From an Estate to a Cossack Nation: Kuban' Samostiinost' , 1917.

This paper explores the origins of Cossack separatism in Kuban' during 1917. It investigates the growing tension between the Cossack caste and the civic universalism of the post-February environment, a setting which increasingly made Kuban' Cossackdom an anachronism, obliging Cossacks to search for a modern alternative group identity superseding the old estate one. The Kuban' Cossacks' answer was to justify Cossacks' estate particularism for the sake of ‘civic unity’ by implementing separatism in the name of ‘self-determination’. The result was the emergence of a Cossack nation-building movement during the civil wars, which pursued the separation of a Cossack state from Bolshevik Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]