Stenka Razin

Stepan Timofeyevich Razin is remembered as Stenka, a diminutive that already sounds like a song. He was a Don Cossack of a settled, relatively prosperous family, not a nameless runaway invented by later verse. The hosts, their rivers and their bargains with Moscow have their own chapter. This one follows a man who turned Cossack mobility into a movement the government could not treat as ordinary brigandage.

He gathered, around him, landless newcomers and adventurers whom older Don households regarded with unease. The lower Don had long distinguished established Cossacks from poorer men who arrived from upriver seeking a share of freedom and of loot. Razin’s authority grew among the second group, and his own comfortable origin did not prevent him from becoming their hetman in the field. That split inside the host would matter when the rising failed. A rebellion that looks, from a distance, like “the Cossacks” was also a quarrel about which Cossacks would decide the Don’s future, and about whether the old bargain with Moscow was still worth the grain and the powder it bought.

Before the great rising he took the water road. On the Volga he preyed on shipping, including treasury and merchant vessels, then pushed towards the Caspian, wintering, raiding, and fighting along Caucasian and Persian shores. He failed against some well-defended ports and succeeded against others; the point is not a catalogue of landings, but a long amphibious hunt that taught his men to live from the sea as they had from the river. The campaign made him famous and rich enough to be treated, for a season, as a potentate rather than a thief. Moscow offered pardon; common talk turned him into an invincible figure. The river towns of the lower Volga, predatory in their own right and far from the Kremlin’s daily eye, were ready ground for such a reputation. None of this yet amounted to a programme for Russia. It amounted to a fleet, a following, and a name that travelled faster than dispatches.

A later portrait of Razin, made after his death, is not a likeness taken on the Volga. It offers a face for songs and pictures. It cannot stand in for the Caspian years, or for the leaking coalition that followed them.

One image in particular must be kept in its place. A later song has Razin cast a captured Persian princess into the Volga so that his men will not say he has grown soft. Foreign traces of a drowned woman exist and do not even agree on the river; modern historians treat the episode as legend rather than a documented act of politics. The song is part of Razin’s afterlife. It is not a source for the campaign, and it should not be allowed to stand in for Astrakhan, Simbirsk, or the scaffold.

In 1670–71 he turned from southern plunder towards Rus. He told the Don assembly that he would go against traitorous boyars and the tsar’s advisers, not against the tsar himself. That distinction mattered to Cossacks who still took the sovereign as a distant father and blamed the men around him for stolen liberties. It also mattered to peasants who could imagine a just tsar if the local officer were gone. Fortress towns on the Volga fell or opened: Tsaritsyn, then Astrakhan, the wealthy gate to the Caspian. In the taken towns, nobles and officers were killed with a cruelty the sources do not soften. Local government was replaced with Cossack forms of self-rule, assemblies and ranked companies of a kind familiar from the host. A carnival of looting followed. So did the claim that a river empire of equals could be built on the ruins of chancery towns.

Astrakhan was the prize that made the rising look like a state in embryo. The city stood where the Volga met the Caspian trade, walled, gunned, and full of warehouses that connected forest Russia with the eastern sea. Streltsy of the garrison went over; the island fortress did not save the voevodas. Razin’s people plundered bazaars and installed Cossack institutions of self-rule. Then he moved upriver. Saratov and Samara opened their gates. Peasants, bargemen, poorer townsmen and garrison soldiers joined as the flotilla passed. The social mix was wide and never a single army with one grievance. Cossacks remained the core of command. Around them gathered people who had different reasons to hate a clerk, a landlord, a tax, or a fort.

Along the middle Volga the rising ceased to be only a Cossack raid. Non-Russian communities of the river basin — Mordvins, Chuvash, Mari, Tatars — entered the unrest on local terms, as did Russian peasants and river workers who hauled, loaded and starved beside the same water. No honest count of their numbers survives in a form that should be repeated as a parade of figures. What the record does show is breadth: a belt of towns and countryside in which many kinds of people could hear a promise of Cossack liberty and translate it into their own quarrel. Emissaries and rumours ran ahead of the boats, stirring districts far from Razin’s own person. That translation was the movement’s strength. It was also why no one captain could hold it together once the first defeats came.

The middle Volga did not wait for a single command. Local quarrels over land, tribute, garrison abuse and old frontier scores shaped how towns and villages rose, and how they later collapsed. For a time rebels held a wide country between the great river towns, but they did not hold it as one army. When government columns advanced from several directions, that looseness became fatal. Razin could take a city by water. He could not become the government of forests, fields and forts whose people had joined him for reasons he did not control.

Simbirsk stopped him. The town held through repeated assaults; a government force under Prince Yury Baryatinsky, trained in the newer European drill that Tsar Alexis’s court had been buying at high cost, broke the rawer host in the field. Discipline, firearms and cohesion did what reputation could not answer. Razin was wounded and fled down the Volga, leaving most of his following to be hunted. Towns that had opened now refused him. On the Don, the older households already hostile to his band would not save a defeated ataman whose war had brought the tsar’s anger onto their river. The leader of a rising had become a fugitive in his own country.

Loyalist Cossacks seized him and handed him to the tsar’s officers. He was taken to Moscow, tortured, and executed by quartering on Red Square. Sergei Kirillov’s twenty-first-century canvas of the scaffold, like Surikov’s river dream, belongs to memory and to the appetite for a martyr. The political fact is colder. Part of the Don chose Moscow over Razin, preferring the old subsidies and the old name of service to a war that had begun to look like suicide. The government answered the wider revolt with exemplary slaughter, burned settlements, and a demonstration that Cossack self-rule on the Volga would not be allowed to become a second Sich. Astrakhan, last of the great rebel holds, was recovered after the ataman was already dead. The host on the Don survived. The particular liberty Razin had offered did not.

The song wanted a prince of the river; the scaffold showed a coalition that could take cities and could not become a government.

Razin’s afterlife was larger than his victory. Ballads, operas and paintings kept Stenka in circulation as the generous outlaw who made boyars tremble, a river prince rather than a captain of a leaking coalition. The rising itself had mixed Cossack defence of autonomy with peasant fury, the anger of river labour, and the separate politics of Volga peoples who were not extras in a Russian drama. It failed as war. It succeeded as a warning, to the court and to the hosts, that the old bargain on the frontier could still explode. That is reason enough to tell him without the princess, and without pretending that one man was a nation.