The Kuban’ region (Krasnodarskii Krai) of the Russian Federation provides a unique case for testing our understanding of how Soviet applied nationality policies transformed and influenced local identities. Although prior to the revolution the Cossacks had clear conceptions of group identity (drawing important distinctions between themselves and their Russian, Ukrainian, and Caucasian neighbors) and zealously guarded the boundaries of their communities against non-Cossacks, they were denied any status whatsoever in the Soviet solution to the nationalities question.^[1] Soviet policies promoted other groups to membership in the family of fraternal socialist nations and awarded them trappings of nationhood ranging from alphabets to opera houses, but the Cossacks were stripped of their existing attributes (flags, symbols, uniforms) and civic distinctions (administrative borders, institutions of local self government, historical narratives, academic choirs).^[2] In many ways the Cossack case represents the reverse of the Soviet construction of ethnic infrastructures. If the USSR was a communal apartment, the Cossacks were deprived of a room of their own and frequently tucked away in corners of the kommunalka that were virtually invisible to the other inhabitants.
The Kuban’ Cossacks provide a particularly fascinating case, because they were subjected to two different nation-building projects in the Soviet era. Between 1926 and 1932 the Ukrainianization of culture and self-identification was promoted in the region.^[3] As a result of opposition to grain requisitions and fears of insurrection in Kuban’ stanitsas, after January 1933 Ukrainianization was halted and the Ukrainian language was banned from schools, publishing and the media.^[4] Party directives decreed that virtually overnight more than a million people would be re-categorized and re-nationalized as Russians. Expected to live their lives with a Russian identity, the Kuban’ Cossacks were marked for extinction through assimilation rather than recognition or reinforcement of ethnic distinction.
After decades of oblivion, however, Cossacks re-emerged from the shadows in the late eighties and demands for recognition came soon thereafter. In a 1998 article, I argued that Kuban’ Cossack revival, which started with a kind of informal proto-revival in the seventies and eighties and became official in the early nineties, is based upon a concept of ethnic distinction, regional uniqueness, and historical “rights.”^[5] I outlined how the term kazachestvo was historically utilized to denote both a people and a military caste and suggested that Cossack identity became an ethnic identity in the Soviet period. Since Soviet rule (acts of targeted repression against Cossacks, destruction of kazachestvo as a military caste, collectivization, lack of official recognition,) and modernization (mechanization of warfare and agriculture, industrialization, urbanization, the elimination of estate categories) coincided, activists in the early nineties lamented the loss of Cossack traditions and articulated the need to revive kazachestvo.
I concluded that the current Kuban’ Cossack revival is both a political movement and a process of ethno-cultural renewal. Although Cossack leaders claim to speak for the “indigenous” Cossack inhabitants of Kuban’, the size of their Cossack constituency has never been precisely determined. I portrayed the movement as a minority movement spurred by activists who hope to halt migration to their region and claim for Cossacks the same titular status enjoyed by the national republics of the North Caucasus. Cossack leaders repeatedly claimed that Kuban kazachestvo must not only be revived or reborn as a people and culture, but must also be legally rehabilitated. While “revival” as a nation or people in most respects depends upon the Cossacks themselves, rehabilitation is a process that requires winning recognition and cooperation from state authorities.
Now, after a decade of revival, I will revisit the questions of identity that emerged in the post-Soviet period. My primary objective is to make the Kuban’ Cossacks manifest to scholars of ethnicity and nationality policy by surveying the negotiation of identity in the Kuban’ region between 1991 and 2002. I also will address the following questions: How have conceptions of local distinction been constructed since 1991? Have Cossack activists been able to reconstruct a Cossack constituency from the descendants of pre-1920 Cossacks? How do local people talk about nationality and Cossack identity? I will argue that official invisibility does not constitute extinction and that various modes of viewing produce differing depictions of Cossack distinction.

