The First Head of Works on the Construction of the Volga-Don Canal (on Kamyshenka) Yagan Brekkel and his Activities in Russia in 1695-1698.

Kleitman Aleksandr Leonidovich Doctor of History Leading Researcher, The Institute of the History of Natural Science and Technology named after S.I. Vavilov of the Russian Academy of Sciences 125315, Russia, Moscow region, Moscow, Baltiyskaya str., 14 malk@bk.ru Other publications by this author

The construction of the canal between the Volga and the Don through the tributaries Kamyshinka and Ilovlya was one of the first major projects to modernize the transport infrastructure of Russia, implemented in Russia during the reign of Peter I. The author of the first project of this channel was an officer of Swedish origin, who entered the Russian service in 1695, Yagan Brekkel. Work on the construction of the canal according to his project was carried out in 1697, and in the winter of 1698 he left Russia, leaving the work on the Kamyshenka unfinished.

Despite the fact that this subject is traditionally considered on the pages of generalizing works on the history of the Peter the Great era, the history of science and technology, no special studies have been conducted on the biography of Ya. Brekkel to date. In the huge flow of popular and local history literature devoted to the Peter the Great era, his biography has acquired many details, often contradicting not only historical truth, but also common sense. In this regard, there is a need for a special analysis of historiography, which somehow considered the activities of J. Brekkel in Russia, as well as writing his biography, which will be based on a wide range of reliable published and archival sources.

The first work that examined the history of the construction of the canal on Kamyshinka in 1697 was John Perry's book "The State of Russia under the current tsar". Englishman J. Perry, an engineer, a specialist in the construction of navigable canals and docks, was the author of the second project of a canal through Kamyshinka and Ilovlya, work on which was carried out in 1699 – early 1700s, but was also not completed. In his work, he described his predecessor and his project in several sentences. J. Perry mistakenly believed that Brekkel was a German, but he absolutely rightly noted that he served as a colonel in the tsarist army and was a good specialist in fortifications. The reason for the engineer's flight abroad was the fear of punishment for not being able to complete the construction of the Volga-Don Canal. As noted by J. Perry, already outside Russia, the fugitive wrote a letter to the tsar complaining about B.A. Golitsyn, who allegedly refused the engineer everything necessary for the production of works, and mistreated him ^{[17, p. 3-4]}.

The well-known researcher of the biography of Peter I, I.I. Golikov, although he made a mistake in the name of Ya. Brekkel, calling him "Blekler", rightly noted that the author of the first draft of the channel "knew well only to build fortifications, and nothing else", and also correctly pointed out that the news of the suspension of work on the channel caught Peter I in London ^{[8, p. 78]}.

During the XIX century, various publications published separate documents containing information about the recruitment and flight from Russia of J. Brekkel.

In the early years of the XIX century, letters of Peter I to the Apraksins were published, including a letter sent from Derfort on March 29, 1698, in which the tsar expressed regret over the flight of Ya. Brekkel: "You immediately write that Colonel Brekkel secretly traveled abroad, and it's too bad that you made such a mistake, it was possible to look harder in that, and here not only someone else, but the kings themselves sign each roadway with their own hand..." ^{[20, p. 2]}.

The Russian geographer, hydrologist of German origin Johann-Christian Stuckenberg was able to expand the database of sources about the history of the construction of the canal between Kamyshinka and Ilovlya according to the project of J. Brekkel. In the book "Beschreibung aller, in Russischer Reiche gegrabenen oder projectirten, schiff- und flossbaren Canaele ...", published in German in 1841, he first turned to the documents on the employment of J. Brekkel, stored in the archives of the College of Foreign Affairs. Thanks to these documents, I.H. Shtukenberg was able to clarify the biographical information about J. Brekkel, as well as describe in more detail the circumstances of his flight from Russia ^[1].

In the appendix to the work "The History of the Reign of Peter the Great" published in 1858, N.G. Ustryalov published a report from the Austrian ambassador O.A. Player, sent to King Leopold I in March 1697, in which it was indicated that Peter I was going to send 20,000 people to build a canal between the Volga and the Don. This channel, as the diplomat noted, was necessary to ensure the supply of the conquered Azov, the operational dispatch of troops there ^{[21, p. 633]}. In the appendix to the 4th volume of his work, published in 1863, N.G. Ustryalov published a letter from F.M. Apraksin to the great ambassadors dated February 16, 1698, which described the circumstances of Ya. Brekkel's flight abroad ^{[22, pp. 604-606]}.

In 1864, as an appendix to the article "The project of connecting the Volga with the Don. Brekel and Perry" the curator of the museum of the Institute of the Corps of Railway Engineers, Nikolai Pavlovich Durov, placed fragments of documents on the admission of J. Brekkel to the service, which had previously been introduced into scientific circulation by I.H. Shtukenberg. The researcher was able to more accurately determine the role of J. Brekkel in this project. According to his fair remark, Astrakhan governor Prince B. A. Golitsin was responsible for the economic and construction part of the construction of this canal, and Brekkel was assigned the role of head of the technical part ^[11].

