The statecraft of the steppe

Horses shape human societies. One of the most striking examples of this horse-driven historical process is the emergence of the Cossacks in what is now Russia and Ukraine. I have been reading Albert Seaton’s somewhat old-fashioned, but dense narrative history, The Horsemen of the Steppes: The story of the Cossacks. His retelling of raids, massacres and rebellions proves heavy going, but one can clearly distinguish the role of the horse.

The Turkish word kazakh meant a freebooter. Any man without an overlord could turn kazakh, including lords who had lost their positions. When Babur, the future emperor of India, found himself chased out of Samarkand by the Uzbeks, he entered into ‘kazakhlik’, the state of being a kazakh. In the depths of the steppe, a kazakh was a horseman, because you can’t get far, geographically or politically, on foot.

What I learned from Seaton is that the word kazakh applied not only to the horse-riding, pastoralist Turks and Mongols of the steppe, but also to the mountaineers of the Caucasus and to the farmers and fishermen of the great rivers, the Dnieper, the Donets and the Don, whenever they shook off the yoke of authority.

The mountaineers and riverine populations earned their reputations as kazakhs by marauding, pirating and kidnapping. As the authority of the Golden Horde broke down in the 15th century, the whole region of today’s Ukraine, southern Russia and the northern Caucasus turned into a no-go zone for merchants and emissaries, unless they travelled with thousands of armed escorts. Perhaps the greatest nuisance these groups represented for the rulers of Moscow, Vilnius or Istanbul was their willingness to give refuge to fleeing murderers and thieves, as well as escaped serfs. In doing so, they threatened the established order. They established a whole territory of kazakhlik, known by the Muscovites, Lithuanians and Poles as ‘Dikoe Pole’, the wild plains. Eventually even these sons of the land learned to ride, stole horses, and took on a whole new dimension.

The horse transformed these robber bands into state actors. With horses, the Cossacks of the Don launched raids, 600 miles away, against the Ottoman fortress of Azov, and succeeded in plundering that rich trading post. While threatening their neighbours, they also learned how to make themselves useful to them, as mercenaries or ‘deniable’ allies. Mounted Ukrainian Cossacks formed the first line of Poland-Lithuania’s defence against the Ottomans and the Crimean Tatars. The Stroganov brothers used Cossacks on the upper Volga to destroy the Khanate of Sibir, opening up Siberia to Russian colonisation. Moscow told the Sublime Porte that they had no control over the Cossacks’ ruthless raids on Ottoman territories, while secretly backing them. This scenario has become familiar, as we will see.

The horse-breeding Cossacks developed a more hierarchical society, including a military organisation divided into companies, regiments and hordes, mirroring the ancient Turco-Mongol traditions. Though their hetmans and atamans were elected, they tended to be longer serving than the leaders of the pirate bands, though their politics was still more rough and tumble than that of the Golden Horde or Crimean Tatars. Both groups experienced a good deal of violent changes, but the Tatars, unlike the Cossacks, kept supreme political power within elite families. This dynastic aspect provided some consistency to the politics of their hordes. The Cossacks, on the other hand, remained true to their kazakh ethos and frequently changed political direction. For this reason, they were ultimately outsmarted and absorbed by Moscow, which found their elected hetman easy to bribe or coerce.

Moscow began as a Mongol-successor state. Ivan the Terrible proclaimed himself as the Great Khan of the West, and hinted that he had Genghis’ blood from his mother’s side. Ivan played the game of manipulating his Tatar rivals shrewdly, and succeeded in expanding his territories deep into the steppe. Boris Godunov, himself of Tatar origin, was no less adept at dealing with the horse-breeding nations.

