...yet there are many remote places in Russia, five hundred versts and more without a town, veritable refuges for brigands and all manner of fugitive and passportless people

...yet there are many remote places in Russia, five hundred versts and more without a town, veritable refuges for brigands and all manner of fugitive and passportless people. An example may be seen in the wooded expanse around the river Vetluga, which, stretching seven hundred versts in its course from source to mouth, has not a single town upon it. Into that country a great multitude of barge-haulers betake themselves from the Volga in winter, and a good part of them are brigands. The peasants keep them the whole winter through at fifty kopecks a head, and should one do any work, they feed him without payment, asking no passport. In such places towns ought to be founded and set up, granting civic rights to the notable villages, establishing town halls and voivodeships, and fencing them about with reliable fortifications and precautions against brigands, as shown above.

Lomonosov, "On the Multiplication and Preservation of the Russian People", 1761.

Stereo pairs by Zakhar Vinogradov, "The Life and Nature of Russia", from the series of 1909-1911 "In the Trans-Volga Lands: the Vetluga Region".

Vetluga was founded in the sixteenth century on the right bank of the river of the same name, the Vetluga, a left tributary of the Volga in the northern part of the Volga region. Today it is a small town of some 8,000 inhabitants in the Nizhny Novgorod Region.