In modern Russia, the memory of the Cossacks is perpetuated in monuments and museum exhibitions; their culture and history are described in school textbooks, including specialized ones; some regions open special Cossack classes; and hundreds of social media groups discuss the history of the Cossacks. Central and regional authorities as well as Cossack organizations, both official and unofficial, take an active part in the politics of remembering the Cossacks. However, there are practically no specialized studies exploring memory politics regarding the Cossacks. Nevertheless, this topic deserves attention and careful analysis not only because a variety of intensive processes are taking place in this area, but also because this case has a number of specific features and allows one to take a fresh look at some dichotomies widely used in memory studies such as victim and heroic narratives, official and unofficial memory, and local and national memory politics.
In this article, we focus on analyzing the memory of the 20th century, primarily the violence that took place during that period, and its role in memory politics and Cossack identity in Southern Russia.1 Collective memory is always associated with group identity. However, the case of the Cossacks is unique as many questions about their group’s boundaries and status remain open. Who should be considered true Cossacks? Should it be only those who are commonly called “natural” Cossacks, that is, those who have Cossack ancestors, or everyone who has joined Cossack societies in recent years? Are Cossacks a separate nation or only a specific social group within the Russian nation, understood as an ethnic community? Is it possible to talk about the Cossacks of Russia, or, at least, about the Cossacks of Southern Russia, as a single group, or are there different groups, albeit with similar characteristics? Memory politics is directly related to attempts to assert certain answers to these questions.2
We will study the narratives of the Cossacks’ past, above all, the tragic chapters of the 20th century, as well as the institutions and actors involved in memory politics. In our research we rely on the analysis of museum exhibitions, and a number of memorials and memorial complexes. We also analyze textbooks and teaching guides that were and are published in Southern Russia and describe the history and culture of the Cossacks. An important source is our semi-structured expert interviews with researchers, faculty members and teachers, museum workers, and local administration officials.3 Some of the interviewees consider themselves “natural” Cossacks4 and are (or were) “Cossack revival” activists. The debates taking place among the Cossacks, primarily in social media—where there are more than 1,000 groups devoted to Cossacks in general, and where the past is the subject of active discussion—are a vast topic that requires special research methods.5 We will consider only those VKontakte network groups that have the largest number of users and analyze the ongoing discussions on the history of the 20th century.
Context
During perestroika and in the first half of the 1990s, various ethnic groups in Russia went through intensive political mobilization, which was largely based on the memory of past injustices, oppression, deportations, and other forms of repression that took place in both the Russian Empire and the Soviet state. On April 26, 1991, the RSFSR adopted a law on repressed peoples, which concerned ethnic groups deported in Soviet times. Strong emotions and expectations were raised by Articles 6 and 7 of that law, which proposed “territorial rehabilitation,” that is, the return to the affected peoples of the lands they lost during repressions. Ethnic mobilization processes were particularly vigorous in the southern regions of Russia, which in the early 1990s precipitated several armed conflicts that varied in scale, intensity, and duration.6
Significant changes occurred in the administrative map of the region: in 1991, Adygea was excluded from Krasnodar Krai to become a republic in its own right. The same happened to the Karachai-Cherkess Republic, previously part of Stavropol Krai. Almost all internal administrative borders in this region are controversial in one way or another. They changed as a result of deportations to other parts of the country carried out by the Soviet government during World War II, resettlement campaigns within the Caucasus region during the Civil War and after World War II, as well as numerous decisions made over the years in Moscow to change the borders of autonomous areas and their status. Each ethnic group in the region remembers the time when the borders of their autonomies were more beneficial to its members, and remembers the events that led to the loss of control over part of the territory that had previously belonged to them.
In this context, processes later named the “Cossack revival” gradually have developed in the south of Russia since the mid-1980s. The concepts of “revival” and “awakening” were used by national movements in Eastern and Central Europe in the 19th century, and then migrated into the works of historians who studied these movements in the second half of the 20th century.7 In the late USSR, the national revival of Slavic peoples was a popular topic of historical writings. From the viewpoint of first-generation “Cossack revival” activists, this concept was very suitable for the tasks of the movement as it put the Cossacks among the peoples and nations that were regaining their identity. Such borrowing should not be surprising, because most of the Cossack revival activists during perestroika and in the early 1990s were urban intellectuals who kept the memory of the Cossack roots. Many of them were people who had majored in history or taught history. Specialists studying this process adopted the notion of “revival” from the Cossack movement activists. It remains in use by activists and researchers to this day, and, taking into account the above reservations, we will also use it, without quotation marks, but being fully aware of its conventionality.
Cossack activists sought to declare the rights of the Cossacks as a special people and put them on a par with other “repressed peoples” of Russia. The presidential decree of June 15, 1992, and the resolution of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation of July 16, 1992, extended many provisions of the 1991 law on the rehabilitation of repressed peoples to the Cossacks, spoke about Cossacks as a historically rooted sociocultural group, but did not recognize them as a special people. The authorities viewed Cossacks as a social group with certain cultural characteristics. For most Cossacks, the choice between the status of a separate people and that of a special social group amounts to being recognized as part of the Russian people or not being recognized as such, which clearly makes the question of identity and status particularly acute and complex.8 On the one hand, the authorities cannot stay indifferent to the Cossacks’ desire as a group to separate themselves from the Russian people, while on the other hand, the authorities remain constantly wary of grassroots Russian nationalism as a potential base for political opposition (Kolstø 2016). We will talk about the significance of this complex combination of factors in the conclusion.
