This article deals with the problem of contemporary Cossack identities, and discusses the question of popular support for the Kuban Cossack organisation in the southern Russian region, Krasnodar krai. In the early 1990s the Cossack movement gathered between 3.5 and 5 million people, and constituted a significant political movement in post-Soviet Russia. Today, the movement’s political force has weakened. In this article it is argued that one important reason for this is the tension between the urban based, official Cossack politics, and the constructions of Cossack identity in rural Cossack settlements (stanitsas). It is further argued that this tension is produced by the Cossacks’ historically changing relation towards the state.
Notes
1It is not unproblematic to refer to the diversified branches of Cossack organisations as one movement. I have chosen to adopt this, somewhat simplified notion, first and foremost because my informants operate with the unified conception of the Cossack organisation. For them, the Cossack movement is a membership organisation the activities of which revolve around the Cossack identity. They do not distinguish between the political positions of the different branches. Secondly, the various organisations are indeed united in the common project of revitalising the Cossack identity in military, social and cultural terms. Therefore, in this article, I will use ‘Cossack movement’ when I refer to the phenomenon in national politics, and the concept of ‘Cossack organisation’ when referring to ‘Rada’, the dominating Cossack organisation in Krasnodar krai.
2Krasnodar krai is situated on the southern border of Russia, north-west of the Caucasus Mountains, on the eastern shores of the Black Sea. The Cossacks of that area get their name from the largest river in the region, the Kuban River. They were perceived as one of the most powerful Cossack hosts (army units) in Russia.
3The Russian word stanitsa means large village, and is associated with Cossack settlements. The name of the settlement is fictive, because of the politicisation of the Cossack issue in the region.
4The main fieldwork was conducted from March to September 2000. During this period, I stayed with a married couple in their early thirties, and their child, in the stanitsa. My host worked as my ‘guide’, i.e. translator, door-opener and interlocutor. We mostly visited people at home, drinking tea and talking, as well as participating in public ceremonies and events, funerals, weddings and farewell parties for young men headed for military service. I had two years of Russian studies before the fieldwork, and my interviews and conversations with people were conducted in Russian. The local dialect, however, was a challenge and here my guide contributed with translation. As door-opener, and local ‘native’, my assistant’s help was of vital importance to my fieldwork. I conducted four weeks of additional fieldwork at the same location in 2003, and had shorter visits during 2004. Quotes in this article derive from conversations as part of anthropological fieldwork observations.
5I will use the term ‘Cossack descendant’ when referring to people who trace their origins to Cossack families but who are not organised/no longer active in the Cossack organisation.
6Today, there are few of the Greek population left in the stanitsa; they were all gathered one night under Stalin’s repression, and were either killed or exiled. Only a handful of these have returned to the stanitsa, and a large part of the Greek population chose to migrate to Greece after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
7After serfdom was abolished in Russia in 1861, peasants were offered land in the new conquered territories.
8A khata is a little, single storey house consisting of two small rooms. Usually one room is used as a kitchen, the other as a living room and bedroom.
9 Who speaks is also of importance, but any local inhabitant, who has lived in the stanitsa for a while, is able to reproduce general features of the representations of the Soviet and Cossack past.
10The rhetorical comparisons are made explicitly in statements such as ‘earlier we had … , now we have not’, as well as implicitly.
11 Zhestkii can be translated in various ways, including ‘tough’ and ‘hard’. I have chosen ‘rigid’ to translate this concept, but the word also refers to a kind of brutality.
12In Russian, as in many of the European languages, the pronoun ‘you’ has two forms: ‘vy’ (polite) and ‘ty’ (informal). The different uses of ‘ty’ and ‘vy’ depend on the definition of the situation. Factors like relational closeness, formal or informal situations, age of the communicators, social and professional positions and so on, will influence the choice of words. The uses of ‘vy’ and ‘ty’ thus reveal a great deal of the social universe of the Russians. Today, children address their parents, and sometimes their grandparents, with ‘ty’.
13Snapping fingers near one’s neck is the general sign meaning ‘drunk’, but also signifies the act of drinking vodka irrespective of the actual condition of the drinkers.
