An ordinary small Russian town, built in ancient times on the border with the steppe region. Ancient beautiful buildings of the 18th-19th centuries, combined with strange monuments of the Soviet period, create their own unique flavor. Now the life of the population of Buzuluk depends on the level of oil production and prices for hydrocarbon raw materials.
General information
Buzuluk is a city in the Orenburg region, built on the banks of the Samara, Buzuluk and Domashki rivers. The official name of the inhabitants: men - Buzuluchan, women - Buzuluchan, townspeople - Buzuluchans. The regional center Orenburg is 246 km away, another large city, Samara, is 176 km away. For some time the city was among the best in terms of economic development in the Volga Federal District.
The total volume of production in the region in 2017 amounted to 230 billion rubles. This is a good indicator for a small town. The main part of production falls on the mining and oilfield services industry, which produced products worth 214.3 rubles. The growth compared to the previous year was 10.1%. Increased production volumeengineering enterprises through orders for drilling equipment. A slight decrease occurred in the food and light industries. 1393 people applied to the Buzuluk Employment Center in search of work.
Etymology
The fortress was named after the tributary of the Samara, on which it was built. Buzuluk is a fairly common name in the steppe regions, where Turkic tribes roamed. Rivers of the same name flow in the Volgograd and Dnepropetrovsk regions.
Derived from the ancient Turkic toponym "Buzuluk", which translates as "ice". Usually nomadic tribes called small rivers that fill up only in spring, during the melting of snow and ice. In the Crimea there is a Buzuluk cave, the bottom of which is covered with non-melting ice. From the Crimean Tatar the name is translated as "glacier" or "accumulation of ice".
There is another version - that Buzuluk comes from the Tatar "bozau" - "calf" or "bozaulyk" - "veal fence". According to this hypothesis, the place where the river flows into Samara is very convenient for grazing calves. According to another alternative version, the name of the city was given by the Turkic tribe Buzu or base, which translates as "rebellious" and "rebellious".
History
The Buzulutskaya Fortress was founded in 1736, in 1781 it was given the status of a county town as part of the Ufa governorship. For a long time, the inhabitants of the city hunted, fished, farmed andtrade. The city has not escaped the cataclysms experienced by the country. In 1774 the city was one of the centers of the Pugachev uprising. During the civil war, Buzuluk was occupied either by the Reds from the Chapaev division, or by the White troops of Ataman Dutov and Kolchak.
During the Great Patriotic War, the first foreign military units were formed in the city - the Czechoslovak battalion under the command of Ludwig Svoboda. After the war, when he became president of the country, Svoboda came to Buzuluk and awarded the city with the Order of the Red Star of Czechoslovakia. Enterprises from the occupied part of Russia were evacuated here, where they were engaged in the production of tanks and armored cars. Then they were redesigned for the production of metallurgical and mining equipment
Population: from foundation to revolution
At the time of the construction of the fortress, the population of Buzuluk was a little more than 500 people, including 478 Yaik Cossacks, 19 Nogais and 47 of various classes. Lists of residents of the Buzuluk fortress have been preserved in historical archives. In 1740, 629 people were recorded in ancient acts, of which 240 were Cossacks, the rest were family members. Some of the Cossacks were "complained" - 148 people who received payment for military service. Others lived off agriculture - "arable", 92 people. Interestingly, of all the adult men, only three were able to sign their testimony. The city grew slowly, with a population of 1,000 in 1811.
According to the first official data of 1856, 5600 people already lived in the city. The population grew as a result ofrecruiting Cossacks and peasants who have come here from the central provinces in search of a better life.
The main forms of employment in Buzuluk were agriculture and handicrafts. By 1913 the population had reached 16,500. The growth of Buzuluk was facilitated by the expansion of the Russian Empire into Central Asia, since the region was the main transit point on the way from the central regions.
Population in modern times
In Soviet times, the population of Buzuluk grew rapidly, in the early years - due to industrialization, when the city replenished the rural population. In 1939 the number of inhabitants reached 42,400. In the post-war period, oil was discovered in the region, and due to the opening of enterprises in the industry, the population of Buzuluk reached 76,000 people by 1976.
In the post-Soviet era, the urban population continued to grow, peaking at 88,900 in 2008. Despite the fact that almost all industrial enterprises were closed, oil-producing enterprises compensated for the decline in production in other sectors of the economy. The main vacancies of the Buzuluk Center for Employment in these years were related to the professions of this industry. After the fall (in 2010-2011), in subsequent years, the number of inhabitants gradually increased. In 2017, 86,316 people lived in the city.
