It is three years since Australian songstress Judith Durham took the Morningtown Ride. Dusty Springfield’s brother Tom followed soon afterwards.

Judith might not have been my teenage crush – that was Dusty – but The Seekers were a significant part of my adolescent soundtrack. Aussies were an exotic species back then in Britain, and to me, more associated with now-disgraced Rolf Harris with Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport and Sun Arise, but there was also Frank Ifield and Patsy Ann Noble. More Aussies followed them to Britain – the Easybeats and Bee Gees entering the pop charts soon afterwards, while soon to be famous actors, artists, authors and activists had already steamed back to Old England’s Shores and were busy making names for themselves.

The Seekers were “discovered” by Tom Springfield and were marketed as the new Springfields, the natural heirs to that wholesome folksey trio (he had written their greatest hits or adapted them from folk standards). When the Seekers folded in 1969, group member Keith Potger gave us the New Seekers, a bunch of pretty blonde Brits who most people now believe wanted to buy the world a coke! For trivia fans, that song was (spoiler alert!) the happy hippie  finale of that fabulous series Madmen.

The Seekers released their smash hit, the allegorical song of farewell The Carnival Is Over in 1965. It is forever associated with this well-loved trio, but Tom had actually based it on a traditional Russian song about a brutal Cossack rebel [read all about him below]. A natural linguist, he’d learned Russian whilst undergoing compulsory national service in the fifties. Apparently, those few conscripts who graduated from the Ministry of Defence’s Russian Language School as interpreters and translators were regarded as the crême de la crême of conscripts. Often, trainees would put on concerts of Russian songs and plays for their own amusement.

Stenka Razin

Tom Springfield borrowed the melody of The Carnival is Over from Stenka Razin a traditional folk tune set to music in the 19th Century by Dimitry Sadovnikov. It told the tale of a drunken seventeenth century Cossack rebel who threw his Persian bride of one night over the side of his boat into the Volga River when his men accused him of going soft. Tom changed the story entirely though he retained a nautical riff and cast the star-crossed lovers as the theatre characters Pierrot and Columbine rather than casting them overboard.

Tom’s song was an ironic mid twentieth century reimagining in which a tragic, violent and mythic saga of patriotism, loyalty, and patriarchal authority illustrative of national an revolutionary folklore was reinvented into wistful pop as a saccharine song of romance, emotion, loss, and a meditation on the impermanence – how the joys of love are fleeting. No such maudlin melancholy on the part of the preening old riverboat pirate. Over the side she goes!

The lyrics and the sentiment couldn’t have been more different:

From beyond the wooded island
To the riverbank he came,
On his breast he held a maiden,
And his comrades called her name.
Then he flung her to the waters,
Crying, ‘Thus I make my vow,
I will have no foreign woman
As a wife to me now.’

Say goodbye, my own true lover
As we sing a lovers’ song
How it breaks my heart to leave you
Now the carnival is gone
High above the dawn is waiting
And my tears are falling rain
For the carnival is over
We may never meet again

The shift from revolutionary folklore to wistful pop is emblematic of the 20th-century repurposing of folk traditions – filtering political anthems through modern, personal, and emotional frameworks. The lyrics and the sentiment couldn’t have been more different:

If you watch the hoary old Hammer horror film Rasputin, about the sinister Svengali who enchanted the last Czarina of Russia – portrayed herein by that eminent old frightener Christopher Lee – you will recognise the tune as a recurring leitmotif.

There is a clunky film reenactment of the story, sung by the famous Red Army Choir immediately below the Seekers‘ song.

The real Stenka Razin

“Stenka” is simply the affectionate or diminutive form of the Russian name Stepan, much as “Johnny” is for John. His full name was Stepan Timofeyevich Razin (c. 1630–1671), the Don Cossack leader who led one of the greatest popular uprisings in Russian history.

The historical Razin and the legendary Stenka quickly diverged.

