Medyn is a city in Russia, the administrative center of the Medynsky district of the Kaluga region. The city of Medyn forms an urban settlement.
There are three stone Orthodox churches in the city, two of which are
active - the Kazan Mother of God (founded in 1836) and the Intercession
of the Blessed Virgin Mary (founded in 1905).
The ancient
Cathedral of Helen and Constantine (founded in 1777) currently stands in
ruins.
It is located in the north-west of the Kaluga region, on the Medynka
River (Oka basin), 15 km from the Myatlevskaya railway station on the
Vyazma - Tula line and ~62 km from the regional center - the city of
Kaluga.
The federal highway A130 “Moscow - Roslavl - border with
Belarus” passes through the city.
Medyn, like the Kaluga region, is located in the MSC time zone
(Moscow time). The applied time offset relative to UTC is +3:00.
On
March 27, 2011, Medyn, together with all of Russia, switched to
permanent time measurement according to the international standard UTC,
that is, the permanent use of summer time was established.
It was first mentioned in historical documents dating back to 1386.
Then Medyn passed from the Smolensk principality to the Moscow
principality through the efforts of the boyar Prince Dmitry Donskoy -
Fyodor Andreevich Svibla. In 1389, Dmitry Donskoy, in his will, gave it
to his son, Andrei Mozhaisky, as part of the Mozhaisky inheritance.
Prince of Mozhaisk Ivan Andreevich, grandson of Dmitry Donskoy,
promised Medyn to the Polish king Casimir IV in 1448 in exchange for
help in ascending the Moscow throne. In 1454, the Mozhaisk inheritance
was captured by Vasily II and Medyn again went to the Moscow
principality. Vasily II the Dark bequeathed it to his son Yuri the
Lesser in 1462.
In 1472 it became the property of Grand Duke
Vasily III, who in 1508 granted the village to Prince Mikhail Glinsky,
or, according to other sources, to Ivan and Vasily Glinsky.
In
1480, Ivan III founded the Annunciation Hermitage in Medyn, in memory of
the overthrow of the Tatar-Mongol yoke.
In 1533, Grand Duke
Vasily III, before his death, bequeathed Medyn to his youngest son Yuri
Vasilyevich, Prince Uglitsky.
In 1565, Ivan the Terrible took
Medyn into personal control (oprichnina).
At the beginning of the
17th century, Medyn and the Annunciation Hermitage were devastated, and
at the end they ceased to be a city and became an economic village.
In 1603, the Moscow nobleman, governor Efim Buturlin received a
royal decree to march with military men to Medyn to fight gangs of
robbers.
In the summer of 1610, Prince Dmitry Ivanovich Shuyskoy
from Mozhaisk sent Ivan Eropkin and Tsar Vasily Ivanovich’s military men
to Medyn to fight the “thieves’ people.” The campaign ended with the
liberation of Medyn.
In 1660, the restorer of the Annunciation
Hermitage, Elder Abraham (according to other sources, the founder; he
held the position of builder in the monastery from 1660 to 1694, and the
inventory of 1678 states that the hermitage was founded on the site of
the “church on the Medyn settlement”), wrote in a message to Tsar Alexei
Mikhailovich about the complete desolation of Medyn - “The city of
Medyn... stands empty and there is not a single person living in it.”
Three years earlier, the plague epidemic ended in Russia. In 1676, the
hermitage (Abraham built a church and two monastic cells in it), which
did not own any land, was assigned to the Resurrection New Jerusalem
Monastery. After the secularization reform of 1764, the monastery was
left to the state and was soon completely abolished.
In 1680, the
former city (fortification) of Medynsk, by decree of Fyodor III
Alekseevich, was transferred into the possession of the New Jerusalem
Monastery. According to old-timers of that time, the former city of
Medynsk stood on a place called the Annunciation Hermitage.
In
1708 it was assigned to the Moscow province, in 1719 it remained part of
the Moscow province.
In 1777, the village of Medyn (Medyn
settlement) was transformed into the city of Medyn (Medynsk), which
became the district town of the Medyn district of the Kaluga
governorship, and since 1796, the Kaluga province.
During the Patriotic War of 1812, near Medyn, the Cossack detachments of Bykhalov and Ilovaisky stopped and defeated the vanguards of General Lefevre, who, according to the plan of Jozef Poniatovsky, were supposed to break through to Kaluga and Yukhnov after the Battle of Maloyaroslavets. Napoleon tried to find a “new reliable communication” through unravaged areas.
In 1845, Gustav Gemelin, who came to Medyn from St. Petersburg and
settled in Medyn, founded the first match factory in Medyn.
In
1865, a prison was established in Medyn.
