Cossacks of God
Hive, Queen and Country Contest
Michael Rieder
Books
Black Man by Robert Martin (I bought this at Heathrow in a bookshop – interestingly, in the US this book is published with the name “13”)
Where found – In the book shelf the graduate students share in my office by one of my graduate students (I asked her to pick a book, any book)
Central Concept – Covert program with selective breeding and extensive training of children to produce super-soldiers
The Language of God by Dawkins
Where found – In the bookcase in my wife’s office by my wife (I asked her to pick a book, any book)
Central Concept – Biology, notably molecular biology, is part of God’s plan
The Russian Army of the Crimean War – (Osprey)
Where found – In the bookcase next to my painting table by No. 3 son (I asked him to pick a book, any book)
Central Concept – The poor performance of the Russian Army in the Crimean War related to poor preparation, uninspired senior leadership and misleading tactical doctrines
So – the central concepts of these three books were combined to produce the following:
The Cossacks of God
It all began in the light rain and mists of a fall day in the Crimea in 1854. On November 5th, 1854, four massive columns of Russian troops – 42,000 troops in all – emerged from Sebastopol and advanced towards the British positions on Cossack Mountain – the place the British called Mount Inkerman – to drive the British off the heights and then disrupt their supply lines to the Allied base at Balaclava, forcing the British and French to break off their siege of Sebastopol.
In the second column of Russian troops, commanded by Lieutenant General P.I. Pavlov, in the ranks of the 11th Infantry Division marched the battalions of the Iakoutsk Regiment. One of the chaplains of the Iakoutsk Regiment was a young Russian Orthodox priest, Father Sergei Petrovich Chevitch. Father Chevitch was the youngest member of a brood of rambunctious children sired by Pyotr Sergeyevich, a member of the minor nobility who had served as a junior officer in the Guards Cavalry during the closing stages of the Napoleonic Wars. While all of his four older brothers followed their father, three into the cavalry and one in the infantry, young Sergei Petrovich decided to pursue a different calling. As a toddler with six older siblings he managed to catch every infection his brothers and sisters brought home and consequently Sergei spent a good part of his third to seventh year sick at home. His mother Elena, whose fondness for religion evolved logarithmically as her family grew, spent considerable time with young Sergei, reading from the Holy Bible and sitting beneath icons of Blessed John of Moscow and Saint Euphrosyne. As Sergei grew, regained his strength and began to venture into the broader word beyond the walls of the family’s small and shabby estate near Moscow, he felt the call of the Holy Orthodox Church. When he announced to his parents that he was planning on entering the seminary, his mother was ecstatic and his father breathed a silent sigh of relief, the cost of having four young officers in the Czar’s army being more of an expense than a struggling country nobleman was capable of bearing.
In 1850 at age seventeen Sergei Petrovich walked through the gates of the Ecclesiastical Academy at the Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra, the major theological academy of the Russian Orthodox Church. For the next four years, he reveled in the heady academic and religious environment of the Academy, where the tradition of 150 years of religious scholarship was heady brew for his undeveloped but formidable intellect.
Although he avoided the siren-like call to military service experienced by the other young Chevitchs, when Czar and country called the newly ordained Father Sergei was there to answer the call. Competing his studies in 1854 just as war was declared between Imperial Russia and the combined forces of France, Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire, Father Sergei volunteered to serve as a chaplain in the Russian army.
The young priest’s military ascendants were not lost on the Russian military authorities. Although the regiments marching to the Crimea already had regimental priests, it was decided that young Sergei Petrovich would be an excellent assistant priest for units likely to be in the heat of combat. Assigned to the Iakoutsk Regiment, Father Sergei dutifully trudged through the dust of the Crimea to Sebastapol, where the British and French had landed in September with the hated Turks to steal the seaport from Mother Russia. As the Russians built up their forces in the Crimea, the Allies closed in on Sebastapol, putting the city under siege. Before the Iakoutsk Regiment arrived, their comrades in the 10th and 12th Divisions manage to capture some of the British redoubts and open the Woronstov Road in the Battle of Balaclava on October 25th. On the next day, Russian forces skirmished to the right of the Allied siege line, a small battle that was in fact a probe to explore the chance of breaking the Allied siege once and for all.
