Kuban Cossacks - National Identity

National Identity

The concept of national and ethnic identity of the Kuban Cossacks has changed with time and has been the subject of much contention.

In the 1897 census, 47.3% of the Kuban population (including extensive 19th century non-Cossack migrants from both Ukraine and Russia) referred to their native language as Little Russian while 42.6% referred to their native language as Great Russian.

Most cultural production in Kuban from the 1890-1910 period, such as plays, stories, etc., were written and performed in the Little Russian/Ukrainian language, and one of the first political parties in Kuban was the Ukrainian Revolutionary Party. During World War I, Austrian officials received reports from a Ukrainian organization of the Russian Empire that 700 Kuban Cossacks in eastern Galicia had been arrested by their Russian officers for refusing to fight against Ukrainians in the Austrian army. Briefly during the Russian Civil War, the Kuban Cossack Rada declared Ukrainian to be the official language of the Kuban Cossacks, before its suppression by the Russian White leader General Denikin. .

After the Bolshevik Victory in the Russian Civil War, the Kuban was viewed as one of the most hostile regions to the young Communist state. In his 1923 speech devoted to the national and ethnic issues in the party and state affairs, Joseph Stalin identified several obstacles in implementing the national programme of the party. Those were the "dominant-nation chauvinism", "economic and cultural inequality" of the nationalities and the "remenants of nationalism among a number of nations which have borne the heavy yoke of national oppression". For the Kuban, this was met with a unique approach. The victim/minority became the non-Cossack peasants who, like their counterparts in New Russia, were mixed population group, with an ethnic Ukrainian majority. To counter "dominant-nation chauvinism" a policy of Ukrainization/Korenization was introduced. According to the 1926 census, there were already nearly a million Ukrainians registered in the Kuban Okrug alone (or 62% of the total population)

In addition to that, 700 schools with Ukrainian as the language of instruction were opened, and the Kuban Pedagogical Institute had its own Ukrainian department. Numerous Ukrainian-language newspapers such as Chornomorets and Kubanska Zoria were published. Historian A.L. Pawliczko even claims there was an attempt to have a referendum on the joining of Kuban to the Ukrainian SSR. In 1930 the Ukrainian Minister ("People’s Komissar") Mykola Skrypnyk, involved in solving national issues in the Ukrainian SSR, had put forward an official proposal to Joseph Stalin that the territories of Voronezh, Kursk, Chornomoriya, Azov, Kuban regions be administered by the government of the Ukrainian SSR.

By the end of 1932, the Ukrainization programme was reversed, and by the late 1930s the majority of Kuban Ukrainians identified themselves as Russians As a result in the 1939 census, Russians in the Kuban were a majority of 2754027 or 86% The 2nd edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia explicitly named the Kuban Cossacks as Russians.

The modern Kuban vernacular known as balachka differs from contemporary literary Russian and is most similar to the dialect spoken in central Ukraine near Cherkassy Some regions the vernacular includes many Northern Caucasus words and accents. The infuence of Russian grammatic forms is also apparent.

Like many other Cossacks, some refuse to accept themselves as part of the standard ethnic Russian people, and claim to be a separate subgroup on par with sub-ethnicities such as the Pomors. In the 2002 Russian census the Cossacks were allowed to a have distinct nationality as a separate Russian sub-ethnical group. The Kuban Cossacks living in Krasnodar Kray, Adygea, Karachayevo-Cherkessia and some regions of Stavropol Krai and Kabardino-Balkaria counted 25,000 men. However, the strict governance of the census meant that only Cossacks who are in active service were treated as such, and at the same time 300,000 families are registered by the Kuban Cossack Host. Kuban Cossacks not politically affiliated with the Kuban Cossack Host, such as the director of the Kuban Cossack Choir Viktor Zakharchenko, have maintained at various times a pro-Ukrainian orientation. Zakharchenko has recently changed his position and proposes a unification of Ukraine and Russia.