Day: March 15, 2023

Haphazard Accusations:

Circassians Don’t Beg for a Certificate of Good Conduct from Russia

Adel Bashqawi

March 15, 2023

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Friday, March 10, 2023

Russia’s Two-Headed Eagle Came Not from Byzantium but from Golden Horde and the Tatars, New Kazan Study of Muscovy Says

Paul Goble

Staunton, Mar. 8 – In 1975, the Kazakh writer Olzhas Suleimenov stirred up a firestorm of criticism in Moscow for his book Az i Ya, which discussed the Turkic origins of the Russian chronicle, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign. Now a new book by Kazan authors about Mongol and Turkic elements in Muscovy threatens to do something similar. Read more →

Cossackia: A Potentially Powerful Bulwark Against Russian Imperialism

By: Paul Goble

March 14, 2023

Cossackia, the land east of Ukraine and north of the North Caucasus in the Russian Federation, is the traditional home of the three largest Cossack communities: the Don, Kuban and Terek hosts. As such, it has the potential to become a powerful bulwark against Russian imperialism, a defender of Ukraine and an ally of the West, its activists argue (T.me/Ertaul, March 11). But despite these very real prospects given the territory’s enormous natural wealth and geographic location astride the north-south and east-west trade routes Moscow has relied on to project power, Cossackia as a potential country remains more often a subject of dismissive laughter for the West than one that evokes serious attention. Three major reasons undergird this failure, and not one is justified.

First of all, many Western analysts remain not only Moscow-centric with regard to all communities outside the Russian capital but also prisoners of Hollywood and Soviet propaganda, in particular about the Cossacks. This propaganda blames the Cossacks for pogroms others ordered them to take part in and fails to pay much attention to the Soviet genocide of the Cossacks (Window On Eurasia, January 29, 2020; January 28). Second, those who know more about the Cossacks doubt that any Cossack state is possible due to the enormous diversity of the Cossack community and its geographic dispersion. As a result, they refuse to recognize the three largest hosts as predominant. And third, the West has not recognized that, in Putin’s Russia, two very different groups of people are referred to as Cossacks and that, following what happens to one group, mentions nothing about how that affects the other. Read more →