Khabarov Erofey Pavlovich

Year of birth: 1605

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Year of death: 1671

Traveler, explorer of the Amur region. He was born in the Vologda region in the family of pomor peasants. In his younger years, he went fishing beyond the Urals, to Mangazeya, to Het and Pyasina (Taimyr). Until the spring of 1630, he served as a tollman in the Het winter residence. When rumors of discoveries on the Amur discoveries reached him, he left his business, gathered a group of "hunters" and arrived in Ilimsk. After receiving a permission from the new governor to go to the Amur, he took on credit military equipment, weapons, agricultural equipment and led a group of 60 people; in the spring of 1649, he came out of Ilimsk, and in the autumn, he went up the Ulekma.

The detachment spent part of the winter at the mouth of Tungir; until March 1650, they passed to Urka (left confluent of the Amur), and from there, went down the Amur. In one of the villages, he was told about the "luxury of the country" behind the Amur, the ruler of which has an army with a "fire fight" and cannons. Khabarov left 50 people in the abandoned town on the Urka and, on May 26, 1650, returned to Yakutsk. Appointed as a "responsible person" of the Daurian country, he came from Yakutsk in July with 70 volunteers and in the autumn arrived on the Amur "to conquer the lands lying on the Amur" to the Daurian land. "He obtained a lot of bread and livestock", established himself for the winter in Albazin, triumphantly went to the daurs, captured and taxed them with yasak.

In 1651, he managed to conquer several Daurian princes who lived down from Albazin along the Amur River and reached the Achani-ulus, where, wintering, he sustained three sieges from the Duger, Achani, and Manchur, after which he went back up the Amur. On the way, he had to fight against the former accomplices who had fallen apart from him (Polyakov, Chechigin, etc.), as well as with the giliaks. Meeting Khabarov and his people, in August 1653, at the mouth of the river Zeya, the Moscow nobleman Dmitri Ivanovich Zinoviev, who was sent from Moscow to reward Yerofey Pavlovich with gold coins, refused to show him the tsar's order, according to which Zinoviev was told "to inspect the entire Daurian land and …". For this, Khabarov grabbed his beard and beat him, and then made a "search." Accusing Khabarov of "neglecting the benefits of the sovereign’s treasury, enslaving servitors, treacherous attitude to the natives and devastating the entire Amur region, he replaced him and took him to Moscow, exposing all sorts of harassment along the way." But upon arrival in Moscow in 1654, Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, after the essence of the conflict, granted Khabarov to "boyar children", gave a "feed" to a number of villages in Siberia, but he refused to return to the Amur.

In subsequent years, Khabarov was engaged in trade. In the autumn of 1667, in Tobolsk, he informed the drafters of the "Drawing of All Siberia" Remezov about the upper reaches of the Lena and about the Amur. In January 1668, in Moscow, the explorer asked again to let him visit the Amur, but was refused and returned to the Lena. Three years later, he died in his settlement in the mouth of the Kirenga. According to the legend, Khabarov bequeathed to bury him in the Holy Trinity Monastery of the Kirensk Pogost (since 1775 Kirensk), to whom he transferred all his lands in Siberia; at present, the exact burial place is unknown.

The name of Khabarov was given to the huge territory and its administrative center, the Erofey Pavlovich station on the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Khabarovka village on the Lena River near the mouth of the Kirenga River.