by Tim Cope
In an attempt to halt the Mongol advance, a Russian army of around thirty thousand was assembled on the banks of the Dnieper River. The Mongols melted away into retreat in what must have appeared as a sign of capitulation but which was a classic nomad tactic—the likes of which Herodotus had described more than a thousand years earlier. Lured into a sustained pursuit for nine days, the Russians were weakened by the rigors of travel and taken far beyond their borders. When Mstislav of Galich became overconfident and crossed the Little Kalka River ahead of the main Russian army, the Mongols seized their chance.
Prince Mstislav of Kiev could only look on as the Mongols turned on Mstislav of Galich’s soldiers, who were no match for the Mongols in the open, marshy terrain. Realizing that retreat for his own army would be fatal, Mstislav of Kiev fortified himself on a hill and offered surrender on the grounds that his army be allowed to return home. When their weapons were put down, however, the army was slaughtered, and the bodies of Mstislav of Kiev and his fellow princes were crushed beneath planks of wood upon which the Mongols feasted and celebrated victory.
Little more than a decade later the Mongols, under Subodei, would return to subjugate Russia in its entirety and use the Pontic and Caspian steppes (also simply known as the Pontic-Caspian steppe) as a base from which the Golden Horde would rule over Russia for 240 years.2 After this initial invasion, however—a sort of reconnaissance sojourn—the Mongols retreated as abruptly as they had appeared. Riding east via the Caspian and Aral Seas through what is modern-day Kazakhstan, they rejoined the main Mongol army in 1224. In a paltry two or three years the small, disciplined detachment had traveled at least 10,000 km, conquered armies at will, and created a reputation of invincibility that would endure for centuries.3
It was humbling to reflect that in roughly the same time it had taken Jebe and Subodei to achieve this military expedition from Asia to Europe and back, I had barely managed to reach Russia in one piece. In fact, before my first day of riding beyond the Manych Depression was out, I was feeling more depleted than at almost any other time on my journey.
Little more than 30 km from the checkpoint, I fell ill with a high fever. For the next three days I lay in the care of a Dagestani farmer, drifting in and out of sleep, haunted by a dream in which Kok appeared with his two front legs chopped off. He stood on the bloody stumps with terror in his eyes, searching for his family. I had imagined arriving in these settled lands infused with the courage of the big wide steppe, but without Kok I felt exposed and vulnerable. Utebai was a small, weak horse unsuitable for travel and sooner or later I would have to find a replacement.
Uncertainty was creeping up on me from another quarter, too. As a foreigner, I was required to receive official registration to account for every day of my stay in Russia. The hotel in Elista registered me for the days I had been there, but beyond that I had no fixed address or host. This hadn’t been an issue in the Kalmyk countryside, but I was now in provinces closer to the unstable republics of Ingushetia, Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ossetia. The ongoing insurgency in Chechnya, raw memories of the Beslan school hostage tragedy, and recently foiled terrorist plots had created a heightened atmosphere of suspicion. I had experienced an indicator of this during my bus trip from the Crimea to Elista, during which I’d been ordered out for document checks eleven times. Almost every intersection in Stavropol and Krasnodar Krais—krai is a term that is the equivalent of oblast but historically used for territory on Russia’s frontier—were manned by heavily equipped police, some even with light tanks. Because I was a foreigner riding three horses (one of which was not the same one listed on the papers I was carrying), carrying a satellite phone and GPS (technology that also required a permit), and traveling on an unregistered visa, things felt a little precarious.
After recovering from the fever, I set off gingerly. Fixing a westerly course and trying to avoid unwanted attention, I began by resisting any attempt to conform to the reality of fields, roads, and villages and took direct routes via compass. But it wasn’t long before the hidden dangers of this environment were revealed. In the deep, soft soil of plowed fields, the horses tired fast, and I became hemmed in by a web of irrigation canals. While trying to jump across one such canal Taskonir fell up to his chest in muddy water and spooked the other horses. As I tried to calm them down Tigon ran off chasing a hare and did not return. An hour of searching led me to a railway track where he was tangled dangerously by the collar.
