by Tim Cope
Initially I had hoped I could slip in and out of these settlements inconspicuously, but even the dead would have been woken by the wave of barking dogs and honking geese that preceded me when traveling the length of a khutor. The longest was 15 km but had a population of less than 1,000. The kerfuffle gave people time to ready themselves to greet me with jars of homemade vodka and preserved cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, jams, honey, juice, pears, and salo (pork fat). The key to getting past was having at least one shot of vodka, although under duress this often became three. On one occasion I was told that if I wanted to become a genuine Cossack, I would have to drink a giant bottle of home-brewed vodka, known as samohon6 and then “jump over a fence.” It was a drinking culture that reminded me of a description I’d read in Leo Tolstoy’s short novel The Cossacks:
“All Cossacks make their own wine, and drunkenness isn’t so much a tendency common to all as it is a ritual, the non-fulfillment of which would be considered apostasy.”
Within two days I had accumulated so much heavy produce that the offerings had become a serious danger to the packhorses. When I explained this, the gift bearers always glared back indignantly. More than once I was told, “If I have given it to you, you must take it! You know the saying: ‘When they give, take. When they kill, run.’”
The fanfare in khutors sometimes delayed me long enough for Cossack men to dress up and greet me on the street in traditional regalia. Near Il’inskaya, a stanitsa (a town larger than a khutor, big enough to have a church), one such man stepped proudly into my path in a black Astrakhan hat, a golden embroidered cloak fitted with bullets in the chest pockets, and a whip and antique dagger on the belt. His near-royal refinement was strongly at odds with the uncouthness of the poachers I’d met a few days before.
“Welcome, Cossack! I am the ataman of the Il’inskaya Cossacks. Where are you migrating to?” he said, shaking my hand. “As ataman, I am the leader of the Cossacks here and responsible for getting young people enlisted in the Kuban Cossack army. But my job is also to instil the spirit of freedom, fairness, and independence that was crushed in the Soviet era.”
I asked the ataman what relation he felt to the nomadic people of the steppe.
“Like nomads, we could always pack up and leave wherever we needed. In old times, like for nomads, the steppe gave us all we needed—horses, wild game, and fish.” He cast his eyes over my gear and the horses with a look of envy. “I consider that Genghis Khan was a Cossack by definition. Although we did not live in yurts, we adopted the best of nomad custom: most important, their horses and horsemanship. We have a saying: ‘Only a bullet can catch a Cossack rider.’”
As I rode on there was no doubt in my mind that Cossacks genuinely identified with my journey and were conscious of their history as great horsemen. I took great heart from this and was beginning to lose my fear of authorities. Nothing, however, could hide the fact that the essential ingredient of their past—horses—had disappeared. I felt the absence of the equine at every move. Most village atamans I met stepped out of cars or traveled on foot, and no one thought to offer me fodder—a meaningful gift for a nomad. The few horses I did encounter had never been saddled. Famous don breeds that had once been ridden into war were now used for pulling carts. When I passed them on the road they shied at the sight of my caravan and sometimes bolted off the edge of the road, the driver hanging on for dear life.
In another telling sign of the absence of horses, in all my time on the Kuban steppe only one family ever invited me to stay. Very few had horses or the facilities to keep them overnight, and those who did didn’t believe they had room or feed for three extras. Whenever I asked if there was somewhere I could lodge, I would be directed to a collective farm beyond the village. These ranches were depressing Soviet relics, many of which had been converted into piggeries and almost exclusively manned by poor men who lived in the village and worked out at the farm on irregular shifts. As it had elsewhere in the Soviet Union, collectivization had clearly driven a wedge between farming and family life. Horses had subsequently become associated with state farms and were no longer treasured family members.