Under the Romanov dynasty, however, Moscow developed a European-political culture. Peter the Great and especially Catherine the Great recruited large numbers of western Europeans into the civil and military service. The reason why people speak French in Tolstoy’s War and Peace is because many of the senior ministers and generals of the era in which it is set – the late-18th and early-19th centuries – did not speak Russian fluently. This served the state well when dealing with European states, but against Russia’s eastern neighbours, the old steppe statecraft of Ivan the Terrible was readily deployed. Treaties and legalistic formulas did not work with the Kazakh and Kalmyk Hordes, or with the Circassians and Chechens. The ability of the enemy to saddle up and disappear into the boundless steppe, or climb into mountain fastnesses after a fearful attack on Russia, made the conquest of these zones time-consuming and costly. Moscow’s response was to practise hostage-taking, massacres, double-crossing, deniable raids, all tactics taken right out of the kazakh playbook of centuries earlier.

A kind of peace reigned on the steppe frontier at the end of the empire and during Soviet times. ‘They pretend to rule and we pretend to obey’ could be the motto here. Bride kidnappings, honour killings and outright ethnic pogroms, and, of course, the lucrative activity of gangsters sustained the traditions of kazakhs in this post-horse era. This explains in large part the coloniser’s fatigue felt by Russians when the so-called Stans, Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan declared independence. ‘After all we did for them!’ was a frequent reaction. But as much as Russians wanted to turn westward in 1991 and integrate with Europe, the kazakhlik spirit persisted.

Looking at recent Russian history in this light, we see a country that on the one hand manages with extreme legalism its treaties with the West, like those covering nuclear weapons or rules of navigation. On the other hand, the old steppe statecraft comes into play, for example, during the wars in Chechnya. Moscow chose very opportunistic solutions to put that conflict behind it. No western European polity would have accepted the existence of the legal no-go zone that is Chechnya today. The relationship between this republic and the Russian Federation is basically a personal relationship between Vladimir Putin and Ramzan Kadyrov, one that Ivan the Terrible would have understood. The Russian eagle symbolises the duality of its statecraft: one face to the west, another to the east.

The war in Ukraine started off as another hybrid operation, with ‘little green men’ providing deniability. Horrific massacres such as that committed in Mariupol were designed to terrorise the Ukrainians into submission. Perhaps the Kremlin thought it could execute a rapid regime change, as it has done to many steppe peoples in the past, finding a more pliant ruler willing to follow Moscow’s guidance. I cannot help thinking that the image of the Cossack – brave, but fickle – inhabits the Kremlin’s view of Ukraine, and that this led to the tragic decision to start the bloodiest war in Europe in 80 years.

Now Russia is stuck in a classic European war, which can only be solved by classic European means. Since Russia has violated all its treaties with respect to Ukraine, the only alternative is to conquer, like Genghis Khan, or to retreat far into the steppe and await better times.

Steppe statecraft is a defining feature of Eurasia, Russia and China, in particular. They have long dealt with the rough-and-tumble of their steppe frontiers, through formal diplomacy, treaties and conventions, as well as the more opportunistic, un-Kantian diplomacy of the steppe. Kant argued one should not pursue a given policy unless it applied to everyone; the khans of the steppe did whatever they could get away with. They broke treaties, launched deniable raids, changed sides in the midst of battle, and carried out indiscriminate, terroristic massacres. They did so because these means were the only way to assert power on the open steppe. With no boundaries, with the only property being livestock, which could easily be stolen, with no fixed cities to defend or protect, only fear, rather than trust, kept rivals at bay. There are many aspects of Russia’s and China’s behaviour today which can be traced back to this tradition.

Take stealing. The horse breeders of the steppe could hardly guard their herds from rustlers. They simply raided tit-for-tat. Stealing was considered something daring and admirable. Yigits (braves) rode off on rustling expeditions to win praise in their encampment. Very successful thieves went on to become, as in the case of Tamerlane, supreme rulers. When the Russians began to rule these unruly borderlands, they tried in vain to suppress cattle rustling. They also tried to outlaw bride kidnapping, an even more culturally unique feature of the steppe dwellers’ society. Bride kidnapping could actually contribute more to keeping the peace between two clans than a formal agreement. By creating a kinship relationship between them, it reduced the chances of bloody conflict. Neither the Russians nor the Soviets ever managed to end the practice, which survives today in the independent states of Central Asia, though modern social mores are gradually changing the perception of this practice.