Cossack modernity: Nation building in Kuban', 1917--1920

This dissertation explores "Kazach'ia samostiinost'", the nation building and federalism of the Kuban' Cossacks from 1917 to 1920. It explores the growing tension between the particularism of the Cossack caste and the increasingly universalistic setting of modern Russia, a setting that reduced Russian Cossackdom to an isolated anachronism. The Cossacks' attempt to escape the outmoded soslovie identity and their search for a "modern" alternative marked the beginning of samostiinost'. When the new "soslovie-blind" civic order of the 1917 Revolution threatened the survival of the Cossack caste, the response of the Kuban' Cossacks was "universalistically particularistic": the promotion and practice of estate particularism in the name of universalism.;This oxymoronic move to universalistic particularism featured two problematic claims that set Kuban' samostiinost' on the path to separatism: the ethnocentric self-fashioning of Cossackhood and the state-bound claim of self-determination by the Kuban' province. When the Kuban' Cossacks launched the "People's Republic of Kuban'" in early 1918, their justification of Kuban' separatism was not a soslovie-bound Cossackhood, but a " soslovie-blind" representation of civic unity. This duality was furthered in 1918 and 1919, as the Cossacks combined ethnic self-fashioning with the idea of civic community, thereby wrapping the Cossack identity in a new nationalistic mantle. The result was the emergence of an allegedly universalistic nation-state practicing the particularistic exclusion of the non-Cossack population. It was a Cossack state proclaiming a non-Cossack civic statehood. It realized separatism while decrying it.;The paradox of Kuban' samostiinost' culminated in its alliance with the Russian Whites. By associating itself with the Cossack oxymoron, the White Movement itself became a paradox. As an alliance of two antitheses, the separatist Kuban' and the "One and Invisible Russia," the South Russian White movement was doomed.