Black Sea (17 page)

They drank toasts to
'Zemiya, Rod, Rodind'
— Land, Race, Motherland. It was impossible not to like the Lermontov race. They had survived — no mean achievement for twentieth-century Russians. They had remembered kinship across oceans and across the walls of the Cold War. When the world and Russia opened the rusted gates, they rediscovered one another and encountered tribes of unknown children. They had just made a mass pilgrimage to the meadow where Lermontov fell at Pyatigorsk (the Fiscal, still pale, confided that the rail journey had been the worst thirty-six hours of his life), but they were not really interested in Mikhail Yurevich for himself. They were interested in each other, and they were celebrating themselves.

In the end, there was no keeping up with them. I went out into the night, and breathed cold sea air from the bay of Anapa. A Cossack man who had driven down with me from Rostov was angered by it all, by the absence of the 'real' Lermontov. He muttered, 'Fetishism!'

The park at Anapa, once a neat and demure place, is now the home of a pack of feral dogs who scratch all day and howl all night.

Beyond the town begins the Taman peninsula, a long spit of Asia reaching out until it almost touches Europe across the Kerch Straits. Lermontov went there too. He stared at the
kurgan
tumuli which rise like hills over this flat landscape: for him, they were tombs for Ossian,
zabvenniy
places.

He was wrong. Scientific excavation had not begun in Lermontov's day, and he would have known little about what really lay inside these burial mounds. It was true that they were first raised to cover the single, lonely body of a nomad prince or queen, sharing the burial-chamber only with sacrificed horses or slaves. But, as the years passed, the grave was usually invaded by a mob of other skeletons crowding in for company. Under the turf, another sort of family reunion would gather until it spilled over into new, smaller burial mounds nearby. In Russia, as Tolstoy was to find before he was even dead and buried, it is hard to remain at once great and solitary.

Chapter Three

The nucleus of this singular people [Cossacks] were deserters... The course of nature, and the constant arrival of fresh fugitives, rapidly increased their numbers. They opened their arms to recruits from every nation, and were joined by all the outcasts whose crimes compelled them to abandon civilised society. In this manner, they ceased to be mere fugitives, and became a people. As may be supposed, their habits revealed the taint which sullied their origin.

Henry Tyrrell,
History of the Russian Empire

ONE COLD AUTUMN
, I went to the Don delta and stayed in a Greek colony. On the ruins of the city of Tanais, there is a small modern village of archaeologists living in wooden shacks. In summer, expeditions arrive from Russian or German universities to excavate, and for a few months the site is crowded with muscular students who sleep in tents and sing to the guitar round camp-fires. But out of season, only half a dozen men and women live at Tanais, their beds squeezed between shelves of broken Greek pottery and carboys of photographic chemicals. At such times, before the Scythian frosts trim the Sea of Azov with ice and snow blocks the road to Rostov, there are empty huts to rent to visitors.

The director of Tanais, commander of the colony, is Valeriy Fedorovich Chesnok. Like his colleague at Olbia, Mr Chesnok is stranded in an outpost whose subsidies have been cut off, left to survive on his own resources as if on some ice-floe forgotten by the supply ships. Water comes from a well, heating is uncertain, sanitation is a pit latrine. Some food and any amount of vodka can

be found in the Cossack village of Nedvigovka (meaning roughly 'No-Surrenderville'), a mile away. Vegetables can be bought in abundance from a rich, well-organised Armenian village halfway to Rostov, but only in spring and summer. While I was there, in late September, the scientists were still eating well: breakfast was carp stew and beetroot salad, with gallons of steaming tea made from camomile and steppe herbs.

'Science' is the word Russian archaeologists use to describe the whole profession of knowledge to which they belong. The word in Russian has none of the limitation to physical sciences or technology which it has acquired in English; a philologist or an art historian is as much a scientist as a molecular biologist, in the sense of the French word
savant.
Nothing, neither Stalinist terror nor free-market pressures and privations, has been able to rob this Russian term of its majesty. WTien Mr Chesnok and his colonists spoke about themselves as 'scientists', I came to understand that they were talking not only about their research but also about something inward and existential. They meant a sort of marble stele in the mind; incised upon it are the moral commandments to which the life of a scientist is dedicated. These commandments include the commitments to truth, to loyal comradeship, to intellectual and personal self-discipline, to an ascesis indifferent to discomfort or money. This is the Rule of a religious order. At Tanais,
1
heard a love affair between a Russian archaeologist and a foreign scholar condemned as 'unworthy of a scientist', because it had led the woman concerned to re-time an excavation schedule.

Once I watched Mr Chesnok as he put through a telephone call to Moscow. He stood up at his table, his small, energetic figure erect, shouting concise orders to one operator after another through the humming and frizzling of static. I was watching an artillery officer at the battle of Kursk calling down a barrage, or getting through to a threatened battery commander. 'Moscow?
Alloa!
This is Chesnok, Tanais -
1
repeat: Chesnok, Tanais. Get me Moscow!
Alloa!.
..' In this way, across widening crevasses of chaos and across distances which seem to grow longer as Russia's central coherence yawns apart, the integrity of science is defended.

Mr Chesnok remains undaunted. He has written a booklet, available to visitors, entitled 'The Principles of Life', which expresses his own iron optimism through citations from the Decalogue and the American Declaration of Independence. One night, at the end of an enormous row with a Cossack about corruption, Cossack nationalism and the fate of the nation, he tried to communicate his faith to me: 'All this is not such a tragedy. Culture is what matters for identity, not ethnicity and not money either. Russia is going through wild years. But we will survive them.'

