Fedorov, the seventh place is taken by Sokolov (again a nickname surname!), Then - Yakovlev, Popov (also from the nickname), Andreev, Alekseev, etc.
It should be noted that the surname Sidorov in Russia now occupies as much as 71st place, yielding in frequency of distribution even to such a completely non-Russian surname as Schmidt (68th place).
The revolution changes surnames
In the 1920s, at a time of post-revolutionary enthusiasm, when it was fashionable to subvert everything related to tsarist Russia, by a special resolution of the Council of People's Commissars, people were allowed to change the old, dissonant from the point of view of revolutionary ethics, surnames for new, as it was then said, "Bolshevik".
The list of the changed names was constantly published in the Izvestia newspaper. It was at that time that such names as Kolkhoznov, Industriev, Rabochev, Fabrichkin, Zavodov, Traktorov, Pyatiletkin, Pervomaisky, Krasnoflotsky, Oktyabrsky entered the Russian language.
There was a case when a descendant of an ancient and rare surname of the Emperors changed it to a more “fashionable” and “advanced”, as it seemed then to Dazdramirev, which was deciphered as “Long live the world revolution!”.
It should be noted that the renaming of the 1920s and 1930s affected not only surnames, but also first names. A huge number of Nikolaev changed their "royal" name to Mels (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin), Vilen (Vladimir Ilyich Lenin), Vil (the same), Kim (Communist Youth International), Reval (short for revolution), Marat (in honor of the leader of the Great French Revolution), etc.
Of course, these days, such "revolutionary" neoplasms can only cause a smile, but who knows, perhaps in 300 years some Russian of the future named Bronepoezdov will proudly say that his great-great-great-grandfather served on a red armored train in the distant twentieth century " Death to Wrangel! " and took his surname in honor of his faithful iron comrade in arms.
S. Volkov