The first half of the 1990s was a time of grassroots Cossack activism, which more than once led to conflicts with the authorities. The first wave of researchers’ attention to the topic of Cossack revival dates back to that time. Their interest was logically focused on the Cossacks living in Southern Russia, because this is where the three largest Cossack hosts (Don, Kuban, and Terek) had their lands in tsarist times, and because this is where Cossack activism was most noticeable (Skinner 1994; Derluguian and Cipko 1997; Tabolina 1999; Kozlov 1995).
We will also focus on three regions of Russia in the south, namely Rostov Oblast, Krasnodar Krai, and Stavropol Krai. In all these regions, Cossacks play an important role in memory politics; in Krasnodar Krai and Rostov Oblast, regional authorities are trying to make the Cossack theme a key element of regional identity. These three neighboring and geographically large southern regions are also the most populated—in total, about 10% of Russia’s population lives there.9 The size of the regions matches the resources that the regional administrations have to carry out cultural and educational policies, including memory politics. These regions have significant resources and pursue very active memory politics.
The population of these regions is ethnically quite diverse, but at the same time, according to the 2010 census, Russians make up more than 80% of all residents in all three regions. These regions are located on the border of Russia, and the importance of this factor has increased significantly after the collapse of the USSR. Rostov Oblast is adjacent to the state border with Ukraine, specifically to that part of it where the unrecognized Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics appeared after 2014, and where intensive fighting has been going on since 2022. Krasnodar Krai shares a border with Abkhazia and is connected to Crimea by a newly built bridge. However, the frontier position of the three regions is determined not only by these circumstances. First, these lands were conquered by the Russian Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, and their border location necessitated the presence of Don, Kuban, and Terek Cossack hosts there.
Second, Krasnodar and Stavropol Krais are directly adjacent to a kind of internal border with a cluster of autonomous Caucasian republics, where the number of ethnic Russians has decreased by 75% after the disintegration of the Soviet Union (Sushchiy 2017). Currently, these regions are experiencing intense demographic pressure from the Caucasian republics with high birth rates. Alarmism associated with the demographic situation and migration from the Caucasian republics is felt most strongly in Stavropol Krai (Blakkisrud and Kolstø 2017).10 We will show the significance of this factor for memory politics regarding Cossacks below.
Actually, the territories historically populated by Don, Kuban, and, especially, Terek Cossacks do not match the modern borders of the regions. A significant part of the land previously owned by Terek Cossacks11 was confiscated shortly after the 1917 revolution and is now part of several Caucasian autonomous republics. Terek Cossacks can be considered a victim of the first deportations carried out by the Soviet government in 1918–21. Krasnodar Krai does not geographically match the historical lands of Kuban. There were almost no Cossacks in the Black Sea region (Novorossiysk, Anapa, Sochi, Tuapse). So, the equation of Krasnodar Krai to Kuban, clearly noticeable in the policy of regional authorities, is an exercise in imaginary geography in a bid to “pull” the concept of “Cossack land” over the entire region. The area of the Don Cossack Host and modern Rostov Oblast do not fit together either. It was not until 1888 that the city of Rostov itself became part of the Don Cossack Host, which also included some parts of present-day Volgograd and Astrakhan Oblasts. Nevertheless, the image of Ataman Platov, a hero of the War of 1812, is gradually turning into a calling card of the region: Rostov’s airport is named after him, monuments to him are installed in Rostov and a number of other cities in the region, and most of the monuments to the heroes of World War I also feature Cossacks rather than soldiers.
The task of “neutralizing” dangerous (in the eyes of the government) trends in the Cossack memory politics, which could have turned Cossacks into an opposition and even separatist force mobilized by ethnic origin and a victim historical narrative, was largely solved in the 1990s. In the second half of the 1990s, the authorities succeeded in transforming the official historical Cossack narratives to prioritize the topic of valor in serving the country, which was facilitated, among other things, by the outbreak, in 1994, of the first Chechen war that dramatically changed the lines of division and ethnic confrontation in Southern Russia. Although some Cossack leaders tried to make individual deals with Chechen separatists, most of the Cossacks allied with the authorities.