His arrival in Sebastapol was bittersweet for Father Sergei. Two of his older brothers were already there, his brother Kolya a Captain in the Ingermanland Laandski Hussars and his brother Nikolai – breaking the family’s cavalry tradition – a lieutenant in the Sevski Infantry Regiment. In the Battle of Balaclava, the Ingermanland had clashed with the crack British cavalry of the Heavy Brigade and had come out much the worse. Kolya had been seriously wounded; when Sergei came to see him in the crowded hospital, he almost did not recognize him. His handsome older brother, smiling and elegant in the tall light blue shako and yellow braided blue jacket of the Ingermanland, had been replaced by a gaunt stranger wrapped in stained bandages, whose forced smile and sweat-rimmed brow betrayed the gravity of his injuries. After sitting with his brother for hours, Father Sergei returned to his regiment with the army surgeon’s assurances of “we are doing all that we can” bringing him scant comfort.
In the first week of November, Prince Menshikov gave the order for the attack that the Russians hoped would break the Allied grip on Sebastapol. On November 5th, four Russian columns marched forward, with the goal of capturing Cossack Mountain and driving the Allies back into the sea. The 16,000 troops in Pavlov’s column – Father Sergei included - were supposed to link up with the 19,000 men in Soimonov’s column and launch a coup de main on the British position while one other column launched a diversionary attack and another column kept the French from intervening. Emblematic of the problems facing the Little Father’s forces, the attack ran into trouble from the start. Coming to the Tchernaya River, Pavlov’s forces found the bridge was unpassable, and two precious hours were spent repairing it. As a consequence, when Soimonov’s attack went in, it was without the support of Pavlov’s men. The red-coated Englishmen, who despite the earlier skirmishing had done little to strengthen their line, were able to move troops up and despite heroic efforts Soimonov’s men were driven back in disarray. Pavlov’s troops, coming up ravines leading from the river, attacked through the remnants of Soimonov’s units. The Borodino and Taroutine regiments led the attack, pushing the British back from a position they called the Sandbag Battery. The redcoats counter-attacked and pushed the Russians back. Pavlov responded by ordering forward the Iakoutsk regiment, along with the Okhotsk and Selenghinsk regiments. Wearing a Cross of St. Nicholas on his chest, Father Sergei marched forward with the muzhiks of the Iakoutsk, straight into the jaws of the bear.
As the Russian regiments moved forward, they marched into what seemed like hell on earth. The redcoats, whose Minie rifles outranged the percussion muskets of the hapless Russians, showered Pavlov’s men with the Devil’s rain. For the rest of that long, doleful day the troops moved back and forth, the Russians advancing into rifle and musket fire, nearly breaking through the British line only to meet English and then French reinforcements, being pushed back, rallying and attacking again. In the clouds of smoke and dust, Father Sergei ministered to the wounded and prayed for the dying. The battalions of the Iakoutsk fought, retired, rallied and fought again. By the end of the day, the dead of the regiment were so numerous that they were piled like sheaves in a cornfield. At one point, as Father Sergei was kneeling over a wounded man, wrapping a bandage around his bleeding arm, an Englishman emerged from the smoke and stood not two metres away, bayoneted rifle pointing directly at the Russian priest. Father Sergei raised his empty hands. The Englishman had lost his hat and looked like a devil in his red coat, face smudged black with powder and eyes gleaming with frenzy. For a few eternally long seconds the muzzle of his gun stayed centered on the Russian priest; then, with a inhalation, he lowered his gun, stepped forward – and bayoneted the infantryman Father Sergei was caring for in the chest. Pulling out the bayonet with a sickening sound, the Englishman turned to vanish into the dust and smoke – but not before he raised his rifle and shot Father Sergei in the head.
As the shattered ranks of the Iakoutsk limped back to the redoubts around Sebastapol, the muzhiks knew two things – the enemy was the Devil, and Father Sergei was a Saint. Truly, how else except for the intervention of God had the priest not died? Even though a son of a dog Englishman had shot a priest in the head at short range, God the Father had pushed the bullet aside, so that although Father Sergei has a viscous looking gouge in his scalp above his left ear – a scar that he would carry for all his days – and a ringing headache, he was otherwise alive and well. As for Father Sergei, he had much to think about.
