AN OLD RUSSIAN PRETENDS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3339, 13 March 1918, Page 52

AN OLD RUSSIAN PRETENDS.

By Jessie Mackay.

The lurid phantasmagoria of the Russian Revolution tills the world with dreadful rumour to-day. Hour by hour that rumour changes with the suddenness and irrelevance 'Sf a nightmare. Now the canvas is filled by one dream-figure, now by another. Yesterday’s ccnqtieror on the banks of the Neva is reported dead at Moscow’s gates to-day, and to-morrow he will be as confidently reported risen again in the Ukraine. Now this phantom conqueror is in treaty with the enemy; now he is called Czarist, now, Kerensky’s man, and yet again he is said to be bound to Lenin and the red Juggernaut of the ultraSocialists. One thing only seems clear: Whoever is master or whoever is ally, the soil of Russia is still drenched with the blood of her own people. And this is as it has been all the dreary centuries since Rurik led his Northmen eastward to Muscovy in the end of the Yiking days. Glancing over the issue of “ All the Year Round,” bearing the date 1880, one comes upon an anonymous article on an arch-Nihilist of a century previous, Pougatcheff, the Don Cossack. It is curious, by the way, to note how tUe one good old word, “Nihilist,” has been dissipated into the confused particles—Maximalist, Minimalist, Anarchist, Leninist, Red Guard, and what not —that crowd the cable columns of to-day. But “ Nihilist ” was good enough for all rebels 40 years ago, and thus it is that Emelian Pougatcheff is here described, although he gave himself out not to be a leader „of Nihilism, Nothingism, or but a Russian prince of the blood, come to be a s kind of David to the disaffected persons then, as now, the majority in that unhappy land. His Cave of Adullam was the wide plains of the-Ukraine, that Debatable Land between the Cross and the Crescent, Turkey and the true Russia, which rests upon the deltas of the four great rivers—Dnieper, Don, Volga, and Ural. This is the home of the Cossacks, that curious feudal division of the Czar’s subjects, whose privileges and duties are so hard to grasp by the Western mind and the Western polity. Were they a special people, an offshoot of the ancient Scythians, as the Rumanians profess to be an offshoot of the old Danubian Roman population? Or were they simply a conglomerate of disaffection from all the lands round about, the children of runaways who made their way down the great rivers past the outposts of Muscovite law proper? That is the view taken by Pougatcheff’s biographer in the article under review. Not for nothing did the Cossacks earn that name which spurred .Eastern Prussia dn the early days of the present war to fight as against the very demons of the under-world. The more or less settled organisations of the Ukraine . today have not blotted out the memory of raids in which Cossack horsemen figured as Attila’s Huns did. “ RaVens bury the Cossacks; we will not,” declared the Eastern Germans in 1914. Nor were these wild pirates of the river-mouths and raiders of the Russian steppes any -more tolerant of their German neighbours than these were tolerant of them. In addition to the general detestation of boyar rule, as piece by piece these Russian nobles brought the Cossack country under the sceptre of the Czars, there was that ever potent factor of division, the religious question. Most of these stark pirates and “land loupers” professed the older Greek faith as opposed to the orthodox Greek Church of Russia, and the rest belonged to the peculiar forms of militant dissent which coloured the history of seventeenthcentury Europe to such an extent. The Anabaptists who had filled even staid Holland with their lurid fanaticism earlier had not modified their wild creed nor abated the crassness of their credulity and ignorance in the remote bounds of the Ukraine in the days of the English Georges. To these men, afire with the search 'for their own ideal city of righteousness, Peter the Great and all the Romanoffs who came after him were Antichrists—in truth, we can hardly blame them for thinking so! Pietiturk, their rude rendering of St. Petersburg, was a name of sin to the Cossacks two centuries before it became an offence to Russia, stabbed in the back by German ambition. It was a narrow world that the Cossack inhabited. Tartary closed it on the east. On the Ayest, beyond the three ancient cities—Moscow, Kieff, and Jerusalem,—yawned the gates of hell opened for his country by the great and forever accursed Peter, who built the home of Antichrist on earth, surrounded by evil angels. The German heathens _ dwelt beyond this, and beyond them was the world’s end. The Antichrist was known to speak no Russian, but German. Therefore, when the much-be-German-ised Government of the German Empress of Russia, Catherine 11, sent officials of that nationality to put down risings among the Don Cossacks in 1771, they left anything but order and goodwill behind them. Among the fugitive rebels who escaped over the Polish - border was Emelian Pougatcheff, a soldier-visionary of the Anabaptists, who had no mind to leave his native land under the tyranny of the boyars and their German minions. By means of forged pasisports he returned two years later, and went to the as yet almost independent Cossacks of the Ural, and stirred them up to rise against the Moscow Government. He was captured and taken to Kazan, the chief town of Eastern Russia, but. made a sensational escape before he could be sent to a living grave in Siberia. He was soon at the head of a troop, and reduced one fort after another till the Ural was almost clear of rule. It was during these early successes of his flying band of Eastern Cossacks that Pougatcheff thought out that wild tale of imposture which carried his name to the utmost bounds of Muscovite empire. He gave out that he was Peter 111, the wretched young degenerate from whom his able and unscrupulous German bride had snatched the reins of power in 1762.