14As we have seen from the different perspectives in academic writings on Cossacks, history is always positioned and my analysis is no exception. This account highlights the processes of external categorisation of the state in the construction of the Cossack idea, instead of for instance, focusing on interethnic relationships. This does not imply that other processes are irrelevant for the trajectory of the Cossack category, but that they are of less importance for the argument presented.
15The etymological origins of the word kazak remain far from resolved. In his book, Longworth claims that the word stems from Turkish, and probably again, was borrowed from Arabic where it means ‘soldier nomad’. In Russian/Polish language contexts, he argues, the word was extended to signify ‘wandering soldier’, ‘adventurer’, ‘man without permanent work or residence’, ‘trader of the steppes’ and ‘contract worker’. If we choose to lean on Longworth’s argument, the word originally seems to be tied to manhood and a specific way of life (Longworth Citation1969).
16The Zaporozhian military camp, Sich, around the river Dnepr in the seventeenth century could be described as a miniature state (see Grannes & Heraldstveit Citation1994). The Zaporozhian Cossacks’ greater political ambitions can be read from the fact that they chose to support the Swedish king against Peter the Great at the battle of Poltava.
17See Seaton (Citation1985). The most renowned in the Russian branch are the Don Cossacks who traditionally had their areas around the river Don. In the Ukrainian group, the Zaporozhian Cossacks are the most famous, having their settlements around the Dnepr River.
18The Zaporozhian Cossacks from the area around the Dnepr formed a considerable part of the host. Their military settlement, Sich, was destroyed by the troops of Catherine the Great in 1775, and legend has it that they sent their representatives to Moscow to ask her permission to settle in the newly conquered area around the Kuban river. Permission was granted.
19The Zaporozhian Cossacks constituted a considerable part of the Kuban Cossacks, and this influence from Ukraine plays an important part in the building of the contemporary Cossack identity, as well as local identities in settlements where the local dialect is a mixture of the Russian and Ukrainian languages.
20In 1919, Lenin and Trotsky ordered a special campaign against the Cossacks. This red terror campaign called razkazachivanie (de-Cossackisation) was aimed at eliminating Cossacks and their counter-revolutionary activity (see Derluguian Citation1996).
21Curiously, after 10 years of identity politics to rehabilitate the Cossacks, I found that this Soviet category was still in use in the year 2000. In a local school exhibition of the stanitsa‘s past, the label ‘white bandits’ accompanied a photograph of Cossacks during the revolution.
23The category, ‘oppressed people’, has been used to denominate non-Russian minorities, who under Stalin, suffered deportations (see Lankina Citation1996).
22Another important institution for the promotion of Cossack traditions on a regional level is the Kuban Cossack Choir headed by Victor Zakharchenko. The choir has become a cultural representative for the region both in and outside Russia. Thus, despite a multi-ethnic composition of inhabitants in Krasnodar krai, the region is presented in the public sphere as the traditional homeland of the Cossacks.
24 Priezhye literally means ‘those who come travelling’. This category has replaced the older version ‘inogorodnyi’ (which was used in opposition to the Cossack category at the beginning of the century).
25 Korennoi mestnyj comprises the words, ‘place’ (mesto) and ‘root’ (koren’), and thus refers to a person who has her roots in that particular place; roots in the sense of ancestors.
26The House of Culture is an institution established during the Soviet times and was used as a means in the so-called ‘Soviet Cultural Construction’ that aimed at shaping the population according to the visions of the Soviet Union (see Grant Citation1995).
27The Cossack hosts would accept new male candidates that they considered to be worthy, regardless of Cossack ancestry or even ethnic origin. Even though the ‘new Cossack’ was often of Slavic origin there are examples of inclusion of Tatars, Kalmyks and different Caucasian people in Cossack communities. In addition, the Tsar established new Cossack groupings in newly conquered areas in need of defence, often including the original local population in this group (see Seaton Citation1985; Longworth Citation1969).
28The fact that since the 1990s, the Cossack organisation has experienced a problem of support among the rural Cossack descendants in Krasnodar krai does not reach the public channels and media. The phenomenon of diminishing local support has not been given attention in the scientific analysis produced on contemporary Cossackdom. This may be connected to the scientific method applied. If the data had been based on interviews with members of the organisation and public discourse as reflected in journals and newspapers, it would not have been possible to detect the tendencies discussed in this article. The tendencies, here, have been traced instead by the means of fieldwork.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09668130600926306