Six days after the Battle of Inkerman, Kolya’s injuries got the better of him, and he died in the over-crowded and squalid hospital. The senior priest of the Iakoutsk presided at the simple military funeral, Father Sergei – his head wrapped in bandages – standing silent and red-eyed at the grave of his beloved older brother. For the rest of the long, painful siege Father Sergei continued to minister to the Czar’s soldiers and to the people of Sebastapol, working for eighteen hours a day while the Allied siege artillery rained devastation and death on the city. When the French captured a key battery in June of 1855, Nikolai’s company, marching back from a night in the trenches, launched a hasty and successful counter-attack led by General Khzulev that re-took the battery at a cost of 105 of the 138 men in the company. One of them was Nikolai. His left arm was shattered by a French bullet and had to be amputated, but fortunately Nikolai rallied and survived both the wound and the amputation. Father Sergei was in the hospital visiting Nikolai when Baron Osten-Saken, the commander of 4th Corps, pinned the St. George Cross to Nikolai’s breast.
The siege dragged on and on, the Allied shelling becoming more and more intense as their supply lines were more firmly established, including having a railway that brought the Allied guns plentiful stores of ammunition. Russian morale crumbled, especially when Admiral Nakhimov, the energetic and popular commander of Sebastapol, was killed by a sniper’s bullet on June 28th. On August 27th, a massive Allied attack took the Malakoff redoubt, making Sebastapol’s defenses untenable, and the city fell. Father Sergei stayed in the city, ministering to the injured and the faithful, as the British and French soldiers marched in.
As to the other members of the clan Chevitch, Sergei’s oldest brother, Vladamir, a Major in a Guard Cuirassier regiment, did not see active service, while his next oldest brother Grigori, a Captain in the Moscow Dragoons, sustained a minor injury when an Englishman shot his helmet off his head with a well-aimed pistol in the debacle at Eupatoria, where the Russian cavalry was again routed.
By February of 1856 both sides had decided that enough was enough. Russia was exhausted, and the Allies realized that further gains were unlikely to be worth the cost; as well, they had accomplished their goal, at least in the eyes of the Russians, of humbling Mother Russia before the hated Turks. The troops marched out and negotiations began, ending in Russian humiliation in the Treaty of Paris signed in March of 1856.
At the end of the war, Father Sergei was still in Sebastapol, having been awarded a St. George’s Cross for his heroic work. Although he was physically well, it was a very different Father Sergei who returned to the family estate and to the Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra than the naïve, kindly youth who had left it. He had become a grim and thoughtful man, one given to long silent spells that could be mistaken for melancholy, whose head wound would ache when the weather turned wet and whose forgiving nature had been replaced with a burning desire to find a way for God’s favour to return to Mother Russia. A hero of the war, he could have any posting he wanted, and it was with some bewilderment that he was granted his request to be posted to the convent-monastery of St. Nicolas the Miracle-Worker in the distant Omsk Eparchy.
The long and torturous journey to the monastery in the western portion of Siberia only confirmed Father Sergei’s conviction that this was the right move. After the long train ride to the city of Omsk – seat of the Governor-General of Western Siberia – there was a long ride to St. Nicolas by wagon, sunny days riding over the steppe and then stretches of dark, forbidding forests, forests echoing the mood of the brooding priest. Father Sergei had been devoting his considerable intellect and his new-found zeal to the fundamental question, how to find means to return God’s favour to Mother Russia.
His arrival at the remote and rustic monastery was, to say the least, understated. Although the Abbot was very honoured to have a war hero and scholar as a resident priest, the monastery’s means were very modest. Still, there was a small crowd of monks to greet Father Sergei as well as locals from the neighbouring village, accompanied by a dozen motley Siberian Cossacks in stained white tunics and red-crowned hats. Father Sergei quickly settled into a quiet routine, spending much of his time reading and thinking, walking in the woods near the monastery and talking with both the monks and the local populace. His medical experience, gathered from working with wounded soldiers and the people of Sebastapol, was invaluable for a village and religious community with no doctor. He began to hold clinics, first once weekly and then more often as word of the healing holy man spread through the district.
