Imatges de pàgina
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by Peter II., but the virtual authority still remained in the hands of the Russian governors; and the Ataman, though he marched at the head of his people in war, was allowed the exercise of but few of his former prerogatives. The remaining immunities of the Ukraine was silently and gradually undermined; but the administration was generally mild and equitable; and the Cossacks, to whom the remembrance of their past liberties was now but a phantom of bygone days, learned by degrees to acquiesce in a sway which it was hopeless to resist. The Supreme Court at Gloukhoff, which had been abolished by Peter II., was re-established in the last year of Anne, under the new title of "College of Regency of the Ukraine," and invested with the functions not only of judicature, but of government, its decisions being subject only to the senate at Petersburg. And when, in the succeeding reign of Elizabeth, the dignity of Ataman was virtually abolished by being conferred as a post of emolument on Kyrillus Razumofski, the brother of the Empress's favourite, without even the form of an election, the Cossacks saw this last vestige of their independence vanish, without any attempt at resistance or remon. strance. They still, however, conti nued to serve under their own officers only in the Russian armies; and a division of 12,000, which joined the army of Marshal Apraxin in the Seven Years' War, made their name terribly known throughout Germany by the devastations which they committed in Prussia, where the royal poet Frederic has commemorated their descent on the country

"Comme un vaste et sombre nuage Renferme en ses flancs tenebreux

La grêle, la flamme, et l'orage-" But these barbarities were severely avenged; for during the whole war the Cossacks were treated by the German troops as savage marauders, and never admitted to quarter; and at the defeat of Zorndorf, nearly their whole number fell under the sabres of the Prussian hussars.

Soon after the accession of Catharine II., Razumofski was deprived of the titular dignity of Ataman, the revenues annexed to which amounted to 100,000

The

rubles annually; the empress herself
for some time assumed the title, till it
was merged in that of Ataman-General
of all the Cossacks, which she conferred
on her favourite Potemkin.
slender remains of the Cossack privi-
leges in the Ukraine, were now des-
tined speedily to disappear. On the
promulgation of the project for a new
general code in 1767, all their internal
jurisdictions were summarily abolished
by an imperial edict, and included
under the new regulations of the em-
pire. A capitation and hearth tax was
levied; and the deputies who appeared
at St Petersburg to exclaim against
these arbitrary measures, were thrown
into prison, and are supposed to have
died in confinement. A few years
later, the annihilation of this branch
of the Cossacks as a separate commu-
nity, was completed by a decree which
declared the peasants attached to the
soil, and enabled the Russian nobles
to possess estates in the Ukraine: even
the distinction of territory was oblite-
rated in 1776 by the new general di-
vision of Russia into viceroyalties.
Six thousand migrated into Poland
during these changes; but the re-
mainder submitted in silence, and be-
came, as Heber describes them at the
commencement of the present century,

66

in all respects bona a fide Russians, but still preserving their language and dress, and very proud of their Cossack descent."

But the indomitable Zaporofskis were not so easily reduced to obedience: and their smouldering discontent, which various causes had contributed to excite, burst into a flame at the attempt to coerce their savage freedom within the bounds of legislative enactments. By the treaty of Belgrade, it had been stipulated that the extensive plains between the Dniepr and the Seimka should be left desert and abandoned, as a boundary between the two empires: but this neutral ground was speedily encroached upon by the Russians, who aimed at extending to the western frontier of the Khan's dominions, by the occupation of this fertile delta, the line of circumvallation which the possession of Azoph had at length rendered complete on the east. The reclamations of the Tartars produced no ef

*Lesur.

fect: and the supine court of Constantinople, buried in a thirty years' peace, (unexampled for duration in the Ottoman annals,) saw with indifference the communication with its vassal kingdom gradually intercepted: towns, villages, and military posts, rapidly sprung up; while settlers were invited from Germany, Switzerland, and even Scotland, to aid in the colonization of the rising province of New Servia, as this hitherto nameless district began to be called. In the efforts made by the Tartars to check the progress of the new colony, they received zealous assistance from the Zaporofskis, who claimed the territory as pasture-land for their herds, and were unwilling, like the red Indians of North America, to have their fortresses approached too nearly by the haunts of civilisation. The settlers, harassed by the inroads of their wild neighbours, at length applied to Petersburg for protection: and some regiments of cavalry were located as military colonies in the most exposed quarters, where an irregular warfare was carried on to such an extent, that the Zaporofskis were on the point of being denounced as open rebels, when the promulgation of the new code brought their disaffection to a climax. They unanimously refused compliance: and when, in the following year (1768,) war at length broke out between Russia and the Porte, they not only withheld their appointed contingent, but many deserted to the Turks on their advance towards New Servia, in order to wreak their vengeance on those whom they considered as the usurpers of their soil. The Tartar Khan, KrimKherai, who was appointed generalissimo of the Ottoman forces, by a daring and unexpected manœuvre crossed the Dniestr on the ice in the depth of winter: and the wretched inhabitants of New Servia were exposed without defence to a torrent of desolation, which (if credit is to be