After a short and miserably unhappy 'Union, Catherine signally avenged her own wrongs, and saved Russia from a madman's rule by ordering his assassination. But credulity found a fertile field amid the Cossacks, who, much as they hated Moscow and the Czardom, were marvellously elated at the thought of having *a resurrected Czar .for their champion and hero, and willingly drank in the archrebel's tale of a rescue and a retreat in" Constantinople, preparing for his divine mission of liberating the Cossacks and the serfs from Russian tyranny. His army grew like a snowball; but he found that a conqueror abroad can be a slave at home. He fell under the domination of a hopeful trio of scoundrels, his chief lieutenants. O.ne was a farmer, one a corporal, and one a runaway convict, who veiled his prison mutilations as the Prophet Mokanna veiled his hideous countenance, under the magnificent trappings of a Russian count. These three headed the orgies that followed the loot of the Government stores of strong drink; and, while they gave Pougatcheff the outer honours of royalty, they ruled him with a rod of iron in private, even putting his beloved wife to death because they were jealous of her gentler counsels. Minor successes in the Ural emboldened them to besiege the strong town of Orenburg, which, however, made a successful resistance, and Catherine's ablest general was fortunate enough to scatter the rebels and capture two of the three lowborn dictators. But Pougatcheff was now past the puppet stage, and with marvellous energy created another army of Cossacks and serfs. A fearful chase up and down the Ukraine ended in the capture of Kazan by the rebels—Kazan, that halfTartar city, the ancient capital of the » Golden Horde, when they poured down out of Turkestan on the hapless plains of Russia. The sack of Kazan was one of those Mongolian nightmares of history that marked the trail of Attila, Jeughis Khan, Timorere, and other yellow Napoleons of the savage past. A short-lived triumph was this, soon, however! to change into a real success, When he dared at last to cross the Volga into Russia proper, and call the serfs of Muscovy to his banner. "Are you for Peter or for Catherine?" was the rebels' question to all they met on the road; and the noble or official who dared to stand for the Empress found a short shrift at the stake. All Russia as far as Nijni-Novgorod was under a reign of terror. Moscow itself feared it would fall like Kazan. But Genera] Michelsohn at last turned the blood-stained banner of the Cossacks. The -final battle was fought near Astrakhan, and the. defeated rebel • fled towards the Ural. But his mana had departed ; he was at last betrayed by his own followers, nut in a cage, and carried to Moscow, with an army to guard him. Slowly the procession moved through the country that all might see the arch-impostor who had called himself the Czar. He thus ran the gauntlet to Moscow, where for two months more he was shown like a caged wild beast, till at last he was put to death. He had been the death of at least 10.000 nobles and officials during the four years he had been ' the terror of-; Eastern Russia, and ho died in 1775. It says something for Catherine's clemency, that he was not tortured, and that of his followers only five mffered the death penalty; but Pouaratrheff's head and limbs were nailed to the gates of Moscow for many a day afterwards, a grim reminder to and rebels. The lifting" of this veil from a longforgotten picture of Russia's stormv T>n.?t helps-us to understand how lurhtly the ties between the Ukraine and Northern Russia can be broken to-day: but it does not indicate that there is anv racial affinity or inherent .kindliness between the Cossacks and' the Germans, although they have sheathed the sword at a time most inopportune for us.