After the Empire: Ukraine and the Don Liberation Movement Seek a Common Future

On 26 May, an interesting event took place at the Ukrinform press club. The formal theme and occasion were the 105th anniversary of the agreement’s conclusion between the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in exile and the Don Republic. The actual theme was Ukraine’s interaction with the Don Republic Movement, which is fighting for the freedom of the Don and the restoration of the Don Republic’s statehood and independence. The Ukrainian side was represented by people’s deputies – leaders and members of the special parliamentary commission, Maria Mezentseva, Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, Dmytro Mykysha, leading experts on the decolonisation of the Russian Empire, Mykola Marchenko, Oleg Magaletsky and others. On behalf of the Don Republican Movement, one of the leaders, now a serviceman of the Defence Forces of Ukraine, Saryn Kuchinsky, presented a lengthy report in good Ukrainian on the history of Don statehood, other movement leaders joined online. I will try to get and publish this text, it is worth it.
Let us note a couple of things.
1. The myth of the Don Cossacks as part of the “Russian people” is the same as that of the “Little Russians”. The originality of the language was lost, the culture was appropriated (“adopted”), but the self-governing and identity-based separateness of the All-Great Don Army was preserved even in conditions of total imperial pressure. Russians there have long been called the word that Facebook algorithms do not like. Only the communists managed to carry out “de-Cossackisation” and destroy the tradition, and only then, after the defeat of 1920.
2. All this lasted so long because Moscow was afraid to touch the Don. There were never so many uprisings anywhere. The communists wrote them down in textbooks as uprisings of the working people against the exploiters. But the Don Cossacks were free settlers, who were the exploiters? It was an anti-imperialist struggle for freedom. The atlas by Sergei Gromenko, which we have already presented earlier, perfectly reflects this history.
3. The treaty was signed in 1921 by Petliura, but Ukraine recognised the Don Republic back in 1918 under Skoropadsky.
4. The uniqueness of the situation is also in the fact that the 1959 American Act, adopted by Congress and signed by President Eisenhower, recognises the right to statehood and independence of the Cossacks on a par with Ukrainians, Estonians, Georgians, Poles, Hungarians, etc. The tradition of this act was supported by Obama, Trump in his first term, and Biden.
5. An independent Don, bordering Ukraine and Kazakhstan (which, I remind you, declared itself the heir to the Golden Horde), automatically turns on the independence of a dozen nations of the North Caucasus. Just look at the map.
In fact, everything is complicated and at the very beginning of the path. But the first steps are being taken now. There will be more.