his frontier stronghold is especially associated with the name of Pougatchev and the great Cossack revolt of the reign of Catherine II. Following the defeat of the armies of the "False Peter III," only accomplished after a long and bitter struggle, the ancient name of Jaik, which had formerly distinguished both the Cossacks and their country, was changed to its present name of Uralsk.*
On account of their isolation from their neighbours, the Uralski Kasaki have preserved many of the manners and customs of the ancient Cossacks, long since abandoned by the Cossacks of the Don. In these rarely visited districts the ancient system of Cossack land tenure and communal existence are still maintained in all their purity. (See Appendix.)
The Cossacks of the Uralsk deserve, perhaps more than any other branch of their race, to be called the true survivors of the old "Free People."
* Since the author's visit to Uralsk, in 1916, the old name of Jaik has been restored by a vote of the Cossack community.
For more than three hundred years they have figured in Russian history. To the remnants of ancient tribes, perhaps of Scythian origin, fugitive Russian peasants and other foreigners joined themselves to form the earliest community inhabiting the shores of the Jaik, Among these first settlers were many religious refugees, a majority of them belonging to the strange Russian sect known as Raskolniki or "Old Believers." These Russian sectarians, rather than obey the reforming edicts of the Tsars who desired to modernize the ritual of the ancient faith, fled to the deserts to worship God after the primitive fashion of their fathers. A census made during the reign of Peter the Great (1723) shows that the colony included the members of several sects of dissenters, many of whom held to creeds stranger than those of the Raskolniki. Along the shores of the Jaik all who were persecuted and oppressed, whether Poles, Hungarians or Cossacks of the Don, could live their Hves as they pleased.
It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the Russian Government sought to exercise any control other than a nominal supervision over these liberty-loWng citizens. It is to be feared, however, that the Cossack Puritans of Uralsk had their own strange ideas of the ethics of freedom: for, as one of their rolHcking songs expresses it,
"Formerly we Cossack fellows Sailed at home upon the sea; Our long boats upon the waters Took a toll from Khiv and Persia."* * See an article by N. Borodin. Popular Science Monthly.
As long as these austere brigands confined their attention to the subjects of the Shah and the Khan of Khiva the Russian Government interfered but little with their affairs. It was only when, at the end of the eighteenth century, Russian trade upon the Caspian began to be an important factor that the business of piracy fell upon evil days. However, the great extension which contact with Russian merchants gave to the fishing industry more than made up for the toll which the Cossacks formerly levied on the trade passing near their shores.
An interesting historical note, concerning these "fishing" Cossacks, may be found in Hakluyt's "Voyages." In this account we are told that in 1673, Master Geoffrey Ducket, retiu-ning from his fifth voyage for the Muscovy Company, ran afoul of these pirates, when, "by reason of the variety of the winds and dangerous flats of the Caspian Sea" he was riding at anchor near their shores. He tells that "certain Rus Cossacks, which are outlaws or banished men.,. came to us with divers boats under cover of friendship and entered our ship." The suspicious conduct of these visitors, however, soon undeceived the wise British merchants with respect to their intentions and they thereupon took their hatchets and "skowred the hatches."
For many years the Uralski Cossacks have lived as orderly and peaceable an existence as frontier conditions permit. They were among the first to declare their allegiance to the constitutional government after the overthrow of Tsarism in 1917, and have since resisted the tyranny exercised from Moscow and Petrograd by "King Stork" Lenin, with the same courage and determination which they opposed to the officials of "King Log" Nicholas. The leaders of the Soviet movement — realizing the necessity of winning the Cossack element to their doctrines — have tried every method learned from their German teachers, from terrorism to propaganda, to enlist the sympathies of the sturdy Uralski. But the excesses of the pandemoniac government at Petrograd have so disgusted the Cossacks that the adherents of the Bolsheviki were none too gently thro\\Ti out of their settlements, early in the struggle between order and anarchy.*