Russka: The Novel of Russia

  ‘Yes.’ The huge fellow got up slowly. ‘We must talk.’ And with that he walked slowly over to the place where the girl was sitting in the shadows. Quietly he led her to the fire and made her sit by him. Andrei, curious though he was, left them alone. Then, very softly, Stepan began to talk to her.

  For some time, from a distance, Andrei watched them. The other Cossacks glanced at them too. What a strange fellow the bearded giant was, to be sure!

  The girl seemed to be saying little, watching Stepan with her large, thoughtful eyes, interjecting a word here and there as if to prompt him. There she was, a fifteen-year-old who had seen her own father hacked to death just a few hours before, and now she was sitting with this strange Cossack who had taken it into his head to marry her. And, Andrei thought, it was as if she were the teacher and he the child; for something in her composed, tragic young face made her look older than him – older than any of them, perhaps.

  At last, Andrei went to sleep. But several times, that short summer night, he awoke to see them still sitting there, quietly conversing by the glowing embers of the little fire.

  What was Stepan saying to her? Who knew what strange jumble of thoughts might be coming from that solemn head. Was he trying to convert her? Was he, perhaps, telling her about the lands past the Don which were his home? Was he telling her his life story, or God knew what tales of magic and superstition with which his simple head was full? Perhaps he was describing the endless, scented steppe, or his belief that all men should be equal brothers. Whatever it was, it was clear to Andrei that his friend, believing that this Jewish girl was his fate incarnate, had chosen that night to pour out his whole soul.

  And the girl was listening, always listening.

  She probably knows more about that fellow than some wives learn in a lifetime, he thought with a smile, the third time he went to sleep.

  It was just as the sky was beginning to lighten that he half awoke, to find Stepan rummaging through his baggage beside him. He noticed two things – that the girl was standing up, by the fire, and that his friend had upon his simple face a look of extraordinary exaltation, as if he had just been told some wonderful, mystical secret. More than ever, he seemed to be in a sort of daze. More asleep than awake himself, Andrei remembered vaguely seeing the two of them going out of the fort together, and thinking that Stepan looked like a man who was sleepwalking. Then he fell unconscious again.

  The shout which woke the whole fort came only minutes later.

  Startled wide awake, Andrei rushed to the gate, to find several of the guards already there, gazing out in puzzlement. He darted through them, and down the path.

  Stepan was standing by the river bank. In his hands was a pistol. The girl was lying on the grass a few feet in front of him, dead.

  He did not move. Even when Andrei reached him, he was still staring at her with a look of mystified disbelief on his face; and when Andrei tried to take him by the arm, he found that the big man was completely rigid.

  For several minutes they stood there together, in the pale light of early morning then Stepan let Andrei take the pistol out of his hand and, his body suddenly sagging, walked slowly up the slope with him.

  Only when he had sat the strange fellow down and made him drink a little vodka did Andrei get a confused account of what had happened.

  During their long talk that night, it seemed the girl had understood the foolish, superstitious fellow only too well. She had told him she would marry him. He had been ecstatic. She had entirely won his confidence. And then, towards the end of the night, when Stepan had entered a state which, to him, seemed to be mystical, she had told him her wonderful secret.

  ‘It is true we were fated to meet, Stepan. I was expecting you.’ She had smiled. ‘You see, I am magical.’

  She could even prove it to him, she said. If he came to a private place, she would show him.

  ‘You can fire your pistol through my heart,’ she promised, ‘and it will not even hurt me. Come, let me prove it.’

  And that was what the simple fellow had done.

  Even now, he could not fully understand that his faith in his destiny had been shattered. Still, he shook his head.

  ‘There must be a mistake. Perhaps she only fainted.’

  Nor, it seemed, did any of the Cossacks except Andrei understand that, to the girl, death was better than to be sullied by Christian hands, even when those hands were kindly.

  A little later he went to see to her burial.

