*'masterless man," one who refused to identify himself with the Krestianin or ordinary agricultural laborer (a class about to fall wholly into the condition of serfdom). The same word may pre\aously have been used by the Tartars after their conquest of Russia to denote tribesmen who, refusing to settle in towns or colonies, preferred to continue the -j-^^ nomad and adventurous life of their ancestors. • name also began to be applied to soldier-merce- \ \ naries from the steppe "war bands," who, while maintaining the warlike traditions of this wandering life, refused to become incorporated among the men-at-arms attached to the great boyars or to take permanent serWce in the paid mihtia formed by the Tsars after the reign of Ivan IV.
To the brutal methods of Tartar dominion may be ascribed traits which have left a deep mark on the government and policy of the empire of the Tsars. Russian historians are now the first to recognize the depth and force of this influence. Naturally democratic in their ideals and personal relations, long subjection to the Tartars taught the Slav people subservience, and (together with later principles borrowed by Peter the Great from the Prussian system) furnished their rulers a model of greedy despotism and autocratic power. Even the excesses of revolution in our own daj^ show the persistence in the Russian state of these pernicious alien influences.
Under the ruthless sword-strokes of Czar Vasili,
and his successor Ivan the Terrible, began the upbuilding of the great modern state of Russia — engulfing in an ever-widening circle of dominion the liberties of lesser princelings and the hourgeoisie of the forest "City Republics." Such was the fate of Pskov, of the Free Republic of Vologda and the city of "Lord Novgorod the Great."
Meanwhile, on the vast southern plains, imder the leadership of dispossessed hoyars, renegade Polish nobles, Turkish janissaries, or even some far-wandering French or German adventurer, the characteristic civilization of the Ukraine Cossack communities steadily grew and strengthened. Recruited from sturdy vagabonds of every race and clan, "stolen youths, thieves and patriots" armed with the weapons they had brought with them from. Russia or with the bows and arrows of their Tartar neighbours, they fought for and gradually obtained the right to exist and to remain free. \ In view of the importance of geographical conditions upon the inhabitants of these plains, it no^' becomes necessary to consider at greater length some of the phenomena peculiar to the South Russian Steppes. For thousands of years — until the coming of the railways in recent times — the problems of life on the Russian prairies must have presented themselves again and again under the same inevitable forms. The nations who established their permanent home in this fertile "smiling wilderness" were all endowed with similar characteristics.
F THE "FREE PEOPLE" 11
Their lives were passed on horseback and their existence depended on their skill as breeders of halfwild cattle and hunters of wary game. The Greek legend of the Centaurs was, in their, case, scarcely an exaggeration. In plains so vast as to be almost without natural limits or defensible frontiers a necessary factor of effective occupation became the ability to defend a chosen area at any moment in hand to hand encounters with a mobile foe. Highways of trade and communication could be shifted — in the absence of all natural obstacles — with the same ease that a new course can be steered at sea. For this reason, the objects of steppe warfare were different from those of ordinaiy strategy. In reading of the military campaigns of the Ukraine we must often be prepared to draw our comparisons from naval rather than from land operations, vy,f The country known as the Ukraine, where the '? characteristic Cossack civilization arose and developed, is> as the name indicates, a continental "border land," neither European nor Asiatic. On the wide steppes of the Black Sea basin even the climatic influences of north and south meet without blending. Thus, while during the short sunmier months a true southern climate prevails, yet the retmn of winter is marked by a cold nearly subarctic in its intensity.
In the famous Black Earth region about Kiev and Poltava, the brief harvest season forms the
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]