Abstract:

The paper focuses on the examination of the complex structure of space and identity in the context of a Don Cossack region, which, emerges as a concept characterised and framed by the popular discourse rather than administrative boundaries (The Land of the Don Army). The paper accentuates the urgency of space/identity interplay at the time of crisis and/or austerity measures: I will demonstrate how Cossack space influenced the regional identity during three periods: Russian revolution of the beginning of the 20th century, the Collapse of USSR in 1990s, and the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine. Considering territory as a notions of ownership, power and control whereby that space is utilised for the attainment of particular outcomes (Sack 1986; Storey 2001; Delaney 2005; Elden 2010), I am going to argue the limitation of the approach when a borderland defined as a type of space where local indigenous actors far from imperial state centers could play off imperial powers against each other and thereby maintain a degree of regional power, autonomy, and freedom outside the scope of colonial control (Aron, Adelman 1999). Instead, I argue that Cossack region is to be considered as a continuous phenomenon of instability, mobility, and resistance that unsettles and exposes the limitations of the homogenizing national state-building project.

The main paper’s question is how a Don Cossacks as a space of permanent interconnection between borderland fixity and fluidity informs us about Cossack identity. The ‘sense of place’ produces a form of regional patriotism that includes controversial forms of loyalty and marginalised identities. In the paper I am also going to demonstrate epistemological dynamic about the Cossack space as a continuous adaptability of the universal and situated history-writings. The particular role of collective memory in the defining of a place is caused by the fact that any place ‘are the focus of personal sentiments, with the feelings for place permeating day-to-day life and experience’ (Muir 1999, 274). I will argue that dynamic of Cossack memory has been caused by two-fold process: from one hand it was determined by global humanities and the impact of growing memory-studies field, and from the another in Russian context it is deeply influenced by the political conjuncture and instrumentalisation of history in Russia. Thus, the paper provides a new lens through which to formulate a new concept of Cossacks as an identity and space.