The Russians Collection

by Michael Phillips

  When the reach of the tsar’s hand began to encroach upon the self-governing Cossacks in the 17th and 18th centuries, rather than attempt to subdue them by force—a notion unlikely even for “the tsar of all the Russias”—the Caesars of Moscow chose instead to offer a compromise. In exchange for military service in his army, the Cossacks would be allowed to retain a good deal of their independence and would face taxes less stringent than the crippling tributes exacted from the rest of the serfs and peasants throughout the land.

  The Cossacks could not have been a more amiable breed for such an arrangement. They had already proven well enough that they made good fighters. And for the next two centuries their reputation as the best horsemen in the land served their tsars well. In numerous wars and skirmishes, cavalry forces of largely Cossack origin played determining and pivotal roles.

  If the Cossacks were feared by many of these, so too were they despised and looked down upon by those considering themselves their social superiors. In their turn, Cossacks looked down upon those below them in Russia’s widely divergent social scale. Religion, too, played a key role in the fomenting of hatreds and prejudices, and the Russian Jew came in for more than his due share of persecution, as have those of God’s scattered chosen people in all lands and throughout all time.

  Military service, whatever its hardships and disciplines, did nothing to tame this passionate and sometimes savage horse-riding mixture of Slav, Scandinavian, and Mongol. The allegiance of the Cossack was to none but himself. They were not always well-treated for their service, and they were willing enough to join rebellions whose causes suited them. As the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, with all its political foment of revolution and independence, this fearsome breed would prove as unmanageable to Russia’s tsars as it had once been useful.

  Indeed, new ideas and independent thinking were on the winds sweeping across Europe in the nineteenth century. Russia was far from a homogeneous collection of a single race. Those who made up this great diversity, though they would slumber for yet a while longer, would one day begin to awaken to their ethnic and historical desire for autonomy. The inhabitants of Russia’s vast borders came from a diversity of blood, history, culture, and language, the mixing of which provided a constant tinderbox of strife and prejudice. Every ethnic group within this vast array stretching over eight thousand miles hated and was hated by some other different people. “Russians” they may have been to the rest of the world. But within those expansive borders, the people themselves remained staunchly Lithuanians, Bulgars, Rumanians, Latvians, Cossacks, Estonians, Ukranians, Modavians, Kazakhs, Yakuts, and numerous others of large and small geographical and historical significance.

  However, during the early years of the nineteenth century, these internal differences remained mostly silent, awaiting the future to express themselves. During the years when Napoleon was conquering Europe and revolution was abroad in the land, Russia remained uniformly united behind mingled territorial and religious objectives. Though Byzantium was by now dead, the “second Rome” had refused altogether to die, and had in fact continued to thrive under the Turks. Catherine’s predecessors had always hungered not merely to don the religious mantle of Constantinople’s heritage, but to possess its land and buildings and riches and vital seaport as well. Religious motives may have been one thing, but they hardly interested Catherine the Great. She set out to seize the region once and for all, making no spiritual pretense of her aim. And she was successful in achieving a portion of that long-coveted goal, by taking the Crimea and most of the northern shore of the Black Sea.

  But Constantinople was not so weak that Catherine could stretch her conquests quite that far. Nor would the rest of Europe have allowed that ancient and strategic city and the Turkish straits to come under Russian dominion. Russian thirst for dominance in the region thus went unsatisfied despite Catherine’s acquisitions, and from that time on into the mid-1800’s a long series of flimsy treaties temporarily kept the unpredictable Russian bear at bay.

  Russia continued to feel it possessed a historic and religious claim to the entire region, including Constantinople itself. Yet the stronger the bear from the East became, the more determined grew the rest of Europe to keep it from taking hold of that claim. The region of the Black Sea, Constantinople, the Turkish Straits, and the Dardanelles, therefore, became a tinderbox for East-West conflict among the military powers of Europe. What Catherine had begun had become a festering sore which would lead to the Crimean War in 1853, as well as future conflicts, gradually involving more and more of the nations of the world in a constant flux of self-serving alliances.

  Eventually, the conflict would contribute to sending a world into war with itself, and cause unrest, leading to the eruption of cataclysmic revolution in Russia, changing the direction of the earth’s history forever.

  7

  1768

  By horse he came, from out of the east.

  Hair streaming behind him, teeth bared against the elements, he lashed the mighty steed beneath him, whose mouth was already frothing and whose flaming nostrils indicated that exhaustion had set in long ago. Onward through wood, across stream, and over frozen plain he mercilessly drove the beast. Horse and rider both wore black—the one the shining coat God had given him, the other coarse trousers and a traveling cloak, hardly sufficient protection against this unseasonably early November’s freeze. But haste had impelled him, not warmth, and he would ride too hard for the frost to alight.

  Truly the two made a fearsome spectacle as they came. The horse chewed up the hardened earth in great chunks that flew out behind his hooves, his master bent low over his mane, face into the wind, cloak flapping about his hunched shoulders like the frantic wings of a great black crow. The fierce glow of determination in his eyes would seem to confirm that this was no ordinary man. And in truth the blood coursing through his veins was that of no domesticated breed. For in his breast beat the heart of a Cossack.

