by Anna Reid
We were in a Turkish coffee-house at Caffa, when the principal minaret, one of the antient [sic] and characteristic monuments of the country, was thrown down, and fell with such violence, that its fall shook every house in the place. The Turks, seated on their divans, were smoking; and when that is the case an earthquake will scarcely rouse them; nevertheless, at this flagrant act of impiety and dishonour, they all rose, breathing out deep and bitter curses against the enemies of their Prophet. Even the Greeks, who were present, testified their anger by similar imprecations. One of them, turning to me, and shrugging his shoulders, said, with a countenance of contempt and indignation, SCYTHIANS!13
At least a third of the buildings in Bakhchisarai, he wrote, had already been demolished. Aqueducts and fountains were being stripped of their lead, and cemeteries of their tombstones, despite the fact that the country afforded ‘most excellent limestone, capable of being removed from the quarries with almost as little trouble as the destruction of the grave-stones occasions to the Russians’.14 Kaffa’s ancient Greek remains were being broken up to build barracks, and at Chersonesus marble was up for sale by cubic measure. Clarke wanted to buy a bas-relief – on offer, ‘together with a ton weight besides of other stones, for a single rouble’ – but purchase was prohibited ‘because we were strangers; and, worse than all, we were Englishmen’.15 ‘If it be now asked what the Russians have done in Crimea,’ he concluded furiously,
the answer is given in few words. They have laid waste the country; cut down the trees; pulled down the houses; overthrown the sacred edifices of the natives, with all their public buildings; destroyed the public aqueducts; robbed the inhabitants; insulted the Tatars in their acts of public worship; torn up from their tombs the bodies of their ancestors, casting their reliquaries upon dunghills, and feeding swine out of their coffins.16
Clarke exaggerated. In reality, the Tatars were no harder hit by tsarist rule than the other newly conquered nations of the expanding empire, and in some ways, they were better off. Though Russians staffed the local bureaucracy, police force and courts, the government did not interfere in religious matters or with the clergy-run schools. The old khanate lands were distributed among royal favourites – Catherine II alone gave away a tenth of the whole peninsula – but Tatars, unlike Ukrainians, were never subjected to serfdom, paying the same taxes to their new Russian landlords as they had to the old Tatar nobility.
The Tatars’ response was to vote with their feet, emigrating en masse to Turkey. Out of a population of half a million on annexation in 1783, over 100,000 had already left by the early years of the nineteenth century. More major exoduses followed each of the four Russo-Turkish wars, especially the Crimean War of 1854–5, during which Tatars were pushed out of their farms on the fertile southern coast into the dry steppe interior. By mid-century, the Tatars made up only just over half the population, and as Crimea filled with Slav settlers with the opening of the railways, they fell into the minority. By 1897 they were down to a third of the population, by 1921, to a quarter.17 The few Tatar noble families who did not emigrate were coopted, like the Ukrainians before them, into the Russian nobility, becoming to all intents and purposes Russians. (One such was Rasputin’s murderer Felix Yusopov.) Outside the mosques, Tatar culture atrophied and died, only reviving again at the end of the century, with the first stirrings of the modern national movement under a new middle-class intelligentsia.
