Nizhnetoyemsky Selsoviet () is the low-level administrative division (a selsoviet) of Verkhnetoyemsky District of Arkhangelsk Oblast, Russia. It was formed along with other fourteen selsoviets in April 1924 and occupied the territory of the former Nizhnetoyemskaya Volost of the former Solvychegodsky Uyezd of Northern Dvina Governorate. The administrative center of the selsoviet is located in the village of Burtsevskaya, at the confluence of the Nizhnyaya Toyma and the Northern Dvina.
The volost had been attested through archive records since the 16th century, but its name, known since the 12th century, refers to ancient speakers of Uralic languages that were by then already extinct or assimilated.
A station on the ancient trading route along the Northern Dvina River, in the end of the 17th century the volost became a hub of the Old Believers flight to the north. The government suppressed the dissenters, the Russian Orthodox Church responded with continuous missionary activities, and in the 19th century the village was brought back into official Orthodoxy.
The craftsmen of the volost developed a unique school of folk painting, notable for its use of black, red and gilding over a white background. This art, limited to household artifacts like distaff boards and murals over log houses and Russian stoves, remained unknown to historians and collectors until Olga Kruglova rediscovered it in 1959.
Geography
A community in this area developed at the confluence of the Nizhnyaya Toyma and the Northern Dvina Rivers. The Nizhnyaya Toyma River freezes in November, thaws in late April or May, and allows commercial timber rafting. Its valley, with an area of 1740 square kilometers, is continuously covered with small hills and ridges. These terminal moraine ridges mark the southernmost extreme of the prehistoric glacier expansion.
Yury Arbat, an ethnographer who studied the folk art of Arkhangelsk outback in the 1960s, described the place: Nizhnyaya Toyma is not a village ... but a group of villages under a common title. An observer standing by the Nizhnyaya Toyma River, looking away from the Northern Dvina, sees a coastal village called Strelka (Spit) on a cape between two rivers. Further right is a boarding school and a diner, and the Krasnaya Gora (Red Hill) village behind them. Then there are Kholm (Hill) and Zagorye (Behind the Hill). Up on the crest are Navolotskaya and Vizhnitsa, the administrative center, behind it. The Gorodishche on the opposite side of Nizhnyaya Toyma River, is quite likely an ancient fort ... Eleven such villages, in total, compose Nizhnyaya Toyma.
At least some of these villages, according to Arbat, sported traditional large, spacious Pomor type log houses with carved balconies and traditional exterior murals in local style.
History
Etymology
The toponym Toyma is common to all northern Russian territories, from Toyma in Karelia to Toyma River in the Republic of Tatarstan. It relates to an extinct Finnic ethnonym also known to the Novgorodians since (at least) the beginning of the 12th century. Janet Martin considered Toima (sic) the southern extreme of Novgorodian control over the Dvina basin in this period. The first mention of Toyma, paying tribute to Novgorodians, is dated 1137 but there is no evidence that the word Toyma relates to the present-day area or its neighbor, Verkhnetoyemsky Selsoviet. The 1219 chronicle mentions ethnonym toymokary (). The 1237 Tale of the Death of the Russian Land mentions "Toyma pagans" living between "the Karelians" and Veliky Ustyug (), a location roughly aligned with the Northern Dvina basin.
Russian linguists argue whether the ethnonym Toyma relates to a specific tribe, a tribal group, a language or a whole continuum of Finno-Ugric languages. Evgeny Chelimsky applied ethnonym Toyma to the wide area in the southern part of Northern Dvina basin and wrote that it is equivalent to the Northern Finns in Aleksandr Matveyev's classification. Matveyev objected, writing that the Northern Finnish continuum was considerably wider than Toyma's, and that the hypothetical Toyma people occupied only a minor portion of it. He preferred to equate the Toyma with a particular tribe that lived in Nizhnaya Toyma area, and noted that it also could belong to Permic languages. At any rate, the Toymas disappeared before the 17th century, when their existence could be recorded in Muscovite sources, either through russification or through earlier assimilation by other Finnic tribes.