An important step in establishing control over the Cossack movement was the introduction of the State Register of Cossack Societies in the Russian Federation in accordance with a decree of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, dated August 9, 1995.12 Over time, the State Register of Cossack Societies covered most of the Cossacks who participated in the Cossack revival movement. Official Cossack societies were open to everyone, regardless of having Cossack roots, which undermined claims to the status of a special people. The registered Cossack society is officially built on the understanding that Cossacks only had the specific features of an individual ethnic group in the past, if at all. The most “correct” official position was stated by one expert as follows: “We have no Cossacks. All are citizens of the Russian Federation, and any person can participate, no one forbids this, but there are no people who would position themselves as having a kind of ethnicity. Someone can say that he has parents, grandfathers who are Cossacks, but there is no such identity at the first-person level.…In any case, I have not seen any such clearly defined claims. Maybe grandparents” [E-03-04].13
Having started with the State Register, the federal authorities are increasingly seeking to establish control over the Cossacks in order to transform them into an instrument of state power. In 2014, Article 4 of the Federal Law on the Service of the Russian Cossacks, adopted in 2005, was amended as follows: “Members of Cossack societies included in the State Register of Cossack Societies in the Russian Federation, who have assumed obligations to join the civil or other service, are obliged to suspend their membership in political parties or other public associations pursuing political goals, and may not join them or participate in their activities. The activities of political parties and other public associations pursuing political goals are not allowed in Cossack societies included in the State Register of Cossack Societies in the Russian Federation” (Pravo.gov.ru 2005). In practice, Cossack representatives are elected to local legislative assemblies and the State Duma with the support of United Russia Party as nonpartisan members. The Central Museum of the Russian Cossacks, the creation of which has been ordered by President Putin, should become a symbol of state patronage over memory politics with regard to Cossacks (RIA Novosti 2021; Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation 2017).
Cossack societies in Southern Russia generally receive generous support in the form of presidential grants, which, following the adoption of the law on foreign agents in 2012, remain the main source of funding for public projects. In 2022, all Cossack societies submitted 118 applications to the Cultural Initiatives Fund. The top three applicants were the Kuban Military Cossack Society with 34 applications, the Terek Military Cossack Society with 24 applications, and the Military Cossack Society of the Great Host of the Don, which submitted 17 applications. About half of all applications submitted and grants provided concern certain aspects of memory politics [E-07-03]. Such level of support for “Cossack” applications indicates the most favored treatment regime. These grants are used to organize Cossack culture festivals, educational projects for Cossacks’ children, historical reconstruction events, and so on.
While preventing the recognition of Cossacks as a special people, the authorities, at the same time, build a narrative of “Russian Cossacks” as a single whole, obscuring significant differences between various groups of Cossacks coming from different Cossack hosts. We will show below that historical narratives even among neighboring Cossack hosts differ significantly.
In general, there is extensive literature (Toje 2006; Ozerov and Kiblitskii 2004; Markedonov 2001, 2003, 2004; Skorik 2006; Burmagin 2009; Vodolatskii 2006; Rvacheva 2020, 2021) on the history of Cossacks’ revival, the transformation of their relations with the authorities, and the introduction of the status of registered Cossacks, or “neo-Cossacks,” as some researchers prefer to call them. However, as we have already noted, memory politics has not been duly explored in these works, be it historical narratives, commemorative sights and museums, textbooks, or discussions in social networks. We shall consequently address all these aspects.
Narratives
We can say that the living memory of Cossacks, which still existed in the 1990s, when old people—contemporaries of the 20th century—were still alive, was shielded from the outside world and bore traces of deep injuries and fear of repression. Old Cossacks, as a rule, did not discuss the past with “strangers.” Descendants of Cossacks from among the urban intelligentsia very often say that they experienced difficulties during their first contacts with such old people, trying to prove their Cossack origin and credibility. These activists designed a victim Cossack narrative, relying on the memory of old people, but, of course, using concepts unusual for the latter. First of all, these include the notion of “genocide,” which was used by almost all ethnic groups in both the post-Soviet space and wider, post-communist Europe, to describe their suffering (Finkel 2010). Today, almost all natural Cossacks consider themselves victims of the Soviet genocide, even though they may interpret different events as genocide. At the same time, this concept is almost not used in the public sphere.
Most often, the term “genocide” is used to describe events of the Civil War period. At the center of this narrative is the so-called de-Cossackization policy, initiated by a directive of the Organization Bureau of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), dated January 24, 1919, and aimed at destroying the Cossacks as a special class. Since then, January 24 has been a commemorative date for the Cossacks. This interpretation unambiguously prevails among the Don and Terek Cossacks.
In the memory of the Terek Cossacks, a special place is given to the “Terek genocide,” that is, the events of 1918–21. As a punishment for fighting the Soviets and in the hope of winning over the North Caucasus peoples, the Soviet government evicted about 25,000 Cossacks, giving their lands to ethnic Caucasians. The memory of those events, combined with the memory of the Caucasian War and the Chechen wars, is a complex knot of victim narratives circulating in different communities, directly linked to the issue of land ownership.