For a Russian scientist, the wild years which brought the first wave of primitive capitalists after 1991 have often resembled a new inrush of steppe nomads. But when an unfamiliar horde is seen from the walls of a Black Sea city, there has always been a choice of tactics. The first option is to bolt the gates. The second is to invite the nomad chieftains to enter as honoured guests. In return for a few gold rings or an amphora of Trebizond wine, they may be impressed enough to offer their services as the city's protectors. Tanais, whether as a Greek emporium or as a Russian archaeological colony, has generally chosen the second option.

I discovered this for myself early one morning, as I stumbled over mounds of potsherds to reach the latrine. I had stopped to look at the view. The huts and the Greek ruins stand on the northern shore of the Don delta, above a backwater which was once the main channel of the Don but is now the 'Dead Donets'. In the distance, the Sea of Azov gleamed tin-coloured under low clouds. And then I saw a Bactrian camel. It swayed towards me until it reached the end of its hobble, then bit a piece out of a bush growing on the old rampart. Beyond the camel, I made out an encampment of rusty caravans and towing-tractors, all flagged-out with washing hung up to dry.

This turned out to be the Rostov State Circus, in its new winter quarters. Mr Chesnok had discovered a sponsor: a speculative builder who had fallen in love with the lady who trained the performing dogs in the circus. The circus was in trouble, however, and the dog-lady was inconsolable, for the Rostov authorities had cut off the rent subsidy for their expensive palace in the city centre. The sponsor, knowing Mr Chesnok's problems, saw a way out. He proposed that if Tanais would allow the circus a few hectares of unexcavated Greek suburb to winter on and graze its animals, then he could see his way to constructing a new brick storage and laboratory block for the scientists.

So the deal was made. The builder was happy, the dog-lady was consoled, and the Tanais scientists stepped uncertainly into this new world in which culture is dependent upon the pleasure of private entrepreneurs.

For the urban cultures of the Mediterranean, from the Greeks to the Genoese and Venetians, the Don delta was the north- eastern corner of their world. The delta, at the far end of the Sea of Azov, was a place so distant, so exposed to nomad raiding and so hard to reach across a sea which froze over in many winters, that for long periods the Aegean and Mediterranean traders had no foothold there. But in good times fortunes could be made. When the rulers of the inland steppes were not at war with one another, caravan trails - the 'Silk Routes' - would reach across Eurasia from China to the mouth of the river Don.

This was not just hinterland trade, like the wheat, dried fish and slaves which made Olbia rich. It was long-range exporting in luxury commodities. From China, Persia and India came silks, spices, porcelain, bronze and gold luxuries, which the European colonists at the Don delta paid for in different ways. The Greeks exported wine, red- and black-figure pottery, jewellery and ornaments made first in Greece and later in the Bosporan Kingdom at the Kerch Straits. Both Greeks and Italians did a certain amount of cash business, and their coinages found their way thousands of miles back up the caravan routes into Asia. Most of the Italian export trade was coarse European woollen cloth woven in Flanders, Lombardy or Venice, much of it produced in the earliest versions of a factory system.

To serve these long-range routes into Eurasia, two fortified trading cities grew up at the delta. The first was Tanais (which is also the Greek and Latin name for the river Don itself). Founded around 250 BC, it stood on the north side of the delta on what was then the main river channel; ships were able to enter from the Sea of Azov (several miles nearer than it is today), and tie up under its walls. Tanais stood for some five hundred years, until the Goths sacked and burned it in the third century AD. Some squatters returned to the ruins later, but Tanais was finally obliterated when the Huns appeared out of Asia around the year 350.

Prosperity along the north shore of the Black Sea has always required two conditions: steady peace inland on the steppes, and free passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. These conditions revived in the eighth and ninth centuries, when Khazar nomads established dominion over the whole region between the Black Sea and the northern forests. But the
Pax Khazarica
did not reach far eastwards into Asia. It was not until the conquests of Chingiz Khan and his successors in the thirteenth century, extending a Tatar-Mongol empire over northern Eurasia from the Sea of Japan to the Black Sea, that the overland routes between China and Europe reopened after an interval of nearly a thousand years.

The Tatar-Mongols arrived on the Black Sea when the Byzantine Empire was near its end, weakened by the struggle against the Ottoman Turks and by the pressure of the Crusader kingdoms advancing from the west. Pushing behind the land armies of the Crusaders were the maritime city-states of Italy — Genoa and Venice above all — impatient to break through the Narrows into the markets of the Black Sea. Unwilling to share the Sea with outsiders, the later Byzantine emperors at first offered these 'Franks' and 'Latins' only reluctant and occasional passage through the Narrows. But after the Crusaders had stormed Constantinople in 1204, the two maritime empires were able to slip through the Bosporus and reach the Crimean coast, the Sea of Azov and finally the river Don.

Now the second delta city was built. Tana, as it was named, stood on the opposite, southern side of the delta, looking across ten miles of reeds to the silent ruins which had been Tanais. Founded by Genoese and Venetian colonists in the thirteenth century, Tana began as an open trading-post which only gradually acquired Italian-designed stone walls and towers. In practice, the walls meant little. The survival of Tana remained always a gamble on the tolerance of the Golden Horde, the western division of the Mongol empire which had arrived in the Pontic Steppe only a few decades earlier. Tana's diplomacy, like much of its short-range trade, concentrated on the Horde's 'capital' far away at Saray on the Volga. When the Genoese were finally edged out, Tana became for a time the most profitable of all Venetian colonies. But its dependency on the Mongols, and later on the Crimean Tatars, never lessened. For the most part, the sabre of Mongol power was turned away from the Italians. In the end, it struck them down.