Читать книгу The Red Reign. The True Story of an Adventurous Year in Russia онлайн

63 страница из 93

“If your officers commanded you to run through school-children with your saber, would you do it?” I asked. The man colored perceptibly as he answered:

“Certainly. I would obey.”

Others in the room hastened to add that they would not do such things of their own accord, but only at the command of their officers, whom they were sworn to obey, or unless they were well plied with vodka.

The morning I left this stanitza a snow-storm was raging and our progress down from the Cossack plateau to the plain below was slow and labored. Part way down we passed another Cossack stanitza, and at the suggestion of my blue-eyed driver we halted here for a time to rest the horses and call on two or three of his friends. One man was building himself a new house. For the materials and workmen whom he was hiring he was paying five hundred rubles—two hundred and fifty dollars.

This brief experience among the Cossack villages I later followed up by visiting other villages in different parts of Russia—in the Kuban in the territory of the Don, in Orenburg, and in Siberia—and my conclusions in regard to Cossacks in general are summarized pointedly: The Cossack is a survival of medievalism, kept alive only by a government which finds it to its interest to employ medieval methods against its own subjects. After the Russo-Japanese war the Cossack will never again be relied upon in regular warfare. He won’t do. But as a particularly severe and drastic policeman, he is better than any one. Where there is an unarmed mob to quell, or crowd to disperse, where there is a village to “pacify”—there send the Cossack. If the job happens to present difficulties, dole out vodka to the Cossacks and they become dare-devils. But devil-may-care methods are no longer effective against a regular army. The Cossack is not scientific, and therein he fails. His hour has struck. Another generation will know him not. For several hundred years the Cossack has continued to maintain his own, but for such methods as his the twentieth century has no place.