The Carpatho-Russian community in the Siberian socio-cultural space during the Civil War (1918-1919): a view through the prism of the history of emotions

During the Revolution and the Civil War, a few score of thousands of natives of the Ciscarpathian Rus came to Siberia and the Far East as refugees and prisoners of war. All of them, including members of the Central Carpatho-Russian Council (CCC), had to choose different strategies to adapt to the changing environment. At the same time, this forced them to choose sides in the conflict, which, in turn, foregrounded the problem of self-identification. Addressing these issues in terms of the history of emotions, it is possible to build a research model that allows reconstructing and describing the adaptation and self-identification strategies used by the community as a kind of attempt to construct an “emotional community”. This construction itself could occur by creating certain “emotional modes”, which were a set of prescribed emotives - speech acts describing emotions and changing or causing them. Since emotives could be expressed in discourse and rituals, it is appropriate to turn to the analysis of the content of symbolic politics and media, namely the official CCC newspaper Karpatorusskoe slovo. This research analyses the newspaper publications to identify the emotives used by the CCC for shaping a certain emotional mode for the “emotional community” - the natives of Ciscarpathia, who found themselves in unfamiliar social and cultural environment in Eastern Russia. The analysis allows considering the specificity of the CCC's agitation activities and the process of construction of the Carpatho-Russian identity as “an inherent part of the Russian people”.

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