Meanwhile, there is a tendency among the Kuban Cossacks to use the notion of genocide in relation to the period of the late 1920s and the early 1930s, when collectivization, the expulsion of the dispossessed kulaks, and the famine of the early 1930s caused a huge loss of life among Cossacks, especially in Kuban. One of the interviewed experts from among the Kuban Cossacks noted that de-Cossackization did not deserve to be called genocide as much as the events of the late 1920s and the early 1930s, and emphasized the cumulative effect of several factors. “No, I think there was no genocide of the White Cossacks during the Civil War. Genocide occurred later, after the Civil War.…I believe that the most serious stage in the destruction of Cossacks—I do not support the overwhelming use of the term genocide—a serious blow to the Kuban Cossacks was the emigration, then, secondly, the deportation of people to the north, the Far East, and Siberia, and so on. Thirdly, it is the Holodomor. In Kuban, the Holodomor of 1932–1933 is a family story. I know this very well, I know where the mass graves are, I know these villages, and I know descendants—this is still a sensitive topic for very many people. By the way, young people also remember this” [E-03-02].
The notion of “Holodomor” used by the expert reflects the influence of the Ukrainian memory politics with regard to the famine of 1932–33. This term, created to present the Ukrainian version of the famine of 1932–33 as genocide (Kas′ianov, 2019), and inextricably linked with this version, is never used in Russian official historic narratives. The Black Sea Cossacks, resettled to Kuban from Zaporizhzhia at the end of the 18th century and united with Cossacks of the line into the Kuban Cossack Host in 1860, remember their roots. They mostly refer to themselves as “Russian khokhols,”14 a perception characteristic of many regions adjacent to Ukraine, but not subjected to the policy of intensive Ukrainization in the 1920s.15 However, susceptibility to the Ukrainian narrative among the Kuban Cossacks distinguishes them from the Don and Terek Cossacks.
The reaction of an expert from among the Don Cossacks to his Kuban colleague’s reasoning that the notion of genocide rather refers to the period of collectivization is quite interesting: “Of course, they were mostly Red, and they were almost unaffected by repressions in 1919.” There are obvious significant differences in the narratives of the Kuban and Don Cossacks, even though both narratives are focused on the suffering experienced in the 20th century.
It should also be noted that in relation to the Civil War, Cossacks often see themselves as a separate force, which should not be considered part of the White movement. “Kaledin and Denikin are two different forces, with different tasks, although both fought the Bolsheviks,” one of the experts explained.
Official memory politics puts emphasis on overcoming the White-Red opposition. There formed a standard model for monuments symbolizing the overcoming of this division: on one granite slab there is a budenovka (Red Army headgear) and a papakha (astrakhan fur hat) or a peaked cap worn by White movement Cossacks. Such monuments have been installed in Novocherkassk and Krasnodar. A report about a conciliatory memorial to the victims of terror during the Civil War, unveiled at a historical cemetery in the center of Krasnodar, where the Red and the White sort of walk toward each other, has an expressive headline reading “Half the city stands on the bones. An ‘execution commemoration site’ place can be opened anywhere” (Yuga.ru 2019).
The participation of Cossacks in World War II is covered quite selectively in both the official and unofficial Cossack narratives, but the omission strategies differ. The official narrative focuses on the heroic participation of Cossacks in the Red Army and emphasizes that tens of thousands of Cossacks were awarded orders for valor on the battlefield. Cossacks who opposed the Soviets on Hitler’s side are unambiguously regarded as traitors. The authorities are quite adamant in resisting attempts to commemorate Cossacks who collaborated with the Nazis.
The fate of Cossacks who sided with Nazi Germany during World War II is the next important point in the Cossacks’ victim narrative. It is emphasized that these Cossacks cannot be considered traitors, because they left the country at the end of the Civil War and did not swear allegiance to the Soviet government. The question of what the Cossacks who took Germany’s side did during the war is pushed into the shadows in these narratives. Often mentioned as “justifying” is the fact that the Cossacks fought the partisans not on the territory of the USSR, but in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia. The main episode of the WWII Cossack narrative is the decision of the Britons to extradite the Cossacks, who had surrendered to them, to the Soviets in Austria’s Lienz. Some of them were executed; most received different terms of imprisonment or exile.
It should be noted that in Southern Russia one more set of narratives is added to this already complex and contradictory picture of the Cossacks’ past, namely the memory of the Caucasian War of the 18th and 19th centuries. It reflects the role of the Cossacks as a vanguard of the empire’s colonialist policy. The Caucasian War is one of the key historical topics in Krasnodar Krai. It gets extensive coverage in regional textbooks. They claim that the war was primarily the result of intrigues on the part of hostile powers (see below for more on textbooks). Using almost the same words, the textbooks briefly speak of the “tragedy of forced resettlement” when half a million mountain people (Gortsy) were moved to the Ottoman Empire. The Kuban Area Studies textbook describes the war in detail, but The History of the Cossacks emphasizes evaluative judgments about the war. The most important of such evaluative judgments claims that “the bloody war brought decades of suffering to both sides, killing thousands of Cossacks and Russian soldiers.…The losses of the mountain people were no smaller. The tragic finale of the war was the forced resettlement of about half a million mountain people to Turkey.…‘Peaceful Circassians,’ who recognized Russian power…, retained their language, religion, and culture” (Matiushchenko and Chernii 2020, p. 30).16
The topic of confrontation with the Caucasian peoples is supplemented by a narrative about neighborhood symbiosis, while responsibility for the cruelties of the war is mainly “exported” and shifted to the regular imperial army.17 It is in connection with the memory of the Caucasian War that the narrative of the “brotherhood in arms” between Cossacks and mountain people during World War I acquires particular importance.