  Andrei wondered whether to bring her brother there, but decided it was better not. Feeling that the little fellow should at least have something to remember her by, he searched her and was surprised to discover, on a little chain around her neck, a small, ancient metal disc with a three-pronged trident on it. He had no idea what this might be, but took it for the orphaned boy all the same.

  So it was that the girl was buried in an unmarked grave, by the edge of the steppe. That her journey with Stepan to the lands beyond the Don would have taken her to the homeland of her ancient Khazar ancestors, she had not remotely guessed.

  As for Stepan, he gave his puzzled judgement later that morning: ‘It was that wildcat we saw. It must have looked at me. That’s what did it.’

  At noon the party departed, to seek out news of the magnate Vyshnevetsky and his army.

  The massacre of the Ukrainian Jews in the year 1648 followed a pattern very similar to the events at Russka. Indeed, written records survive of incidents just as strange as Stepan’s courtship.

  How many Jews were actually killed is a matter of dispute which is unlikely ever to be resolved, but it is certainly true that the death toll ran into tens of thousands and that, for the rest of its history, this year marked the start of the systematic pogroms which have been a recurring feature of that region.

  As for the magnate Vyshnevetsky, he gathered by early June a force of some six thousand men from his own vast estates and then crossed the Dniepr to its western side. Under his direction this force burned, looted and massacred virtually every Ukrainian settlement in its path, thus ensuring once and for all that the Ukrainians would loathe the Poles and demonstrating, with awesome stupidity, that singular genius for vengeance and incapacity for government that was the chief distinguishing trait of the seventeenth-century Polish Commonwealth.

  In July, the fighting was resumed. And in the succeeding months, Andrei achieved the rank of esaul.

  He did not forget, in the campaigns that followed, to look out for Stanislaus and Anna.

  1649

  It was a day he would always remember in later years: for, in a sense, it marked the end of the bright days of his youth.

  At first it had seemed that things were going well. The uprising had been universal. By the end of 1648 half the population of the Ukraine were calling themselves Cossacks. Bogdan and his men had won more crushing victories over the Poles, captured another hundred guns with a baggage train containing a hundred million Polish zloty and the victorious Cossacks had entered Kiev to be greeted by the free townsmen and the Metropolitan himself as the saviours of the ancient lands of Rus.

  A new Polish King had made a truce; treaties of friendship been signed with the Turkish Sultan and his east European vassals, and for a time it even looked as if the dream of a free Cossack state might come true.

  Yet, despite these triumphs, Andrei could see that his friend was not happy.

  After that terrible day at Russka, Stepan had never spoken of the girl again, but Andrei sensed that something important had changed within his friend. Stepan’s faith in himself, his simple-minded belief in his destiny, had been broken.

  And though he continued to fight alongside his brother Cossacks, it was clear as the months went by that Stepan was losing faith in this cause as well. It was this disappointment on his part that caused the two friends, however sadly, to drift apart.

  For the cause of a democratic Cossack state in the Ukraine was lost, even before it started.

  There were two reason
s. That very first season, when Poland was at its lowest ebb, Bogdan had been unable to take advantage of his victories. And as Andrei watched the peasants drift back to their farms, he could see why.

  ‘We aren’t strong enough to mount a long campaign without allies,’ he remarked.

  True, there were the Tatars. But like most mercenaries, they were only there for profit. By the following spring, they refused to fight unless they could see the battle was going to be won, and in early summer, they started to make their own terms with the Poles.

  The role of the Cossacks in history would always be the same: they could make or break another state, but there were never enough of them to form a viable state of their own.

  They needed a protector – either Poland, the Crimean Khan, the Sultan of Turkey, or the Tsar of Russia. They could only fight for the best terms possible. But what were those terms to be?

  In the summer of 1649 the Cossacks reached an agreement with the Polish Commonwealth. The terms, by Polish standards, were remarkable.

  In effect, at that point, Bogdan and the Cossacks were promised a state within a state. No less than forty thousand of them were to be fully registered. Ancient Kiev and two other cities were to be the headquarters of Cossack regiments: Jesuits and Jews would be forbidden to live there.

