Re-making a Frontier Community or Defending Ethnic Boundaries? The Caucasus in Cossack Identity

Abstract

The essay focuses on the notion of the Caucasus as a reference point in the construction of Cossack identity in southern Russia. Since the late Soviet period, the Cossack revivalist/nativist movement has emerged in the territories which constituted the frontier zones of Tsarist Russia. Arguably, the historical Cossack hosts were established as a kind of frontier community which played an important role in the expansion of the Russian Empire. This essay examines how post-Soviet Cossacks reinterpret the meanings of the Caucasus as a spatial and cultural realm where, or in relation to which, they produce their identity as a distinct ethnic and cultural community.

Notes

¹The ‘Cossack case study’ was conducted as part of a three-year EU FP6 project ‘Societies and Lifestyles: Towards Enhancing Social Harmonization through Knowledge of Sub-cultural Communities’ (Contruct No: STREP-CT-CIT5-029013). This large international collaborative project was coordinated by Vitautas Magnus University, Lithuania.

²In September 2007, I was joined in the field by Hilary Pilkington (University of Warwick). Several audio interviews were recorded by both researchers jointly or separately. The fieldnotes and interview transcripts were word processed and coded for analysis using the Nvivo 7 software.

³‘Vol’naia stanitsa’, available at: http://fstanitsa.ru/, accessed 12 September 2011; ‘Kazarla: etnicheskoe kazach’e ob’’edinenie’, available at: http://www.kazarla.ru/, accessed 12 September 2010.

⁴This is how it was used as an example by Bromlei (1981, p. 48), a founder of the Soviet ‘theory of ethnos’.

⁵Daniil, born 1984, 24 April 2007, Krasnodar.

⁶Telephone conversation with the author, 14 November 2008.

⁷Ingvar, born 1987, 9 April 2007, Krasnodar.

⁸Kazach’ya set’, Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev o kazakakh, not dated, available at: http://cossackweb.narod.ru/kazaki/r_gmlkz00.htm, accessed 19 June 2010.

⁹The digitalised version of the Gubarev and Skrylov’s volumes (1966–1970) can be found as Kazachii slovar’-spravochnik, available at: http://www.cossackdom.com/enciclopedic/encyclopedic.htm, accessed 15 June 2010. It also became a foundation for so-called Donskoi kazachii slovar’, available at: http://silverhorseshoe.narod.ru/voc/voc.htm, accessed 15 June 2010, hosted on one of the Neo-Cossack websites. See also, Cossack National Alliance, ‘Karta Kazakii’, 1962, available at: http://old.fstanitsa.ru/3/114_1.shtml, accessed 19 June 2010.

¹⁰Comandor, born 1984, 1 April 2007, Sochi.

¹¹See, for example, Kazarla, ‘Grebenskie kazaki. Kazachii slovar’-spravochnik, A. I. Skrylov, G. V. Gubarev’, not dated, available at: http://www.kazarla.ru/index.php/historyview/864, accessed 20 June 2010.

¹²Daniil, born 1984, 24 April 2007, Krasnodar.

¹³The Azov festival is dedicated to the Don Cossacks’ defence of the fortress of Azov against the Ottoman Turks in 1637–1641, the so-called ‘Azovsoe osadnoe sidenie’. These festivals have been run by one of the Don Cossack military-history re-enactment clubs in the contemporary town of Azov in the Rostov Oblast’ since 2005. The members of the ‘Bunchuk’ are among the most active participants of these festivals.

¹⁴The popularity among Terek and Kuban Cossacks of gorskii dances such as the above mentioned lezginka before the revolution is well documented (see, for example, Eleseev 2001).

¹⁵The kolovrat or sun wheel is a Slavic pagan symbol dedicated to svarog, the sun god. Some of my informants interpreted the kolovrat as a ‘symbol of fire, strength and power’ (Comandor, born 1984, 1 April 2007, Sochi). A few of the ‘Buchuk’ members, including Sarmat himself, belong to a neo-pagan sect of Rodnovery. For more details on this, see Pilkington and Popov (2009).

¹⁶Georgii, born 1982, 23 August 2007, Krasnodar.

¹⁷Stepanych, born 1956, 12 September 2007, Krasnodar.

¹⁸Comandor, born 1984, 1 April 2007, Sochi.

¹⁹Vania, born 1985, 12 September 2007, Krasnodar.

²⁰Yura, born 1979, 13 September 2007, Sochi.

²¹Dima, born 1982, 21 March 2007, Krasnodar.

²² Balachka is a commonly used word for the local Ukrainian dialect which some Kuban Cossack nativists consider to be a distinct Cossack language.

²³Ingvar, born 1987, interview with the author, 9 April 2007, Krasnodar. I quote this interview with all its inconsistency and abrupt stops of phrases because it demonstrates how uneasy and inconsistently the Cossack identity is constructed and represented in the narrative which leaves part of the story untold.