The next evening I thought my luck had changed when I crested a hill to find myself looking down at a green sea of virgin spring pasture. It was sweet, thick, grass—the kind I could only have dreamed of in the arid steppes of Kazakhstan and Kalmykia. I found a hidden hollow for my camp and the horses ate until morning and their stomachs were as tight as drums.
In the morning, I had only just emerged from the tent when a Russian jeep came barreling down on us. The driver was on his feet before the engine cut out. “So, you think you’ve found some good pasture?”
I nodded. The man angrily explained I had destroyed his autumn-sown barley—there were apparently hefty fines for such “vandalism.” I couldn’t bring myself to apologize and instead explained it was one the first fields I had seen since leaving Mongolia. But the man didn’t leave until I had tied the horses to a row of trees on the edge of the field. As he drove off he shot me a venomous look and left me with these words: “I hope you do keep grazing fields. Soon the mouse and rat poison will kill your animals anyway.”
Over the coming days remnants of open pasturage became increasingly rare, and just as Anir had warned, the only grazing to be found was among the single-file rows of trees so narrow I could barely fit a tent on them. I could no longer afford to let the horses graze free, and tethering ropes had to be especially short. Afraid that Tigon, who loved catching mice and rats, might be poisoned, he too was permanently tied. I put him on a long leash and let him guide from the front of the caravan.
As I rode I cast my eyes sadly over Taskonir. With his coarse, tangled mane, stormy eyes, and untamed spirit, he was a living descendant of wild horses that had only ever known the freedom of open steppe. I felt guilty for bringing him to a land where he did not belong.
A week beyond the Manych I passed the town of Krasnogvardeiskoe and crossed out of Stavropol Krai into Krasnodar. I was now about 400 km from the Azov Sea and had arrived on the Kuban—the most fertile and heavily cultivated steppe in southern Russia.
Given the intensity of farming onward from here, I expected conditions to grow more difficult. Instead, I found respite by following a series of rivers that flowed on an east-west line—some draining eastward into the Manych Depression, and others westward to the Azov Sea. I was able to locate pasture along the banks and enjoyed the cover of reeds. Most of all, I took heart that I had reached the home of the Kuban Cossacks—the legendary horseback warriors of Russia’s frontier who had evolved on the very kind of crossroads of sedentary and nomadic society that I now rode through.
The most accepted version of Cossack origins holds that they were lawless Tatar bandits who began to fill the power vacuum left behind on the steppe after the disintegration of the Mongol Empire. Living in unclaimed borderlands between the Turkish, Russian, and Polish empires, the borderlands that were once so important for the Golden Horde, they were joined by Russians and Poles and emerged in the fourteenth century as a loose federation of military societies. Although Cossacks came to adopt the Russian language and Orthodox Christianity, their oft-worn Asiatic-style forelock on a shaved head, known as a khokhol, was a symbol of their unique place on the crossroads between the perceived “wild” East and “civilized” Europe.
Most Cossacks fought for whoever paid them, and so their alliances changed like the seasons. The free Cossacks—those not registered as soldiers in service to the tsar—commonly made raids on both Ottoman and Russian territory, and the ruler of one often asked the other to curb the attacks. Ivan the Terrible’s reply in 1549 to the Turkish sultan was typical of such exc
hanges: “The Cossacks of the Don are not my subjects, and they go to war or live in peace without my knowledge.”
At the end of the eighteenth century Russia moved to expand its empire and defeated the Cossack armies, after which Cossacks served the tsar and went on to become the imperial army’s most feared cavalrymen, playing crucial roles in Russo-Turkish wars and the colonizing of Central Asia and Siberia.4
The Cossacks’ dogged, independent spirit nevertheless endured, leading to a series of uprisings. In the twentieth century they had fought for the Whites and the Reds, the Nazis and the Soviets, and consequently Stalin considered them unreliable, if not traitorous. Cossack Nazi collaborators repatriated after World War II were infamously executed en masse in what Nikolai Tolstoy (a distant descendant of Leo Tolstoy) labeled the “secret betrayal.” They also were singled out for repressive measures during collectivization.
