Pustozyorsk was the administrative center of Yugra

Yugra

Yugra was the name of the lands between the Pechora River and Northern Urals in the Russian annals of the 12th–17th centuries, as well as the name of the Khanty and partly Mansi tribes inhabiting these territories, later known as VogulsThe Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug of Russia is also...

 and Pechora

Pechora

Pechora is a town in the Komi Republic, Russia, situated on the Pechora River, near the northern Ural Mountains. Population: It is served by Pechora Airport and is affiliated with the nearby Pechora Kamenka military air base....

 krai

Krai

Krai or kray was a type of an administrative division in the Russian Empire and the Russian SFSR, and is one of the types of the federal subjects of modern Russia ....

s of Muscovy and Imperial Russia. It was situated in what is today Nenets Autonomous Okrug

Nenets Autonomous Okrug

Nenets Autonomous Okrug is a federal subject of Russia .It has an area of 176,700 km2 and population of 42,628 as of the preliminary results of the 2010 Census , 21,296 of whom live in Naryan-Mar, the administrative center.-Geography and ecology:The arctic ecology of this...

 of Arkhangelsk Oblast

Arkhangelsk Oblast

Arkhangelsk Oblast is a federal subject of Russia . It includes the Arctic archipelagos of Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya, as well as the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea....

 in Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

.

Pustozyorsk was founded in 1499 in the lower reaches of the Pechora River

Pechora River

The Pechora River is a river in northwest Russia which flows north into the Arctic Ocean on the west side of the Ural Mountains. It lies mostly in the Komi Republic but the northernmost part crosses the Nenets Autonomous Okrug. It is 1,809 km long and its basin is 322,000 square kilometers...

 by the members of a military party led by S. Kurbsky, P. Ushaty, and V. Zabolotsky-Brazhnik. The town was built in a deserted area on a barren soil, hence the name Pustozyorsk, which literally means "deserted lakes". It was the most distant northern outpost of Muscovy and the first Russian settlement on the Pechora. Pustozyorsk was supposed to play the role of a military fort on the northern borders of the Russian state.

Pustozyorsk had been the administrative center of Pustozyorsk volost

Volost

Volost was a traditional administrative subdivision in Eastern Europe.In earlier East Slavic history, volost was a name for the territory ruled by the knyaz, a principality; either as an absolute ruler or with varying degree of autonomy from the Velikiy Knyaz...

 for more than two and a half centuries (until 1780). The town was most active in the 17th century, when such notable people as Artamon Matveyev, Vasily Galitzine, and Avvakum

Avvakum

Avvakum Petrov was a Russian protopope of Kazan Cathedral on Red Square who led the opposition to Patriarch Nikon's reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church...

 were exiled there. The spot where the latter was burnt at the stake is now commemorated by an ornate wooden cross.

In the 18th century, Pustozyorsk gradually lost its economic importance and began to deteriorate because a more convenient southern route to Siberia

Siberia

Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...

 through the Urals had been discovered. The last inhabitants left Pustozyorsk in the early 1960s. The wooden Church of Transfiguration is the only structure that remained after the abandonment of Pustozyorsk. It was moved to the nearby village of Ustye, located on the Lake Gorodetskoye.