Lunino

Lunino grew on land granted in 1665 to the dragoon lieutenant Osip Lunin and Lieutenant Colonel Makar Milevsky. Initially called Arkhangelskoye after its church, the village had passed to a monastery by 1710, when it contained sixty households. In 1717 raiders from the Kuban burned it, killing four people and taking sixty-six captive. The village was rebuilt, and by 1795 its houses stood along the great Penza–Saransk road on the left bank of the Shuksha. A wooden church of the Archangel Michael and a Sunday market served its inhabitants.