Historically, Razin was a charismatic Don Cossack at a time when Muscovy was tightening its grip over the frontier. His revolt (1670–71) began as a Cossack expedition on the Caspian Sea, descended into piracy against Persian shipping, and then evolved into a vast peasant and Cossack rebellion against the Tsar’s officials, landlords, and the expanding system of serfdom. His forces captured major towns along the Volga, including Astrakhan, Saratov, and Samara, and for a time seemed capable of threatening Moscow itself. Eventually, however, the rebellion was crushed. Razin was betrayed, captured, taken to Moscow, and publicly executed in 1671 by drawing and quartering.

In folklore, however, he became Stenka Razin, the Robin Hood-like champion of the oppressed and the embodiment of Cossack freedom. Songs, poems, and legends transformed him into a larger-than-life figure who defied both Tsar and aristocracy. The most famous of these is the nineteenth-century folk song borrowed by Tom Springfield (also known as “From Beyond the Island to the Midstream” or Iz-za ostrova na strezhen).

Whether this episode ever happened is highly doubtful. Most historians regard it as legend rather than fact. Yet it became inseparable from Razin’s popular image, inspiring paintings, operas, and one of Russia’s earliest narrative films (1908).

Orlando Figes’ The Story of Russia, gives Razin an important part in the recurring Russian pattern of revolt against autocracy. He was the first in a line of great Cossack rebels that included Kondraty Bulavin (1707–08), Yemelyan Pugachev (1773–75), who claimed to be Peter III during Catherine the Great’s reign, and, in a very different way, later revolutionary movements. In Russian memory, these figures symbolize the perennial tension between the centralized state – the “Holy Tsar” – and the fiercely independent frontier spirit of the Cossacks.

In that sense, Stenka Razin is not merely a historical rebel. Like Robin Hood in England or William Wallace in Scotland, he became a national folk hero whose legend often overshadowed the man himself.

The Cossacks

The word Cossack derives from the Turkic term qazaq (Kazakh: qazaq), meaning “free man,” “wanderer,” “adventurer,” or “one who lives independently of established authority.” Long before it became associated with the frontier warriors of Russia and Ukraine, it described those who had left settled society to seek freedom on the open steppe. The same linguistic root gives rise to the name of the Kazakhs, although the Kazakh people and the Cossacks evolved into quite different historical communities. The name itself captures the essence of the Cossack ideal: men who lived by their own laws on the frontier, owing allegiance first to their comrades and only later, and often reluctantly, to the state.

The Cossacks emerged from the vast frontier lands south and east of Muscovy between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their very name, from the Turkic qazaq, means “free man,” “wanderer,” or “adventurer.” They were not a distinct ethnic people but a frontier society, composed of escaped serfs, adventurers, displaced peasants, Tatars, and others who chose a life beyond the reach of princes and landlords.

They lived in self-governing military communities along the Don, Dnieper, Ural and Terek rivers, electing their own leaders (atamans) and priding themselves on their independence. As Orlando Figes observes, they existed “beyond the laws of the state,” inhabiting the liminal zone where settled civilisation gave way to the Eurasian steppe.

Yet the relationship between the Cossacks and the Russian state was always deeply ambivalent. They were at once rebels and servants. The same men who periodically rose in bloody revolt against the Tsar under leaders such as Stenka Razin and Yemelyan Pugachev were also employed as some of Russia’s finest irregular cavalry. In return for privileges, land and a degree of autonomy, they guarded the empire’s long southern frontier against the raids of the Crimean Tatars and Ottoman forces. Ironically, much of this frontier lay in what is today eastern and southern Ukraine, where the Cossacks were both defenders and colonists.

As the Russian Empire expanded, so too did the Cossacks. They rode with Yermak in the conquest of Siberia in the late sixteenth century, helped carry Russian rule across the Urals to the Pacific, established fortified settlements throughout the Caucasus, and became indispensable agents of imperial expansion into Central Asia. Wherever Russia’s frontier advanced, Cossack hosts were usually not far behind.

