The Cossack Revival and the Memorialization of the Civil War

Introduction. This article examines how the Cossack revival movement activists conducted memory politics regarding the Russian Civil War by cooperating with, and sometimes opposing, local authorities in the Rostov and Krasnodar regions in the 1990–2010s. Methods and materials. The research uses the institutional approach to analyze memory policy as an interaction of multiple actors arguing for symbolic capital and political domination. It draws on a wide range of source material, some of which is analyzed for the first time in historiography. Analysis. In the early stages of the revival, the key theme for Cossack memorial activism was the Civil War and, as a consequence, the Soviet repressive policy of de-Cossackization, which activists conceptualized as genocide of the Cossacks in order to obtain preferences from the authorities. It was in the “Cossack” territories that the memorialization of the White heroes of the Civil War began in the form of monuments and museum exhibitions. The article argues that the demonstration of reconciliation and harmony in the form of the installation of monuments of the same name in Krasnodar and Novocherkassk was a political move by local Cossack elites seeking to legitimize their position in the power vertical. Results. The victim narrative about the genocide during the Civil War was a consensus for the entire Cossack movement until the mid-2000s, when the process of bureaucratization took shape. After that the narrative of de-Cossackization began to be used to emphasize the heroic nature of the Cossacks, who overcame suffering and once again took their place as defenders of Russia. The agonistic approach to the memory policy has changed to an antagonistic one. Funding. This article was supported by the Russian Science Foundation grant №25-28-20369 “The policy of memory regarding the participation of the Don Cossacks in the Civil War 1918– 1920 year in Southern Russia in the Soviet and post-Soviet period: images of the Cossacks, memorial space, forms of commemoration” and the Administration of the Volgograd Region.