
- To break or take control of any ties between Russians inside the Russian Federation and Russians abroad,
- To “completely subordinate the Cossacks,”
- And to promote “a new Russian (or more precisely neo-Soviet) ideology” in which the state and its power are the central articles of faith.
Given those goals, he says, it was absolutely impossible that he would not be targeted; and the state’s campaign against him began long before he erected the statue at Lienz, Austria, in memory of the forcible deportation of the Cossacks to Stalin’s Russia. That was simply the last straw.“After visiting our museums and memorials, people are left with no doubt that such an ideology will lead only to the degradation of society and the human personality and that it will be possible to avoid this degradation only when the Individual is put at the center of the construction of the state.”

Related:
- Moscow’s attacks on Cossacks show limits of Putin’s ‘reconciliation’ program
- Putin’s war in Ukraine keeps Moscow from addressing Cossack genocide of 1920s
- Russian neo-Cossacks hold military parade near Luhansk
- Kuban might pursue independence but won’t become part of Ukraine, Russians say
- Stalin starved populations to death to russify Ukraine, North Caucasus and Kazakhstan, statistics show