Authors: Neal Ascherson
When
I
first saw her, she was in the treasure-cabinet of the Rostov Museum, inspecting the diadem of a Sarmatian warrior-princess. Later, at a lunch given in her honour by the museum director, she told me about her visit to the Don Cossacks on Suvorov Street.
'I
said that
I
sympathised with them and their demands, but
I
warned them above all to avoid violence. Then their
ataman
made a great welcome speech about "we, the Cossack people".
I
interrupted him to say, "There is no such thing!
1
am proud to be a Cossack, but
I
am a Russian — and so are you."
I
turned to all the others, and
I
dared them to tell me aloud that they were not Russians. And, do you know, they looked so hangdog, and they mumbled to me, "Yes, we are Russians . . . " '
The Cossack revival is a disaster of the human ecology. Not all the ecological catastrophes of the Black Sea happen in water. Just as the inrush of pollutants into the Black Sea has decimated the variety of marine species, allowing certain algae and the marauding jellyfish
Mnemiopsis
to multiply on an explosive scale, so Stalin's deportations created a social void, a monstrous demographic impoverishment into which the Cossack movement now expands uncontrollably.
'New Russia
9
, the imperial province established by Catherine around the northern coast of the Black Sea, was a colonial territory of many peoples. Before the Revolution, a traveller would have experienced this land as a succession of ethnicities: Tatar villages; colonies of Russian veteran soldiers and their descendants; settlements of Polish exiles; neat farming districts where almost everyone was German; Cossack
stanitsas
('stations' or villages); Jewish
shtetls;
Greek towns and rural regions, like Mariupol or Anapa; Armenian villages and even cities, like Nakhitchevan, which was a separate town before it became the Armenian quarter of Rostov.
Between 1930 and 1950, this proliferation of human societies was systematically destroyed. First came the suppression of cultural rights, which had on the whole been well cared for in the first years after the Revolution. Greek and Tatar schools, newspapers and publishing houses were closed. The anti-religious drive shut down the synagogues and churches and mosques, and in the central square of Nakhitchevan, the Armenian cathedral was dynamited -to be replaced by an immense concrete and glass building designed in the shape of a caterpillar tractor. Finally came the deportations, reaching their peak in the post-war years when the Germans, Tatars and Greeks were driven out of their homes and removed to Central Asia. Immigrants from Russia and Ukraine were brought in to occupy their houses and their land. The Armenians and the few Jews who had survived the Nazi occupation lived cautious, unobtrusive lives.
The Cossacks alone remained with a confidence of deep-rooted belonging. They had been persecuted and robbed of possessions and liberties, but they were still in their own country, and — given their curious ideology of imperial patriotism — they could understand the inflow of millions of uprooted Russians and Ukrainians as a sort of reinforcement rather than as a threat of dilution. When the Communist régime fell apart, and with it effective central control over what happened in distant provinces and on the margins of Russia, the Cossack claim to mastery and domination was unimpeded. Most of the rival, 'alien' populations had gone (few Cossacks wish them back, or regret the Russification of the Black Sea coast). So had theauthority of Moscow, which had once used the Cossacks as a whip to control the nationalities of New Russia but which had never, ever, offered the Cossacks political power over others.
A mile away from Tanais is the village of Nedvigovka. It is an old Don Cossack
stanitsa,
a single street between wooden cabins and cottages of plaster washed blue or white. The women wear headscarves; the men have long, soft leather boots stained with clay. The children, climbing in and out of the gaps in the broken plank fence along the street, are very thin.
The only new thing is the inside of the church. The priest stands in the yard among his own calves, geese and kittens, while his son and a black-bearded deacon lug scaffolding poles up the church steps. For many years, the Church of the Death of the Madonna at Ncdvigovka was boarded-up or used as a storehouse. Now the restoration is almost complete.
They brought a young woman from Rostov to renew the nineteenth-century frescoes in the cupola. Finding them almost effaced by damp and frost-flaking, she settled down to painting her own. St Andrew, patron of Russia and of the Cossacks, is there, and so is St Cyril who crossed the Don near Nedvigovka to preach to the Khazars. But they are now the only men in the scene. The young woman from Rostov, who had advanced views, felt that Russian Orthodox androcentrism was due for revision. The Madonna's family is entirely female, the congregation of martyrs is composed exclusively of women, the angels leaning down from the cupola to stare and laugh are all girls with Russian faces.
The scientists from Tanais come here to pray or - in one case - to be christened into the Orthodox faith after twenty years of education in atheist materialism. They find delight in a church so unexpectedly dedicated not only to the Mother of God but to all women. But in Nedvigovka, where women are held to know their place, people are less certain about what to think about the frescoes. They are one of many ripples from distant revolutions which reach the lower Don and leave the Cossacks baffled, uneasy.
The priest asked me, 'What are we to think of this new Russia? In this village of ours, people are beginning to come from outside and sell things which they have not made themselves. To travel in order to stand on the street and sell carrots which you have grown, a toy which you have carved, a kettle which you fashioned in your own workshop — why, yes, that is natural and even good. But these new people do nothing beyond buying and selling. They buy an article in one place, and then they come here to sell it for a higher price. They do not work, they do not make anything! I have told my congregation that it is a wickedness, a sin, to make money out of what you have not produced.'
The transition to a market economy in the lower Don requires more than laws made in Moscow. It needs nothing less than a cultural revolution, an overthrowing of inherited moral codes no less complete than the transformation which St Cyril intended for the Khazar pagans. (St Cyril failed. The Khazars chose Judaism instead.)