given to the narrative of De Tott) rivalled in merciless atrocity the deeds of the early followers of Zingis. But the death of Krim-Kherai, who was poisoned through the jealousy of the Grand-Vizir, speedily changed the fortune of the war: and when its triumphant conclusion, by the peace of Kutchuk-Kainardji in 1774, left the Russians at liberty to regulate the affairs of their own frontier, the contumacy and rebellion of the Zaporofskis were not long in meeting with due punishment. The setsha was surrounded by a cordon of troops, and its inhabitants, excepting a portion who escaped into Tartary, made prisoners: a few only were allowed to retain their lands on condition of submitting to the new ordinances, but the majority were either draughted into Russian regiments, or exiled to distant parts of the empire: the vacant lands being assigned to Russian proprietors, and colonized by peasants forcibly transplanted for the purpose, from Podolia and Volhynia: while the new town of Kherson became the emporium of Russian commerce in the Mediterranean, till superseded twenty years later by the erection of Odessa. * With their expulsion from their ancient haunts the name of the Zaporofskis ceased to exist :† but a portion of the same race, under a new appellation, have continued to the present day. These derive their origin from the refugees who fled into the Krim on the destruction of the setsha, and who earned their pardon from the Russians, in the struggle which preceded the final annexation of that country to the Muscovite empire, by turning their arms against the nation which had sheltered them. This last act of treachery was rewarded by Potemkin with an establishment on the territory between the Don and the Kuban, which the Kuban Tartars had deserted on its seizure by Russia: and there, under the title of Tcherno

* It should be remarked, that the name of this modern city is correctly New Odessa; while Varna is marked in the Russian maps by its classical name of Old Odessa;-a tolerably significant hint to its present possessors!

+ A paragraph appeared in some English papers shortly after the passage of the Pruth, by the Russians in 1828, stating that the Zaporofskis had just tendered their voluntary allegiance to the Russian empire, and that their Ataman, late a pasha of two tails, had held the helm of the barge in which Nicholas crossed the Pruth! This extraordinary blunder passed, however, uncontradicted.

‡ Three-fourths of the Tartars expatriated themselves after the treaty of Kainardji

morski or Black-Sea Cossacks, their descendants still remain, carrying on an incessant border warfare with the Circassians. They elect their Ataman, subject to the governor of Ekatarinoslaf: they are allowed free fishery in the sea of Azoph, and the still more valued privilege of making and selling brandy free from duty. Their num. bers are estimated at about 15,000 effective men; and, inconjunction with the Cossacks of the Terek (a branch of the Donski), they serve in the frontier cordon on the line between the Black and Caspian Seas.

The history of both the branches of the Cossacks on the Dneipr may now be considered at a close, one of them being reduced to insignificance, and the other melted into the general

mass

of the Russian population; but, before we recur to the changes effected in the condition of the Don-Cossacks, it is necessary briefly to advert to the famous rebellion of Pugatchef; an event which, though removed by its magnitude and importance beyond the scope of merely Cossack history, demands some notice in this place, from both the leader and his original, partisans having been of the Cossack nation. In our introductory remarks, allusion was made to the prevalence among the Cossacks of the roskolnik or schismatical tenets, and the persecution to which these sectaries had frequently been subjected by the Russian sovereigns. As early as the reign of Peter I., a large body of them had migrated into the Tartar territorities rather than shave their beards, to the preservation of which they attached peculiar importance; from their patron saint, St Ignatius, they were known among the Tartars as Inat Cossacks, under which name they are mentioned by De Tott in 1768, as forming part of Krim-Kherai's army. A similar attempt in 1771, to deprive of these cherished appendages, and subject to regular military discipline, the Cossacks of the Yaik (a wild race deriving their origin from those of the Don, and professing almost universally the roskolnik heresy), led to a sedition in their capital of Yaikskoi, in which both their own Ataman and the Russian commissioner lost their lives, in

endeavouring to restore order; but the advance of a Russian corps speedily induced the appearance of submission, and the town was retaken from the insurgents.

