I met her on her first visit to the land of her fathers. Madame Nathalie Fedorovsky was born in Belgium, raised in Katanga and now dwells at Roissy, near Paris. But her Russian is perfect. More important, this wise and polished lady possesses a French sense of proportion. She was aware of all the ironies: that Cossack male machismo should be constructing a cult round a woman; that precapitalist steppe horsemen should be making a shrine out of an industrialist's city mansion. She walked through the streets of Rostov like a queen, with a small, fluttering retinue. Madame Fedorovsky was not to be manipulated.
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, 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.
Chapter Four
Wax for women, bronze for men.
Our lot falls to us in the field, fighting,
but to them death comes as they tell fortunes.
Osip Mandelstam, Tristia'
WITHOUT A MAN upright on a horse, the landscape of the Black Sea grasslands seems incomplete. The novels, from Tolstoy's to Sholokhov's, have been read; the films watched. But this was once Amazon country, and the very maleness of the Cossacks is in reality a discord with the past.
Among the nomads of the Pontic Steppe, women were at times powerful: not in the condescending male sense of silky persuasiveness in beds or over cradles, but directly. They ruled; they rode with armies into battle; they died of arrow-wounds or spear-stabs; they were buried in female robes and jewellery with their lances, quiver and sword ready to hand.
In their graves, a dead youth sometimes lies across their feet. A man sacrificed at the funeral of a woman? This could not have happened in the Graeco-Roman tradition we call 'European civilisation', where - as the German film-maker Volker Schlôndorff once said — every opera about human transcendence requires the sacrificial death of a woman in Act Three.
To say 'the Amazons existed' is too easy. What is fair to say is that the Greek story about a race of virgin women warriors, mounted and firing arrows from the saddle, still looks like myth but no longer entirely like fiction. A hundred and fifty years ago, those same Victorian scholars who taught that Herodotus was a liar dismissed his and other versions of the Amazon story as childish fantasy. Since then, archaeologists and structuralist critics have both concluded
that Herodotus was more sophisticated than the Victorians supposed. His statements about material and spiritual culture in the Pontic Steppe continues to be confirmed by research, as we have seen. Where he did invent, it has become clear that he did so in a secondary, 'non-fictional' way: assembling shreds and tatters of diverse narratives from the past (which would otherwise have perished entirely) into a collage, a new presentation whose impact he had calculated with some care.
Writing in the fifth century BC, Herodotus started with old Amazon tales known to most Greeks and then assimilated them to new narratives which had come to him — second-hand, third-hand — from his oral sources, most of them apparently colonial Greeks on the Black Sea coast, if not from Olbia itself.
After the Trojan wars and the death of their queen, Penthesilea, the Amazons living on the south shore of the Black Sea had been overcome by the Greeks and herded into prison-ships. But they mutinied, killed their guards and finally landed somewhere on the Sea of Azov. Here they at first fought the Scythians but eventually mated with them, settling 'three days' journey from the Tanais eastward and a three days' journey from the Maeotian lake [Sea of Azov] northwards' and becoming the nation of the Sauromatae. 'Ever since then the women of the Sauromatae have followed their ancient usage; they ride a-hunting with their men or without them; they go to war, and wear the same dress as the men.' Thus wrote Herodotus.
It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century, when archaeological techniques were still perfunctory, that Russian excavators in the Pontic Steppe began to register that some of the warrior skeletons under the kurgans were female.
The first of these discoveries was made in a tumulus in Ukraine, near the middle Dnieper, by the amateur Count Bobrinskoy who knew a bit about skeletal anatomy. But gradually the bones of the women warriors, as they were recorded on the map, began to cluster in the region north-east of the Don, the land of the Sauromatians in the time of Herodotus. Further east, in the plains between the Ural and Volga rivers, nearly a fifth of the female Sauromatian graves dated between the sixth and fifth centuries BC have been found to contain weapons. Scythian graves all over southern Ukraine have revealed women soldiers, sometimes buried in groups, equipped with bows, arrows and iron-plated battle-belts to protect their groins.
Later still, it became clear that the Sarmatians, who began to displace the Scythians from the Black Sea coast in the fourth century BC, also shared military and political authority between men and women. Sarmatian women burried by the Molochna River lay in scale-armour corselets, with lances, swords or arrows. The young Sarmatian princess buried at Kobiakov on the Don with her treasury of cult jewellery — a whole Iranian pantheon of animal and human figures made of gold — had her own battle-axe placed in the tomb beside the harness of her own horse-team.
Two conclusions seem to emerge. One is that Iron Age societies inhabiting the Black Sea-Volga steppes in the time of Herodotus and afterwards provided for a least some military and political parity between men and women. Not all of them did: Thracian women were not as free to ride, fight and govern as the women of some neighbouring nations were. Nor is it sensible to talk about 'equality'; knowing that both women and men were trained to use weapons and to ride as aggressive cavalry does not reveal much about how men and women behaved to one another or divided labour when they were out of the saddle. All the same, the Greeks were right to think that the Scythian-Sarmatian world had an attitude to women and power which was quite unlike their own. They found that attitude horrifying and fascinating.
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