Ship workers, of course, always sympathized much more with the robbers and their masters, and as for the barge haulers, they very often acted in unison with the robbers, who were their faithful defenders in many cases. The fact is that if the barge haulers were shortchanged, or generally offended by the ship owner, then they did not go to complain to the river administrators and in general not to the local authorities, but to the robbers; they found a more favorable trial against the offender; in ordinary courts they would have faced the usual red tape in those days and a strong rich owner;
there he came out unscathed, and the judgment of the Zhegulev fellows was brief and convenient for the barge haulers: if the guilty shipowner or clerk was not killed, then they were torn to the decks in the most cruel way, with the laughter of the barge haulers' complainants.
Very many shipowners, wanting to appease their workers and barge haulers at the same time, long before the Vegules, began generously treating them with vodka and feeding them to their fill; everyone knew that the slightest complaint from the barge haulers, brought by the Zheguli youths, could bring very sad results for him, and therefore another shipowner, who was a true asp throughout the lower reaches, became the father and benefactor of his workers already 200 before Zheguli. If it happened on the way that from a ship crawling along the Volga it was visible how they robbed another ship stopped by robbers, there could be no mention of any tax of help; Not a single ship owner would have done this out of fear (to each his own shirt is closer to the tfl) and the ship workers and barge haulers would not have allowed this; Everyone in these hectic discussions reasoned like this: “He’s being robbed, but what’s the point for me? If only I could somehow slip through!”
The peasantry who inhabited the Samara Luka treated the robbers often with indifference, and in most cases with sympathy. In general, all of them were completely afraid of the gnfva of Zhegulev’s daredevils, gnfva, who could always let the houses and all the property of the peasants go after them. Therefore, when the government took energetic measures to eradicate robberies and offered large monetary rewards for the capture of robbers, it saw almost no help from the peasants. That's understandable! What benefit would it be for the peasants of one or another village, even for a large reward, to hand over to the government the robbers peacefully walking around the villages, if every peasant knew for sure that no authorities would save the village from completely burning it to the ground? Everyone knew that behind the ten robbers who had been extradited and caught, there were a hundred young men walking around in freedom, capable of celebrating their comrades. It is very natural, therefore, that the authorities had to reckon with and deal with the robbers only through the detachments sent against them; Between these detachments and the Zhegulev freemen there were sometimes bitter battles, which did not always end in favor of the government soldiers.
This is how things went until the start of the current battle. By decree of October 921, 1829, a half-battalion of the military-working team was formed; This half-battalion, transformed after 9 years into a garshkut crew, was entrusted with the protection of ships sailing along the Volgf. The crew consisted of 800 people, belonged to 8 squadrons, had 28 boats armed with cannons, and belonged to the department of the Ways of Communication.
But, alas, the crew achieved very little of their assigned goals, and a lot of “troubles” arose from them; in the end, the ship's crew is much worse in the eyes of shipowners than robbers; The latter took only tribute and, having received it, left the person in peace, and the crew also took tribute, could not get money from the robbers and did not leave the ship owner in peace, constantly demanding from him the passports of the military workers and barge haulers. It is quite natural that it was even more impossible to present passports to the company, and that in most cases they were not available in the wild, since the majority of barge haulers and workers were recruited from homeless vagabonds and various non-domestic, passport-less government workers.
Lytyba. Meanwhile, since the shipowner did not present all the required passports, incredible bribery began, dragging around the courts, transferring from the fields, and so on.