During a direct line last week, the Russian president saw on the screen the question "Where did the chuds go?" and decided to answer it. “They were assimilated, in the main,” said Vladimir Vladimirovich. Who are weirdos? Why did they bury themselves alive? We talked with the researcher and even found one of the distant descendants of this nation.
Chudi are the indigenous people of the north about which little is known. In 1920, they were mentioned in the population census, but then they mysteriously disappeared. Together with other peoples, they were united into the Vepsa group. But at the beginning of the 2000s, the creeps appeared again. Researcher Sergei Grigoriev achieved the inclusion of the Chud people in the population census. In 2010, there are only 27 of them left.
How it all started
Sergey Grigoriev is a researcher of the Chud people and an employee of the Ministry of Ethnic Affairs. Since 1974 he has been visiting the Pinezhsky district, the village of Nyukhcha. There he studies documents, talks to people and writes scientific papers. As the scientist said, there is no exact definition of what a chud is.
Some pre-Slavic peoples called Chudya. External differences: high cheekbones, elongated skull, pale blue eyes, not as wide apart as in others.
Fragment of the Russian-Chud dictionary. 1913 g.
As Mikhail Lomonosov wrote in the article "About Russia before Rurik" - this is the people who have inhabited the north for a long time. In addition, the Chudi could be Estonians who lived on Lake Peipsi. And the inhabitants of the Arkhangelsk region generally called themselves "Chud Zavolchanskaya". Residents of Komi also know that their origin comes from the Chud, Chud inhabited the Urals, and in Yekaterinburg even a sculpture stands - the Chud idol.
Promotional video:
A resident of the Arkhangelsk region talks about the people:
Once, when Grigoriev did not yet know who the Chuds were, he offered the ministry a program for studying folk cultures in remote and inaccessible places. On one of the expeditions, the explorer sailed along the river in a boat and sometimes stopped in villages to study the people. One day he was in the village of Nyukhcha to fix the boat. A bunch of children were gathered around.
The scientist created a museum of peasant life at this place. And at the same time he found a reason to periodically come to the village. According to Sergei, at first he did not come there for a chud and did not even think that he would study this topic so deeply. But after the discovery, the researcher organized three more expeditions. He noticed that the appearance of the locals differs from the usual in these parts.
There was only one riddle - where did the Chud people go?
Sergei Mikhailovich began to dig up old documents. Found a census for 1920 - Chuds were on this list. He decided to make a whole village of the remaining miracles - for this the Ministry of Finance allocated 15 million rubles. “I made a plan for what can be done. But the local kings, as I call them, were scared. That they - the heads of the district, the agricultural council - will be left without work."
Then the journalists of regional publications in each issue wrote about an eccentric guy who powders the brains of the local population with some kind of chud. The formal number for 2002 is 21 representatives of purebred miracles. In addition, part of the local population signed up as a small nation, but this angered the real residents. Because of the pressure, they began to say that there were no miracles there, that the scientist had invented everything. According to Sergei, after that the census data were falsified - and now there is not entirely correct information.
President's response:
Among the villagers who belonged to the Chud was Tatyana Sedunova. Journalists found her in the Arkhangelsk region, in the village of Verkola. Her grandmother was a Chudyu, in 1997-1998 they all family submitted an official application to the community. But in 1999, the organization was closed.
Thousands of years later, the moat in which the Chuds killed themselves still exists. In the 60s, archaeologists came to the village - they wanted to carry out excavations. But the locals came out, overshadowed them and did not let them do it. “We are still observing these mounds. In the 90s, a Moscow journalist Sergey Grigoriev came to us. He told us about chud. I shared my findings. The more we learned about this people, the more we were interested,”Tatyana recalls. Sergei Mikhailovich spent a huge amount of time in the library. I learned that the Chudi had its own culture, its own god for worship and writing - there is even a Russian-Chud dictionary.
What about the people now?
"Chud" has survived in Russian toponymy. Reminds the name of Lake Peipsi on the border of Estonia and the Pskov region, where the famous Battle of the Ice took place in 1242. The year before last, Sergei Grigoriev even found maps where the Chudi lived. The conclusion was made: the inhabitants of the Arkhangelsk region have no resemblance to the Slavs, that they are relatives to the Swedes, Estonians, part of Poland, and that, apparently, Iceland was inhabited precisely by immigrants from the Arkhangelsk territory (well, these are the conclusions of Sergei).
Tatiana Sedunova believes that small people can become a brand for a district. With its own cuisine and unique craft. Already, these people can be attributed to the small indigenous people of Russia. Attract tourists, investment and society. Well … It remains to prove to the others that these people exist at all.
