Specificity of the East Slavic ethnicity as exemplified by Kuban
The author discusses the reasons for failure of Ukrainization in Kuban during the Civil War and the New Economic Policy (1918-1929), defines interpretations of the Kuban ethnic identity in contemporary Russian and Ukrainian historiographies and reveals the social conditions for prevalence of the Russian identity in pre-revolutionary Kuban. The artificial nature of Ukrainization, rejection of it by the Kuban population, and its nonconformance with the imperative of socio-cultural integration into the Soviet society are reasoned on the basis of constructivist paradigm. In 1918-1929 the Kuban Cossacks had a complex ethnic-caste identity which could not be properly revealed by methods of analysis existed at that time. Voluntary assimilation of Ukrainians by Russians gradually gained ground, contrary to the authorities’ course to Ukrainization in 1923-1932. Detachment of the Cossacks from «out-of-town» people and urban Russian population was based on their stratified caste society and on historical memory of their pre-revolutionary privileged position. The author has identified a number of features of the East Slavic ethnicity as exemplified by the Ukrainians of Kuban: lack of a rigid binding of ethnic identity with the corresponding dialect and traditional culture (they preserved the sense of belonging to the East Slavic people); close ties of identity with territorial localization; strengthening of ethnic self-awareness in case of its «binding» with social and occupational status, and higher importance of the latter compared to native dialect and culture. These features have been developed as adaptation to volatile living conditions and instability of political, social and economic life in Kuban. Education system, literature, mass media, as well as high level of people involvement into the formation and development of modern society and culture exert a great deal of influence on the ethnic identity of Kubans.