One of his conversations with an elderly monk, Brother Valentin, who was in charge of the monastery’s extensive gardens, changed everything. Brother Valentin – who preferred to be called by his diminutive, Valya – had learned a great deal in six decades of facing the challenges posed to agriculture by the harsh climate of the Omsk Eparchy, where summers were 30 degrees Centigrade and winters –40. He and Father Sergei were talking about God’s hand in biology when Valya described his observations about pea plants.
“You know, Sergei Petrovich, not all things are created equal.” The old monk raised a gnarled hand to reverently touch a pea plant. “Look at these simple plants. Even they are not equal. The yellow seeds dominate the green seeds.” Father Sergei stopped and turned his head, asking Valya to explain what he meant. Valya then described his work with the pea plants, including more than a decade of carefully planned experiments, which demonstrated beyond question that many of the characteristics of the plants did not occur by random chance, but were controlled by heredity. This appreciation struck Father Sergei like a thunderclap. Thanking the elderly monk, he hurried back to his cell with Brother Valentin’s decades worth of careful notes, where he mediated for the next three days. When he emerged, he was a man transformed. The gloomy and thoughtful Father Sergei had been banished – the new Father Sergei was a man of dynamic action.
The first thing that Father Sergei did was to sit with the Father Abbott and have a long, long conversation about the insights God had given him and how St. Nicolas the Miracle-Worker was to be the vehicle for God’s instruments to do their work. The Father Abbott was old and sensible but also very pious – he recognized in Sergei the hand of God the Father, and he embraced the new mission for St. Nicholas and the monks and nuns therein. Very shortly, the monastery became a beehive of activity as new buildings went up, arcane chemicals and scientific equipment arrived and the clinic transformed from a side-line to one of Father Sergei’s main areas of interest. The news of the new activity at St. Nicholas wasted no time in going through the district, and soon long lines were forming at the clinic, the moreso when it became clear that Father Sergei was most interested in children and pregnant women.
The conversation that the Father Abbott and Father Sergei had with the sotnik commanding the company of Siberian Cossacks that compromised the local garrison took an unexpected turn. The sotnik, long overlooked for promotion and fond of vodka, kaska and salt pork, was very opposed to the ideas that the clergymen – especially that puffed-up little nobleman – had for his kazaks. After the priest finished talking, the sotnik leaned forward, his crumb-encrusted mustache sweeping over his cheeks and his sagging belly straining the fabric of his tunic, and began to pound the table, cursing and shouting. Abruptly, a startled look came over his ruddy face, his eyes squinted up – and he fell forward, dead as a stick. The two clergymen looked at each other and then the Father Abbott raised a finger heavenward. “Surely it is best not to contest God’s will.” So it was that the company’s young Starshy Uryadnik, Senior Sergeant, had both a quick promotion and a return to the religious fervor of his childhood, and with that profound changes also began in the little Cossack post.
Over the next five years the community of St. Nicholas worked, studied, prayed and grew – most especially grew. The birthrate, high even by Siberian standards, was supplemented by considerable movement of people and businesses to the burgeoning community. With this movement, the coffers of St. Nicholas filled – but were emptied just as quickly, to serve the community, the clinic and, most especially, the laboratories and training grounds that Father Sergei had built in a remote section of the monastery. Father Sergei’s studies into heredity had convinced him of two things, the importance of genetics and the equal importance of shaping the clay into the pot he wanted created. There were unfortunate things – terrible things, actually – that happened as Father Sergei used the clinic as his God-appointed laboratory. When they happened the priest paused, prayed, and moved on,
While the work at St. Nicholas was continuing, Father Sergei was also making sure that the molding was taking place. The children born at the monastery’s growing hospital all were provided with free education, not something that an illiterate muzhik would turn down. Promising boys were directed into one of three streams, the priesthood and academia, skilled trades or to the Cossack post, where the sotnik anointed by God had initiated a rigorous training program. Not blind to the world beyond, Father Sergei had paid for three of the most promising Prikazny to visit the military academies of Prussia, Austria-Hungary and their old enemies France and Great Britain, even traveling across the water to the United States. The young Cossacks were polite, well mannered, and sponges who absorbed all they could about modern warfare and military education and returned to put this to practical use. This was especially useful in that the boys coming in for training were bigger, smarter, stronger and much, much tougher than any recruits the veteran Cossacks had ever seen. An additional huge asset, underappreciated at the time, was the elderly Chinese gentleman who arrived one day at the gates of St. Nicholas to see the Holy Man. A convert to Christianity, Huang Ying had been working as a merchant on the Russian side of the Siberian border when he had heard the news about St. Nicholas. He decided that this was his call from God – in this case, to introduce to the young kazaks a thing called martial arts.
