*
From the ferry, we walked the short way into Starocherkasskaya, passing a graveyard, at the gates of which an old man was selling worms for bait from a plastic bucket. We turned up the dusty road to the early-eighteenth-century Military Resurrection Cathedral which stands alone on the edge of the town, surging upwards out of the raked-bare fields. Before the Cossack capital was moved, the cathedral served the entire Don Cossack region. Built in the Byzantine style by Moscow masters sent to Cherkassk by Peter the Great, the brick and whitewash cathedral, set in its own bare steppe landscape, was simple and strong. From a powerful lower mass, it soared into a jostle of simply decorated towers with long narrow windows and bulbed cupolas topped with green-patinaed metal and pink-gold filigree crosses that caught the sunlight. Gift of a tsar, the cathedral expressed Cossack allegiance to the centralised Russian state; inside, among the whitewash, baroque gold and polished slate, was a massive chain, said to have shackled the Cossack rebel Stenka Razin before he was quartered alive on Red Square. Stenka Razin’s life of piratical raiding and rebellion had taken him to Persia and made him ruler of a Cossack rebel republic centred in Astrakhan, from where he aimed to dominate the Volga and advance on Moscow. From the place where the cathedral now stands, Razin, master of Cherkassk in 1670, once called the Don Cossacks to follow him north to unseat the Moscow boyars and subject the whole of Rus to their own violent, egalitarian principles of government.
Razin was a figure of enduring popular and artistic fascination. Pushkin (who later wrote a history of the Cossack Emilian Pugachev’s uprising against Catherine the Great) said that Stenka Razin had been his first hero, that he had dreamed of the rebel when he was only eight years old. On May Day 1919, Lenin unveiled a monument to Stenka Razin on the Lobnoye Mesto, the ‘execution place’, on Red Square, proclaiming the ‘real freedom’ that the workers’ state would bring, and telling the young people in the crowd that they would ‘live to see the full bloom of communism’. The folk ballad ‘Volga, Volga, Mother Volga’ sings of Razin’s marriage to a beautiful Persian princess. ‘He has changed us for a baba!’ Razin’s men complain in the song. ‘Just one night he spent with her, and by the morning he had become a baba too …’ The Cossack chooses his men, and the princess is cast into the river as a ‘gift from the Cossacks of the Don, so that there will be no discord among free men’.
As the authority of the tsarist state broke up in 1917, Tsvetaeva wrote a poem about Stenka Razin. In ‘Free Passage’, a prose vignette that recounts her visit to a rural requisition station in 1918, she meets a handsome tow-headed peasant soldier – ‘Two St George Crosses. A round face, cunning, freckles …’ – and names him Stenka Razin: ‘He’s Razin – before the beard, but already with a thousand Persian girls!’ Tsvetaeva trades stories and poetry with the young soldier, and they talk about Moscow, Marx, churches, and monasteries: ‘“I wanted to say something else, comrade, about the monks. Nuns, for example. Why do all the nuns make eyes at me?” I think to myself: sweetheart, how could one help but …’ As they part, Tsvetaeva gives the blue-eyed soldier a signet ring, a tsarist ten-kopeck piece in a silver frame, and a little book called Chroniclers, Travellers, Writers and Poets on Moscow, ‘a treasure house’. He stirs in her images of ‘pretemporal Rus’: ‘I reach out to you! Straw-headed Stepan, listen to me, steppes: there were covered wagons and nomad camps, there were camp fires and stars. Do you want a nomad tent – where through the hole you see the biggest star?’
