Black Sea

by Neal Ascherson

  This is the iron hand of Peter. The fist of Peter the Great brought Russia to the shores of the Sea of Azov, and drove Dutch and German shipwrights to build the first Russian Navy at Voronezh just three hundred years ago, in the 1690s.

  Between Russia and the open ocean, there were three bottlenecks plugged by the Turkish enemy. The first was the fortress of Azov, built by the Turks to command the main channel of the river Don as it reached the sea. The second plug was the stronghold of Yenikale, built by the Ottomans to block the Kerch Straits: Catherine the Great broke through that barrier at the end of the eighteenth century. The third was the Narrows, the double passage of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles which led past Istanbul itself to the Mediterranean. The Narrows have been open to the merchant shipping of the world since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1912, but all the armies and navies of Russia have never been able to capture them.

  The Russian struggle south to reach the warm waters of the Mediterranean, and the Turkish struggle to hold the Ottoman conquests around the Black Sea and protect the Narrows, raged for nearly three hundred years. They led to one major European war-the Crimean conflict in the 1850s which involved France, Britain and Sardinia as well as Russia and Turkey-and nearly precipitated several others in the course of the nineteenth century. Generations of illiterate, obedient peasant soldiers died on both sides. So did the innocent inhabitants of wasted landscapes and stormed cities all round the Black Sea, from Azov to the outskirts of Istanbul.

  Byron devoted a long section of his poem Don Juan to one of these famous slaughters, the battle for the Turkish fortress of Ismail on the Danube:

  All that defies the worst that pen expresses, All by which hell is peopled, or as sad As hell - mere mortals who their power abuse -Was here (as heretofore and since) let loose.

  In the end, both sides died of their wounds. Russian hatred of Turkey and Turkish fear of Russian expansion were among the most dangerous ingredients in the mixture of unstable diplomatic explosives which blew up in 1914. Turkey joined the war behind Germany and Austria-Hungary; Russia invaded Anatolia from the east. The effort broke both regimes. Within a few years, before the First World War was over, both the Russian and Ottoman Empires had collapsed.

  The honour of knocking out the first Turkish plug belonged not to Peter, but to the Don Cossacks. The Cossacks were confederations of Russian and Ukrainian outlaws and fugitives -often intermarried with local Tatar or Kipchak nomads — who had settled in the freedom of the steppes during the late Middle Ages. This particular confederation or 'host', the Cossacks who ranged over the plains of the lower Don, had been harassing and resisting the Turks for more than a century before Peter the Great arrived on the Sea of Azov. They had dug a canal across the delta, so that boats could sail or be rowed upriver without passing under the guns of the fortress-town of Azov. Far to the west, on the lower Dnieper, their cousins the Zaporozhe Cossacks had built a form of submarine to evade Turkish guard-posts: covered-in skiffs propelled with oars, supplied with air through wooden pipes and carrying sand-ballast to release when they wished to surface. (Reports that fleets of submarines crossed the Black Sea in the sixteenth century, disgorging Cossack commandos who captured Anatolian cities like Sinop, belong, however, to Russian mythology.)

  None of this gave the Turkish sultan serious anxiety. But one day in 1637 a Cossack force prowling in the Don delta approached the walls of Azov and then, on a wild impulse, attacked them. There was a large Ottoman garrison there, behind zig-zag brick and earth ramparts constructed according to the latest designs of European military engineering. But the defenders were taken by surprise. The Cossack regiments burst into the town and then, after three days of fighting, captured the citadel.

  They soon lost the place again. The Turks came back to Azov with reinforcements, and many years and sieges passed before Peter finally captured it for Russia. In the end, the job had to be done professionally, with encroaching trenches, regular armies, demolition sappers, mortar batteries and gunboats. When Azov finally fell, the butchery was as sad as Byron's hell, and in the back gardens of the town men digging for potatoes still find collapsed trenches containing Turkish bones and buttons among iron Russian cannon-balls.

  Peter did the hard and brutal work here, but the Don Cossacks

  rode off with the glory. Taking Azov suited the Cossack myth. It was a blow struck for Russia and Christendom, in lands far beyond the limits of the tsar's dominion. It was done without orders from any superior, on the spur of the moment, without fear of the forbidding military odds against them. It was the victory of plains people, poor horsemen from the fens and steppes, over settled and heavily armed people who lived behind walls.

