Kuban Cossacks sent large contingents to fight alongside the Imperial Russian Army in many wars and formed the Tsar's personal bodyguard.

The military nature of their lifestyle was mirrored in the administration of the region, where stanitsa settlements had much more autonomy than traditional Russian villages, electing a local Ataman (commander).

However, during the reforms of Tsar Alexander II, the pacified Kuban Oblast was heavily invested in and extensive peasant migrants from Russian, Armenian and Ukrainian provinces migrated to cultivate the land.

Kuban Cossack units deserted the front lines and returned home to protect their homelands from a threatened Turkish invasion.

A few days after the closing of the sessions, the members of the Council voted for a resolution to join a federal structure with Ukraine (under its conservative Skoropadsky government).

Yet after the early successes of Kornilov's Volunteer Army, which rid the Kuban of the Bolsheviks, the front lines moved north into the Don territory.

[citation needed] 4 December 1918 at the special session of the Council where the 2nd Constitution was proclaimed, the Kuban National Republic was renamed Kubanskiy krai.

By April the delegation put forward its requests for international help for the Kuban as an independent state to be defended from Bolshevism and announced its break from Denikin and refusal to further cooperate in the White Movement.

In December 1919, after Denikin's defeat, it had become clear that the Bolsheviks would overrun the Kuban, and some of the separatist-minded groups managed to restore the Rada authorities and to break away from the Volunteer Army, either to fight the Bolsheviks in alliance with other independence-striving governments such as the Ukrainian People's Republic and the Democratic Republic of Georgia or to liberate Ukraine from Pilsudsky's invasion in alliance with the Reds.

The last premier of the Republic, Vasil Ivanis, argued that had Pavlo Skoropadsky acted more decisively, and sent a UNR division led by General Native to the Kuban, Ukraine would have become the main nexus of the Anti-Bolshevik movement.

Ivanis states that with the aid of the Central Powers they could have easily reclaimed all of Russia, given that Aleksander Kolchak would have acted in the same time frame in the East.

The reason for the proclamation of the republics in Karachay-Cherkessia was a referendum held by Cossack activists in the summer of 1991: 64.8% of whose participants were in favour of creating autonomy.