After visiting the cathedral, we climbed the eight-sided tent-shaped belltower, startling the pigeons. There was once a prison in the cellar of the tower. Standing beneath the bells, among feathers, pigeon droppings and hunks of rotting timber, we looked out of its portals, eye-level to the cupolas. On the ground below lay the iron yoke of a trading scale and the folds of the door of the Turkish fortress of Azov, Cossack trophies of territorial wars long past. From the other side of the tower we could see the ensemble of Starocherkasskaya: the Don church, the Ataman’s palace, the whitewashed fortress-home of the Zhuchenkovs, an eighteenth-century family of trading Cossacks, and the two-storey house of Kondraty Bulavin, leader of another peasant uprising. Between the cathedral and the old stone buildings, paled in by slumping fences, was an untidy line of tiny wooden houses with hand-carved eaves and shutters, some newly painted bright green. From above, everything seemed to lean this way and that, vegetable plots had been raked over, bathtubs and basins filled with soil for spring planting, garden rubbish piled up. An old woman hoed, small bonfires smoked, the skin of the dark earth greyed in the sun. From afar, we watched two monks in long black robes walk side by side across a field towards the village.
We wandered lazily through the Museum of Cossack Life. The objects on display – eighteenth-century linen chests, lead weights and accounts ledgers, orders and medals, books on the geography of the Don, wine labels, buttons and lace, dainty pots of theater puder and blancheur de la peau – told not of nomadism, wildness and fratricidal war, but of domesticity, settled purpose, order and measure, an austere and precise sense of the value of beauty. On the walls were hundred-year-old photographs of Cossack families, with grave faces staring out from under their hats, posed against the same slumping fences, on the same patchy grass.
Fiction can make innocent things sinister, and the yellowed family portraits made me think of Babel’s story ‘A Letter’, in which Kurdyukov, a peasant soldier in Budyonny’s army, writes home to his mother. In filial tones, he tells her how, during the Red advance on Rostov, his father, a secret medal-wearing White, killed his own son Fyodor, calling him a ‘mercenary’ and a ‘Red dog’, only to be killed in his turn by his other son, Semyon. Kurdyukov shows Babel a photograph of his family before the Civil War: ‘Papasha’ with a glazed stare in his colourless vacant eyes; Mama, shy and consumptive in a bamboo chair; and behind them, two lads, ‘monstrously huge, slow-witted, broad-faced, goggle-eyed, frozen as if on drill parade, Kurdyukov’s two brothers – Fyodor and Semyon’.
In the Don church opposite the museum, a liturgy was being sung. A sign told women to cover their heads, not to wear lipstick. The iconostasis was newly painted with bright medallions showing Adam, Noah, Cain, Abel, Abraham and Samuel. Outside, a war veteran who had lost both legs in Chechnya sat in the sun in his wheelchair, collecting kopecks in a sawn-off Pepsi bottle. Next to him, a bright green bicycle leaned against the church wall. Tulips were pushing through the packed earth. Dogs barked and a cockerel crowed. Sound carries far over the flat land. A voice called up the belltower, ‘Komandír! Komandír!’, ‘Commander! Commander!’
At a trestle table under a willow tree, a moustachioed man in a Cossack hat was selling books. I began to browse, and he told me, with a small bow, that he was Mikhail Astapenko, Cossack historian. Each book was stamped with the seal of the Don Cossacks, a simple graphic depicting a happy warrior sitting on a barrel with rifle, sword, horn and cup. There was a school textbook by Astapenko on the history of the Don Cossacks; a book of Cossack recipes (fish and white cabbage pie, Rostov lamb, antonovka apples in sour cream); an album of Cossack songs; Atamans of the Don Cossacks from 1550 to 1920 edited by Astapenko with contributions from Cossacks in Rostov-on-Don, Paris, Yosemite and Buenos Aires; and Astapenko’s literary anthology on the Cossacks from ancient times to the year 1920. I bought the anthology, and the bookseller signed my copy ‘from the author’ with a brisk flourish. It contained excerpts of poetry, novels, short stories, historical narrative and folk song: Karamzin, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Gilyarovsky, Roman Gul, Mikhail Sholokhov, no Babel … But there, to my happiness, in a section entitled ‘Brother on Brother’, was Tsvetaeva’s poem ‘The Don’. A ‘rebel, gut and brow’, she called herself. As the ‘wife of a White officer’, in Moscow’s Polytechnical Museum at the end of the Civil War, Tsvetaeva recited her ‘Don monarchist’ poem to an audience of Red Army soldiers and communists. ‘The passions of the stage’, she said, ‘are military.’ She described her recitation that night as ‘the discharge of a duty of honour’: