“Antigones” from Transbaikalia. The specificity of women's counter-memory in the border regions of Inner Asia

Stalinist mass violence led to the dispersion of Transbaikalian Cossacks, the loss of their material and cultural base, the decrease of their population and the disintegration of the group. The reaction of the ex-Cossack transborder society in the USSR, China and Mongolia were the counter-memory building practices including the glorification of anticommunist uprisings and great respect for the local warlord Ataman Semenov (being the symbol of resistance). These re-remembering practices of the ultra male-oriented and dominated community reveal essential gender aspects. Paradoxically, the Transbaikalian Cossack counter-memory is a mostly women project. The Socialist modernization trauma confronted Cossack women with the so-called Antigone dilemma of the choice between the family (memory) and the state (forced forgetting). This article aims at showing the specificity of Cossack womens memory-building practices from the perspective of the character of women’s memories (connected with their family life, religious experiences and local social network), the difference between the sexes as regards the social experience in Transbaikalian villages and women’s role in the Cossack tradition (telling the truth). The empirical foundations of this investigation are based on the field work and archive research conducted in Russia, Mongolia and China. The theoretical basis is the assumption of the mostly epistemological presence of the Past and the dependence of memory on the current social and cultural situation. Thus, that proves the active social role of memory and the impossibility of the purely autonomous collective memory in the conditions of isolation and mass political indoctrination. Nonetheless, the analyzed case has also shown the possibility of transforming ideological patterns into private mythology and the women’s legends about the ancestors’ glory, crucial for the cultural survival of the community.