over

The germs of disaffection, however, remained; and when, two years later, the daring adventurer Yemedyan Pugatchef, a Don-Cossack by birth and a roskolnik by religion, made his appearance near Yaikskoi, and assumed the name of the deceased Czar Peter III., the Cossacks of the Yaik became his first, as they continued to the last his firmest, supporters and followers. The extraordinary career of this impostor, who was at one time master of the whole country between the Ural and the Volga-his repeated victories Russian generals, and his final betrayal and execution at Moscowremind the reader of the exploits of Stanko Razin, whom Pugatchef resembled also in the success with which he allured the serfs to his standard, by promising the abolition of slavery, and by the cruelties which he exercised on all the nobles who fell into his hands. But the details of the war, which cost in its progress and suppression the lives of 300,000 persons, belong rather to the general history of Russia than of the Cossacks, whom it only affected by its origin among a remote and obscure branch of their body. On the extinction of the revolt, the Cossacks of Yaik suffered severe punishment: and, in order to mark their treason by a perpetual stigma, Catharine abolished the name of Yaik by an imperial edict, and substituted that of Cossacks of the Ural, by which they have been since known.

The final abolition of the privileges of the Ukraine, must have prepared the Don-Cossacks for a similar invasion of their own rights; but their formidable and still unbroken numbers made the experiment too hazardous to be risked, at a juncture when all the forces of the empire were required for the execution of the ambitious projects of Catharine: and the capricious favour of Potemkin, who saw and appreciated their value as irregular troops, was a farther safeguard to their remaining immunities. Important

-in 1769, the peninsula alone furnished 40,000 cavalry-in 1782, only 450 houses in Kaffa were inhabited. Most of them fled to Turkey: but many to Circassia and other parts of the Caucasus.

changes were, however, made in their internal organization: their troops, which had hitherto appeare ared in the field in separate stanitzas, each headed by its own chief, were formed into re. gular regiments of the guard and the line, under officers appointed and commissioned by the crown: a fixed period of military service was rendered obliga. tory on each Cossack as the tenure of his lands and fisheries: and the authority of the Ataman was circumscribed by the establishment at Tcherkask of a Russian chancery under a procuratorgeneral, to which was transferred the control of the allotment of lands, and the revision of judicial sentences. But while the spirit of their government was thus silently undergoing a transformation, nothing was neglected which could foster and inflame their military spirit, and convert them from the turbulent allies into the zealous and obedient soldiers of Russia.Honours and rewards were liberally showered on their leaders; and Souvaroff, to whose ferocious courage and contempt for modern tactical science in war, their undisciplined bravery was peculiarly congenial, treated them with eminent distinction, and employed them as his chosen troops on all occasions of peril. In the sieges of Oczakow and Ismail, columns of dismounted Cossacks were combined with the regular battalions in the assault; but their want of discipline made them inefficient when acting in concert with the other troops: and the total destruction at Ismail of a corps of 5000 Cossacks, whom their headlong valour had carried into a situation whence it was impossible to rescue them, prevented the experiment ever being repeated. But as light cavalry in the field, or in protecting the flanks and outposts of an army, the Cossacks continued to be unrivalled; and their eminent services in this capacity, through the various campaigns of the French revolutionary wars, spread the renown of their powers throughout Europe. Their peculiar mode of fighting, though not materially differing from that of Oriental cavalry in general, has been described by Scott in language so vivid and picturesque, that we cannot refrain from quoting it in this place : - " Instead of acting in a line, a body of Cossacks about to charge disperse at the word of command, very much in the manner

of a fan suddenly flung open, and, joining in a loud yell or hourra, rush, each acting individually, upon the object of attack, whether infantry, cavalry, or artillery; to all of which they have been in this wild way of fighting formidable assailants."

..

" In covering the retreat of their own army, their velocity, activity, and courage, render pursuit by the enemy's cavalry peculiarly dangerous; and in pursuing a flying enemy their qualities are still more redoubtable. In the campaign of 1806-7, the Cossacks took the field in great numbers under their celebrated Ataman Platof, who, himself a Cossack, knew their peculiar capacity for warfare, and raised their fame to a pitch which it had not attained in former European wars."

