Not angels on horseback
Benjamin Yarde-Buller THE COSSACKS by John Ure
Constable, f20, pp. 253
As Sir John sat weighing the relative merits of subjects for his next book, he can hardly not have been swayed by the amaz- ing felicity of the English word 'Cossack'. It is a phonetic phenomenon, simultane- ously evoking the hiss and crack of the famous whips, the 'cussing' and `sacking' which they habitually practised, as well as — and this is the coup de grace — delicate- ly alluding in a near rhyme to the preferred Cossack mode of transport, horseback. This really is a book which one might buy for the title alone; I am, however, delighted to report that what goes on between the covers more than lives up to the foreplay.
The Cossacks originated on the southern frontiers of Russia in the times when the inhabitants of Muscovy were perpetually at odds with the Tartar hordes to the south and east, who roamed the plains, raiding settlements for loot and prisoners to be sold in the slave markets. Cossacks — the word is from the Turkish 'quizzag', mean- ing protection gang — were Tartars hired by the Muscovites to protect them from their ex-fellows.
It was Ivan the Terrible in the mid-1500s who first harnessed this band of skilled horsemen and fighters to the imperial cause, employing them, via the entre- preneurial (in trade as well as culinary mat- ters) Stroganov family, as the instruments of Russian expansion into the fur-rich forests of Siberia. It was a Cossack, Serny- on Ivanovich Dezhnov, who first estab- lished, 100 years and countless casualties later, that the Asian continent was not con- nected by land to the Americas. Typically, though, his report was mislaid somewhere in Yakutsk, and Vitus Bering took the credit for the discovery another century on. It is extraordinary how significant a role the Cossacks have played in Russian, and hence world history; there are numerous further examples in the book — the defeat of Napoleon in 1812 and the Russian Rev- olution, to cite but two.
Ure has the knack of writing about the past in a way which not only informs the reader of what happened but also invites him or her to see, feel and hear what it
would have been like. This is fresh, sensual history and, although one can imagine sen- tences like `When eventually [Anna] was snatched up onto the saddle she was still holding the baby, but only by the foot while Lydia's head banged against the stirrup', being sniffed at by academics, it seems to me that this version is true in spirit and certainly more satisfactory than 'Anna and her daughter were kidnapped'. In short, Ure's storytelling has the dash to cope with his subject.
The book is, however, more than a col- lection of flamboyantly narrated adventure stories. Its serious historical purpose is to make sense of a people with so seemingly contradictory a past. Are the Cossacks essentially freedom fighters, as the populist rebellions against oppressive tsarist regimes might suggest, or are they brutal and fickle mercenaries? Evidence for the latter version includes their inglorious role during the revolution, when they were employed by the Romanovs as riot police. Ure's reading of Cossack history is convinc- ing; he sees them as a fundamentally mili- tary and opportunistic caste, always spoiling for a fight and fighting for the side most likely to maintain their tax- and law- free existence in the Caucasus. With their dress, dancing, music and skill in combat, they are undoubtedly stylish, but they are not, despite their numerous skirmishes with 'infidel' Turks and Tartars, paragons of Christian, or any other kind of virtue.
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