From Marginalized to Militant: The Post-Soviet Cossack Revival

This seminar, drawn from a larger book project on migration affiliated with the Soviet Union’s collapse, examines how the post-Soviet Cossack revival became intertwined with questions of migration, borders, and diasporas in the wake of the Soviet collapse. 

By incorporating the voices of migrants, this research challenges narratives that reduce the Soviet collapse to top-down narratives, demonstrating instead how population movements and their management were fundamental to the forming of the new Russian state.

The speaker traces how Cossacks—historically marginalized under Soviet rule—transformed from victims of repression into state-sanctioned border enforcers who policed non-Slavic migrants in Russia’s North Caucasus. The research documents how these policies affected displaced communities like Meskhetian Turks, who faced systematic discrimination and were effectively denied basic rights and services in regions under Cossack influence. 

The North Caucasus became a crucial migration crossroads receiving three-quarters of all refugees to Russia by 1992. Cossack organizations actively lobbied the Russian state for recognition and power, presenting themselves as defenders of Russia's new diasporas in the former Soviet space and border security. The state strategically empowered these organizations in the early 1990s, integrating them into state structures at a time when hundreds of thousands of (former) Soviet citizens were displaced by the Soviet collapse.

Through previously unused archival sources, the seminar demonstrates how this alliance helped the weak post-Soviet Russian state consolidate power, establish ethnonationalist principles in place of Soviet internationalism, and create precedents for using claims about protecting Russians abroad to justify territorial expansion. 

Cossack organizations fostered irredentist campaigns in Kazakhstan, and later played instrumental roles in Russia’s actions in Crimea and the Donbass region of Ukraine.

Admittance is on a first come–first served basis. Tea and Coffee Provided.