I am motivated to tell you about this fellow largely because of his magnificent name. He was a Cossack, born in 1630. At that time Russia was engaged in a series of wars and taxation was growing to be an ever=increasing burden on the peasantry. Moreover, the government was drafting an ever-larger fraction of the population. The oppression was backed up with ferocious retaliation against the slightest resistance; the government was slaughtering recalcitrant peasants right and left. The situation was so bad that that thousands of peasants were fleeing Russia, many of them going to the lawless southern regions occupied by the Cossacks.
Stenka was from an apparently prominent Cossack family; he appears in a few records as participating in official embassies. However, like any Russian with power, he was also a robber. In his case, he preyed upon Russian merchants sailing down the rivers. Over the course of about a decade, he expanded his operation until his robber band was a large army, and he captured a number of Russian fortresses along the Volga River. His biggest score came when he captured and sacked Astrakhan, the major trading entrepôt at the mouth of the Volga River. His armies treated their subjects in a kinder, gentler fashion than the Russian armies; they killed only ‘bad people’, a rather loosely defined category.
His big mistake came when he attacked a well-defended Russian fortress; he failed badly, his army fell apart, and some of his Cossack ‘allies’ took him prisoner and handed him over to the Russians. They took him to Moscow in a cage where they publicly dismembered him. He was 41 years old. The Russian armies reconquered the Cossack areas and eliminated any prospect of future rebellion by killing everybody.
January 23rd, 2020