Through the chaos of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the Tatars’ national aspirations ran a doomed and familiar course. On Nicholas II’s abdication in March 1917 the leaders of the various Tatar parties raced home from exile in Constantinople and Switzerland and began agitating for self-rule under the slogan ‘Crimea for the Crimeans’.18 In December the radical wing of the Tatar movement, the Milli Firka or National Party, held a national assembly – dubbed a ‘kurultai’ after the old khanate gathering – in Bakhchisarai, electing the Young Turk-affiliated Noman Celebi Cihan as head of a new Crimean Tatar government. But while the Tatars established their headquarters in Simferopol, the Bolsheviks took control among the Russian sailors of Sevastopol. In January the Bolsheviks marched on the capital, easily defeating the Tatar cavalry they met on the way. The kurultai disbanded and its members fled to the mountains or to Turkey. Celebi Cihan, who had stayed behind hoping to come to a modus vivendi with the new regime, was killed and his body thrown into the sea. Wholesale slaughter of Tatar and Russian civilians followed: taking over under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in May 1918, the German army uncovered fresh mass graves. The Germans left again in December, and for the next year and a half the peninsula was in chaos, changing hands four times before finally falling permanently to the Bolsheviks in October 1920. A new wave of terror followed, as Lenin’s Cheka set about rooting Tatar partisans out of the hills, and slaughtering the Tatar and Russian intelligentsia. Sixty thousand Crimeans were killed in less than six months,19 and another 100,000 died of starvation. An émigré newspaper described conditions in Yevpatoriya:
Bands of gypsies live in the suburbs of the city, dying of hunger. Robberies are innumerable during the night. The soldiers of the Red Army, in rags and bare feet and dying of hunger, attack the inhabitants at nightfall and steal their clothing. The Communists are not exempt from these attacks. The lack of fuel requires that doors and windows are used for heating . . .20
The ‘taking root’ policy of the 1920s, aimed at reconciling non-Russians to Bolshevik rule, saw a brief cessation of hostilities. Tatar schools, libraries, museums and theatres opened; Simferopol got a new university and returned to its old name of Akmecet. Permission was given for the publication of Tatar-language books, and Tatars – including many old Milli Firka members – got senior posts in local government. But the period of grace did not last long. In 1928 the Tatar Bolshevik Veli Ibrahim, leader of korenizatsiya in Crimea, was executed, signalling a new round of purges. Collectivisation meant the deportation of 30–40,000 Tatar ‘kulaks’21 and thousands more deaths through starvation. The Tatar alphabet was first Latinised then Cyrillicised – not just a cosmetic change, since it cut off the younger generation from Arabic-script pre-revolutionary Tatar literature. Mosques were closed, and Muslim clerics exiled to Turkey or Central Asia.
Up to the Second World War, the Tatars’ experience of communism was nothing unusual. Executions, deportations, famine – these were the common lot of all Soviet subjects, including the hapless Russians themselves. But in 1944 the Tatars became one of a select group of nationalities for whom Stalin had reserved a special fate: wholesale deportation – not just of collectivisation-resistant peasants and the urban middle classes, but of the entire population.
The deportees came from eight different nationalities – about 1.6 million people in total.22. They were the Crimean Tatars; the Chechens, Ingush, Meskhetians, Karachai and Balkars, all Muslim nations from the Caucasus; the Volga Germans and the Buddhist Kalmyks, from the Caspian steppe. The Volga Germans were deported in the summer of 1941, as the Wehrmacht advanced, the rest from 1943 to ’44, as it retreated again. In what was by now a familiar pattern, the victims were arrested, piled into wired-up cattle-trucks and shipped, food- and water-less, to ‘special settlements’ in Central Asia and Siberia. In the Tatars’ case, the round-up was completed in three days. Recently released NKVD statistics say that 5 per cent of Tatars died in transit, and another 19 per cent in the first five years in the settlements.23 According to the Tatars themselves, 46 per cent of deportees died during the journey or within a year of arrival.
Nothing was publicly announced about the deportations until June 1946, when a Supreme Soviet decree, published in Izvestiya, announced the abolition of the Crimean and Chechen–Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics:
During the Great Patriotic War, when the peoples of the USSR were heroically defending the honour and independence of the Fatherland in the struggle against the German-Fascist invaders, many Chechens and Crimean Tatars, at the instigation of German agents, joined volunteer uni
ts organised by the Germans and, together with German troops, engaged in armed struggle against units of the Red Army . . . meanwhile the main mass of the population of the Chechen–Ingush and Crimean ASSRs took no counter-action against these betrayers of the Fatherland. In connection with this, the Chechens and the Crimean Tatars were resettled in other regions of the USSR, where they were given land, together with the necessary governmental assistance for their economic establishment.
