People's Republic of Yorkshire

So what exactly does all that have to do with Brown's current travails? Well, Liam Murray reckons that Labour supporters are having trouble believing that the Tories have genuinely changed. I don't disagree, per se, but I would argue that this scepticism is not simply confined within party affiliations. I'm not a Labour supporter, but I have real difficulty accepting that the nasty party might be becoming a little bit nicer. On a purely intellectual level, it shouldn't surprise; the New Labour project has followed a surprising trajectory that appears to have taken it lurching rightwards, so there's ostensibly no reason why the Tories shouldn't go in the other direction.

So why is it so difficult? I actually think there are constructions of regional identity at work that help explain why the Tories have failed to make bigger inroads despite the present government's woefulness, and why they have not been better represented in the traditional Labour heartlands in recent decades. What do you picture when you hear the place name "Sheffield"? Pound to a penny, it's steel. The North-East? Coal-mining, ship-building. Yorkshire? Coal-mining, steel, dark satanic mills. I've said before that I don't find Englishness a compelling identity:

For me, the word leads me to the Home Counties, cucumber sandwiches, and a certain froideur. It doesn't encompass the looming mills of my home town, nor the open moors around it. In my understanding, I'm not English, I'm Yorkshire.

If truth be told, I have to say that I would add big C Conservatism to the list of English traits I don't believe I share. I know that is ahistorical: let alone the mill-owners, there were plenty of small business people and independent traders who like as not voted Conservative, and even the West Riding is not short of Conservative clubs, but this is a quasi-nationalist narrative being constructed, not a history thesis. And I am willing to bet that if you interrogate your mental image of a Yorkshireman a little more deeply, you get past the flat cap and whippet to see him stood in front of a row of back-to-backs, and a pithead wheel, foundry or textile mill not far off. These are images that I grew up with in Bradford, too, even though the heavy industry was already dying.

And who was it that delivered the death blow? Step forward Lady Thatcher. Liam criticises what he sees as a lack of historical knowledge, seeing "only" the milk snatching, miners' strike and mass unemployment. Well, the death of entire communities is a difficult thing to see past. If I understand my history correctly, the miners' strike was a deliberate political ploy by the Conservatives to demonstrate to the unions that their time had passed, and, emphatically, their power had gone. It was also repaying them for bringing down the Heath government. Let's not forget, for Thatcher, the miners were the "enemy within". And after the dispute had ended in defeat for the miners, the mines began to be closed. Not just closed, but put permanently beyond use, although no-one could say that they would never be profitable in the future. This was more than an industrial dispute, it was a deliberate attempt to destroy a way of life. And it worked: in the late 1990s, I drove a white van round the ex-mining villages of North Nottinghamshire, and those formerly thriving communities were pretty much ghost towns, scourged by heroin and the attendant crime.

What was that we were saying about decossackisation? Politically inspired attempts to uproot an existing culture? Yes, of course, the miners were not rounded up and shot, but all the same that way of life is dead. It may already have been ailing, but it was murdered, not put out of its misery. And the death of the other heavy industries gets conflated with the miners' fate, and makes a big red mark in the debit column against the Tories. On the Kuban', distrust of any regime in Moscow persists from the persecution of the 1920s and 1930s. People have long memories, and the 1980s were anyway not so long ago. So for me, and I suspect many like me, Cameron still has a lot to do before my cross will go in his box.

Mythos Thatcher*

So I'm in the park in the blistering heat, but enjoying the shade of a tree considerately planted just for my comfort by far-sighted gardeners thirty or so years ago. I'm with a man from Donetsk, Ukraine, and we're idly chatting as our daughters chase each other round the garishly painted playground furniture. I've sort of glossed over my thesis progress - this is, after all, idle chat - and we turn to the current troubles of Mr Brown; I make a remark, not startlingly original, that he would be even further in the eponymously-coloured stuff were it not for the memory of Thatcherism that still poisons the image of the Conservative party in the minds of many, myself included.Whoosh, I'm taken straight back to my thesis, and an intriguing parallel begins to take shape.

I've been concentrating recently on the importance of the myth of decossackisation for the contemporary Cossack movement, and particularly the Kuban' Cossacks. Let me state once again that here I am using the word myth not to imply a lack of truth, but to describe a narrative deployed by, in this case, a national movement to mobilise support, that may well have at least some basis in history (and, yes, I am aware that that is not an umproblematical remark. Still, I am only planning one draft of this. Anyhoo.) Essentially this particular myth states that the Bolsheviks employed a variety of measures, up to and including physical extermination, to remove any trace of Cossack ethnocultural identity from the territories traditionally associated with them. A 1919 letter from the Bolshevik Central Committee, signed by Sverdlovsk, is central to this myth, as it talks in clear terms about conducting "merciless mass terror" against Cossacks, defined in broad and ambiguous terms, which ambiguity was interpreted on the ground to dictate the fate of pretty much any Cossack, whether of high or low rank. This letter is inevitably cited by all present-day Cossack revivalists as evidence of the Soviet regime's murderous approach to the Cossack question, and there is evidence that in 1919-1920 on the Kuban' the Red Army conducted terror operations: indiscriminate shelling of Cossack villages, shooting people, and killing them with cold steel. Members of the Cossack movement privilege these accounts in constructing narratives of 'genocide' against the Cossacks, although the Sverdlovsk letter was in fact only addressed to the Don and Ural region Revolutionary Committees.

This strategy proved, unsurprisingly, counter-productive for the Bolshevik effort to bring on side the poorer elements of Cossack society - and there were plenty such. Sholokhov's magnum opus brings out the political divisions within Cossack society, which was not the unified pro-Imperial Russian whole that many of the emigre White authors would have you believe. Even the anti-Bolshevik forces were far from cohesive, indeed, Denikin executed some of the Kuban' Cossack leaders after they declared independence for Kuban' - Denikin saw this as treason against the Empire. Some commentators believe that the subsequent desertion of Kuban' Cossacks from the White ranks was the most important reason for the ultimate Red triumph in the Civil War. But, as one Russian commentator has it, although the tactics changed, the strategy remained the same: instead of trying to physically exterminate the Cossacks, the Bolsheviks began to use cultural re-education and population movements in order to achieve the dilution and ultimate disappearance of Cossack customs and identity. Mind you, it should be noted that the early 1930s saw collectivisation, and for Ukraine and the south of Russia, famine. This, too, is seized upon by the Cossack movement as further evidence of genocide: some Kuban' villages were exiled in toto, while extreme measures were taken against others that were accused of failing to meet their grain requisitioning norms.

This genocide myth is extremely widespread among the Cossack movement today; it justifies various privileges and benefits that have been granted to the Cossacks under Russian legislation on repressed peoples, and the Krasnodar Regional administration has been very supportive of the Kuban' Cossack movement. I think, though, that there is something more fundamental going on here: there is grave doubt among many observers that the Kuban' Cossacks can be considered a nation. The term 'genocide' implies a 'people' - gens - who are the target of the attacks, and are attacked purely because of their ethnic affiliation. If the Cossacks can establish the notion of a Cossack genocide, then they will be that much closer to establishing the idea of a Cossack nation.

What has this got to do with the spectre of Thatcher still dampening Conservative prospects? Ah, well, that's another post.

*I can't not acknowledge that I'm loving the fact that the common collocation for mythos is Cthulhu; you can make your own jokes about hideous, blindly destructive monsters lurking in the depths, that the insane still worship and implore to return.