Yorkville enquirer. [volume] (Yorkville, S.C.) 1855-2006, 1921-05-24
"JoAN OF ARC OF UKRAINE"
Cossack Girl Leads Bands Agains
BoIsheviki.

| Cossack Girl Leads Bands Against
BoIsheviki.
Down on the Lower Dnieper, the
country where Mazeppa once hold
forth, there is a sort of Ukrainian Joan
of Arc. Her name is Marusha, she
is a sister of Machno, the Robin Hood
of those parts. She has an army OF
her own, she has faithful staff of
eight hundred around her and bolshe-
visit cornmissaries sing soft and low
when they reach the edge Of the great
forest to the south Of Kieff in which
Marusha has pitched her tent
Marusha is what the Cossacks call
q gainza, which corresponds in Rus
sian way to Cowgirl" in the Ameri-
can West. She is one of those slender
Cossack women, with the fire and
recklessness of the Slav, and the hard
realism of the Tartar. She knows that
she is good looking and that three
fourths of her power lies in her beau
ty. She, loves to play with her power
as child plays with a toy balloon.
She holds the string carelessly, but
she holds it and each of her eight hun
dred followers is bound to her service
with a. separate devotion.
This word picture of Narusha was
not easy to get. had to drag it out
of Col. Nicholas Cozakevitch, who
knows people who know Marusha.
Her story begins with Machno, her
brother. Machno is Of the Cossacks
who settled down to farming in the
I'big bend of the Dnieper below Ekater-
inoslav. His idea was that revolution
was TO make people free, not to saddle
them with tyrannical idea called boil
shevism. At the same time he saw
too much. of the old cZarism in the
ideas of Denikine and Wrangel to join
them. He found his fellow farming
Cossacks felt the same way about It,
so he became their leader in resisting
all comers.
The Taurida is enormous, fame can
not travel wide, and when Marusha
was separated from Machho she soon
found it was her name that conJured
in the villages. In time she rode fur
! ther,and further iysest, untN she; igot
to the country where Machno had
never been heard of.
Our young informant told us Maru-
t1I nj
kind to the peasants, who resist the
| intrusion of bolshevist commissarles
| under her direction. Vain and capri
cious she is, it goes without saying.
That is in the character Of the gainza.
and she is always the actress. He
told how she sulks and tyrannizes her
! followers, how she rides theatricaily
through the villages.
Cozakevitch had no enthusiasm for
Marusha. She and Machno had Great
ed customs of warfare that were dis
tressing to bunch Of fugitive Co.'S
sacks bound west.
"You see," said Cozakevitch, they
made our journey complicated. First
off. when we found ourselves stranded
at Yalta, our commander, General No
vikoy, decided we had to catch an iso-
lated detachment Of the red army, take
their documents and move off as If we
were they. That went all right, though
we had some trying ordeals. One day
we passed the opposite direction to the
| whole 18th red army on the Crlmean
claussee. The next day Il. Letrian di-
vision also passed us. If they had not
been in too big hurry they might
have discovered who we were.
"Once we were nearly done for. we
had made out papers to the town OF
Oushkovska, not knowing tie Bo'she-
wiki had renamed the town.
"The Twcnty-seventh Of November
| when the Bolshevists began to investi-
gate us they soon found that we were
trying to fool them. We made break
| for it. They followed with larger
| force. We fought back as we ran, and
soon we learned that the people of the
country were harrassng our pusuer5.
We cautiously questioned why
eve also belong to our greatest
protectrcss, Marusha. we were told.
at was the first time we had heard
of her, but VIC promptly acclaimed her
too. We learned where she was, and
gave her a wide berth. But we kept
hearing about her In the villages. II
| half they tell is true, the reds are
afraid Of her. and it was not until we
got nearly to Vosnesensk that we be-
gan to come upon communist commits
sarcs again. Marusha seems to con-
troll about half the country lying be-
tween Kieff and Odessa. To The west,
though, the Bolsheviki are strong.
More liberal rural credits and eX-
| tension Of the present six months re-
discount limit by the federal reserve
! fpt-