In the post-Soviet era these harms had been publicly acknowledged, and Cossacks were reportedly reestablishing their culture. This was something I had long hoped to witness, not least now, because I was desperate to believe that some spirited fight for freedom still existed in a land that had submitted to the plow.
Ten kilometres shy of the town of Uspenskaya I happened on a rich meadow along the banks of the Kalaly River. Hidden from roads and almost entirely encircled by reeds, it seemed an ideal place for a rest day.
I had only just unloaded the horses, however, when the sound of Soviet-era motorbikes—a model found universally in former Soviet states called a Ural—thrust rudely from behind the reeds, passengers in sidecars bouncing about wildly. It was too late to pack up and move, and my spirits sank as I contemplated a long, sleepless night.
One of the drivers nearly drove into me before he stopped. As his mop of curly ginger hair settled, he barked at me, “What the fuck are you up to?” Hugged by a much-darned woolen sweater, he hauled his heavy gut up against gravity and stood with hands on hips. With his sights trained on me, I told my story rather pleadingly.
“Fuck off. Did you fuckin’ hear that, boys? Mongolia to Hungary. Fuck me!” he replied.
Two other men who had tumbled out of the motorcycle sidecar stood a breath away. They had hulking, fat shoulders, and their faces were sunburned landscapes of freckles and unruly stubble.
It turned out that I was apparently guilty of making camp in their private fishing hideout. A deflated rubber raft was bundled out of a sidecar and pumped up by hand. Meanwhile, a picnic of salami, cucumber, vodka, and beer was laid out, and two more motorbikes came roaring to the scene.
One of the newcomers was a mountain of a man with a face as broad as a wheat field and green eyes the size of eggs. His gargantuan head swam in an even bigger wobbling chin, and like the others he had chipped teeth and mismatched clothes. Bellowing expletives, he settled next to me, rested his head against my saddle, then tore the cap off a beer bottle with his teeth, saying, “This is the most important part. You know the saying: beer without vodka is like throwing money to the winds!”
The food and alcohol consumed, my new friends unpacked a pile of fishing nets and set about the main business of the evening. They had only just managed to paddle out from the reeds, though, when the large man received a call on his cell.
“Boys! Police! Quick! Let’s get the fuck out of here!”
The raft was deflated in seconds, and everything was stuffed into sidecars before the bikes were push-started in a scramble of legs. As they tore away they yelled at me in no uncertain terms: “Don’t say a word or else! As soon as those fuckin’ police have gone, we’ll be back with more vodka!”
Fifteen minutes later the headlights of a Russian police jeep jittered across the uneven land in the falling darkness until the reeds around my camp were lit up like an amphitheater. Three policemen stepped out stiffly. “You haven’t seen any poachers around here, have you? On motorbikes?”
A skinny, pale officer with a wiry mustache butted in. “You know these damn Cossacks—you have to be careful. Remember, you are on the Kuban now.”
The jeep had only just taken off when the roar of motorbikes came to life and I was assaulted with backslaps and wild shrieks of thanks. They had managed to collect wood in the meantime and went about establishing a roaring campfire.
When the nets were set, we bundled up in my horse blankets and lay on the earth roasting salami and preserved pig fat on sticks. Vodka and pure spirits flowed, and by the flickering light the cracked-tooth smiles and tough but boyish faces took on an air of celebration. They talked rude, freewheeling talk about women, fishing, and fights, creatively describing everything using variations of just a few obscene words.
Listening to the ebb and flow of the stories, I sank into my coat, relishing the feeling of pig fat warming my belly. Tigon sat among us all, one of the gang. For the first time since crossing the Manych two weeks ago I was not alone; it was nice to feel a sense of camaraderie.
For a time the conversation petered out, then the large man poked the coals and looked at me. “You know, we are Cossacks after all. We have to live free! Stalin turned our land into fields, took away our horses. Brave men became wheat farmers and tractor drivers! Now we’re not even allowed to fish without permission!” In the pained expression that spread across his face, you could tell he was trying to appreciate the identity of his people, something he would never have the luxury of knowing as anything but legend.