KUBAN’ COSSACK IDENTITY IN SCHOLARLY DISCOURSE 1991-2002

The appropriation of Cossacks by intellectuals is one of the principle issues in the study of Cossack communities in any period. Regardless of how Cossacks have imagined or talked about themselves over the ages, much of the discourse on Cossack community and identity has been generated by and for intellectuals, who for centuries have engaged in the “intellectual privatization” of the Cossack subject for supra-local narratives.^[6] Information on Cossack identity is often made public through the mediation of interested parties with metropolitan agendas, whether they be historians, literary critics, school teachers or ethnographers.
After decades of hidden history (Cossacks were barely mentioned in narratives of local history in the Soviet period) since 1991 local scholars have helped define the contours of Cossack visibility in post-Soviet Kuban’. Competing visions of what kazachestvo once was, could help to shape what it might become. While ostensibly looking at the same object (Kuban’ kazachestvo), however, observers have managed to discern different things.
Although hundreds of articles have been written on topics pertaining to the history of Kuban’ since 1991, few of these have been published in a forum that is easily accessible to readers in most Kuban’ stanitsas, let alone available to scholars in Moscow or academics outside of Russia. Numerous academic miscellanies appear in Krasnodar every year in editions of no more than a few hundred copies and quite often they are unavailable even in local bookstores. Many very good articles on individual aspects of local history are published annually in local journals such as Rodnaia Kuban’, Golos Minuvshego, and the various publications of the Kuban’ State University of Culture and Arts, but, thus far, only a handful of works have addressed the larger problem of conceptualizing Cossack distinction.^[7] Thus, I will provide only a selective sample of recent studies that have tried to delineate the broad contours of Kuban’ Cossack distinction.
The most influential scholar of the first post-Soviet decade was Nikolai Ivanovich Bondar’ a historian, ethnographer, and folklorist. He grew up in Kuban’ and attended Leningrad State University. Upon returning to the region in the mid-seventies, he was one of first scholars to systematically investigate Cossack topics under the permissible guise of folkloristics. By 1993, when I became acquainted with him and his work, he already occupied his present positions as a professor at Kuban’ State University and co-director of the newly founded Center for Folk Culture in Krasnodar. By that time he had amassed a collection of thousands of folkloric texts and was acknowledged as the leading specialist on Kuban’ Cossack culture. Although his works have primarily been published in limited print-run editions, his influence as a teacher, academic patron, and publicist has been very important on the local level.
As I noted in my 1998 article, Bondar’s research provided critical academic support for the early stage of Cossack revival. His two major contributions to debates about Cossack culture and identity, however, were already being formulated years before the fall of the Soviet Union. As early as 1983, he began to talk about the interpenetration of Russian and Ukrainian cultures in local folk culture.^[8] In later articles he further developed this position and by 1995 he could declare: “the traditional culture of Kuban’ Cossacks occupies an intermediary position between Russian (in its local southern Russian variant) and Ukrainian cultures.”^[9]
A 1987 article in an academic miscellany published in Maikop provided the first argumentation that the Kuban Cossacks are a sub-ethnos of the Russian nation. “One of the most important results of the development of Cossackdom in Kuban’ in the period discussed here [the 19th century],” he concluded, “was the emergence of a Kuban Cossack subethnos.”^[10] Using a category (subethnos) created within the walls of Institute of Ethnology, Bondar’ articulated an acceptable compromise between local distinction and national identity.^[11] The compromise consisted of subordinating the former to the latter.