Thus, when the war clouds again gathered over Mother Russia, Father Sergei and his anointed were ready. For two years the Russians and Ottomans had engaged in fruitless negotiations, while revolts in the Ottoman Empire were suppressed with increasing brutality. In April of 1877, Mother Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire, and for the second time in two decades Russian and Turk marched to the drums.
As the Russian army crossed the Danube and drove into Turkish territory, Father Sergei and a company of Siberian Cossacks left St. Nicholas for the front. Quietly building up the garrison, the little post actually had three times as many Cossacks under arms as would have been expected. As well, some of the considerable wealth coming into the monastery had provided the soldiers with the finest arms to be had anywhere. This gave the priest ample volunteers and equipment to put together a 100-man company of his newly trained kazaks- the toughest, smartest and most deadly Cossacks ever to take to the field.
By the time that Father Sergei and his little command arrived in Bulgaria, the war was hot and heavy. The Turkish defenses at Plevna were soaking up every soldier that the Russian high command could throw at them, while elsewhere Russian troops were moving forward. When the Siberians arrived at the crossings over the Danube, they presented the over-stretched Russian operations officers with a dilemma. Although the Siberians were part of the forces of Holy Mother Russia, no one had ordered them to deploy to the Balkans. Therefore, no one had any clue as to where to put them. Sometimes, though, one problem solves another. As the Podkhorunzhy in charge of Father Sergei’s troopers waited patiently in the office of the overworked staff Major told to deal with them, an urgent request arrived from General Radetzky, commanding the Russian forces holding Shipka Pass, for reinforcements. With Osman Pasha’s skillful defense of Plevna consuming Russian troops faster than they could march down from the Danube, there were no spare troops to shore up the critical defenses at the pass, beyond with Suleiman Pasha was massing units for a third attempt to break through. Looking up at the handsome young Cossack, the Major dashed off a quick note. “Congratulations, Podkhorunzhy – you can visit the picturesque mountains in Shipka Pass.”
Father Sergei’s command clattered up to the Pass just as General Radetzky was surveying his defenses and bemoaning his lack of troops – just 8,000 of them facing off against at least 35,000 tough Turkish infantry. The news that there were some reinforcements, even a few, raised morale among the muzhiks manning the trenches and stone walls commanding the Pass. They did, though, provide the General with an interesting tactical problem. A few minute’s talk and a quick inspection convinced the veteran Russian commander that his new troops were superlative light cavalry – but the question was, how to use excellent light cavalry to defend a mountain pass? As he was brooding over the question, Father Sergei appeared at his elbow. As if he had been reading his mind, the scarred priest answered his question. “Wondering where to use my men, General? If you want my advice – send them out there.” He pointed past the defenses. “Let my wolves range freely.” The General smiled – and took the priest at his word.
Over the next several days, Father Sergei’s kazaks filtered out of the defenses in the evening, building hides and shelters and taking careful note of the Turkish preparations for the attack to come. On September 13th, the Turkish guns began to bombard the Russian positions. The shelling continued until the 17th, when Suleiman Pasha nodded to his Chief of Staff –and the attack began.