A minority of Tatars had indeed collaborated. Erich von Manstein, commander of the German Eleventh Army, headquartered in Crimea until late in 1942, was able to recruit some 20,000 Tatars into anti-partisan battalions and ‘village defence units’, designed to protect homes from marauding Russian and Ukrainian irregulars. But more than twice as many Tatars fought alongside the Russians in the Red Army, only to be deported on discharge along with everybody else. (These included several bemused Tatar Heroes of the Soviet Union.) As for the Chechens and Ingush, their lands had never even been occupied by the Germans, so they had had little opportunity to collaborate whether they wanted to or not. The real reason for the deportations seems to have been the NKVD’s desire to justify its existence, since it had not done any front-line fighting (letters from Beria to Stalin show him vigorously supporting the scheme24), combined with Stalin’s customary paranoia about the non-Russian nationalities. As Khrushchev observed in his earth-shattering ‘Secret Speech’ to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, ‘the Ukrainians avoided meeting this fate only because there were too many of them . . . Otherwise, he would have deported them also.’ (A statement greeted with laughter and animation in the hall’.25) Though Khrushchev condemned the deportations as ‘monstrous’, officially rehabilitating five of the deportee nationalities, he made no mention at all of the Tatars, Volga Germans or Meskhetians, who had to wait for the dying days of perestroika before being allowed home to their native lands.
Saide Chubukshiyeva is one of the oldest returnees. Before the war she lived with her husband and two children at 23 Rosa Luxembourg Street in Bakhchisarai. She had a job in a printing shop, under a friendly Russian boss, and her husband worked as secretary to the city council. At five o’clock in the morning of 18 May 1944, she says, the family were woken by a knock at the door. ‘Two militiamen were standing there. They shouted – you have ten minutes! The children were small then – you can imagine what one could collect in those ten minutes.’ By the end of the day all the Tatars in the town had been taken to the station and loaded into railway-cars. There were 133 people in Saide’s wagon, ‘all women and children – I can’t imagine now how they managed to squash us all in’. The next morning the train set off for the east. Though Saide was occasionally let out to get food and water, there was never enough for everybody, and the older women and the children started dying – ‘we just had to throw the bodies out of the window’. At the stations, she says, ‘people called us traitors, betrayers – they threw stones.’ Twenty-eight days later the convoy arrived at Perm in the Urals. ‘We were all ordered to the forest to work as lumberjacks. The salary was in kind – they gave us 400 grams of bread a day. My youngest sister was nineteen then. She had to load those six-metre logs into wagons – can you imagine? If you didn’t complete your quota for the day you weren’t allowed out of the forest. There were these slogans painted on the trees – “If you don’t finish your work, don’t leave the forest.”’
Forty-seven years later Saide made her way back to Crimea with a daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren. Not, of course, to the old house on Rosa Luxembourg Street, but to a one-room trailer in a new Tatar shanty-town on the windswept hills above Bakhchisarai. Though the cold bites straight through the trailer’s paper-thin walls, they have done their best to make it cosy. There are rag rugs on the floor, and a picture of a cocker spaniel hangs above the wood stove in the corner. Six people live here at the moment, says Saide, but last winter there were eleven. The rest of the settlement still looks like a refugee camp. Half-built houses cobbled together out of bricks and breeze-blocks alternate with tiny shacks made of sheets of polythene tacked to wooden frames. Hens and goats scratch about in the coarse dry grass, which stretches away in treeless billows to the horizon. The returnees have rigged themselves up an electricity supply, pirated from the mains, but there are no drains or standpipes. Drinking-water comes in a lorry twice a week.
When the Tatars arrived three years ago the hillside was completely deserted. ‘We waited and waited for official permission to start building,’ says Saide, ‘but nothing happened, so we divided it into plots ourselves. They came and told us to stop, but we weren’t going to move. It’s so stupid – in Glory to Labour I saw an article saying “the Tatars have occupied a fertile peach-orchard”. Can you see any orchard here?’ Relations with local government have improved a bit since, but ordinary Russians still resent the returnees. ‘Quite recently I went to get my pension. Three or four other Tatar women were there too. And the girl behind the counter said – hey, you’ve brought the whole tribe, and you won’t go away until you’ve taken everything! That’s mostly the Russians who’ve arrived recently – the ones who were here before the war know the Tatars; their reaction is completely different.’
