Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 19 – The Russian
justice ministry is working on legislation defining the Cossacks as an
independent people rather than simply a social stratum within the Russian
nation. If they get that status, some Russians fear, that will open their way
to demand independence particularly given that then they can legitimately claim
to have been victims of genocide.
On the Versiya portal, Russian commentator Igor Yegorov says that such
talk raises the question “Is Cossackia not Russia?” the answer to which, he suggests, most
Russians had assumed was settled a long time ago and need not be revisited now
(versia.ru/kubanskie-kazaki-zaxoteli-stat-narodom).
Yegorov says that the initiator of
this new federal law is Nikolay Doluda, the ataman of the Kuban Cossack
host. The Cossack says that “the most
important” aspect of the draft legislation is that “the status of Cossackry is
defined in the document as a special form of state and social life of a
self-standing people – a people and nothing other.”
“In other words, the Versiya commentator says, those who have
drafted this legislation believe that “in the south of Russia lives a certain
independent people, the Cossacks, and these are in no way Russians.” It thus
opens the way for the Cossacks to carry out a planned 2020 census of the
population to determine who is a Cossack and who is a Russian.
A little over a year ago, he
continues, the Presidential Council on Cossack Affairs called for the preparation
of “a ‘big’ law on Russian Cossacks,” something the Federal Agency for
Nationality Affairs approved. “No one disputes that such a law is important and
necessary. But why run to the extremes?”
Many Cossacks do believe they are a
separate people and not a social stratum of the Russian nation, Yegorov
concedes; but not everyone in Moscow has reflected on what it will mean if the Cossacks
are defined that way in legal terms. If
they become a nation, the Cossacks will be able to justify their Day of the
Cossack Genocide on January 24.
That is because only a people may be
subject to genocide: a social class or stratum can’t be, however much it may
have suffered. And if the Cossacks are a
people who has been subject to a genocide, they are well on their way to
demanding independent statehood under current international law.
Those working on the draft insist they
have not made this concession. According to them, Yegorov says, “the document
does not contain a precise formulation that the Cossacks are a self-standing
ethnos.” But that is hardly the end of the story, he argues, given what the
draft legislation does say.
“Paragraph 2 of the draft law
contains the following definition: ‘The Russian Cossacks are a historically
evolved ethno-cultural community of citizens living on definite territories and
having a unique culture, traditional economic arrangements and forms of dress.”
That almost completely “coincides with the Stalinist definition of ‘the nation’
as a people.”
Ask any legal specialist about the
way these two things coincide and he will tell you that they do whatever the
drafters of the legislation think, the Versiya
commentator says. And if the Cossacks are given this, soon they will want their
own independent national territory, something that would carve up the Russian
Federation.
Since 1959, when the US Captive
Nations Week law was passed, many have laughed at the very idea of Cossackia as
a place deserving national self-determination.
But with this new law, the Cossacks in all their diversity are closer to
being able to make that claim on the ground than they have ever been.
Not surprisingly, some Russians are
worried. There are now some five million Cossacks in 12 hosts from the Arctic
to the southern borders of Russia and from the western edge of that country to
the Pacific. If a significant number of them pursue self-determination, that
will pose perhaps the largest ethnic challenge the Russian Federation has ever
faced.
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