The official and unofficial Cossack narratives identically interpret the relationship between Cossacks and mountain people. The main point is that they were opponents worthy of each other: “the mountain people were seasoned and brave warriors.…In order to resist mountain people, one needs to be equal to them in battle. It is no coincidence that they used to say in the Caucasus: a Cossack is no different from a Circassian, only of Russian nationality” (Ratushniak and Frolov 2016, 22–23). This topic was embodied in a monument to Cossack and mountain people heroes of World War I, unveiled in Krasnodar in 2016, with top officials from the regional administration and the Republic of Adygea attending the ceremony. A mountain person and a Cossack standing next to each other are so similar that one needs to take a very close look at them in order to figure out who is who (Kuban News 2016). There is a similar monument in Maikop. World War I represents a “convenient past” for all mnemonic actors in Southern Russia—both Cossacks and Caucasian peoples fought together for Russia, against a common enemy. It is no coincidence that Southern Russia started to pay so much attention to World War I in regional memory politics before central regions.
May 21 is designated throughout the Caucasus as a day of remembrance for the victims of the Caucasian War. Regional authorities are actively involved in the commemorative events. At the same time, there is no repentance motif in these ceremonies and the Caucasian War is interpreted as a “common misfortune.” Representatives of the federal authorities never attend Caucasian War commemorative events. In federal textbooks, the Caucasian War is only briefly mentioned in the context of the 19th-century Russian-Turkish wars.
The topic of confrontation between Cossacks and mountain people regularly reemerges in connection with the events of the most recent past. A special role is assigned to the memory of Cossacks’ participation in the post-Soviet wars in Chechnya and Abkhazia. This is a fresh and living memory. So we can say that an integral narrative about the participation of Cossacks in military conflicts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has not yet formed. This is partly due to the fact that these events involved a large number of actions on all sides that did not fit into the laws of war. The first and the second “Chechen” wars of the 1990s and the early 2000s are still “hidden” memory in the south Russia and are rarely mentioned in public. This memory fuels the perception of a threat for Russia’s southern regions, which serves as an important resource for encouraging the Cossacks’ commitment to cooperation with regional and federal authorities.
Regional Textbooks on Cossack History and Culture
Russian regions are allowed to allocate 20% of classroom hours in history and culture to teach regional aspects using specialized regional textbooks. Not every region exercises the right to publish such textbooks in full. But Krasnodar Krai is perhaps the only region in Russia that has two complete (from the 1st to the 11th grade) sets of textbooks for the “regional component.” The main set is called Kuban Area Studies. It is devoted to the history of the region and intended for all schools in the region (Ratushniak 2020–2021). For Cossack classes organized in many schools there is a special line of textbooks dedicated to the history and culture of the Cossacks.18 More precisely, this is the name of textbooks for the first four grades: The History and Culture of the Kuban Cossacks (Yeremenko 2020a, 2020b, 2020c). Textbooks for senior classes are called The History of the Kuban Cossacks (Matveev 2016; Ratushniak and Frolov 2016; Ratushniak and Ratushniak 2018; Matveev 2019; Matiushchenko and Chernii 2020). This set of textbooks was written in 2004–2008 in cooperation with Cossack movement activists.
The regional administration provides financial support to the publication of these textbooks and to the Cossack classes. In 2020, the Krasnodar Krai Legislative Assembly allocated 1.12 billion rubles for the “Kuban Cossacks” state program (Krasnodar Krai Legislative Assembly 2021). In the same year, 955 million rubles were earmarked for additional education of all children in the region, and 154 million for grassroots sports, which clearly shows that Cossacks, who make up less than 5% of the region’s population, have privileged access to financial resources. Neighboring Stavropol Krai uses three-volume textbooks (Kolesnikova et al. 2020a, 2020b, 2020c). In 2020, the Terek Cossacks Resource Center, with the support of the Presidential Grants Fund, began publishing textbooks for Cossack classes similar to those in Krasnodar Krai (Nevskaia 2020).
In both textbooks published in Krasnodar Krai, Cossacks are portrayed as a bulwark of stability. At the same time, the question of the Cossacks-to-Russians ratio is not discussed anywhere. It is tacitly assumed that Cossacks are part of the Russian people and bear special responsibility for order and well-being in the “Cossack land.” Russians who are not Cossacks are practically ignored in both textbooks. The textbooks say that there were about one million Kuban Cossacks before the 1917 revolution, but their number then shrank by half after the Civil War and repressions. Today, there are about 56,000 registered Cossacks in Kuban, that is, no more than 250,000 with all family members included. They make up about 5% of all Russians living in the region.