Once, in a hotel room at Anapa, I argued late into the night with a Cossack who had decided to start a tourism business. He was eating salted Azov herrings as he sat on his bed, pulling off their heads and splitting their bodies with a horny, expert thumbnail. His idea was to invite rich foreigners down to the Don country for holidays. 'You could bring them from Moscow on charter flights,' I suggested. 'And you could build a dude ranch out in the steppe beyond Novocherkassk, with comfortable chalets with running water, and offer them Cossack Heritage Experience.'
He shook his head. 'That would cost money. To bring them down by train would be far cheaper. They could stay with local people who have apartments and could rent them a room for dollars.' But surely, I said, you had to make some sort of investment first to attract foreign customers, so that you could recoup the start-up costs and make a profit by charging high prices.
'No, no,' returned the Cossack entrepreneur. 'The foreigners will pay very high fees, and we will spend as little on them as possible, and in this way we will make more money.'
There were two other people in the room. One was a young archaeologist from Tanais, herself of Cossack ancestry. She had been listening to this conversation with rising disgust. Now she said, 'We are talking about the sharing of our culture with guests from other lands. For that, we do not need this vile commercialism!'
The other person was an Armenian, a Rostov worker who used his car as an unofficial cab. He said nothing. But he caught my eye. A gold tooth glinted. He rolled his gaze upwards, and very gently shook his head from side to side in disbelief. Russians!
Barbarians, by definition, are so-called; they do not consider themselves to be barbarous. It was not until the last hundred years that certain Europeans undertook the experiment of describing themselves as barbarians. As part of a ferocious modernist critique of 'effete' and restrictive civilisation, they proposed to reverse all the headings over the conventional value-table. 'Barbarous' characteristics changed file from bad to good. Violence, spontaneity, youth, the leadership-cult and Nature became positive. Tolerance, maturity, rationalism, democracy and urban culture itself became negative and decadent.
In January 1918, as his poem The Scythians' began to form in his head, the Russian poet Alexander Blok 'felt physically, with my hearing, a great noise of the wind - a continuous noise (probably the noise from the collapse of the old world)'. What he wrote then was addressed to that old 'civilised' world, to Europe, from a Russia made young and returned to its barbaric self by the Revolution:
Yes - we are Scythians. Yes — we are Asiatics.
With slanted and avid eyes...
For the last time — come to your senses, old world!
To the brotherly feast of work and peace,
For the last time to the bright brotherly feast
The barbarian lyre calls.
When Blok snatched up the 'barbarian' conceit for revolutionary Russia, it had already been well-worn in the service of imperial nationalism, above all in Germany. Emperor Wilhelm II had invited his troops in China to fight the Boxer rebellion with the ruthlessness of Huns, and throughout the Second Reich, from its foundation in 1871, the fashion of barbarity had been embodied in monstrous state monuments: the neo-pagan colossi inside the Leipzig memorial to the Battle of the Nations, or the pseudo-Aztec kitsch of the Deutsches Eck, the imperial ziggurat raised at Koblenz over the confluence of the Rhine and the Mosel rivers. The Third Reich hardened this fashion into a full cultural dogma. It is enough to remember the project for mausolea to commemorate the SS dead who fell in the Russian campaigns: artificial mountains of earth towering over the steppe in the manner of Scythian or Sarmatian
kurgans,
lonely and
zabvennty,
the barrows of a barbarian warrior caste.
To proclaim oneself a barbarian can amount to a licence for acts of unspeakable savagery. But at the same time it is to state that one is not, in fact, a barbarian, but a 'civilised' person who is borrowing costumes from civilisation's theatre-wardrobe of counter-values in order to make some point about the decadence of the times. Under the verbal surface, the old Athenian antithesis between barbarians and 'our sort of people' remains intact.
This is why the neo-Cossack discourse of brutality and primitivism is so revealing. One of the new
atamans
of the Don Cossacks, Yevgeni Yefremov, said recently to Bruce Clark of
The Times
that sending men into battle in Moldava was 'like drinking a cooling glass of water after a long walk through the desert'. In that remark, which is a fair sample of Cossack rhetoric, Yefremov showed what the new Cossackism really is: a parade of negations, an adolescent Black Mass whose celebrants repeat the liturgy backwards — not to raise demons but to appal liberal piety.
There are Don Cossack settlements where illegal village courts now inflict public whipping, frequently on visiting Armenians. Superficially, this is a return to custom. In reality, it is a self-conscious performance, a 'heritage' pantomime of atavism laid on to impress other Russians.
The Cossacks were the last of many steppe peoples to inhabit the Black Sea plains in the old way. And yet they were in some respects unlike their predecessors. The Cossacks were never true nomads, who migrated in wagons behind their herds as the Tatars of the Golden Horde did, or the first Scythians and Sarmatians. The Cossack hosts were ramshackle rafts onto which all kinds of fugitives and adventurers had scrambled, and their economy was mixed: they were as much village-based free peasants as they were horse- and cattle-breeding pastoralists.
Politically, Cossack unity was never more than a matter of short episodes in history. Nothing emerged with the stability and complexity of the Scythian kingdoms, or of the Crimean Tatar Khanate. When commercial port-cities revived again along the Black Sea coast after the Russian conquests of Peter and Catherine, the Cossacks were not capable of acting as partners and protectors, as the Scythian steppe lords had been to the Greek cities and the Tatar khans to the Italians, but fell instead into subjection. Compared to the Indo-Iranian peoples of antiquity, and to some of the Turkic peoples who followed them, the Cossacks were primitive. Force, race and maleness are seldom the values of a stable and traditional society, but rather of bandits.