One of the topics insufficiently covered in science is the evolution of the situation of small service people (soldiers, city Cossacks, archers, persons of the Pushkin rank) in Russia. Forming an ordinary mass of the armed forces, they played an important role in political and economic life, performed political and administrative functions in the cities, and in life and everyday life they did not differ much from the village population and the peasantry. One of the categories of service people was the gunners. There are no works devoted to them in the Russian specialized literature; only specific aspects of their service, economy and everyday life were touched upon .1 One of the reasons is the fact that the bulk of the documents of the archive of the Pushkar order, to which the service people of the Pushkar rank obeyed, died during the fire of 1812 in the Moscow Kremlin. The vacuum in sources on this topic is partly filled by materials from other orders, primarily the Discharge One, which was responsible for the armed forces of the state. In addition, the M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library and the archive of the Military History Museum of Artillery, Engineering Troops and Signal Troops contain about 3 thousand files with information on the history of gunners, as well as metallurgy, cities and weapons production .2Serving people of the Pushkar rank in the cities included gunners, machinists, collars, state-owned blacksmiths and carpenters, masters of the production of tools and ammunition. They performed compulsory military service: gunners served with large-caliber and medium artillery guns, zatinschiki-with small-caliber artillery, collars were city guards. In the" commission record for pushkars "in the city of Lebedyan, it was said:" To serve him in his sovereign tsarev service in all sorts of ways, winter and summer, annual and temporary, marching and 1 Lebedyanskaya A. N. Pushkarsky prikaz [Pushkarsky order]. Candidate of Diss. M. 1950; Buganov V. I. Moskov ... Читать далее