The Kuban Area Studies textbook, intended for all schoolchildren, mentions “long-term residents of the region” (who include Cossacks, Adyghes, and a number of other groups) as a “guarantor of stability,” but gives Cossacks the main role in ensuring stability (Ratushniak 2020–2021, 55–56). The History and Culture of the Kuban Cossacks textbook tells how Catherine II “gifted the Cossacks with lands from the Kuban River to the Sea of Azov” for their military merits (Yeremenko 2020a, 14). The textbook forms an attitude toward the region as a land belonging to the Cossacks, and says that “thanks to the Cossacks and their military exploits, it became possible for everyone to live in peace and harmony on this land.” In 2006, a colossal monument to Catherine II was re-created in the center of Krasnodar. Its pedestal is surrounded by the figures of Potemkin and Cossack atamans. Engraved on the monument is the text of Catherine II’s deed of gift.
Cossack textbooks for primary grades are focused on forming Cossack identity in children. This is not a story about Cossacks and their culture “for all,” but an appeal to those who should perceive themselves as Cossacks. The authors see the most important components of this emerging Cossack identity in Orthodoxy and the “memory of the Cossacks’ ancestors and their exploits.” The striking difference between the two lines of textbooks is the role they assign to the Orthodox Church: it is rather modest in the Kuban Area Studies and central to the History and Culture of the Kuban Cossacks.
In federal history textbooks, Cossacks are mentioned mainly in sections devoted to the imperial period. They fight bravely, defending the empire from enemies and pushing its frontiers farther south and east. Almost none of the 20th-century events that are key to Cossack narratives can be found in federal textbooks. They only mention repressions against the Cossacks during the Civil War. The reviewed textbooks, broadly used at schools, constitute the most full and easily accessible version of the official narrative of the Cossack past.
Museums
Some of the museum exhibitions we studied were created before the Cossack revival started. An example of this kind is a museum in Novocherkassk, which was the capital of the Don Cossack Host before the 1917 revolution. The exhibition focuses on patriotism and service to the state. References to the Red Terror against the Don Cossacks can be found only in the historic Ascension Cathedral, which is the central part of the Novocherkassk memorial complex.19 A room dedicated to the 1962 massacre in Novocherkassk is an important addition to the museum’s exhibition. The authorities ordered soldiers to fire at a demonstration of workers angered by rising food prices. According to official data, more than 20 people were killed and dozens seriously injured. The “instigators of the riots” went on trial and seven of them were sentenced to death. For many years, this story was strictly banned. The connection between the harsh reaction of the authorities and the Cossack question is beyond doubt—in the late 1950s, many Gulag prisoners and exiled Cossacks convicted after WWII were able to return to the Don region, and the authorities saw their influence in the workers’ protests. This fact and the memory of the Cossacks’ past as a time of freedom and resistance to the authorities are emphasized in Andrei Konchalovskii′s film Dear Comrades! released in 2020.20
The exhibition in Krasnodar’s Museum named after E. D. Felitsyn, on the contrary, was created as a result of the Cossacks’ revival movement and under the patronage of its activists. But here, too, the main idea is heroic service to the nation. The core of the exhibition is the Kuban Cossack Host regalia donated by Cossack emigrants as a result of agreements with the regional authorities and local Cossack revival activists. The memorial plaque dedicated to military ataman V. G. Naumenko, who during World War II collaborated with the Nazis, and after the war lived in the United States and preserved these regalia, was erected in 1996 and dismantled for the first time in 2011. The plaque, reinstalled in 2012, was finally taken down by a court decision in 2016. Both times, the removal spurred public protests (Kommersant.ru 2016).
Against this background, one private museum in the stanitsa (a Cossack village) of Elanskaia, Rostov Oblast, is quite remarkable. A local entrepreneur, natural Cossack Vladimir Melikhov has created a museum that is in sharp contrast to the official Cossack history. Melikhov’s motto, as it is stated on the museum’s website, is “We propose changing the agenda that dominates our consciousness: from discussions about what the current government is like to what we are like, and how we can change the government” (Elan-kazak.org 2022). The exhibition’s focal point is the crimes committed by the Soviet government and the Cossacks’ resistance. The authorities exerted strong pressure on Melikhov and even started criminal proceedings against him. But the museum, located on private land, is still open to the public. The museum features a monument to Ataman Piotr Krasnov, who led the anti-Bolshevik Cossack resistance, created the Don Cossack Republic in 1918, emigrated, headed the Cossack Central Office within the Wehrmacht during World War II, and was executed at Moscow’s Lefortovo prison in 1947. Under pressure from the authorities, the monument’s attribution has been changed, and now it is called a monument to the Cossack, but the portrait resemblance to Krasnov is obvious. Melikhov and his museum are the most striking example of prominent participation in the memorial policy by an autonomous actor who advances not only an anti-Soviet stance but also a narrative against the present-day authorities.
The Past in Social Media Discussions
Although at the start of the Cossack revival process in the 1990s and early 2000s, the main source for studying memory politics representations was printed materials (newspapers, magazines), since the 2010s, it has been mainly the Internet. All official Cossack organizations have their own websites with sections dedicated to historical memory. In addition, there are 27 thematic forums that provide a platform for discussions on historical topics. Social media groups are the most informative source to study.
The most popular Russian social network, VKontakte, has a total of 1,800 thematic groups dedicated to the history of the Cossacks, the memory of their past, and their modern identity. However, only about 50 communities are active and large (from 500 to 65,000 members).