  But despite their reputation, fears and prejudices against them, and the savagery said to beat in their hearts of stone, the glow from out of the face of this particular rider was from a different source. As hatred seems universal in the human economy, so too is hunger after truth. And even in the most unlikely places, where oppression, prejudice, and unbelief reign rampant, truth still penetrates to those hungry souls, be they ever so few, whose inner faces are turned toward the light. Such too is one of the unseen threads weaving its way throughout the entirety of Russian history, doing its quiet work, accomplishing its heavenly purposes in the midst of cruelty, starvation, and tyranny. And from out of one such oasis of light now rode the black-clad horseman of the north, his eyes flaming not with the ruthlessness of his kind, but with the passion of the inner light of his soul. Fear there was in his eyes too. But not fear of what men could do to him, rather fear for those whom the light of love had made his comrades in the spirit. The brotherhood of God pulsed in his heart; the cruelty of man’s hatred of man pursued his steps behind him.

  In the mid 1700’s, between the reigns of Peter and Catherine, Polish Jews of western Russia came under savage attack by bands of Cossacks and Russian Orthodox peasants, who swept westward and ravaged many villages and towns, massacring thousands. In 1768, a renewed fire of hatred sprang up, and Cossack raiders set out in droves to exterminate Catholic Poles and Jews as “the desecrators of the holy religion of Russia.” Learning of one such massacre planned in the region of Riga in northwest Russia, a young Cossack man of God—whose trust did not lie in either “religion” or in the Orthodox Church, but in the God of Israel who sent His Son, a Jew, to redeem the world—rose while it was yet night, dressed hurriedly, not even taking provisions for himself, and set out on his race ahead of his pillaging fellows. He had been riding now for several hours, with only brief respites to give his worthy friend water in streams along their way. Too many lives depended on him reaching Riga before the hordes behind him. In Uman they had already slaughtered twenty thousand. He only pray
ed that he could stop the same from happening here. But his horse was tiring, the way was yet far, and the earth was hard on the poor creature’s strong but thin legs.

  The old woman was out early along the bank of the Velikaja, but not to tend the small garden beside her cottage. The frozen ground would yield nothing more now until spring. She was on her way across the now desolate fields with a small jug of milk for a dying man whose cottage lay two versts from her own. She made the trek each morning, taking him what she could coax from their one thin cow, and to build him a fire which he could tend himself through the day. She regretted having to take the milk from the table of her own husband and two daughters. But they were all healthy and would survive without it. And had not the Lord himself commanded them not to worry about their own provision?

  She heard the distant hoofbeats about halfway through her morning’s journey. The quiet rhythm came to her ear slowly, but within moments the distant image approached with what seemed fearsome speed, and the pounding of the horse’s gallop quickly changed to a thunderous echo in the still morning air.

  The woman halted her step, then shrank back a moment in fear. The beast seemed to be making straight for her. For an instant she hesitated, wondering whether to turn and run back to the stile by which she had just crossed the high fence. But as she beheld them, she then realized that neither horse nor its wild rider was even conscious of her presence. They flew by her at a distance of thirty paces. The creature seemed to falter momentarily as he approached the fence, but at the last moment lifted his heavy forelegs into the air.

  Over the fence sailed both front hooves, carrying its burden. But its hind legs were weary, and the poor beast could not pull his last hoof up high enough under him. It caught the topmost board, shattering the fence, sending rider headlong out of his saddle. The enormous creature crashed to the frozen earth with a shrieking whinny of pain, both forelegs crushed and broken under the weight of his twisted frame.

  In numbed shock the woman beheld the catastrophe, then ran to the stile, climbed to the other side, and hastened to the scene of the accident. Huge puffs of white breath were coming form the horse’s nostrils, while his massive frame heaved great dying gasps. There was nothing she could do for him, magnificent animal though she knew him to be.

  She ran on to where the man lay fallen and still, a few feet further on. She reached him, stooped down, and anxiously scanned his face. He was breathing but unconscious. She knew she could do nothing for him alone. She turned and ran back to her own cottage, not even noticing the pail of milk as she overturned it with her foot. Her husband was just strapping on his boots to be off for the village. She burst in, roused the two girls, breathlessly explained to her husband, and within three minutes all four were rushing back out across the field, the two sturdy young women pulling the small rickety cart whose patching and mending their father had given more lives than their cat. Whether it would be able to carry the man they didn’t know, but it was the only way there was hope to get him safely inside.

  The old peasant man stopped briefly to kneel down beside the beautiful horse. Exhaustion and pain together had made his death struggle a brief one. He was glad the suffering had been short and that he had not been himself compelled to complete the task the boards of the fence had begun. He jumped back to his feet and rejoined his women where they all now knelt beside the battered frame of the man.

  One look at his attire and his face told them he was a Cossack. The man and his wife were not Jews, neither were they Poles, yet still their hearts smote them with fear. They had heard gruesome tales, and it was hard not to believe them. With a quiet foreboding each of the four glanced at the others. What awful errand might such a one be about!

