UNIVERSALISING COSSACK PARTICULARISM: `THE COSSACK REVOLUTION' IN EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY KUBAN'

Author: Koo Ja-Jeong  

Publisher: Routledge Ltd

ISSN: 0954-6545

Source: Revolutionary Russia, Vol.25, Iss.1, 2012-06, pp. : 1-29

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Abstract

This paper explores the `universalistic' turn of Cossack particularism in early twentieth century Kuban' from soslovie to ethnos. It investigates the growing tension between the particularism of the Cossack caste and the increasingly universalistic setting of modern Russia, a setting that reduced the Kuban' Cossackdom to an isolated anachronism. In the early twentieth century the Cossacks' attempt to escape the outmoded soslovie identity and their search for a `modern' alternative resulted in the ethno-centric self-fashioning of Kuban' Cossackdom, a move which would lead to the emergence of a Cossack nation-building movement in the Kuban' region during the Russian civil wars.