Stanitsa

A stanitsa or stanitza ( ; ), also spelled stanycia ( ) or stanica ( ), was a historical administrative unit of a Cossack host, a type of Cossack polity that existed in the Russian Empire.

Etymology

The Russian word is the diminutive of the word (), which means "station" or "police district". It is distantly related to the Sanskrit word (), which means "station", "locality", or "district".

Structure

The stanitsa was a unit of economic and political organisation of the Cossack peoples who lived in the Russian Empire. Each stanitsa contained
several villages and khutirs.

An assembly of landowners governed each stanitsa community. This assembly distributed land, oversaw institutions like schools, and elected a stanitsa administration and court. The stanitsa administration consisted of an Ataman, a collection of legislators, and a treasurer. The stanitsa court made judgements regarding "petty criminal and civil suits".

All inhabitants, except for non-Cossacks, were considered members of the stanitsa. Non-Cossacks were required to pay a fee to use the local land owned by the stanitsa.

History

In the Russian Empire

The stanitsa was first an administrative unit in the 18th century. In the late 18th century, when the Cossack peoples largely lost their autonomy within the empire, they still kept self-governance at the level of the stanitsa; each stanitsa was still allowed to elect its own assembly.

Destruction

In the aftermath of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, a new Soviet regime took power. Beginning in 1919, the Soviet regime pursued a policy of genocideSoviet order to exterminate Cossacks is unearthed
University of York Communications Office, 21 January 2003 and systematic repression against Cossacks known as De-Cossackization. The policy aimed at the elimination of the Cossacks as a distinct collectivity by exterminating the Cossack elite, coercing all other Cossacks into compliance and eliminating Cossack distinctness. As part of this policy, the Soviet forces sought to erase Cossack administrative structures, especially of the Don Cossacks. The purpose of this was to "deny Cossacks any Don structure as a point of identification and to 'dilute' the Cossack population by appending portions of neighboring non-Cossack provinces". This included distinctly Cossack names for administrative units, as the Cossacks were fond of these names "as markers of their distinctiveness from peasants." The Soviets sought to erase these identities. On 20 April 1919, the Red Army's Southern Front issued an order renaming the stanitsas to generic volosts, or counties. Local revolutionary committees assisted in this, passing resolutions in parallel to destroy the stanitsa as a social unit. The '' Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine'' lists the specific end date of the existence of the traditional stanitsa as 1920.

Later in the Soviet Union, the term ''stanitsa'' was used after 1929 to refer to rural settlements on former Cossack land that were governed by soviet councils.

Modern usage

In modern Russia, the administration classifies a stanitsa as a type of rural locality in these federal subjects of Russia:

* Adygea
* Chechnya
* Dagestan
* Ingushetia
* Kabardino-Balkaria
* Karachay-Cherkessia
* Krasnodar Krai
* North Ossetia–Alania
* Novosibirsk Oblast
* Omsk Oblast
* Orenburg Oblast
* Rostov Oblast
* Stavropol Krai
* Sverdlovsk Oblast
* Volgograd Oblast

The most populous stanitsa in modern Russia is Kanevskaya in Krasnodar Krai (44,800 people in 2005). Formerly, the most populous stanitsa was Ordzhonikidzevskaya in Ingushetia (61,598 people in 2010), but in 2016 it was reorganized into the town Sunzha. The town Stanytsia Luhanska in Ukraine, originally founded by Cossacks, still has ''stanytsia'' in its name.

References

Bibliography

*

History of the Cossacks
Rural geography
Geography of Russia
Human habitats
Cossack culture
Stanitsa

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