It was an unmitigated disaster, due to Radetzky’s carefully laid out defenses, the power of modern ordnance, the stubborn nature of the muzhiks in the Russian trenches – and to Father Sergei’s wolves. While the Turkish infantry were battering themselves against the Russian positions, the kazaks were busy. Half of the Cossacks busied themselves by eroding the Turkish attackers – sniping officers and sergeants from their concealed hides, watching their carefully planted charges rip apart whole files of Ottoman blue jackets, launching small sharp counter-attacks on the flanks that wiped out whole platoons of Turks while leaving no Cossacks behind. The other half of the wolves took advantage of the fact that every head in the enemy army was directed towards the Pass to move deeper and deeper into the heart of the Turkish army. There, they launched the cruelest of strikes. They planted charges that ripped apart marching columns of Turkish reinforcements on roads that should have been safe. They removed artillery observers, leaving the Ottoman batteries firing blind. No courier or staff officer was safe; the kazaks intercepted dozens of urgent orders, in one case playing a cruel trick. The Podkhorunzhy – who among his many talents wrote and spoke Turkish – re-wrote an order and, dressed in a red fez and short blue jacket “borrowed” from a courier, gave it to a Colonel commanding a reserve brigade. In obedience to the forged order, the Turkish infantry dutifully marched onto a low ridge and halted – according to the order, “to await further instructions”, in actual fact in perfect view and ideal range of two batteries of Russian field guns, who speedily reduced a strong combat brigade to tatters. Their final trick was the capture of a Turkish reserve battery, which had just deployed to support the faltering assault on the ridge. Just as the Turkish gunners were wheeling their pieces forward, two dozen kazaks broke from the bushes. The fighting was intense, lethal and short – all the gunners were killed for the cost of four of Cossacks wounded, one seriously. Ordering the injured to be cared for, the Podkhorunzhy directed the remaining Cossacks as they turned the Krupp field guns around – and began to shell, with painful Prussian accurary, the Ottoman army. A trio of shells burst around Suleiman Pasha’s staff, wounding the Turkish commander and killing most of his staff. As the dazed Ottoman commander pulled himself to a sit, he heard screaming, wailing, and the cry that “All is lost.” Before he could gather his reduced staff, the word had gone out to the army that the commander was dead – and the army broke. Watching the Turks stream backwards, a grimly smiling Radetzky ordered his reserves forward – and launched the counter-attack that shattered the Turkish army. The Turkish remnants – roughly 10,000 troops out of an army of 30,0000 – regrouped south of the Pass, while Radetzky’s Russians celebrated their victory. Father Sergei held a Mass for his Cossacks – attended by many other Russian troops – where they mourned the handful of dead kazaks and thanked the Holy Father for the victory. After the Mass, General Radetzky shook the priest’s hand, having already sent the letter to St. Petersburg that would eventually result in Father Sergei being awarded The Order of St. Andrew the First Called, the highest honour awarded in Imperial Russia. The General shook his head. “You were right, Holy Father. Your wolves did a great service for Mother Russia – now I must ask them to do more.”
So it was that Father Sergei and his Siberian Cossacks re-fitted, re-equipped themselveas and made the ride from Shipka Pass to Plevna. While the Russians had been winning great glory in the mountain passes, at Plevna Osman Pasha, the wily Ottoman commander, had been bleeding the Russian and Romanian forces white as he beat back attack after attack on his well fortified and tenaciously defended positions. When the Cossacks arrived at Plevna in early October, the overall commander of the Russian and Romanian army, Prince Carol, had decided that frontal attacks had filled enough graves, and he directed the veteran Russian general Eduard Ivanovich Todleben, an old name from the Crimean War, to put Plevna under siege. It was with considerable enthusiasm that General Todleben learned of the coming of Father Sergei’s wolves. Over the next several weeks, the wiry Cossacks took the lead in encircling the city, scouting ahead, guiding attacks on outposts, ambushing would-be ambushers and finding concealed routes for the troops following them, with the result that by end of October Plevna was ringed by a circle of steel. It was also the skills of the Siberians that detected Osman Pasha’s attempt to break out on December 9th. Alerting their fellow Russians, the warnings of the kazaks resulted in the Turkish troops, who had exited their defenses in silence on the evening of the 9th, finding that their attack at dawn did not fall on sleepy Russian sentries but rather on trenches full of ready and waiting infantry, supported by well supplied and well sited batteries. The bloody collapse of the Turkish assault – in which Osman Pasha, heart and soul of the Ottoman defense, was wounded – was followed by a swift surrender.