His concepts proved to be productive, however, for delineating local distinction. The concept of “traditional culture” (traditional usually serving as a trope for customs deemed central to the pre-Soviet, pre-modern, Kuban’ folk experience) explains local color and local culture without according them any status in the world of print culture. The emphasis on cultural symbiosis advanced the case that Kuban’ Cossack culture is a unique, local creation that is neither exclusively Russian nor Ukrainian. The concept of a Kuban’ Cossack subethnos provided local scholars with a way to discuss local distinction without calling into question or challenging the hegemonic position of Russian identity and culture in the region since the thirties. His concept of a Kuban’ Cossack sub-ethnos has been widely discussed in private, but not subjected to a systematic published critique. It has, however, been adopted with minor modifications by his colleagues Oleg Matveev and Valerii Ratushniak at Kuban’ State University.^[12]
An alternative vision of Kuban’ Cossack identity focuses on its Ukrainian components.^[13] This development is noteworthy due to the fact that discussion of Ukrainian language and identity in the region was suppressed after 1933. The main proponent of this trend is Viktor Kirillovich Chumachenko, who since 1993 has almost single-handedly revived Ukrainian studies in the region. A specialist in literature and professor at the Kuban’ State University of Culture and Arts in Krasnodar, Chumachenko has organized a series of conferences and published numerous miscellanies on various aspects of the Ukrainian contribution to the literature and culture of Kuban’. His publication of an anthology of Kuban literature in 1994 sparked the only substantial discussion of the role of Ukrainian culture in the region since 1933.^[14]
Chumachenko published excerpts from the works of eleven pre-revolutionary authors from the Kuban’ region. All of the authors selected for inclusion in the anthology wrote in some variant of Ukrainian and Chumachenko and his colleagues translated the selections into Russian. In a few cases dialogues and direct speech in the local (largely Ukrainian) idiom were not translated, but rather were conveyed via Russian orthography as was customary in the nineteenth century.
The publication spurred the local scholarly establishment to address the problem of Ukrainian culture in the Kuban’ region.^[15] The first literary works written in the region were in Ukrainian and many prominent local intellectuals continued to write and publish in Ukrainian until 1933. By attempting to re-acquaint local readers with a series of undeservedly forgotten figures, Chumachenko issued an implicit challenge to generations of local scholars who had excluded Ukrainian culture from their purview.
The first appraisal of the book was penned by Oleg Matveev, who at the time was still a graduate student at Kuban’ State and who subsequently became a rising star among the younger generation of historians in the region.^[16] He questioned why only Ukrainian authors were included in the anthology and insisted that the authors in the collection did not represent a “purely Ukrainian literary tradition” (chisto ukrainskuiu literaturnuiu traditsiiu). Endorsing N. I. Bondar’s concept of a Kuban’ Cossack subethnos, he argued that in the late imperial period a “mutual interpenetration of cultures” (vzaimoproniknovenie kul’tur) had taken place in the region, making it difficult to untangle the Russian and Ukrainian elements of a common Kuban’ culture. The implicit message was that residents of Kuban’ should not be called Ukrainians and to emphasize this point he concluded his essay by lampooning the Ukrainian national movement and arguing that Ukrainians could not even be considered Ukrainians in the late imperial period.
A vitriolic evaluation of the volume was soon published by Vitalii Bardadym, a senior, semi-professional author of several works on local history. Bardadym accused Chumachenko of purposefully omitting mention of dozens of talented representatives of Russian literature in the region.^[17] In a series of scathing comments he criticized both Chumachenko and the authors he republished, reviving the use of the terms such as Little Russian and portraying the anthology as an attempt to fan contempt for Moskali (Russians). F. A. Shcherbina, one of the most distinguished and universally revered scholars of the region in the imperial period, was derided by Bardadym for the Ukrainian tendencies he espoused in emigration:

“He selfishly (samoliubivo) dismembered himself from the single and whole (tselostnyi) living organism of the great Russian people, which consists of the three great and related branches – the Great Russian, Little Russians (Ukrainians), and the Belorussians.”^[18]

Cossacks, in his opinion, “considered it an honor to master the Russian grammar, and the Russian literary language, in order to thereby connect to the common national culture of the fatherland and to world culture (priobshchitsia k obshchenatsional’noi otechestvennoi i mirovoi kul’ture).” He accuses Chumachenko of feeling “enmity (nepriazn’) for everything Russian” and asks:

“Estemeed compiler of Kuren’, whom do you serve? What are you calling for? The unity of the Russian nation? The rebirth of Kuban’ and Great Russia? Or to schism? Where is your conscience and patriotism? They are lost!”

