On our second day, in the sunny flush of morning, we drove out of Rostov towards the Starocherkasskaya stanitsa, the settlement that was once the capital of the Don Cossacks, who called themselves the Free Don Host. On the eastern edges of the city, among willows and birches, pricked green under a high sun with the first leaves of the accelerating spring, were elegant nineteenth-century houses, now dilapidated communal homes, painted in faded tones of mustard orange, pale yellow, green and blue. Just as the houses in the city had become diminished as the streets cascaded towards the riverbank, so here on its outskirts, larger buildings gave way to smaller and smaller houses, until we passed the tiniest dwellings I had ever seen, painted in colours that echoed the dusty steppe and the bright sky. This harmony of tonalities that moves across the great expanse of Russia is a lovely side effect of decades of central planning: trucks, fences, shutters, shops, cemetery railings, from Archangel to Kyakhta, all coloured in the same repertory of paints, at various stages of corrosion and distress.
The gravel road, which narrowed quickly as we left the city, and was full of potholes, took us some way south on to the steppe, then turned north again to meet the Don. Forsythia was in early bloom, and the grass was patched with brilliant green. We came up to a landing stage, jutting into the river at a narrowing bend. As a car ferry pulled away on the opposite side, we stood on the rush-clustered bank and waited. The sky clouded over and a wind blew from downriver, agitating the pewter surface of the water, lifting a chill into the air. In winter, cold from northern rivers courses deep through the underflows of the Don, freezing it, icing the Azov Sea. The ferry came slowly towards us, bearing a bright blue Moskvich (a vintage Soviet car) and a rusted three-wheeler with handlebars at the front and a trailer behind. A pack of wild dogs stopped to watch the craft approach, tails high, sniffing the breeze.
In Cossack songs about the Don, the river is always ‘quiet’, commanding the landscape through which it flows with its own glorious silence. The river is ‘grey-haired’, a batyushka (‘little father’), or Don Ivanovich, a proud and generous provider, feeding the soft fields of ‘Mother Donland’. Our turn came to cross the river, in the company of an old man and his stout wife with a motorbike and sidecar piled with garden rakes. I stood on the platform, leaning out over the water, as the wind blew back my hair. At the moment of equidistance from the shores, the wind dropped, and the low hum of the ferry engine seemed suspended in a deeper quiet, evoked by the unending flatness of the landscape. I wanted to stay out here, on the open vessel in the middle of the wide river, to ride its waters up towards the Volga, or follow their strong current down to the Don mouth at the Azov. As we drew towards the opposite bank, the dull green domes of a church could be seen among the trees. A group of young boys, dressed in camouflage trousers, trainers and tall Cossack hats made of black astrakhan sheepskin, stared at our slow-moving stage from the road, hands in their pockets, as it approached.
Cherkassk, as the Starocherkasskaya stanitsa was once known, was the Don Cossack capital for 150 years from the middle of the seventeenth century. In the days of Cossack autonomy, it was the seat of the krug, the Army Circle that was selected democratically but governed with fierce authoritarian discipline. In time, as the Cossack way of life became more settled and integrated into the institutional structures of the Russian state, the plenitude of the river in spate, which had once aided in the defence of the fortress at Cherkassk, made the place unsuitable as a capital. In spring, the Don would overrun its banks and wash up among the stone churches and wooden dwellings of the settlement. So in 1805, Ataman Matvei Platov, a native of Cherkassk and a national military hero, moved the capital to higher ground twenty miles up country, and named the new administrative and trading centre Novocherkassk. Now Starocherkasskaya (Old Cherkassk) is preserved as a tranquil memorial to the culture of the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Cossacks, who were, by turns, loyal fighters for imperial Russia, and unruly rebels against the autocracy of the Tsar.
The Cossacks, a military caste described by Akhmatova’s son, the orientalist Lev Gumilev, as a ‘sub-ethnos’, formed into a distinct people through their own wayward relation with the authority of the state. The first Cossacks appeared in the lower Don region in the fifteenth century. The word kazak (Cossack) is of Turkic origin and means ‘free man’. Runaway peasants and other sundry fugitives from official injustice, taxation and conscription fled south and adopted a nomadic life on the ungoverned steppe. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Cossacks, with their unequalled horsemanship and fighting prowess, had become a powerful force in the wild lands on the edges of the empire, defending Russian territory against incursion by brigands or foreign states, leading the outward push of the imperial frontier to the south and east. Cossack autonomy gradually diminished, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, ministries of state in St Petersburg were responsible for appointing atamans and military commanders.
Until the late seventeenth century, the Cossack way of life was strictly masculine. The first Cossack wives were captives, taken as war booty. Male authority was unconstrained. An unloved wife could be sold to another Cossack for cash or goods. A woman could be beaten, even killed, with impunity. Later, the Cossacks, who soon became, for the most part, Orthodox (many of them schismatics, Old Believers who had broken with the Church over liturgical reform in the seventeenth century), took on the marriage rites of the Russians. Don Cossack love songs are addressed not to women, but to eagles and falcons, horses, spurs, rifles and shashki (the long swords that had to remain silent as Cossacks rode into battle), to vodka, freedom, the greening steppe, the steep shores and braided yellow sands of the Don, and the joys of killing.
Life is a kopeck. Let’s go to the border to beat the enemies of the Fatherland. Half of them we will hack to death, the rest we will take prisoner … We gallop forward, we cry, we hack. Surrender, or you will fall like grass in the field, we will cut you clean into firewood.
Tolstoy, who spent time with Cossacks as a soldier in the Caucasus when Russia was fighting rebel Chechens in the 1850s, was particularly intrigued by relations between men and women in their small rugged communities, which, for him, were a realisation of primitive innocence: instinctive, authentic, close to nature. ‘A Cossack, who considers it improper to speak affectionately or idly to his wife in front of strangers, involuntarily feels her superiority when he is alone with her face to face,’ he observed. Tolstoy greatly admired the physical strength and beauty of Cossack women. ‘In general’, he wrote in The Cossacks, they ‘are stronger, more intelligent, more educated and more beautiful than Cossack men’. His hero, Olenin, a wealthy idler, ‘what in Moscow society is called “un jeune homme”’, leaves the city for the Caucasus, and falls in love with a Cossack girl, Maryana, who is strongly built, dignified and beautiful, with black shadowed eyes. She walks with a dashing, boyish gait, works hard, and expresses nothing of her inner life. Olenin’s main occupation in the settlement is gazing at her. ‘La feel com sa say tray bya,’ thinks Olenin’s citified manservant Vanyusha when he first sees Maryana drawing wine from a cask in her simple Cossack dress: ‘Back in the servants’ quarters at home they would have laughed if they had seen a girl like that.’