Stenka Razin

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(c. 1630 - 1671), leader of a Don Cossack revolt and hero of folksong and legend.

Stepan Timofeyvich Razin, also known as Stenka Razin, is the hero of innumerable folksongs, legends and works of art. The most popular motif is his (legendary) sacrifice of his bride, a Persian princess, whom he throws into the Volga River for the sake of Cossack solidarity. Over the past three centuries, the name of Stepan Razin has been associated in the Russian popular mind with freedom, social justice, and heroic and adventurous manhood. The philosopher Nikolai A. Berdyaev, assessing the phenomenon of communism in Russia, characterized it as a synthesis of Marx and Stenka Razin.

Stepan Razin, the son of a Don Cossack ataman (military leader) and, it is said, a captive Turkish woman, rose to prominence among the Cossacks at a relatively young age. Thus there was no shortage of volunteers when he led a series of brigandage expeditions to the lower Volga in 1667 and the Caspian Sea in 1668 and again in 1669, especially from among the many impoverished newcomers to the Don region, mostly former peasants escaping serfdom. Unlike other Cossack leaders, Razin welcomed the newcomers and cultivated the spirit of Cossack brotherhood and equality (obsolete by his time) among his men. His expeditions were unusually successful - Russian and Persian caravans were plundered, Persian commercial settlements and towns were devastated, a Persian fleet was defeated, and Razin's warriors won riches and glory.

Upon returning to Russia, Razin departed from tradition by keeping his band intact and not sharing his booty with the established Cossack leaders. Moreover, as he passed through the lower Volga cities of Astrakhan and Tsaritsyn, hundreds of townsmen, fugitive peasants, and even regular soldiers flocked to his standard. The commanders of the Russian garrisons did not dare to stop the popular hero and let him and his men return to the Don region unimpeded.

Having raised an army of perhaps seven to ten thousand, Razin announced a new campaign in 1670, aimed at settling scores with the tsar's boyars and officials, the "traitors and oppressors of the poor." The towns of Saratov and Samara opened their gates to him; Russian peasants and indigenous peoples rose up in revolt by the tens of thousands throughout the lower and middle Volga region. The rebels intended to march on Moscow, although they maintained that they were loyal to the tsar. They were defeated, however, when they besieged the next large town, Simbirsk, crushed by the government's regular army, which exploited the lack of coordination between Cossacks and peasants. Stenka Razin fled to the Don region, where in 1671 he was captured by the men of his godfather, Kornilo Yakovlev, a leader of the Don Cossacks. Stenka Razin and his younger brother Frol were delivered to Moscow in an iron cage and executed on June 6, 1671.

Bibliography

Field, Cecil. (1947). The Great Cossack: The Rebellion of Stenka Razin against Alexis Michaelovitch, Tsar of All the Russias. London: H. Jenkins.

Fuhrmann, Joseph T. (1981). Tsar Alexis: His Reign and His Russia. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.

—ELENA PAVLOVA

Razin, Stenka (stĕng'kä rä'zēn) , d. 1671, Don Cossack leader, head of the peasant revolt of 1670. As commander of a band of propertyless Don Cossacks, he raided and pillaged (1667–69) through the lower Volga valley and across the Caspian Sea. On his return (1670) to the Don, Razin rebelled against the authority of the czar. His force of some 7,000 men took Tsaritsyn (now Volgograd), Astrakhan, Saratov, and Samara, and was joined by serfs, peasants, and non-Russian tribes of the middle and lower Volga region. However, he was defeated by government troops at Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk) and fled to the Don, where the propertied Cossacks delivered him to the government. Razin was executed at Moscow. His exploits have long been celebrated in song and legend.

Razin, Stepan (known as Stenka; 1630?–1671), leader of one of the more destructive Cossack rebellions in Russian history. Razin was born near Cherkassk on the southern Don around 1630. His father was a prominent figure within the Don Cossack Host, his mother a Turkish or Tatar captive; Host hetman Kornilo Iakovlev was his godfather. In 1658 Stepan Razin was among a delegation of Cossacks sent from the Host to the Ambassadors' Chancellery in Moscow. He subsequently played an important role in negotiations with the Kalmyks on behalf of the Host and the Ambassadors' Chancellery.

By the mid-1660s Muscovite military colonization of the southern frontier districts of the Belgorod Line had produced a cascade migration of thousands of deserters and fugitive peasants southward into the Don Host. Moscow's semiannual cash, grain, and gunpowder subsidies to the Host were not increased accordingly, however, and Cossack impoverishment on the upper Don was further exacerbated by harvest failures. Furthermore, the Don Host now faced fewer Moscow-sanctioned opportunities to plunder the Crimean Khanate and Ottoman towns on the Black Sea coast, for Moscow was trying to rein in the Host to convince the Ottoman Sultan to restrain the Crimean Tatars from further raiding in Ukraine.

In 1667–1669 some eight hundred Don Cossacks desperate for plunder defied Moscow's ban and followed Stepan Razin on a campaign of piracy in the Caspian and raids in Daghestan and northern Persia. They successfully overcame halfhearted attempts by Muscovite troops from the lower Volga garrison towns to block their access to the Caspian. This appears to have convinced Razin he was unlikely to receive the tsar's pardon, but also that he had little to fear from the weak Muscovite garrisons on the Volga.

Upon his return to Cherkassk in April 1670 Razin defied efforts to arrest him, killed the Muscovite envoy to the Host, and exploited his newfound popularity among rank-and-file Cossacks to turn against Hetman Iakovlev and form his own renegade Host, which soon attracted about seven thousand followers. In March 1670 Razin's forces began pushing up the Volga; by autumn they had captured Astrakhan, Tsaritsyn (Volgograd), Saratov, and Samara. Razin's addresses to his council (krug) of Cossack lieutenants allegedly proclaimed his intention of marching on Moscow itself to punish particular powerful boyars and chancellery directors as oppressors of the people, and for a while he kept in his entourage a pretender tsarevich and impostor patriarch. His forces did find some support among the lower clergy, townsmen, garrison musketeers, burlak boatmen, peasants, and the Chuvash and Mordvin ethnic minorities. But Soviet historiography exaggerated in painting the Razin insurgency as an emerging general antifeudal class war; Razin's probable objective was, rather, to seize garrison resources on the lower Volga and expand the scale of Cossack piracy in the Caspian region.

Razin's forces failed to take control of the Volga north of Samara; Simbirsk and Kazan' did not fall to them. Detachments under his brother Frolka unsuccessfully tried to carry the war to the eastern end of the Belgorod Line (September–October 1670). In late 1670 Stepan Razin fell back to the lower Don. He tried but failed to overthrow Hetman Iakovlev and bring the rest of Don Host under his control. Iakovlev's Cossacks finally captured Razin at Kagal'nik in April 1671. In June 1671 Razin was executed at Moscow.

Bibliography

Avrich, Paul. Russian Rebels, 1600–1800. New York, 1972.

Chistiakova, E. V., and V. M. Solov'ev. Stepan Razin i ego soratniki. Moscow, 1988.

Khodarkovsky, Michael. "The Stepan Razin Uprising: Was It a 'Peasant War'?" Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 42, no. 1 (1994): 1–19.

—BRIAN DAVIES

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