The biggest Cossack-oriented group in VKontakte is “Cossacks. Russian Cossackdom.” Historical posts (about 600) written in the group in 2013–21 paid the greatest attention to the Cossacks’ military exploits in the Russian Empire (45%); the history of the revival since the early 1990s, and the Cossacks’ fighting in Chechnya (19%); Civil War events (18%); and the early history of the Cossacks in the 16th–17th centuries (10%). The Soviet period is mentioned in occasional references to the year 1936 and a few dates from the Great Patriotic War, with equally positive assessments of Cossacks who fought on both sides of the front (7%), and as far as the Civil War is concerned, only White Cossacks are honored.
The issue of Cossack collaborators during World War II is the most controversial historical episode for the entire community, splitting it from within. There were 12 references to Lienz in the group “Cossacks. Russian Cossackdom” in 2016–18. As a tragedy and a place of memory and sorrow, Lienz was mentioned 11 times in 2016–21 in a group of Cossack nationalists, called “Platov’s Grandchildren, Descendants of Yermak” (5,000 members), who advocate the idea of a special Cossack nation.
In the group “Don Cossacks” (Vk.com) (8,000 members), the discussion titled “Krasnov, Shkuro—Heroes or Traitors?” collected 692 comments: 67% said they were heroes, and 33% condemned them as traitors.
In general, it can be stated that communities emphasizing their connection with the Russian state in the form of service reproduce a nationwide heroic narrative about the Great Patriotic War and other examples of the Cossacks’ service to the state and the Russian nation. At the same time, conspicuously nationalist groups, which separate Cossack identity from the Russian one, pay more attention to the tragic narrative about Cossacks’ participation in the war on the side of Germany and their unenviable fate.
Conclusions
The victim narrative formulated by Cossack revival activists at the initial stage in the late 1980s and early 1990s was opposed by the authorities in the second half of the 1990s with the heroic narrative of Cossack service to the state, which had deep pre-revolutionary roots in the Cossack tradition. In most cases, there is no fierce confrontation between the heroic and victim narratives, and they rather get interwoven with each other in different combinations. Cossack nationalists place more emphasis on the suffering of Cossacks, but do not deny their heroism in state service. Official narratives, on the contrary, clearly emphasize military exploits and loyalty to the country, but the issue of injustice is also present. Only some marginal social network groups advocate the unconditional alienation of Cossacks from the Russian state. Publications of groups like “Cossacks” on Facebook, as a rule, get no comments and have typical features of propaganda and psychological warfare.
Both federal mnemonic actors and regional bodies are involved in formulating and reproducing official narratives about Cossacks. The border between them, as a rule, is blurred. Regional branches of the Russian Military Historical Society or the Russian Historical Society consist of local people and serve as an interface for memory politics between the federal and regional authorities. Cossacks are involved in this activity at all levels and get privileged access to significant material resources. The official memory politics is carried out with the active participation of Cossacks, who can “between themselves” support certain elements of unofficial Cossack narratives.
The administrations of the southern regions, especially Krasnodar Krai, view Cossacks as a mobilized group loyal to the authorities, which can be used in crisis situations. Non-Russian ethnic groups in Southern Russia exhibit a much higher level of mobilization and cohesion compared to the Russian population. Trying to balance this process by ethnically mobilizing the whole Russian population would be a very dangerous policy for a number of reasons. On the one hand, the authorities see Russian nationalists as a potentially more dangerous opposition than liberals.21 On the other hand, the massive nationalist mobilization of Russians in an ethnically diverse region is fraught with new local conflicts with non-Russian ethnic groups. Cossacks in this situation become substitutes, a kind of subgroup of Russians, which the regional authorities are trying to rely on by entering them in the State Register of Cossack Societies.
In its initiatives, including the Law on Cossacks, the State Register, and the plan to create the Central Museum of Cossacks, the federal government, paradoxically, appears to be the main force promoting the unity of the Russian Cossacks from various hosts. Both regional and federal authorities view Cossacks as an important ally of their politics. Their efforts to integrate Cossacks into the “power vertical” have proved quite successful. This was largely facilitated by effective memory politics based on the promotion of heroic service to the nation.
In their policy regarding the memory of the Cossacks, the federal authorities act by the same principle they use whenever they have to deal with painful issues of the past in regions—they prefer not to transfer these problems into the public sphere in capital cities. It is very likely that the authorities fear an avalanche of demands for commemorative events in the capital to remember the victims of repressions carried out by the Soviet government in regions, and prefer to keep such commemorations at the local level.
Crimes committed by the Soviet government and the commemoration of the victims of communist repressions remain a legitimate topic, but it has been pushed everywhere to the margins by the narrative of heroism in defending the country from an external enemy. This is the result of almost complete government control over the sources of funding for memory politics and the education system. This control was further strengthened by the almost simultaneous adoption, in 2012, of the law on foreign agents and of the Cultural and Historical Education Standards.