  Yet each of the four, if they could not help the fear, possessed something deeper in their hearts—the word of the Savior from Galilee. They were of a scarce lineage in that place at that time, whose heritage came from no Slavic or Mongol blood, but from the ancient line of Abraham. Jews indeed they were, of the spirit, as are all who believe in the Messiah of men, and their hearts remembered His words, even as they silently, with one accord, began to lift the unconscious man into the flimsy wooden cart. Then, as their daughters raced back to the cottage to prepare a bed of blankets on the floor, add to the fire, and boil fresh water for tea, man and wife pulled their burden with difficulty across the lumpy and uneven sod.

  How or when and through whom the ancestors of this poor Russian mother and father had been grafted into the messianic bloodline of antiquity, it would be hard to say. Their fathers had believed before them, as their fathers before them. And in the miracle of the generations, bolstered and given much power by prayer, had the Word been passed down—father to son, mother to daughter—and would be passed down to their descendants after them. Unlike their neighbors, their religion was nowhere to be found in the forms and traditions and icons of Orthodoxy, neither in the church of the nearby village nor the cathedral in the city where their fellow peasants scratched about for what morsels of spiritual sustenance they could glean. The light that shown upon their faces was the light of the Son of Man, the light that was come into the world for just such as they. And as they now pulled their carriage along, they could not have known that when the man behind them opened his eyes, the life of that same light would shine out of them.

  It was half a day later before those eyes did open. His exhaustion took the fall as fit opportunity to remedy itself, and sleep possessed his body before the blow to his head had begun to wear off. He looked around in bewilderment, tried to speak but could not, tried to rise but felt only pain, took three or four sips of the warm milk offered him by unknown hand, and was in an instant sound asleep again. When he next woke it was night.

  Again the eyes of the sojourner opened, wider this time. He glanced about, as much as he was able, taking in what he could of his surroundings in what appeared to be a humble peasant cottage. Again he rose, enough to turn his head briefly. But his arm was broken, below the shoulder, and, though it had been splinted with wood and rags as he slept, yet the pain was excruciating and he fell back with a quiet thud. The sound brought one of the girls to his side.

  “Where am I?” he whispered. It was his own voice, but he hardly recognized the sound.

  “You are safe,” she answered, “and among friends.”

  The face which stooped over him wore a kind smile, and love beamed out of the two eyes. But the young women of twenty or twenty five was dressed in little more than rags. Behind her, an older woman was busy at the oven, with a stone jar in one hand, which now she set down and approached as he stared at her. The dark air was permeated through with smoke, suffocating for the horseman used to the wide spaces and chilly air of openness.

  “I . . . I must go. . . .” said the man, again attempting to rise, this time on the opposite elbow.

  “You must eat and then sleep the night,” said the older woman, who was now at his side. “You have been hurt and need rest.”

  “But there is danger . . . I must—”

  “The danger will be to you if you go now,” insisted the woman, laying a gentle hand upon him. “It is night and you could not get far even were we to allow you to go.”

  He lay back down with a sigh.

  “But who are you?” he asked again after a moment.

  “As my daughter told you, we are your friends. You have been sent to us in your time of need. We have prayed for your recovery and your safety. You will return to health and resume your journey, but first you need rest.”

  “Prayed?”

  “We are servants of the Lord.”

  “Then surely you will understand the urgency and why I must go. There are others of my kind behind me, evil men. They are carrying a golden charter from Tsaritsa Catherine authorizing massive killings of Poles and Jews. It is all false, a forgery. I was riding to Riga to warn them. I must get word to them, or disaster will strike!” Though he still lay on his back, the flash in the young man’s eyes had returned, and
they could feel the intensity of his words. He was quiet a minute, gaining back his breath, then he added softly, “Where is my horse?”

  “Your horse has been taken care of, my friend,” spoke a man’s voice from the other side of the cottage. The old peasant thought it best to let the distraught man sleep the night in peace. There would be time enough in the morning to tell him that he and his neighbors had already buried the poor beast. “Now, let my wife and daughters give you some bread and warm milk from our cow. And then you sleep. We will discuss everything when light comes.”

  “Lord God . . . protect them,” mumbled the man as he closed his eyes. He then seemed to relax with the inevitability of his circumstance.

  At the words of prayer from the desperate man, the old peasant and his wife glanced at one another with incredulous expressions of silent question. Could this wild-looking man, this apparent Cossack, in truth be one of them, no enemy to God’s people at all, but one who counted himself among their number, a modern-day Saul of Tarsus transformed into an itinerant Paul going ahead of the persecutors?

  Their prayers for him that night, after he had taken food and drink and again slept, were prayers of expectant and enthusiastic faith.

  The Cossack rider and man of God remained in the humble peasant cottage three weeks. His injuries were worse than they had first realized, and it took his host some time to locate a suitable horse by which he could continue his travels. The very night of his arrival they had sent word of his warning from cottage to cottage, then village to village, until word of the impending treachery reached Riga late the following afternoon. Certain officials were notified of the evil document, and the massacre was averted.