Beyond Il’inskaya, the freshness instilled by the winter break wore off. My body began to ache, and the accumulated lack of sleep took its toll. At the first sign of hunger my mood would crumble. The horses felt heavy themselves, and during breaks they kept their heads down. Even Tigon was exhausted. He had learned that the most important thing while on the lead was keeping well out of reach of Taskonir, for whenever Taskonir caught up he would take a nip at Tigon’s hind legs to remind him who was boss. Several times Tigon’s lead became dangerously tangled in the horse’s legs. The worst torment was when the front horse happened to step on the lead at a trot. It nearly strangled poor Tigon, who, pinned down and trampled by the caravan, was spat out the end in somersaults. How he came out of these scrapes without serious injury was beyond me.
Then came the rains. The lanes and tracks turned to sticky black mud—a telling sign that I was riding through chernozem, or “black soil”—the fertile soils that stretch from the Kuban across the southern steppe of the Ukraine, forming the breadbasket of Russia and the former Soviet Union. It was so sought after for its richness that, legend has it, when the Nazis advanced through southern Ukraine and Russia they took soil back to Germany by the shipload.
As mud, however, this precious soil balled up under the horse’s hooves until they slipped and fell. I resolved to walk, but within minutes the buildup on my boots turned them into heavy clogs. The slightest tug from the horses on the lead rope toppled me into the mud. I walked the better part of three days, descending into a quagmire of filth. The horses were still losing their winter hair, and the shed hair combined with the mud to stick fast to my clothes, my skin, and my sleeping bag. But the dirtier and more desperate for hospitality I became, the less likely it was that anyone would let me in.
And then one night, while I was setting up camp in the pouring rain beyond a ramshackle khutor, a local drunk stumbled upon my muddy patch of earth and twisted the knife. “How dare you camp here on the Kuban, you foreigner! If I tell my friends about it, they will come in the night, take your horses to the meat factory, and drown you in the river for the crayfish to eat!” I swore at him darkly, and he stumbled away. But the look I caught in his eye meant that I slept the night in my filthy riding clothes and with my axe by my side.
Out of grain and low on food the following night, I was forced to camp on a narrow strip of grass next to freshly plowed earth. Despite tying the horses on short tethers, they managed to get out and roll in it. By morning they were all plastered in black grime.
As I sat there with my porridge, a thought dawned on me. I’d become the picture of a down-and-out, homeless wanderer that many westerners and Russians mistakenly associate with the word nomad. My condition reminded me of when I had been in Siberia at age twenty-one, riding a bicycle to Beijing. I had been living on a budget of $2 a day, had a single change of clothes, and hadn’t shaved in more than four months. A village woman, who looked at me in horror, explained the word bomzh, which usually referred to a homeless bum, to me this way: “Well, Tim, bomzh … it’s basically you, only without your bicycle.”
How ironic, I thought, that this same mud that caked us all, the pride of the Kuban, had spawned the end of the nomad era and the downfall of the free Cossack way of life. Stalin had never trusted Cossacks and had needed grain to pay for his dreams of industrialization, and plowing up the chernozem had been a valid pretext to solve both problems. I understood it now: to dispossess a nomad, you take away his horse and plow up his land. Horseless and coaxed into a life between four walls, the once brave warrior becomes toothless and redundant in the space of a generation.
On a lighter note, as I noticed the tattered fabric hanging around my legs, I sadly concluded that the trousers I had been wearing since day one in Mongolia were close to the end of their own road.
18
THE TIMASHEVSK MAFIA
Beyond the stanitsa of Dyad’kovskaya, the rain came down in sheets. I slipped behind a row of trees and headed down a narrow track into some deserted wheat fields. Protected by the hood of my jacket, I kept my head bowed and considered my circumstances.
I was now only 250 km from the Kerch Strait, which lay between Russia and the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine, but before leaving Russia I needed to find a replacement for Utebai and start the process of getting my horses approved for passage through customs. To do either of these would require a miracle. Horses were a scarcity on the Kuban, and no one would ever agree to trade for a wimp like Utebai. In my filthy, disheveled state of late, it was also true that I would struggle to convince a shopkeeper to sell me a loaf of bread, let alone a border guard to give me entry into another country.
