Re-enacting “Cossack roots:” embodiment of memory, history, and tradition among young people in southern Russia

Abstract

This article draws upon ethnographic research which was conducted among young Cossacks (members of officially registered and informal Cossack clubs) in southern Russia. It presents young people’s participation in the Cossack “nativism” as a physical and material mode of socialization into the mnemonic community. The research puts forward an argument that such corporal and sensorial experiences is effective in recruiting some young members to the Cossack movement. At the same time, the performative character of neo-Cossack identity destabilizes contemporary Cossacks’ claims of authenticity related to the status of the legitimate heirs of historical Cossackdom. At the more general level of discussion this paper juxtaposes bodily activities, social memory, and revivalist discourses.

Keywords:

• Cossacks
• social memory
• embodiment
• southern Russia
• young people

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for constructive comments on the earlier drafts of this article to the anonymous reviewers and the Nationalities Papers’ chief editor, Peter Rutland.

Notes

1. The informants are referred by pseudonyms and the year of birth. Extracts from the fieldnotes are referred further in the text of the paper as “Fieldwork diary” with indication of the place and date of the diary entry. In September 2007, Hilary Pilkington (University of Warwick) joined me in the field. Several audio interviews were recorded by both researchers jointly or separately.

2. Valery Tishkov, a Soviet and Russian historian and ethnologist, was Director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology (IEA) in the Russian Academy of Science from 1989 to 2015. Arguably he was one of the first social scientists in the late USSR who challenged the essentialist premises of the “theory of ethnos,” the conceptual framework that had dominated Soviet ethnography and history in the 1970s and 1980s, introducing the constructivist and instrumentalist approaches to ethnicity and national identity (see, e.g. Tishkov 1989a, 1989b). Since the directorship of Tishkov, political and economic process that utilized ethnic and cultural differences and sometimes defined as “ethnic conflicts” have become part of research programs of IEA. In 1992, Tishkov was a head of the Ministry of National Policy.

3. The noticeable exceptions here are works by Appleby (2010), Arnold (2014), Boeck (1998, 2004), Holquist (2009), and Toje (2006).

4. The most famous among Soviet feature films about Cossacks are a collective farm love story, Kubanskie kazaki (Mosfilm 1949) directed by Ivan Pyr’ev and a war drama, Tikhii Don (Kinostudiia im. M. Gor’kogo 1958) directed by Sergei Gerasimov and based on the novel And Quiet Flows the Don (1934) by Mikhail Sholokhov.

5. The Kuren’ is the changed name of the organization. In fact the term “kuren’” is used for the basic (smallest in terms of membership) structural unit of the Kuban Cossack host's organizations in Krasnodar krai. Historically, the kuren’ was a structural unit of the Zaporozhskaia Sech, a Cossack state in the territory of contemporary southern Ukraine existed in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Part of the former Zaporozhian Cossacks formed the core of the Cossack population in the Kuban region after resettlement there in 1792.

6. Anthropologists and sociologists studying Holocaust survivors have written extensively about the effects that memories of survivors have on subsequent generations of their families (see, e.g. Bar-On and Gilad 1994; Hirsch 1999; Starman 2006).

7. Examining the role photographs from family albums play in remembering the “Novocherkassk massacre” against the workers demonstration in the Russian town of Novocherkassk in 1962, Sarkisova and Shevchenko (2011) demonstrate that photographs are not only important prompts for articulating memories of the event across generations but also enable an at least partial reinvention of the past.

8. For the relationships between the Cossack frontier past and the present ethnicist ideology see, for example, Popov (2012).

9. Some commentators even identify the neo-Cossack movement as a particular form of civil society (Tutsenko 2001).

10. Since 2005 the Azov festival has been organized by history re-enactment clubs some of which have explicit Cossack identity, including the Krasnodar-based club Bunchuk.

11. See for example thematic threat on the forum of the Cossack ethnicist website Vol’naia stanitsa, at: http://forum.fstanitsa.ru/ (Last accessed March 6, 2012).

Additional information

Funding

The article based on the research which has been conducted within a framework of the international EU-funded project “Subcultures and Lifestyle” European Commission [Contruct No: STREP-CT-CIT5-029013].