The mere attempt to revive interest in the Ukrainian literary heritage of the region was dismissed as a dangerous example of “Mazepism.” His message is short and simple: a true patriot, and a true Cossack, should turn a blind eye to things Ukrainian.
Nikolai Velengurin, a specialist in literature, responded to the discussion by criticizing Bardadym for his tone, but upheld many of his criticisms as valid.^[19] Chumachenko had neglected to include various Russian authors in the anthology and had hurried the book into publication without “first getting the advice of specialists or discussing it in literary or academic circles” i.e. without consulting the establishment that had suppressed discussion of Ukrainian topics for decades. He did however censure Bardadym for allowing himself “to use the haughty tone of a prosecuting attorney in a literary controversy.” Without touching on questions of censorship or the neglect of Ukrainian topics since 1933, Velengurin mused: “A strange (and previously unknown to literary scholarship) term has appeared: ‘Cossack author.’” Emigre authors had employed the term “Cossack author” since at least the thirties, but apparently Velengurin’s vision of literary scholarship stopped at the borders of the USSR.
B. Gerasimenko concluded the discussion with a letter to the newspaper that had published Bardadym’s tirade. “It reminds me not of a review, but of devastating (razgromnaia) party-line article from a time that is not so distant and that was not so good for the revival of culture.”^[20] With no party to suppress discussion, however, the Ukrainian voices in local discourse could no longer be silenced by administrative fiat. In view of the fact that over half of the region’s population once spoke Ukrainian, the revival of Ukrainian studies is not as remarkable as the negative reaction to the first attempt to violate Stalinist era taboos on discussing the Ukrainian heritage.
Although a few intellectuals followed the discussion, the fact that it was carried out in three different publications effectively precluded broad sectors of the population from following it. Chumachenko has continued to publish profusely on the Ukrainian heritage of the region, but his publications are not widely available in local kiosks or bookstores. Hence, Ukrainian perspectives on questions of local identity and history remain beyond the range of vision of all but the most dedicated local readers.
A more ambiguous view of Kuban’ Cossack language and culture appeared in 1995. Petr Tkachenko, a retired military officer from Kuban’ who now resides in Moscow, published a book entitled: “Where does Cossack glory sleep?”^[21] Widely available in Krasnodar in the mid-nineties, the book treats various aspects of Cossack history and revival in the form of a personal, introspective expedition:

“On several occasions I tried to find out and retrieve from the past [information] about my grandfathers, but nothing came of this – it turned out that everything connected with the life of that mysterious tribe to which I belong, kazachestvo, was mercilessly trampled under foot.”^[22]

The account is a wistful, lyrical search for authentic voices from the Cossack past in conversations with family members, among residents of Cossack stanitsas, in documents, and in songs. Tkachenko portrays his efforts as an intellectual rescue mission to find out whether Cossack glory can ever be aroused from its deep slumber. Here one is reminded of 19th century romantic notions of the nation as a dormant force waiting to be awakened.
Tkachenko also provides an ambiguous assessment of the language situation in the region: “The main problem of the culture of Kuban’ was and remains the problem of its language.”^[23] He condemns both tsarist policies of forbidding use of the Ukrainian literary language and early Soviet attempts to “artificially impose the Ukrainian language” in the region.^[24] He sees a tragedy in the fact that the spoken language and literary language are antagonistically opposed (protivopostavleny), but at the same time he advocates the status quo: retention of Russian as literary language and use of the [Ukrainian] local tongue as a language of “folk creativity” (narodnoe tvorchestvo).^[25]
Tkachenko’s book provides a good indication of the contradictory impulses present among the current generation of Cossack descendants.