  The first time I saw Don Cossacks was in Rostov. In a narrow street with broken pavements, several dozen men in uniform were milling and shouting at one another. In the Russian manner, other people passing down Suvorov Street took absolutely no notice of them except to make a slight detour round their noise.

  The Cossacks had seized a house, one of those squat old merchant's houses apparently built of blue-and-white marzipan and crystallised fruit. Before the Revolution, the house at 20, Suvorov Street had belonged to the Cossack millionaire Paramonov. Now, defying the city council's orders to move out, the occupying force proposed to defend it as reclaimed Cossack property.

  They crowded across the street to harangue me. When, after a diet of Russian novels, you cast eyes on a knout, you recognise it: this leather knout was shorter than a whip but longer than a rope's end, and one of the Cossacks was slapping it against the big red stripe down his uniform trousers. He wore a red-and-white tramdriver cap, pushed to the back of his sweaty blond curls, and his face and neck were brick-red from sun and wind.

  The oldest man, wearing a St Andrew's Cross medal on his military tunic, roared at me, We are not bandits, as they say in the West! No, we are the party of ecology, the party of the environment! All the Don Cossacks ask for is that the factories be torn down and the steppe be given back to us. We will restore this land to nature, and bring all the poor little town children to come and breathe our fresh air.'

  He invited me to sign a petition which demanded a halt to the settlement of 'non-Slavs' in the Don region. This meant 'non-Christians', he explained. So Georgian and Armenian Christians could go on living in Rostov? 'Well... but, anyway, not Moslems from the Caucasus, and not. .. you know. Well, Jews.'

  The early Cossacks lived much in the manner of their steppe predecessors, in mobile cavalry hosts migrating in search of seasonal pasture behind herds of horses and cattle. In a landscape without forests or hills, their refuges in time of trouble were marshes and river meanders: the Don delta or, for the powerful Zaporozhe host, the Sech island below the cataracts of the Dnieper.

  But the price of Cossack freedom was eternal manipulation by the neighbouring settled kingdoms. Until the eighteenth century, during the long conflict between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russia, the Cossacks were able to sell their support to one side or the other. But as Catholic Poland declined, they fell increasingly under the influence of Moscow and of the Russian Orthodox version of Christianity. After Peter and then Catherine had annexed the northern Black Sea coast to Russia, the Cossacks began to serve as cavalry in the tsarist wars against the Turks, against Napoleon, against the Anglo-French invaders of Crimea. In time of peace, they came to be used as instruments of government terror: against the Jews during the pogroms of the late nineteenth century, and against revolutionary strikers and demonstrators a few years later.

  The Revolution of 1917 and the civil war which followed split the Cossacks into 'Reds' and 'Whites'. Some joined the Bolsheviks, like the Red Cavalry described in Isaac Babel's stories which invaded Poland in 1920 under Marshal Budyenny - the Konarmia (horse army). Others followed White Cossack leaders like Krasnov into exile. They left their horses on the quays of Novorossisk, and learned to drive fiacres and motor-taxis in Paris. Much later, some of their elderly leaders were tempted into t
he tragic miscalculation of enlistment with Hitlerism.

  To feel oneself a Cossack is to enter an excruciating crisis of identity. It seems to me that the Cossacks belong to the category of 'outpost people': faithful defenders of some tradition whose centre is far away and which, often, is already decaying into oblivion. The Krajina Serbs believe that they are the truest and purest Serbs, uncorrupted by whatever may happen in Belgrade, standing guard against the 'Germanised' Croats and the imaginary onslaught of fundamentalist Islam. In Northern Ireland, the Protestant 'Loyalist' community proclaims itself to be the bastion of true Britishness with an unreconstructed Union Jack fervour which now seems antiquated, even faintly foreign, in London or Manchester. The Afrikaners, to take a very different example, have in the past understood themselves as custodians of 'Western Christian values', stationed among the barbarians on the direct instructions of the Lord of the Old Testament.