On February 19-20, 1918, the 1st district congress of Soviets took
place in Medyn, which decided not to recognize any other authorities
other than the Councils of People's Commissars and the Council of
Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies locally. Decisions were made
to socialize land, factories and factories, create a Red Guard in each
volost, immediately begin to implement the decree on land, introduce
workers' control at enterprises, impose taxes on all capitalists to
finance institutions, establish a commissariat for public education,
open craft and agricultural and other schools, establish public
libraries. The Congress elected an Executive Committee: from the
peasants, Comrade. Logachev, Finogin, Molchanov, Otryakhin-Khodar,
Ivashkov, Golenev, Ryabov, Belyakov, from the workers and soldiers -
Comrade. Krupkin, Orefyev, Kholopov, Varskoy, Egorov, Iakhov and
Biryukov.
In November 1918, Medyn became a center of resistance
to the forces of reaction from the fragile Soviet government. During the
kulak-SR rebellion, opponents of the new government tried to seize
weapons and funds concentrated in the city. However, the Bolsheviks
quickly took all the necessary countermeasures, which subsequently led
to the suppression of the rebellion with minimal losses on the part of
the victors. In memory of those events, a monument was erected in the
city center. Below it is a mass grave of the victims of the mutiny.
On February 11, 1919, F. A. Zimin’s match factories “and all related
enterprises, departments, warehouses, offices, capital and property”
came under the leadership of the Chemical Department of the Supreme
Economic Council of the RSFSR.
In 1920, an interdepartmental
meeting of the district department of the Council of National Economy
with representatives of the district executive committee, the municipal
department and the Party Committee decided to open a printing house in
Medyn. The necessary printing machines, fonts and other printing
materials were confiscated from the match factories of Zimin and
Vedernikov, and from the Polotnyano-Zavodskaya printing house.
On
January 30, 1923, the 243rd regiment of the 81st Infantry Division was
formed, which in August received the name Medynsky Infantry Regiment and
was stationed in Medyn until 1931. R. Ya. Malinovsky, the future Marshal
of the Soviet Union, served as battalion commander there.
Since
1929, Medyn has been the center of the Medynsky district of the
Vyazemsky district of the Western Region.
On January 28-31, 1930,
dispossession of “merchants and dispossessed” was carried out. The 243rd
(Medynsky) Infantry Regiment of the 81st (Kaluga) Infantry Division was
involved in the dispossession without the knowledge or permission of the
command. Representatives of the authorities gave instructions to the Red
Army soldiers: “Take everything, leave four walls and clothes to cover
your naked body.” All seized property was abandoned and partially stolen
by junior command staff and Red Army soldiers. The investigation of the
243rd Infantry Regiment in the repressions was carried out under the
personal control of K.E. Voroshilov, the events in Medyn were reported
to I.V. Stalin. The “Medyn Affair” became a household name; it was often
mentioned in directives prohibiting the use of Red Army units in
dispossession, resettlement, suppression of peasant uprisings and other
punitive operations.
In the period from 1930 to 1933, it is
planned to build a match factory in Medyn.
With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, in August-October
1941, the city was subjected to air bombing and artillery shelling, and
was partially destroyed. At the beginning of October, in the Medyn
region, a forward detachment created from the 6th company of the Podolsk
Infantry School under the command of Art. Lieutenant L.A. Mamchich,
reinforced by the artillery division of Captain Ya.S. Rossikov. The city
was occupied by units of the 4th Army of the Wehrmacht by the end of
October 12, 1941. During the occupation, the 6th Army assembly and
transit point for Soviet prisoners of war and civilians was located in
Medyn, where a large number of soldiers and commanders of the Red Army
died.
At the beginning of January 1942, on Medynskaya land, in
the offensive zone of the 43rd Army, the parachute landing group of
Major I. G. Starchak operated. The operation to liberate Medyn began on
January 12, 1942. On January 14, 1942, the city of Medyn and nearby
villages were liberated by soldiers of the 17th Infantry Division, the
12th and 475th Infantry Regiments of the 53rd Infantry Division, the
10th Airborne Brigade of the 5th Airborne Corps, the 26th 1st tank
brigade of the 43rd Army of the Western Front during the Rzhev-Vyazemsk
operation. The losses of only the 282nd Infantry Regiment of the 98th
Wehrmacht Infantry Division in the Medyn area were: 56 officers, 1916
non-commissioned officers and privates. In other regiments of the
division, things were no better.
On July 5, 1944, the city became
the regional center of the newly formed Kaluga region.
After the end of the war, Medyn developed as a regional center within
the Kaluga region of the RSFSR.
In 1965, a machine counting
station began operating in Medyn, which was later reorganized into the
RICC and automatic telephone exchange with 500 telephone numbers.