He provides various statements condemning de-Cossackization and the loss of Cossack culture, yet clings to a residual Soviet great-power patriotism. While treasuring and promoting the local idiom, he is ambivalent about its status in the world of print culture. He laments the loss of pre-revolutionary historian F. A. Shcherbina’s archive, without probing the reasons why Shcherbina eventually came to consider himself a Ukrainian.^[26] He rejects the categorization of the Kuban’ Cossacks as either a soslovie (estate/military caste) or a distinct ethnic group, but in articulating his definition of kazachestvo, he relies on vague visions of Cossacks as somehow special and distinct, yet uniquely Russian.^[27] Oddly, or perhaps appropriately, he claims to have found the resting place of Cossack glory in an unmarked, unconsecrated mass grave of victims of the great famine of 1933.^[28]
The famine is a ubiquitous feature of the local historical landscape, but it is virtually invisible in print culture and official memory. The pervasive oral accounts of the famine have not been widely incorporated into narratives of the region’s history. No monograph devoted solely to the famine in Kuban’ has yet appeared and most local officials and academics seem content to forget about the tragedy altogether. Apparently no official, Krai-level commemorations of the famine were held to mark either the sixtieth (1992-1993) or seventieth (2002-2003) anniversaries of this tragic event. Unlike in Ukraine, where memories of the famine have been mobilized to present a narrative of victimization at the hands of an uncaring and unforgiving Soviet government, no coherent Cossack-centered narrative has been constructed from the various individual accounts of the famine period published since 1991.^[29]
A victimization narrative of sorts did emerge, however, in a book called “Combat above the Abyss” published in 1999 by a Vitalii Baranichenko, a university student in Krasnodar.^[30] It would be easy to ignore this problematic narrative concocted from various (sometimes contradictory) secondary sources, if not for the fact that it was issued in a significant print run (5000 copies) by the leading publishing house in the region. Moreover, the book claims to be no less than a “spiritual-moral textbook of the history of Cossackdom of Kuban’ and Russia in the context of the irreconcilable confrontation (protivostoianie) between Good and Evil.”^[31]
Baranichenko frequently recycles from other historians (without citing sources) and covers a broad expanse of history from the medieval period to the twentieth century. In general he produces a crude synthesis of Cossack nationalist views found in Gubarev’s emigre Cossack encyclopedia and the views of Cossacks as servants of Russia that are present in local surveys of the history of Kuban’. The author cannot claim much originality, or conceptual clarity, in his conclusions that Cossacks are both “a people within a people” (narod v narode) and a military estate.^[32]
Innovation, however, can be identified in his re-visioning of Cossack history through the lens of anti-Zionist rhetoric of the type favored by then governor Nikolai Kondratenko. Several chapters set up the usual array of anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic conspiracy theories that are far from rare in post-Soviet discourse, but Baranichenko portrays Cossacks as the “force for Good” that attempted to save Russia from Jewish revolution. He even asserts that Cossacks were crucified by Jewish commissars and that collective farms were instituted by Kaganovich on the pattern of the kibbutz in Palestine.^[33] Here the famine becomes a central event in the imagined history of Cossack victimization by Zionism. Eyewitness accounts of the famine are interwoven with statements blaming Jews. For example a communist named Mendel’ Khataevich is quoted as having said: “it took famine to show them who is the master here. It costs millions of lives, but we won.”^[34] In contrast to the indifference to the famine that characterizes much local historiography, Baranichenko acknowledges local suffering and attempts to explain it. In the face of academic inertia, it is not inconceivable that he and other “historians” could carve out an impressive popular niche for themselves in the politics of local memory. Perhaps even more unsettling is the fact that for a time the author worked as an instructor at a Cossack summer camp for children.