  Two delusive mental syndromes afflict such outpost peoples. One is false consciousness: a skewed and paranoid awareness of the exterior world. The Afrikaner extremist faces a godless international enemy directed by the Illuminati, whose leaders are mostly 'crypto-Jewish' American financiers and politicians. The Ulster Freedom Fighter believes in a Papist-Fenian world conspiracy (which, until the Soviet Union collapsed, included a secret compact betwen Old Red Socks in the Vatican and the late Leonid Brezhnev in the Kremlin). The Serbian clairvoyant decodes the names of Bosnia's international supporters as the encrypted titles of Satan's archangels.

  The second syndrome is dominance. The outposter must constantly remind himself of who he is by displaying his power over 'the others'. These 'others' are held to be inherently inferior as individuals, usually because of their race or religion. But they are more numerous, and represent a constant threat which can be held in check only by public enactments of domination. In Portadown, in Northern Ireland, the Orange March on every Twelfth of July used to surge down through The Tunnel' into the Catholic quarter in order to yell up at the windows and show who was master in the town (in recent years, the police has taken to re-routing the procession and barricading The Tunnel). In Bosnia, Serb militias practised the ritual gang-rape of Moslem women in the same spirit.

  The very sense of collective identity may come to hang on this enactment. An Afrikaner is self-defined by a variety of markers which include language and a Calvinist religious culture, but if he can no longer demonstrate physically his mastery over blacks, he may feel no longer entirely an Afrikaner in his own eyes. Similarly, displayed domination over others was indispensable to Russian imperial nationalism. The Cossacks above all — considering themselves distinct from 'settled' Russians and yet, at the same time, appointed carriers of the essential Russian values - display that syndrome with gloomy intensity. A Russian is somebody who subdues non-Russians.

  Kazachestvo — Cossackism — developed as the idea of a warrior caste whose mission was to defend and extend Russia at its margins.

  Religious and racial intolerance were built into the ideology at an early stage, and both tsars and Soviet rulers knew how to flatter Cossack self-esteem. At Novocherkassk, which is now the unofficial Don Cossack 'capital', a triumphal arch commemorates the Cossack part in defeating Napoleon in 1812, a statue of the mediaeval Cossack leader Yermak stands in the biggest square, and the museum displays a golden sword presented to his wild horsemen by Tsar Alexander I. Medals have always rained down, but all the honours were intended to distract the Cossacks from the realities of their own powerlessness and poverty.

  It worked. For a hundred years, the Don Cossacks lived in a dream: the dream of a horseman cantering across a world of grass with fear rippling ahead of him like the wind.

  There was a sinister beauty here which seized imaginations in unlikely heads. Isaac Babel described how, as a Jewish child in the 1905 Odessa pogrom, he watched his father kneeling in the broken glass of his shop and pleading as a Cossack cavalry patrol came down the street. The focus of that scene is not Jewish humiliation but the fearsome grace of the Cossack officer as he rides by, touching his cap distantly, not deigning to glance down.

  A few years later, surrendering to the malign spell laid upon him in boyhood, Babel in his pince-nez hoisted himself into a Cossack saddle. He joined the Red Cavalry after the Bolshevik Revolution and, as a Konarmia trooper, rode from the Black Sea into the heart of Poland, his horse pacing down the streets of blazing Jewish shtetls.

  Force, race and male pride defined the Cossack. Then came two successive world-endings in the same century, the Revolution of 1917 and the death of the Revolution in 1991, either of which should by its own manifesto have sent those three values to a museum. But Stalin's imperial state, Great-Russian chauvinism belted with a red star, found a use for them. So has post-Soviet, precapitalist Russia in the 1990s. Force, above all, is in demand all round the Russian borders and frequently in the cities. And, because the Cossacks see in this confusion a fresh crisis of the Russian race, they have rediscovered the male profession of warrior.

  Volunteers from the Don Cossacks have fought and been killed in the newly independent state of Moldava, defending the Russian minority in 'Transdniestria' against the Romanian-speaking majority. Kuban and Don Cossacks have turned up in the battles of the northern Caucasus, professing to be defending the margins of Russia by supporting the Abkhazian or Ossetian rebellions against Georgia. In the name of Slavic brotherhood, more than five hundred Cossack volunteers joined the Serbian militias fighting in Bosnia.