Cossacks had been targeted by Stalin not just because of their split loyalties, but because they lived on the most fertile land of the Soviet Union. Stalin relied on grain production in the Kuban and other Cossack territories in Ukraine to fund his push for industrialization. During collectivization, hundreds of thousands of Cossacks were accused of sabotaging the grain procurement campaign and were either executed, exiled to Siberia, or sent to forced labor camps.5 Another policy that aided Stalin in his long-term assault on the Cossacks was that private ownership of horses was declared illegal. When the Nazis advanced into Russia, horses and cattle were herded away from the Kuban and never replaced. With the Cossacks horseless, their land depopulated, and their militaries outlawed, any hope of a return to the former life was snuffed out when the Kuban was set upon by a large-scale project of irrigation and cultivation.
Nowadays Cossacks, like these poachers, were free to revive their culture but the overwhelming reality was that the grinding process of industrialization had long rendered the horseback way of life redundant. And this is now what these young men faced.
One of them who had been quiet until now spoke up. “Have you seen the wild dogs yet? You should be carrying a gun—they are even more dangerous than wolves.”
At the very thought of these wild predators, the man’s eyes were full of hope and expectation. It seemed to me he wasn’t so much frightened by the idea of wild dogs as he was proud of them. The idea excited me, too, to think that somewhere in this land there was a wild spirit that carried on even if the wolf was long gone.
At some point during the night one of the fishermen traveled into the village, then at about 3:00 A.M. returned in a car with more friends. As the beat-up old Lada lurched drunkenly to a halt, eight or nine bodies were disgorged in a wave of cigarette smoke, techno music, and the stench of vodka and beer. The fisherman at the wheel grinned. “We have a gift for you, Timofei!” Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out three small purple packages, which he held up to the headlights. They read: “Contained: 1 condom. Fish flavored.” A robust-looking girl stepped out of the car with a giggle. I was told to take her to my tent.
At the time my temper was frayed—the car had spooked the horses, and Ogonyok and Taskonir had managed to rip out their tethering stakes; I had narrowly managed to hold on to them—and I declined. They seemed quite offended, and later on I couldn’t help but feel bad for rejecting their offer so emphatically.
Traditionally the free life of a Cossack—who was obliged to serve in the army until the age of forty—was incompatible with marriage. Until the eighteen
th century, most Cossack men were single, and even when the domestic family unit was adopted with the influx of Russian settlers, it was custom for married men to walk some distance in front of their wives and children in public places. This was to symbolize the uncertainty that Cossack men lived under, since they could be sent away to war for many years at any time. Women had to be prepared to carry on raising the family without a husband, and to some degree it was acceptable for them to be unfaithful while their husbands were away. Many young Cossacks I later met spoke proudly of their grandfathers, who had been known to have many mistresses. Like the romanticized version of their forebears, it naturally followed in their eyes that my life as a single wandering horseman should entail a love interest—or at least a visit to a prostitute—at every watering hole from Mongolia to Hungary.
The fishermen had deflated their raft and taken away the nets by dawn, leaving me with the condoms for “another time.” I continued along the Kalaly River for a day until it began to curve north, then cut across to another watercourse that flowed west toward the sea. Confident the Cossacks wouldn’t turn me in to the police, I relished the prospect of riding through the long, trailing Cossack villages that clung to the banks of the rivers.
Known as khutors—a Ukrainian term used by Cossacks to describe new settlements—they were built by the original Black Sea settlers who arrived from the Ukraine in the late eighteenth century. Khutors consisted of single rows of timber and mud-brick houses and were traditionally not large enough to warrant a church. It comforted me that in the modern era most didn’t have police or administration representatives, either.
Bypassed by major roads, these khutors seemed to belong to a bygone era. Each house had a healthy plot of land and a run of chickens, pigs, and the odd goat. As firewood was scarce, most families also had mountains of dried corncobs out front—the staple source of fuel on the Kuban. Babushkas bent permanently at the hip worked the earth, and old men rowed leaky flat-bottomed fishing boats into sleepy waters. The clop and rattle of a horse and cart sometimes rose and faded along the single, unsealed streets.