While scholarly discourse helps to define the parameters of Cossack visibility, public education provides a more potent lens for shaping visions of Cossack history and identity. The first officially approved high school textbook of twentieth-century Kuban’ history produced in the post-Soviet period recognizes a degree of local distinction, but nonetheless focuses on Cossacks from a Russian perspective.^[35] Written by Valerii Shchetnev, a historian of the older generation at Kuban’ State University, and Elena Smorodina, a high school history teacher, this cautious overview was issued in a first print run of ten thousand copies. Contrary to much of the debate and writing in the nineties, Cossacks are characterized here as “a special military-service estate” (osoboe voenno-sluzhiloe soslovie ) that enjoyed special privileges and represented “the best military traditions of Russia.”^[36] In a brief survey of Cossack “traditional culture” the authors mention the existence of a “Cossack language” (kazachii iazyk) that “arose on the basis of the unification of Ukrainian and Russian conversational styles (razgovornykh stilei) and represents a dialect within the Russian language.”^[37] This awkward phrase is followed by various examples of local lexical items, but examples of grammar and verbal declension are not provided, for to include these would make transparent the high degree of distinction between local speech and the Russian literary language. Students are thus left with the impression that local speech, which is also characterized as a “disappearing phenomenon” (ukhodiashchee iavlenie), consists of only isolated and colorful words and phrases.
Essentially, the text follows old Soviet narrative structures: endless catalogues of official statistics, glorification of the World War II victors, emphasis on cultural development and economic construction, triumph rather than tragedy. The textbook’s treatment of the Kuban’ republic of the Civil War period is only cursory and one senses a residual discomfort with this non-Bolshevik political alternative. The liquidation of the Cossack estate and repressions directed against Cossacks, arguably the central events of local history in the twentieth century, are barely mentioned. Both the brief period of Ukrainianization (1926-1932) and the ban on education in Ukrainian and publications in the Ukrainian literary language (1933 – ca. 1991) are absent from the narrative. The famine is briefly mentioned and the 1932 deportation of the entire population of Poltavskaia stanitsa is also mentioned, but both are treated without any particular pathos.^[38] The authors acknowledge that some Cossacks joined the Nazi occupying forces during the Second World War, but they are very ambiguous about their motivations for doing so or their overall numbers.^[39] The treatment of Cossack revival avoids controversy and makes no mention of the schisms that exist within the revived Cossack ranks. The Gromov group is portrayed as the successor to the pre-revolutionary Host and is described as dedicated to the “re-instatement and preservation of kazachestvo as a special ethnic group of the population of the krai.”^[40]
In my view, the Kuban’ Cossacks that come into view in post-Soviet historiography are too often one-dimensional images: knights of Orthodoxy, defenders of Rus’, servants of the tsar, patriots of Kuban’, sons of Ukraine, etc. Existing narrative structures have failed to accommodate diversity and one-dimensional models poorly explain the experience and self-perceptions of a hypothetical mid-nineteenth century Kuban’ Cossack: Born on the territory of modern day Ukraine (which he knew as Little Russia), he moved to the North Caucasus. He served the tsar by standing guard in a watchtower which marked the border of the Russian empire, but felt a certain contempt for Russians, whom he casually and sometimes contemptuously referred to as moskali, katsapy, laposhniki. Sometimes on duty he had occasion to speak in broken Russian, but generally he carried on in a local variant of Ukrainian. He sang songs condemning Catherine II for uprooting the Zaporozhians, while commemorating his loyal service in Kuban’ to her successors. Overtly Orthodox, he attended church irregularly and felt a certain respect for his Muslim adversaries. He listened with alacrity when a comrade read aloud newspaper stories about Russia (which for him probably began somewhere north of the Don) and wept when the poetry of Taras Shevchenko was recited.
In order to bring such individuals and their communities into sharper focus, selective vision must yield to multi-dimensional observations and variegated perspectives. Only collective, corrective insight derived from the observations of various scholars (who individually apply diverse ideological lenses, experience astigmatic proclivities, and tend to look through rose-colored glasses or dark-shaded spectacles) can sketch a new and multi-faceted vision of identity and ethnicity in Kuban’.