For the remainder of the campaign, Father Sergei and his Siberians were at the fore-front of the Russian advance, so that by the end of January, 1878 the kazaks were watering their horses in San Stefano, a scant eleven kilometers from Constantinople, when news came that a peace treaty had been signed and the war was over. Father Sergei and his Cossacks, reduced to thirty fit kazaks with fifteen wounded, made their way back to Siberia through cheering crowds of Russian soldiers, their breasts covered with medals.
Success does not come without a cost. The war had brought fame to Father Sergei and St. Nicholas, but also the attention of jealous rivals. Comments were made in high circles, insinuations that the success of the Siberians had been due to dark deeds done in unholy ways. While Father Sergei and the monks and nuns of St. Nicholas ignored the comments and went about their work, the rumours circulated higher and higher until they could be ignored no longer. As Father Sergei was a hero and a priest – holder of the Cross of St. George and The Order of St. Andrew the First Called – any investigation needed to be conducted at the highest level. Thus it was that, in the summer of 1880, Marcarius the First, Metropolitan of Moscow, made the long journey to Omsk to determine the truth of things.
Marcarius was, in addition to being Metropolitan of Moscow and head of the Russian Orthodox Church, an accomplished scholar, in his youth having gone from being a student at the Kiev Ecclesiastical Academy to its Dean in ten short years. His work on Orthodox theology, most famously as published in the Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, was a standard text for students across Mother Russia. His most recent scholarly work, on the history of the Russian Church, had caused him to think long and hard on religion and the nature of God’s Will. Thus, he was superbly prepared to address the complex task awaiting him in distant Omsk.
So it was with some anticipation that the Metropolitan sat in his carriage as it bounced across the Siberian steppe towards St. Nicholas, five bored Guard Cossacks riding as escorts. He was mildly surprised when, tens of kilometers from the monastery, three kazaks in the baggy white tunics and red-topped fleece caps of Siberian Cossacks met them. The Prikazny in charge was almost apologetic when he explained that the wealth attracted to St. Nicholas has also attracted the attention of the mobs of bandits who roamed the Siberian steppe, and that the Father Abbott had asked them to ensure that the Metropolitan had safe passage. The comments made by the Guard Cossacks were brief, uncomplimentary and ignored by the Siberians.
The attack that followed an hour later put the comments made by the Guard Cossacks into context. As the little convoy passed through a stand of pines, twenty-plus ragged bandits rose from a shallow depression and charged them. Ten more emerged from the trees to attack the Russians from behind. In the first volley, three of the Guard Cossacks went down; the Siberians, senses keenly attuned, managed to avoid the poorly aimed fire from the bandits. Firing their carbines with preternatural skill, the kazaks dropped eleven of the bandits before they closed in. When it came to hand-to-hand combat, the bandits did not appreciate that, against Father Sergei’s wolves, the advantage of numbers was no advantage at all. Pulling out their shashkas, the Siberians engaged in a dance of death that left the bandits looking like they had attacked some sort of bipedal death machines. Watching their comrades fall, the bandits at the edge of the pack took to their heels. At this point, only one of the Guard Cossacks was still alive, and he was injured in the left arm. One of the Siberians was dead, victim of a lucky thrust by a bandit, and the Prikazny had several slash wounds on his chest. The remaining kazak retrieved his carbine and, in an incredible display of markmanship, dispatched the eight remaining bandits with well-aimed bullets as they tried to flee. The Prikazny limped to the ornate couch and fell on one knee. “Holiness, I regret this inconvenience, but God has given us victory.”
The encounter with the bandits and his subsequent visit to St. Nicolas the Miracle-Worker convinced the scholarly Metropolitan that the Hand of God was at work. While theology was orthodox and thus unchanging, his studies of the history of the Church had convinced him that in fact the Church was not, and that in this case the change was the Will of God. His return to Moscow – and his elevation of Father Sergei to Bishop – was accompanied by the diversion of considerable resources to the Omsk Eparchy. It was shortly thereafter that the Alexander III, Czar of the Russias, Grand Duke of Finland and King of Poland, announced the creation of a new Cossack Host, the Cossacks of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker.
In distant Omsk, the newly ordained Bishop raised his eyes to God. It was time to avenge the Crimea – time to work God’s will – time for the Czar of the Russias and all the world.