By the nineteenth century they had become both a romantic symbol of freedom and a feared instrument of imperial authority. Their cavalry distinguished itself in the Napoleonic Wars, but they also acquired notoriety for suppressing strikes, peasant uprisings and revolutionary demonstrations. The image of mounted Cossacks charging crowds with sabres became one of the enduring symbols of Tsarist repression.

The Revolution of 1917 split the Cossacks. Many remained loyal to the White armies during the Civil War, while others sided with the Bolsheviks. Stalin later pursued a policy of “de-Cossackisation,” treating them as a potentially disloyal military caste. Thousands were executed, deported or dispossessed, and many Cossack traditions were deliberately suppressed.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union there has been a striking revival of Cossack identity. Modern Cossack organisations celebrate their military heritage, religious devotion and patriotism, although they bear only an indirect relationship to the semi-independent frontier communities of earlier centuries. Under Vladimir Putin, many Cossack groups have been encouraged as auxiliaries to the state, policing demonstrations, patrolling borders, assisting the security services and providing volunteers for conflicts including Crimea, the Donbas and, more recently, the war in Ukraine. Once famed as men who lived beyond the state’s authority, many have become among its most visible defenders.

The Cossacks thus encapsulate one of the enduring paradoxes of Russian history: It is a story rich in irony. Forged in freedom, they became instruments of autocracy; champions of the frontier who helped build one of history’s greatest land empires; rebels against the Tsar who so often ended their days fighting for him. Their story mirrors Russia’s own: restless, expansive, contradictory, and forever balanced between independence and authority.

Read more about music in In That Howling Infinite in Soul Food – Music and Musicians, and for more about  Russia, Ukraine and the Soviet Union, see Russky Mir – Russian history’s long shadow

Stenka Razin – A Cossack who scared the tsar

The Carnival is Over 

Say goodbye, my own true lover
As we sing a lovers’ song
How it breaks my heart to leave you
Now the carnival is gone

High above the dawn is waiting
And my tears are falling rain
For the carnival is over
We may never meet again

Like a drum, my heart was beating
And your kiss was sweet as wine
But the joys of love are fleeting
For Pierrot and Columbine

Now the harbour light is calling
This will be our last goodbye
Though the carnival is over
I will love you ’til I die

Like a drum, my heart was beating
And your kiss was sweet as wine
But the joys of love are fleeting
For Pierrot and Columbine
Now the harbour light is calling

This will be our last goodbye
Though the carnival is over
I will love you ’til I die
Though the carnival is over
I will love you ’til I die

Stenka Razin

From beyond the wooded island
To the river wide and free
Proudly sailed the arrow-breasted
Ships of Cossack yeomanry.

On the first is Stenka Razin
With his princess by his side
Drunken holds in marriage revels
With his beauteous young bride.

From behind there comes a murmur
“He has left his sword to woo;
One short night and Stenka Razin
Has become a woman, too.”

Stenka Razin hears the murmur
Of his discontented band
And his lovely Persian princess
He has circled with his hand.

His dark brows are drawn together
As the waves of anger rise;
And the blood comes rushing swiftly
To his piercing jet black eyes.

“I will give you all you ask for
Head and heart and life and hand.”
And his voice rolls out like thunder
Out across the distant land.

Volga, Volga, Mother Volga
Wide and deep beneath the sun,
You have never such a present
From the Cossacks of the Don.

So that peace may reign forever
In this band so free and brave
Volga, Volga, Mother Volga
Make this lovely girl a grave.

Now, with one swift mighty motion
He has raised his bride on high
And has cast her where the waters
Of the Volga roll and sigh.

Now a silence like the grave
Sinks to all who stand and see
And the battle-hardened Cossacks
Sink to weep on bended knee.

“Dance, you fools, and let’s be merry
What is this that’s in your eyes?
Let us thunder out a chantey
To the place where beauty lies.”

From beyond the wooded island
To the river wide and free
Proudly sailed the arrow-breasted
Ships of Cossack yeomanry.