  How can this defence of Russianness be at the same time the defence of a distinct Kazachestvo} Here the Cossack muddle about identity solidifies into a dead-end of contradiction. On the one hand, the Cossacks are impatient to take up arms against non-Christians and non-Slavs who have the impudence to claim a right to rule over Russians. On the other hand, Cossacks themselves have been seduced into the bazaar of ethnic and linguistic nationalism which is selling quick identities all around the Black Sea. They have proclaimed their own distinct ethnicity as the Cossack narod (people), and in several regions, including the lower Don, they have pegged out an autonomous territory of their own.

  The seven million Cossacks in Russia (ten million, according to their leaders) are in theory descendants of separate 'hosts' settled across Eurasia from the Don to the Ussuri River on the Chinese frontier and even on the Pacific coast. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the hosts were disbanded. The Cossacks lost their old freedoms and became collective-farm workers - a parody of the Cossack system of holding land in common - or industrial labourers in Soviet cities. Stalin manipulated Cossack patriotism in time of war, but their history of independence displeased him; they suffered intensely during the south Russian famines of the 1920s and the purges of the 1930s, and the political control over Kazachestvo was tight. The atamans, traditional host chieftains, were retained, but only as servile officials nominated by the Party.

  When the Cossack revival began, after 1991, the resources of the Kazachestvo heritage were wretchedly depleted. Most of the movement's new leaders were townees, or minor Party bureaucrats who had defected to make an expedition to their own roots. All over Rostov, for example, wives and sisters were ordered to sew together uniforms modelled on faded sepia photographs, while their men, no less clumsily than Isaac Babel, learned how to mount and then how to stay attached to a horse.

  Yet Cossack military strength is real. So is the danger that any convincing revival of old-fashioned, reactionary Russian nationalism will enlist that strength. Early in 1993, Boris Yeltsin resolved to outflank his enemies by playing the Cossack card: a presidential decree offered the Cossacks the return of their customary lands, the revival of the local self-government which they had enjoyed up to the 1917 Revolution, and the restoration of purely Cossack units to the Russian Army, complete with their classic uniforms, ranks and decorations. But the Russian parliament, at this stage dominated by a nationalist-Communist coalition moving into confrontation with President Yeltsin, rejected the decree. Even after the parliament
ary forces attempted their coup in September 1993 and were crushed by troops loyal to the presidency, the Cossack laws remained in limbo; nobody could remember whether they were in force or not. Instead, the Cossacks acted on them. That October, three thousand miles east of the Don, armed Ussuri Cossacks on ponies rode up to the frontier guards on the mountain-line which divides Russia from China and began — without orders - their first patrol. They had returned to their old duty: the watch at the outpost.

  All these contradictions found a home in the house at zo, Suvorov Street in Rostov. Paramonov, who built it and lived in it, was a Cossack. But he was also a great urban capitalist, an industrial and commercial magnate who owned grain elevators and coal mines and barges on the Don. His rival, Panchenko, owned paper mills, and early this century the two dynasties solved their differences with a wedding: a Paramonov daughter married a Panchenko son.

  After the Revolution, many of the Paramonovs and Panchenkos retreated into exile in Western Europe. For the next seventy years, both families were categorised in the land of their birth as bloodsucking monopolists, White terrorists and merciless exploiters. But any conversation in modern Rostov reveals that in spite of three generations of propaganda they are still remembered and revered. Today they enjoy a reputation, golden in hindsight, as fathers of their city, as builders of schools, embankments, parks and churches, as patrons of the arts.

  Cossack achievement which is neither a heaped battlefield nor a street of broken glass is rare and precious. So it was with awed excitement that the Don Cossacks learned a few years ago that the granddaughter of Paramonov and Panchenko was alive and living in France. They hit on the idea of seizing and occupying her grandfather's house, which had become a municipal office. They would hold it until they could hand it over to her - a true-blood Cossack and the house's rightful heiress - as a symbol of the Cossack right to all their 'stolen' properties and lands.