But when I lifted my eyes, columns of light peeled away the gloom, and it seemed my prayers had been answered.
The unruly beard of the man before me caught my eye at first, then his tall, burnished velvet hat and long black robes. He lifted a small broom from a bucket of water, flicking drops from high above his head into the field. Then he turned to me.
“We’ve come here to bless the wheat fields with holy water! Where are you going?”
He was the priest of Dyad’kovskaya, and he explained that since ancient times it had been the role of the Orthodox Church to bless every wheat field of the parish in the spring. As I went on my way, he showered my caravan with holy water.
It was only a few minutes later that proof of his friends in higher places materialized. Accustomed to noisy Russian jeeps and Ladas, I’d failed to notice the purr of a new four-wheel-drive Range Rover until it was right up alongside me. Tigon took a sniff, then retreated. As a tinted window slid down silently, a man who was polished but not as elegant as his car grinned out at me from the leather interior.
“So, fellow traveler, partisan, Kazakh, Cossack—how can I help you?”
I wiped mud and rain from my eyes and peered down as he stepped out and swaggered up to me. Standing only little taller than he was wide, he was adorned with flawlessly buffed shoes, a black jacket, sunglasses, and a silky tie in red, green, and white, the colors of the Krasnodar provincial flag. This was crowned with silver-streaked curly hair and a handlebar mustache. He might have been the second apparition in as many minutes, but there was no doubting it: this man was no priest.
“My friend! You do not know me, but soon, I think, we will be friends. I am Nikolai Vladimorivich Luti: ataman of this region, owner of ten thousand hectares of crops, and employer of eight hundred workers.”
I stammered out my story. Luti, as he liked to be called, looked at me thoughtfully. Finally he said, “Thirty kilometres away at my friend’s farm you will have all the services you need. Go there tonight, and tomorrow we will consider your problem. If we can find a new horse for you, we will.”
Rain streamed down as I hightailed it through fields and villages. Flocks of geese parted, avenues of dogs erupted, and goats tied on short chains nearly strangled themselves in panic as my caravan thundered by. It grew dark and cold, and my body ached, but sometimes I had to let the reins go—I had, after all, been promised hot food and a wash.
It was well into the night when I pulled up alongside a throng of Soviet harvesting equipment, peeled myself out of the saddle, and hobbled inside a cavernous machinery shed. There, under floodlights on a plastic table, lay a tub of freshly roasted meats, fruit, and salads, surrounded by a forest of vodka bottles. Around this table sat Luti and three other men, all clearly ravenous.
As I sank thankfully into a chair, Luti introduced himself as the “big farmer,” and Sascha Chaika—the owner of the farm where we had arrived—as the “little farmer.” Luti then rose with a glass of vodka and puffed out his chest. “I want you to know that you have fallen in with simple people. It’s Easter, and although we are observing fasting, Cossacks were always allowed to eat meat and drink alcohol when on the road … and, well, we are on the road!”
The vodka had barely hit our guts before we swooped down on the food. Sauce exploded from the corners of our mouths, oil ran down our arms, and soon all that remained were empty disposable plates and a “tablecloth” of oily newspaper. Our attention then turned to drink, and soon the shed was filled with a cacophony of laughter, man-to-man talk, and heated arguments that were resolved by more drinking. It wasn’t until the vodka ran out that the calm of night reclaimed the wheat field and the shed grew cold, then dark and silent.
In the morning came a message through Chaika that Luti would agree to see me again only after I had had a wash. Luti had booked me a hotel in Timashevsk for a night, and sure enough I soon found myself with rivers of black and brown mud flowing off me in a luxurious bathtub. Luti had suggested that a little love was in order as part of this “recovery package,” and although I had turned the offer down, I had half expected to find a woman waiting in my room when I arrived.
Clean and sober the next morning, I knew it was time to face the challenge of finding a new horse and eking a way into the tangle of bureaucracy so I could leave the country with my animals. Luti was not fazed by this challenge. Timashevsk, he said, was the perfect base from which to organize everything.