In the collection "Monuments of Diplomatic Relations with the Roman Empire" published in 1867, columns of the Embassy Order were published, containing a retelling of F.M. Apraksin's letter to the great ambassadors, previously introduced into scientific circulation by N.G. Ustryalov ^{[15, pp. 1195-1196]}.

On the pages of the next volume of "Monuments of Diplomatic Relations with the Roman Empire", a letter was published by the Russian diplomat P.B. Voznitsyn from Karlovitz dated October 29, 1698, reporting that J. Brekkel was captured while trying to enter the service of the Turks ^{[16, p. 242]}. Despite the fact that this document was published in 1867, researchers of the Petrine era who mentioned J. Brekkel did not refer to it. For the first time, D.Yu. and I.D. Guzevichi drew attention to this long-published document as a source of information about the biography of the first head of the construction of the canal on the Kamyshenka River only in the 2000s ^{[10, p. 609]}.

In 1872, on the pages of the collection of documents of the Petrine era, stored in the archive of the Voronezh Provincial Statistical Committee, was published "The letter of Tsar Peter Alekseevich to voivode Dimitri Polonsky about the interrogation of Captain Gustav Meer about the escaped engineer Yaganko Brekol and about the things and documents left with him", which allows us to understand what resonance the flight of Ya. Brekkel caused, how a search was conducted for persons who assisted him in this "theft" ^{[7, p. 141-142]}.

In the first volume of "Letters and Papers of Peter the Great", published in 1887, F. Lefort's letter to Peter I, sent from Amsterdam on March 21, 1698, was published, which provided information clarifying the picture of J. Brekkel's flight from Russia. F. Lefort was outraged that on January 19, 1698 J. Brekkel informed his letter that goes to Kamyshinka: "January 19, 1698, my Lord. I'm going to my work at the canal today. Prince Boris Alekseevich let me go early, for the sake of the need for me to prepare a car to dig the ground ahead, and for the sake of Prince Boris Alekseevich wants to do the work soon" ^{[18, p. 710-711]}, and at the same time he left for Narva.

M.M. Bogoslovsky, a researcher of the biography of Peter the Great, analyzing the first attempt to connect Kamyshinka and Ilovli by a navigable channel in 1697, noticed that in the "Day Notes" of I.A. Zhelyabuzhsky, published back in 1840, information on this topic was somewhat different than in other sources. The author of the "notes" pointed out that the boyar Prince Boris Alekseevich Golitsyn with 35,000 pososhny people went by water to the podniz cities and wanted to dig up the river on Tsaritsyn, however, they did nothing and stood in vain ^{[4, p. 375]}. When describing Brekkel's flight from Russia, M.M. Bogoslovsky used Lefort's letters to Peter I ^{[5, p. 355]}.

In Soviet and modern Russian historiography, researchers have generalized, comprehended in a broader context the events associated with the construction of the Volga-Don Canal under the leadership of J. Brekkel in 1697, however, there have been no new sources that would complement or clarify the picture of these events formed in the works of historians of the early twentieth century. entered.

Summing up the analysis of the historiography devoted to the biography of J. Brekkel and the history of the publication of sources containing information about him, the following should be noted. During the XVIII–XXI centuries, many clerical sources were introduced into scientific circulation, containing information about the arrival, activities in Russia and flight from the country of J. Brekkel. At the same time, researchers of the history of the Peter the Great era, the history of the construction of the Volga-Don Canal did not use most of these sources, and describing the work on the construction of the canal, which was conducted under the direction of J. Brekkel, limited themselves to reproducing information from the work of J. Brekkel. Perry. In this regard, there is a need to generalize and systematize the data of published and archival sources on this topic, reconstruct his biography on their basis.

As follows from the petition of Yagan Brekkel, filed on arrival in Russia in the Embassy order, he was born in Wismar. His father, Lavrentey Brekkel, was in the service of the Danish king, served in a cavalry regiment and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Yagan Brekkel himself served in the royal Swedish regiment in France, later transferred to the service of the English king. According to J. Brekkel, he "learned engineering" while serving in France. While in Holstein, he learned about the possibility of entering the service of the Russian tsar. On November 6, 1695 (204), G. J. Brekkel arrived in Pskov, and on December 19 he arrived in Moscow and stopped at the Swedish court ^{[19, l. 1-4]}.