It is difficult to imagine a situation where Cossacks would act as a separatist force disloyal to the authorities. On the contrary, statist orientation and memory politics prevail among the Cossacks for the time being. However, the unofficial nationalist and victim narrative are well-spread among the Cossacks, and should there be a nationwide crisis of power, Cossack nationalism can become a force with its own special policy.
Going back to the dichotomies of victim and heroic narratives, official and unofficial memory, local and national memory politics, we can state that in the case of the Cossacks these dichotomies simplify the real situation so much that it can be argued they do not work as analytical tools, and rather complicate the understanding of memory politics. The victim and heroic narratives do not oppose each other, but are intertwined. Official and unofficial narratives are often reproduced by the same people, depending on the situation. An analysis of the local and national memory politics should focus largely on the structures and practices that cannot be strictly put in either of these categories, and which should rather be regarded as interfaces facilitating interaction, coordination, and bargaining between local and national mnemonic actors.
Published online: February 19, 2024
Notes
We will use the “memory politics” concept as the shortened equivalent of the concept of “political use of the past,” denoting any form of appeal to the past to solve political problems by any actor, be it state structures, NGOs, local communities, or individuals.
By official memory, we mean all forms of commemoration and remembering legitimized by the authorities at both the national and regional levels. Unofficial memory means narratives and forms of remembering that the authorities prosecute and prohibit, or tacitly tolerate.
In total, we conducted 26 interviews in 2020–23, each lasting more than one hour.
Cossacks whose pedigree goes back to pre-revolutionary times call themselves “natural” Cossacks. People who have enrolled in registered societies, but are not Cossacks by birth, are referred to by some researchers as “neo-Cossacks,” and natural Cossacks sometimes contemptuously call them “mummers.”
The first review article on the network communities of Cossacks appeared in 2023 (Rvacheva 2023).
The two Chechen wars in the 1990s and the 2000s were the bloodiest; the Ossetian-Ingush conflict in 1992 was also very cruel and left lasting scars.
See Hroch (2000).
There are various groups of Old Believers among Cossacks. Relatively small-numbered Kalmyk, Bashkir, Tatar, and Mordovian Cossacks hold a special position. Each of these groups has its own specific historical narratives and identity models, the discussion of which is not part of this article. In total, there were 11 Cossack hosts in the Russian Empire, scattered from the Black Sea to the Far East.
Krasnodar Krai (over 5.5 million people) ranks 3 rd in terms of population among all regions of the country; Rostov Oblast, with more than 4 million, is 6th; and Stavropol Krai, which has almost 3 million people, comes in 14th.
The Norwegian researchers conclude that Stavropol Krai will not repeat the fate of Kosovo, that is, Russians will not lose their demographic dominance in the region. However, this threat is subjectively felt by local residents, since the share of Russians in some areas of the region is significantly lower. In addition, Stavropol Krai and Astrakhan Oblast are in a group of Russian regions where the percentage of Russians among newborns is significantly lower than the percentage of Russians in the total population. All other regions in this group are ethnic autonomies. See Livejournal (2017).
This group has a broader meaning covering Terek, Greben, Sunzha, Mozdok, and other Cossacks in the North Caucasus.
The Cossacks included in the register received official status and registration, but some “natural” Cossacks refused (and still refuse) to enroll in registered societies, claiming that they are controlled by the authorities and dilute “natural” Cossacks with those who join them without having Cossack roots. Thus, some registered Cossack do have Cossack roots, whereas others do not. Any data about the percentage of “natural” Cossacks among members of registered Cossack associations is unavailable.
Hereinafter, the code of an interviewed expert is indicated in square brackets, where “E” means “Expert”; the first two digits stand for the code of the region of his residence, according to the All-Russian Classifier of Administrative-Territorial Entities (https://rosstat.gov.ru/classification); and the next two digits denote the unique number of the expert in the database of the Center for the Study of Cultural Memory and Symbolic Policy of the European University at St. Petersburg.
Khokol is a colloquial term in Russian language for “Ukrainian.” While the term is widely used as an insult, many people still use it as their self-description in Kuban region, and in Voronezh and Belgorod oblast′.
For more, see Polianichev (2017) and Boeck (2004–2005).
For more information on the mountain people’s memory of the war, see Urushadze (2020).
The Cossacks’ memory of the Caucasian War correlates with the narrative about the “nagaika Cossack,” that is, Cossacks as an instrument of state repression against the revolutionary movement in the late Russian Empire. In this case, too, responsibility is placed primarily on the imperial authorities.
Rostov Oblast has one-volume textbooks on the history of the Cossacks; Stavropol Krai uses two-volume textbooks, one for 6th–7th grades and the other for 8th–9th grades. Rostov has also published a textbook on the history of the Don Cossacks for higher education institutions, titled The History of the Don Cossacks (Narezhnyi 2008).
A huge icon depicting scenes of the Red Terror takes pride of place in the Cathedral, but visitors are not allowed to photograph it.
The film won Special Jury Prize honors at the 77th Venice International Film Festival.
This was so until 2022, during which most of the liberal-minded oppositionists left Russia. The majority of convicted political activists were Russian nationalists.