Fruits of Colonialism: Cossack Settlers in the Circassian Lands, 1861-1870

CBEES Advanced Seminar with Oleksandr Polianichev

Presenter: Oleksandr Polianichev, postdoctoral researcher at CBEES

Chair: Per-Anders Rudling, Associate Professor at the History Department, Lund University; Research Associate at CBEES

Abstract:

My paper examines the Russian Empire’s settler colonialism in the North-West Caucasus and the eastern Black Sea littoral in the early 1860s-early 1870s. These lands, home to Adyghe (Circassian) peoples prior to their mass expulsion in 1864, became an area of a state-driven Cossack colonization that was supposed to consolidate the empire’s grip on the new territorial acquisition. The paper shows how economic hardships of the settlers and their reliance on the remnants of indigenous horticulture for subsistence led to the government’s and educated public’s disillusionment in the capacities of Russians to act as agents of colonialism and civilising mission.

Bio Note:

Oleksandr Polianichev has a Ph.D. in history from the European University Institute in Florence. He has held fellowships at the German Historical Institute (Moscow), Herder Institute (Marburg), New Europe College (Bucharest), Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (Leipzig), Leibniz Institute of European History (Mainz), Centre for Advanced Study (Sofia), and Centre for Russian, Caucasian and Central European Studies (Paris).

Since 2019, he has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies at Södertörn University (Stockholm). His postdoctoral project, “Russian, Little Russian, Hardly Russian: Ukraine and Empire in the North Caucasus, 1790s–1917,” explores the intricate ways in which the settler colonial community of Ukrainian Cossacks in the Caucasus engaged with the imperial project over the course of the long nineteenth century. Focusing on the Cossacks’ experiences with empire and its colonial endeavor, his project ultimately aims to give a glimpse into a multifaceted world of ethnic and cultural solidarities on the Ukrainian-Russian language frontier.