The military history of the Cossacks may here be closed; but the political changes which were effected during this period in their constitution, demand attention as containing the seeds of the present disaffection. The appointment of Platof to the dignity of Ataman in 1796, by the sole power of the crown, had abolished the ancient right of election; but the popularity of the new chief reconciled the Cossacks to the change; and the powers of the Ataman, which, according to Heber, had extended even to causing men to be summarily bound hand and foot and thrown into the Don, were restricted henceforward to military matters. Paul, whose wish was to obliterate, as far as lay in his power, all that his mother had done, at first declared his intention of restoring the ancient privileges of the Don-Cossacks in their pristine vigour; but his fickle and wayward temper prevented the realization of any any of his promises; and an imperial edict, which assimilated the commissions of the Cossack officers to those in the Russian army, and conferred nobility on the children of those who had the military rank of colonel, excited great discontent, and was exclaimed against as introducing a new aristocracy, to the subversion of the old democratic institutions of the nation. The military spirit of a government, where formerly all were equal, or had only a temporary but absolute power when elected officers, was obviously violated by the creation of this privileged class, the numbers of which continually increased: and the partiality shown to them in the allotment of lands, and appointment to commissions, (which were conferred even on children in the cradle,) widened the breach between the new nobles and the common Cossacks, and excited jealousy against the former, as the partisans and creatures of the Russians. On the death of Platof, the dignity of Ataman ceased to exist as a local title, and was reserved by the crown till the present emperor conferred it on his son, the heir-apparent: the routine duties of the office were, in the mean time, performed by an officer styled nakazniiataman, or vice-ataman, whose residence was fixed at Tcherkask; but the limited power possessed by this functionary, and the insignificance into which the staroshines, and other local authorities, had by this time sunk, left the real administration in the hands of the procurator-general at Teherkask, and the council of war at Petersburg, and deprived the Cossacks of the channels throughwhich their complaints had hitherto reached the ear of the sovereign. The continued alienation of lands from the common territory in favour of the new nobles, and even of Russians, was viewed with discontent and suspicion by the commonalty, who anticipated the introduction of compulsory labour as the inevitable consequence of these appropriations: and an attempt, shortly after the accession of the present Emperor, to introduce the payment of customs on some of the articles which they had hitherto received duty-free, was met by such violent reclamations, that it was found necessary to abandon the project before the commencement of the last Turkish war. The severe and harassing warfare against the Circassians, and the neglect to withdraw several Cossack regiments from this unpopular service at the end of their stipulated period of duty, excited murmurs and discontent, which the imprudent ukases of 1837, and the attempt to coerce the disaffected corps by severity, have inflamed into the present spirit of resistance; and though the rigid surveillance which has been exercised, to prevent the transactions in the interior of Russia from being divulged beyond the frontier, has rendered the accounts which have hither

to transpired vague and imperfect, their uniform tenor sufficiently proves, that the love of freedom which in by. gone days animated the Cossacks against the Tartars, is not yet extinct, and that any attempt to narrow still further the already restricted circle of their liberties, must produce a convulsion which would seriously affect the stability of Russian sway in her southeastern acquisitions.

The vulnerability of Russia on the side of the Black Sea, in the event of her engaging in war with a maritime power, has been long felt by herself, and can now be no longer concealed from the eyes of Europe. When Alexander spoke of the Dardanelles as "the key of my house," he used the phrase in the full consciousness of the danger to his empire which must follow the passage, by a hostile power, of that important barrier; and in our hands especially, if the energies of England were wielded by men of a different stamp from those who now direct them, the knowledge of Russian weakness in this quarter might be converted into a better security than we now possess for the pacific policy of the Czar, from the ease with which a revolt might be excited and maintained among the tribes which cover his southern frontier from the Dniepr to Ghilan, all more or less oppressed and discontented, some but recently subdued, and some still maintaining, against fearful odds, the struggle for freedom. Little cohesion, beyond that which results from a uniform system of military occupation, exists among the various races which have been brought within the geographical boun. daries of the Russian empire since the time of Peter the Great: and, in regarding the present protracted war in Circassia simply as the gallant but isolated resistance of a warlike nation against the power of Russia, the European public has erroneously estimated the importance of the contest. It is not the prowess of a single people which Russia has encountered on the heights of the Caucasus, but the accumulated hatred of the wrecks of tribes and nations once independent, which have turned to bay in the fastnesses of this ancient barrier * against northern irruption. Many thousands

* The Persians term the Caucasus Seddi-Iskender, "the barrier of Alexander:"from the mythological traditions of the East, which attribute to him the erection of

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