Family and Community Among the Don Cossacks

Abstract

A common history, a shared way of life and a set of self-governing institutions helped to preserve a collective identity among the Cossacks. But the cohesion of Cossack society did not stem primarily from these. Cossack solidarity was ultimately underpinned by a sense of family and community, in which the boundaries between the two were constantly being broken. As a result of this process, family and community were inextricably linked, creating a remarkable depth of consensus and common interest among the Cossacks. In the midst of endless economic crises and wider cultural change which threatened to dissolve the Cossacks into an amorphous mass of rural poor, it was the sense of family and community that stabilized and preserved the Cossacks as a separate people.