The Kuban Cossack Association was a New Jersey–based organization active from the end of the Second World War through the early 2000s. Its members had belonged to the Kuban Cossack Host—originally Ukrainian (Zaporozhian) Cossacks resettled in the Kuban’ river region by Catherine the Great to protect the southern flank of the Russian Empire—living abroad after the Russian Revolution, their numbers increasing with the mass immigration of displaced persons from Europe in the late 1940s. The records acquired by the Hoover Institution Library & Archives include the papers of engineer Nicholas Feodoroff, author of the memoir A Cossack Galloped Far Away, and Aleksei Shilenok, also an engineer, who was active in the Russian émigré Beseda Society in Philadelphia. The papers reflect the two men’s respective interests and activities, including Feodoroff’s engineering accomplishments and Shilenok’s teaching and administrative activities with Beseda and Russian schools in Philadelphia. The records also detail the activities of Cossack émigré stanitsas (settlements) in other areas of the United States and other countries, such as Australia, Canada, and Germany. Among the highlights of the acquisition is a photograph depicting Feodoroff with Herbert Hoover (see image above).
While these records are far from complete (disproportionately representing materials dating from the 1990s and early 2000s), they do contain some excellent memoirs, lists of Cossacks in various stanitsas, and biographical materials relating to them. The collection is also rich in photographs documenting the activities of Cossacks in Russia (including during the Russian Civil War) and abroad, as well as photographs, printed matter, and correspondence documenting the ties formed between the émigré Cossacks and the neo-Cossack organizations that emerged in the Russian Federation in the 1990s. In this manner, the records are an excellent complement to the Roman Laba collection, which focuses on the rebirth of Cossack organizations in the Russian Federation in the 1990s. Among the rare photographs is a grand autographed image of General Petr Vrangel’ in his traditional Cossack cherkesska (the typical Cossack tight-waisted woolen coat). Thus, the Kuban Cossack Association records have found a home next to the papers of General Vrangel’, their civil war leader.
Among the notable memoirs in the collection are the correspondence and materials compiled by Fedor Eliseev, for whom the Library & Archives already holds other manuscript memoirs and autobiographical materials. Additional authors describe life in pre-revolutionary Russia, the Revolution, and the Russian Civil War, and then as émigrés (in Europe and the United States). These memoirs form an excellent complement to previously acquired Cossack-themed collections, such as the memoirs of General Mikhail Getmanov. In addition to unpublished materials, this acquisition includes a large collection of Cossack and other émigré periodicals that will be added to the library.
