THE EVOLUTION OF BOROVOE VILLAGE

By the middle of the 19th century, the military-Cossack colonisation of the Steppe continued with less stress and risk. In 1849, not far from the Kokchetav mountains, the village of Koturkolskaya village was founded, and a year later its settlement Shchuchinsky arose. Twenty years later, 22 kilometres north of the village of Shchuchinskaya, on the banks of the Gromova River, the village of Borovskoy grew up.

The foundation of the village of Borovoye by the followers of Zubov dates back to the end of the 1860s but cannot be established more precisely. In 1878, the region was visited by the famous traveller-naturalist I.Ya. Slovtsov. According to his testimony, there were 10 houses in Borovoe “if we count, among other things, two collapsed dugouts.”

From the beginning of the 1870s, people from neighbouring provinces and regions travelled to the Borovskoye district in the summer to “treat with koumiss and breathe clean air”. The whole thing was not regulated by anyone, proceeded without the presence of doctors and was of an extremely primitive nature. The village of Borovoye until the beginning of the 20th century consisted of only a small number of small semi-dugout huts belonging to the families of the Koturkolsky millers and fishermen. The visiting summer residents were accommodated in Cossack huts and Kazakh yurts.

This continued until the early 1880s, when a retired Cossack, General Pakhomov, settled there and began to actively promote this beautiful place. He built two small barracks to meet the demand for apartments from summer residents. In memory of this, the people called the rock that rises near the place where those first barracks were built, Pakhomovka. This name still exists today.

The trip along the steppe dirt roads on horses and draft oxen did not promise any conveniences, and the impassibility in the region of mountains and forests frightened many. The construction of the Great Siberian Route (1896) did not practically improve the situation, when the nearest station, Petropavlovsk, was 267 km from Borovoe. All these factors held back the flow of sick people and vacationers alike. Mostly people of medium and small incomes came here, who involuntarily put up with all the inconveniences.

But, despite the above obstacles, at the beginning of the 20th century, more and more vacationers began to visit Borovoe. General Katanaev wrote about it this way: “Many people come here every year; sick and completely healthy, both from nearby places, and from Russia and far abroad. It is a fact. There are known multiple visits to Borovoye by persons who have been to the famous resorts of European Russia, the Caucasus, and Western Europe more than once before.”

By 1914, thanks to the arrivals of summer residents, the village already had up to 30 proper houses, half of them were two-story. The lower floors and outbuildings were most often occupied by the owners themselves or trading establishments, while the upper floors were rented out to summer residents completely or by the room. Next to this, planned plots were set aside specifically for summer cottages.

In addition to summer residents, representatives of big industrial capital also began to penetrate the region - near the resort on the shores of the Big Chebachy Lake, a large meat-packing plant was built, owned by the Englishman, Bergl, with a number of industrial enterprises (including fat-roasting, sausage, sawmill, and workshops). About a thousand workers were employed in these industries. On the lakes Oraz Ulken-sor and Oraz Dzharty-sor, the Kurgan merchant I.I. Menshikov was engaged in the extraction of Glauber’s salt for the needs of his glass factory.

At the same time, scientists began to take an interest in the Borovoye area: in 1884, the geodesist Colonel Yu.A. In 1894, Dr. N.V. Sobolev in the laboratory of the Omsk Medical Society analysed the water and mud of Lake Dzhanibek-sor, samples of which were delivered by General Ackerman, and in 1895 the doctor made a report at the Omsk Medical Society on the chemical composition of the mud and water of this lake. In the same year, for the first time, observations were made on the opening and freezing of rivers and lakes in the Borovsky region by teachers M.R. Krasnousov (Koturkolskaya village) and Dorogov (Shchuchinskaya village).

The time from 1896 to 1919 is called the “dacha period”. It is characterised by the fact that the state, represented by the Department of State Property of the Steppe Regions, which was set aside in 1894, began to regulate the external improvement of Borovoe. In 1897, V.V. Baryshevtsev was appointed manager of the state property of the Akmola and Semipalatinsk regions.

by Pavel Kossovich