Peter I wrote to A.A. Vinius and A.Y. Krevet on August 5, 1696 from Azov, recently captured during the second Azov campaign: "Gentlemen engineers Leval and Brukel are constantly working in the structure of the city" ^{[18, p. 100-101]}. In most studies on the history of the Petrine era, engineer Brukel, who worked on the construction of the fortifications of Azov, and Ya. Brekkel, who worked on the canal on Kamyshinka, were not identified with each other. In a note to P. Gordon's diaries published in 2018, the editors briefly indicated that the Brukel mentioned in Azov is the same person who supervised the construction of the Volga-Don Canal in 1697. In our opinion, it is necessary to explain why it is really about the same character in both cases. The letters of F.M. Apraksin about the flight of the engineer we are interested in abroad in January 1698 allow us to identify Ya. Brekkel, known for his work on the Kamyshinsky Canal, with Brukel, who worked in Azov: "The Royal Majesty of the Svei factor Philip Fingagen, who lives in Novgorod, gave me a letter, and sent those letters to him from Rugodev, Colonel Yagan Brekel, who was in our troops under the Azov engineer… And he ran away from Moscow without a vacation, and secretly sneaked up to Rugodev..." ^{[22, p. 604]}. Based on this source, it can indeed be confidently stated that J. Brekkel took part in the Azov campaign, was one of the authors of the project of the fortifications of Azov, which began to be built after the capture of the fortress in the summer of 1696, and as a specialist in fortification made a good impression on military specialists ^{[14, pp. 506-507]}.

Brekkel, along with other engineers who took part in the Azov campaign, apparently spent the winter of 1696-1697 in Moscow. In the spring of 1697, he began the next task – the preparation of the project and the start of work on the construction of the Volga-Don Canal. It is not possible to establish the date of the exact dispatch of Ya. Brekkel to Kamyshinka according to the sources known to date. S.V. Bernstein-Kogan's book ^{[3, p. 32]} and V.V. Kistenev's dissertation ^{[13, p. 182-183]} give an erroneous date of January 19, 1698, and the works themselves on Kamyshinka under the direction of Ya. Brekkel date from 1698-1699. The confusion arose because of a letter from J. Brekkel, written that day to F. Lefort, in which he informed about leaving Moscow for Kamyshinka to prepare a machine for digging the earth. However, as the documents published by us now and analyzed above, published in the XIX century, confirm, on this day J. Brekkel went not to Kamyshinka, but to Novgorod, and from there to Narva. This day should be dated not the beginning, but the end of our hero's stay in Russia ^{[18, pp. 710-711]}.

In 1697, under the leadership of J. Brekkel, a moat was dug several kilometers long between the rivers Kamyshinka and Ilovlya, traces of which have been well preserved to this day in the area of the Petrov Val river of the Volgograd region. According to various sources, from 20,000 to 35,000 people worked at these jobs. However, as noted by J. Perry, due to the incorrect laying of the canal route and mistakes made during construction, the constructed gateway was breached by a stream of water during the first tests ^{[17, p. 3-4]}.

In the autumn of 1697, J. Brekkel went to Moscow, from where, as we indicated above, on January 19, 1698, he fled to Novgorod and further to Narva. The flight of J. Brekkel genuinely surprised the people who knew him. P. Gordon in his diary entry dated February 7, 1698 noted in surprise: "The news that Colonel Bruckel disappeared and, they say, escaped" ^{[9, p. 129]}. Brekkel's departure abroad caused a wave of investigations, a search for everyone who helped him in this, kept the papers and things left by him, or even just knew about his plans and did not inform anyone about them. By decree of Peter I, all foreigners known to the Embassy order who were in Moscow were interrogated. The "tales with confirmation" about Ya. Brekkel were taken from the coachmen Antipka and Andryushka Ivanov, Ilimka Isakov and the Novgorod translator Vilim Krestyanov, who were involved in his escape ^{[19, l. 24-25]}. In Voronezh, Captain Gustav Meer was interrogated, who, as the investigation found out, kept the belongings and documents of the escaped engineer ^{[7, pp. 141-142]}. Although it has not yet been possible to find direct instructions in the sources on this issue, it is possible that the arrest of engineer A. Brekkel, who continued to work on the fortifications of Azov, was also connected with the flight of Ya. Brekkel. de Laval in the spring of 1698 ^[6]

The last, confirmed by sources, news about the fate of Ya. Brekkel dates back to October 29, 1698. The Russian diplomat P.B. Voznitsyn in a letter to the great embassy reported: "The Slusny master Becker, who left Moscow, appeared here in this way: he wanted to serve and signed up for the service, and a little bit in that, he intended to change, and at night from Polkov went to the Turkish troops, crossing through some waters and swamps, and got to the dragoon regiment, which took him, brought him. He blamed himself for saying goodbye, and then said that he had escaped from Moscow; he is now in prison shackled" ^{[10, p. 609]}. Given the circumstances of Brekkel's flight outside Russia in January 1698, the resonance it caused, falling into Russian captivity could have fatal consequences for him.

The conducted historical and biographical research allowed us to reconstruct the main facts of Yagan Brekkel's life path and his activities in Russia. Other details of his biography, which abound in local history and near-scientific literature, since it is impossible to prove the opposite, should be recognized as fiction.

Fig. 1. The autograph of J. Brekkel (RGADA. F. 150. Op. 1. 1696, d. 7. L. 4).