Over the next six weeks, my problems would indeed be solved, but in this farming center on the main road between Krasnodar and Moscow, my time among the circle of Luti’s friends and acquaintances would offer me an intriguing portrait of a society in which the void created by the collapse of the Soviet Union had been filled by endemic corruption. Partly in an effort to cope with the eternal uncertainty this created, but also as a celebration of the unregulated times they were living in, people had adopted a carefree approach to life and had a remarkable propensity to enjoy the moment—albeit with alcohol (and, in the case of Luti’s men, the liberal use of prostitutes) at its core.
Much of my journey from Mongolia to Hungary was an external one, dealing with the elements and the horses. But here in Timashevsk, challenged by this culture, I would experience a chapter that would prove to reveal as much about me—and perhaps my naiveté—as it did about those around me.
The first priority was finding a place for my horses, and it wasn’t long before Luti had made a few calls and come up with a solution: “I have the perfect place! My friend owns a scrap metal plant in town.” When he noticed my blank stare, he added, “You will thank me for this, I promise!”
Later that day my blank look turned to one of extreme apprehension as I led my horses toward a run-down industrial building from which came violent booms and the screeching of metal. It looked and sounded more like a glue factory than a stable. I felt Taskonir tremble as we entered and navigated through a mess of twisted car wrecks and mangled steel. A man wearing grease-covered overalls waved urgently at me to stop as a crane swung a full-size truck through an arc just 5 m ahead of me. The truck was dumped in a huge steel bin with a deafening clang, then set upon by a gang of men wielding crowbars and sledge hammers.
Metal recycling had thrived in southern Russia since the 1990s, and plants like this had become processing facilities for the dismantling of seventy years of Soviet machinery. The metal business was also known to have a close affiliation with the Mafia. I was beginning to wonder just who my benefactor was when a blond woman in a figure-hugging dress and high heels emerged from an office and picked her way toward me through the dust and debris. She led me toward some stables in a corner of the recycling yard that I’d overlooked.
There, I met the owner of the plant and Luti’s friend, Igor Maluti—a man who was half Tatar, half Cossack, almost 2 m tall, and bearing shoulders as wide as a draft horse’s. Stooped forward, veins flaring at his temples, he wrenched rather than shook my hand while declaring that his life was devoted to the love of three things: horses, pigeons, and women. As I would soon learn, he was determined to introduce me to all three as soon as possible.
His horses were expensive breeds ranging from English thoroughbreds to ponies.
He never rode them, but he made sure they were given the finest food, and he had the Gypsy stable master wash them weekly with special horse shampoo. “They are food for my soul,” he explained in his coarse, dry voice.
Next he drove me to see his wife and mistresses, one after another, to whom he brought gifts and money. On the way home we came to a screeching halt on a bridge. Luti leaped out and managed to catch a pigeon from the ledge with his bare hands.
“Don’t you see? Pigeons are freedom, intelligence, and peace,” he said, canoodling with the bird, which he held against his powerful chest.
While I sensed that he could be brutal and cruel in different circumstances, there was a directness and honesty in Igor that I warmed to. Flexing his powerful hands over the steering wheel, pigeon tucked under his arm, he turned to me with a sigh and said, “Of course, Tim, to live your free life is my dream.” He turned back to the road, and I saw the folds in his trunk-thick neck smooth out. There was a sad look in his eyes. “But alas, your life is not my destiny.”
The hidden genius in leaving the horses with Igor was revealed later. The Gypsy stable master was an expert at bringing horses back to health. He professed to know when to feed and water them, and how much was needed to make a horse gain strength and weight. By the time I left, the horses were being prepared for the first shampooing of their lives.
On the other side of town Tigon and I moved into an industrial site of our own. Owned by Luti, it was a huge yard fenced in by concrete and barbed wire that contained a tile-making factory and a transit facility for gas and diesel.