Southern Russia

But a new chapter of the history of the art of war was just commencing.

During their sojourn in the plains of South Russia and Romania the Goths had taken, first of all German races, to fighting on horseback.

Dwelling in the Ukraine they had felt the influence of that land, ever the nurse of cavalry from the day of the Scythian to that of the Tartar and Cossack.

They had come to consider it more honorable to fight on horse than on foot, and every chief was followed by his war-band of mounted men.

At last he was recalled, AD 549, and sent into private life, in which he was only recalled on the recurrence of a sudden military crisis in AD 558.

The crisis was a striking example of the mismanagement of Justinian's later years.

A nomad horde from the South Russian steppe, the Kotragur Huns, had crossed the frozen Danube at midwinter when hostilities were least expected.

and thrown themselves on the Thracian provinces.

It is spent in relieving the incompetence, the economic incompetence, of all those about them, in causing wine to come into England from A, Von, Barsac, and though they do not know it, from the rougher soil of Algiers.

It also causes, does the way in which they exercise what only pedants call their potential demand, tea to be grown in Ceylon for their servants and in China for themselves, horses to be bred in Ireland, and wheat to be sown and most laboriously garnered in Western Canada, Ohio, India, Southern Russia, the Argentine, and other places.

Also, were you to seek out every economic cause and effect, you would find missionaries living where no man can live, saved by artifice, and living upon artificial supply in a strange climate, by the strength of this potential demand rooted in the meadows of the Welsh marsh.

Then also, if you were to follow the places whence their wealth is derived, it would interest you very much.

Andrew, brother of Peter, and the first to be called by Jesus, became a tireless missionary.

He brought the gospel northward, crossing Asia Minor and reaching the lands of the Scythians, regions that today encompass Ukraine and Southern Russia.

According to ancient accounts, he founded the church in Byzantium, where centuries later, Constantinople would rise, the spiritual heart of the Byzantine Empire.

His martyrdom occurred in Patras, Greece.

So it was in many other places.

According to the testimony of socialist revolutionary S. Maslov, quote, "It is a fact that in towns and cities of southern Russia, especially in cities to the west of the Dnieper that changed hands repeatedly, the arrival of Soviets was mostly celebrated and the most of hollow sympathy was expressed in the Jewish quarters and not infrequently only in those alone." A contemporary American historian, Bruce Lincoln, author of a big treatise about our Civil War, said that the entire Ukrainian Cheka was composed of almost 80% by Jews.

That can be explained by the fact that prior to arrival of the Reds, cruel pogroms went on nonstop.

Indeed, those were the bloodiest pogroms since the times of Bogdan Khmelnitsky.

The Bolsheviks didn't ask anybody anything.

But especially when they're talking about Jews, the Bolsheviks came in and said, we're your only hope.

It is conceivable that in addition to protection money, giving money to the Cossacks may also be the Cossacks didn't want a, they just wanted an independent southern Russian country.

They didn't want to take the whole country.

On all these countries he gave his fellow-citizens accurate and tolerably full information, and he had diligently collected knowledge about countries in their neighbourhood.

In particular he gives full details of Scythia, or Southern Russia, and of the satrapies and royal roads of Persia.

As a rule his information is as accurate as could be expected at such an early date, and he rarely tells marvellous stories, or if he does he points out himself their untrustworthiness.

Almost the only traveller's yarn which Herodotus reports without due scepticism is that of the ants of India that were bigger than foxes and burrowed out gold dust for their anthills.

Marriages between Ukrainian peasants and Russians well-nigh never take place, and the Ukrainian peasants seclude themselves almost entirely from the Russians.

For all these reasons, and owing to the circumstance that into the Ukrainian territory official Russia deliberately sent Russian officials, dislocated Russian troops, and provided for the admittance into the Ukrainian industrial centers, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, of Russian workmen, the impression forced itself upon any foreign traveler before the war that on all Ukrainian territories, i.e. in South Russia, there lived only one, the Russian nation.

The great political importance which before the war Russia had in Europe affected that the world of science and literature adopted the Russian unitarian theory in the history, geography, and statistics of Eastern Europe without further investigation, and the consequence was that official European political science before the war did not know that there was a large country in Europe called Ukraina, and that in this country there lives a separate nation called the Ukrainians, who have their own history and are leading their own national life.

But the great war forthwith brought enlightenment.

Climbing was helping to quench his thirst for adventure.

The next year, he summited Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and Mount Elbrus in Southern Russia.

His Seven Peaks challenge was back on track.

Next stop, Everest.

His father, a general in the army, who had served in eighteen twelve, a crude, almost illiterate, but good-natured type of Russian, had stuck to a routine job all his life, first commanding a brigade and later a division, and lived permanently in the provinces, where by virtue of his rank he was able to play a certain part.

Nikolai Petrovich was born in South Russia, as was his elder brother Pavel, of whom we shall hear more.

Till the age of fourteen he was educated at home, surrounded by cheap tutors, free and easy but fawning adjutants, and all the usual regimental and staff people.

His mother, a member of the Kolyazin family, was called Agatha as a girl, but as a general's wife her name was Agafokli Kuzminichna Kirsanov.

Revolution would simply become the ultimate argument, the final proof.

But that transformation still lay ahead in a provincial town where a Czech gardener ran a discussion circle, the police considered the most dangerous address in Southern Russia.

Chapter two: In Search of an Ideal.

In eighteen ninety-six, seventeen-year-old Bronstein arrived in Nikolayev, a provincial town where the most exciting event was the weekly cattle market.