  ‘It was worth the fight,’ Andrei had said joyfully to Stepan, but the other had only shaken his head sadly.

  ‘No. We have sacrificed everything – for nothing.’ And when Andrei had looked genuinely surprised Stepan had reminded him: ‘No free state. No equality. Privileges for rich Cossacks, nothing for the poor ones and the peasants.’

  It was true of course. Andrei could not deny it. For men like Bogdan – for Andrei and his father too – the terms were excellent. But those poor peasants, inspired by Bogdan’s promises of freedom, who had risen with their makeshift weapons and suffered the magnates’ revenge – for them there was nothing at all.

  When challenged about it, what had Bogdan and his council replied?

  ‘Let the Cossack be a Cossack, and the peasant a peasant.’

  This simple statement, which would long be remembered, had served as the epitaph for a free Ukraine. It left many of the participants disgusted.

  ‘That is not what I came to fight for,’ Stepan said grimly.

  ‘It’s as good as we could get,’ Andrei remarked.

  Truth to tell, it was as much as he wanted. He realized that. Why should he want a free peasantry now that he was in a position to buy an estate? But in any case, the whole idea was impossible.

  ‘You can’t have complete freedom. It’s an illusion,’ he suggested.

  The big man shook his head.

  ‘It’s no illusion, but you fear it,’ he replied sadly.

  ‘I just know it can’t work. And anyway, who would protect us from attack? Freedom leaves us defenceless. We need authority, a big power. Don’t you see that?’

  ‘I see that treachery brings only evil,’ the big man replied.

  And now, within days, he was being proved right.

  The peasants, furious at being sold out, were beginning to rise up again; and now it was the Cossack council, not the Poles, who decreed they must be put down at once. The orders had been issued. Andrei prepared to ride.

  He knew it was the end of his friendship with Stepan: he knew it the moment he heard the order.

  Yet, even so, he was in for a small surprise.

  He found the big man already prepared to leave. Though he greeted his friend gruffly, Andrei guessed that Stepan must have been waiting for him before departing. His horse was saddled; some modest possessions were strapped to a pack-horse. Andrei saw a spare horse standing nearby.

  ‘You’ve heard the order, then?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘You’re going?’

  ‘Of course. I want no part of it.’

  Andrei sighed. He didn’t try to dissuade him.

  ‘So you’re going back to the Don?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Andrei looked around, a little puzzled.

  ‘Where are your Polish horses? Where’s all your loot?’

  ‘I gave them away.’

  ‘Gave them away? To whom?’

  ‘To some peasants. They needed money more than me.’

  It was a stunning rebuke, but Andrei did not try to justify himself, nor did he feel insulted. Stepan thought one way; he thought another.

  ‘But haven’t you kept anything for yourself? What about your farm back on the Don?’

  ‘Perhaps I won’t go back to the Don.’

  ‘Men are free there, my Ox, even if they aren’t in the Ukraine. That’s where you belong.’

  For a moment or two, the Ox did not reply. It seemed there was something on his mind, something he had been brooding about for some time. He shook his head slowly.

  ‘Men,’ he muttered at last, ‘are never free. Not when they are ruled by their own desires.’

  Andrei looked at his friend. There was a kind of finality in this statement which suggested that, whatever path it was that Stepan had been travelling in his thoughts, he had come to the very end of it and had, so to speak, returned before setting off again.

  ‘Don’t you have faith in men any more, my Ox?’ Andrei asked affectionately.

  The fact that Stepan did not reply at once told Andrei that his faith in the affairs of men had been destroyed.

  ‘We are all sinners,’ he grunted with a frown.

  ‘Where will you go, then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then you still have faith of some kind.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Stepan glanced down at his feet. ‘One day I may become a priest,’ he said gloomily.

  ‘A priest?’

  ‘Or a monk. But not yet. I am unworthy.’

  Andrei scarcely knew what to make of this.

  ‘Will I ever see you again, old Ox?’ he asked.

