The Cossacks were never true nomads, who migrated in wagons behind their herds as the Tatar of the Golden Horde did, or the first Scythians and Sarmatians. And yet they were in some respects unlike their predecessors. “The Cossacks were the last of many steppe peoples to inhabit the Black Sea plains in the old way. Consider this passage about the Cossacks:
The writing is tied together by an element of memoir, and, grounded in a description of the Black Sea peoples. In that they tie together for me many seemingly disparate narratives.
There are some books I think as interstitial reads. Gorbachev was holidaying in Foros that summer and Ascheson happened to be visiting historical sites nearby. It begins in 1991 when the author visited Crimea just as a coup was being perpetrated against Mikhail Gorbachev by septuagenarian generals. It reminds me of two other books one is Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea by Claudio Magris, the other is a trilogy books by Patrick Leigh-Fermor that begins with the volume A Time of Gifts. The book is concerned with the many peoples who lived on the coast of the Black Sea from roughly 1,500 BC to just after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. I’m reading this book while auditing Timothy Snyder’s Yale University course online, The Making of Modern Ukraine.
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