  ‘Perhaps.’ He wiped a fly off his long brown beard. ‘Perhaps not.’ He glanced at his horse. ‘I must be off.’

  Andrei embraced him.

  ‘Goodbye, my Ox. God be with you,’ he said.

  He did not expect to see him again.

  1653

  And now, on a sharp, cold morning, in the spring of 1653, young Andrei was riding northwards with the Cossack envoys.

  They were going to see the Tsar.

  His own career, since the departure of Stepan, had gone from strength to strength. He had increasingly come to Bogdan’s personal notice, and the Hetman, with his long, crafty face, had often given him sensitive missions.

  Old Ostap had died – not of his bad heart, as Andrei and his mother had always expected, but of a plague that had visited the Ukraine a little after the peasant revolt. The incident had saddened Andrei and reminded him of his own mortality.

  ‘Time you married,’ Bogdan had told him. But for some reason, though he had taken to enjoying conquests wherever he went, Andrei had not yet done so. Could it really be that he still remembered Anna? And if so, what could he possibly hope for? He did not know; and he was, besides, too busy to think about it.

  The present mission, he understood very well, was by far the most important of his life. The letters the little party was carrying from the Hetman were designed to do nothing less, this time, than save the Ukraine.

  For events had been moving towards a crisis.

  Poland had not been content with even a partial Cossack state. Neither the Catholic Church nor the Uniates could tolerate the success of Orthodoxy in the Kievan lands; the magnates wanted their lands back; the Szlachta nobility and every taxpaying Pole was indignant at the huge increase in the Cossack register and the large number of Cossacks who therefore might suppose the Commonwealth should pay them salaries. Soon there was more fighting. The Poles added large numbers of German mercenaries to their forces and Bogdan was not always successful. Gradually his hold was weakened. Jews
began to return to the Ukrainian lands. And twice, now, large parties of Cossacks and peasants had crossed the border into Russia and been given asylum.

  What should the Cossack Hetman do?

  He’s still a crafty fox, Andrei had often reminded himself, with admiration.

  Indeed he was. At any one time he might be negotiating with the Sultan, the Tatars, the Tsar and the Poles all at once; he even tried to get the throne of the little state of Moldavia, down in the south by the River Danube, for his son. But above all, it was becoming clearer each year that the only hope for the Cossacks lay to the north and east, with Russia. Only the Tsar would respect the Orthodox religion; only he could protect the Ukraine from mighty Poland.

  The problem was that Russia was unwilling. The great empire of the north had troubles of her own; she had no wish to risk a costly war with a furious Poland if she accepted the Ukraine. Bogdan had sent messengers, threatened to give the Ukraine to the Turkish Sultan, even harboured a strange adventurer who claimed the Russian throne – anything to get the Tsar’s attention.

  Now, this spring, the Poles had sent another large force to reduce the Ukraine and yet again, the Hetman was appealing to Moscow. But this time, things might be different.

  ‘So far we’ve had nothing but offers of cheap bread and salt,’ the Hetman told Andrei, as he handed him the letters. ‘But there may still be one way to sway them.’

  Andrei nodded.

  ‘The Church?’

  ‘Exactly.’ The Hetman leaned back in his chair and half-closed his eyes. ‘Holy Russia. That’s how they like to think of Muscovy now. Moscow, the third Rome. Remember, the old Moscow Metropolitan became a Patriarch after Ivan the Terrible’s reign – just like Constantinople or Jerusalem. That’s very important to them. There are powerful men in the Church and amongst the boyars, who think they should protect their Orthodox brothers in the Ukraine. What’s more, they’re getting stronger.’

  He opened his eyes again and grinned. ‘Shall I tell you something else? Our Ukrainian priests are better trained than the Russian ones. I’m told that the new Patriarch wants to import more of them to civilize his own priests. Let them pay the price, then – don’t you think?’ He closed his eyes again. ‘I’ve told him I’m ready to give the Ukraine to the Sultan. Of course, I know our people wouldn’t like it because the Turks are Moslems, but the Orthodox Russians will like it even less.’