The man responsible for holding the line between Tatars and Russians is Mustafa Cemiloglu, head of the Milla Mejlis, the organisation Crimean Tatars think of as their national parliament, and one of the grand old men of the Soviet human-rights movement. After an hour’s driving about the Simferopol suburbs, we found the Mejlis’s headquarters in a cottage on one of the straggling streets where town starts turning into countryside. In the courtyard a group of weatherbeaten men in felt boots and padded jackets stood round a burned-out Mercedes. They were a generation younger than Saide – born in exile in Uzbekistan, they had no memory of pre-war Crimea. One had spent his life in a silk factory in Samarkand; another had worked on a collective farm, only survivor of seven brothers and sisters. The car, they said, had burned out the previous night, when somebody threw a petrol bomb over the wall.
In a back room decorated with a star-and-crescent flag and a portrait of Celebi Cihan, head of the stillborn Tatar government of 1917, Cemiloglu gravely gave me my interview. Though only in his early fifties he looked twenty years older, with draggly silver beard and an old lag’s nervous nicotine-yellow fingers. The first time I was arrested,’ he said, ‘was in 1966, when they wanted to send me to the army. I told them I couldn’t serve in the Soviet army because I couldn’t serve the Motherland – I had no Motherland. There was nothing for me to protect. That’s how I got my first year and a half’s sentence.’ The brave, lonely life of the dedicated ‘uncorrectable’ followed – seven more arrests and a total of fifteen years in prison, two in Vladivostock, three on the arctic Magadan peninsula in a camp for violent criminals. When he was released for the last time in 1986 it was thanks to the support of better-known non-Tatar dissidents. His mentors were Andrey Sakharov, who put him on the list of political prisoners whose freedom he made a condition of his return from Gorky to Moscow, and General Petro Hryhorenko, a Ukrainian army officer who, magnificently and improbably, adopted the Tatar movement for his own in middle age, suffering five years’ torture in psychiatric clinics as a result. Cemiloglu lived with him between prison sentences. ‘He was,’ he says, ‘my second father.’
In 1989 Gorbachev finally allowed the Tatars to start returning home. Now they faced a new problem: how to make themselves felt in a Crimea where they were vastly outnumbered by defensive and disoriented Russians. Around 260,000 Tatars have returned so far, giving them just under 10 per cent of Crimea’s population. It is an awkward number – large enough not to be ignored, but too small to give them much electoral clout, especially since they are thinly dispersed throughout the peninsula. For a while, it looked as though things would turn violent: in October 1992 the Crimean government bulldozed a Tatar settlement on the coast, arresting and beating up several protesters in the process. (‘You might consider it a violation of human rig
hts,’ a Crimean official told me, ‘but we call it making order.’) The Tatars responded by storming the Simferopol parliament, breaking every window in the building. The following winter two prominent Tatar moderates, a businessman and a parliamentary deputy, were assassinated – whether for political or financial reasons is unclear, since neither man’s murderer has ever been brought to trial.
Since then, although officialdom still puts bureaucratic obstacles in the way of Tatars getting land and jobs, and filches Western resettlement aid, things have quietened down. In the autumn of 1993 Cemiloglu succeeded in negotiating a quota of fourteen Tatar seats in the ninety-six-member Crimean parliament – not as many as he wanted, but generous none the less – while simultaneously reining in violence-prone factions in the Mejlis. What he fears most now is pro-Russian separatism. ‘It’s not that we love Ukraine any better than Russia,’ he says. ‘We simply realise that we need a stable situation here in Crimea. Changing boundaries means war.’ He has accordingly come out strongly on Kiev’s side in its periodic bust-ups with Crimea’s Russian nationalists, a tactic which should have earned favours for the future.
But however cunningly Cemiloglu parlays Tatar influence, their basic grievance is not going to go away. Like stateless nations everywhere, the Tatars regard themselves as a conquered people unjustly sidelined in a country morally their own. ‘But how can you have a Tatar Crimea,’ I ask, ‘when 70 per cent of Crimeans are Russians?’ Tapping his yellow fingers on the desk with the star-and-crescent flag, Cemiloglu has heard this question all too many times before. ‘Of course we don’t represent a majority of the Crimean population. But it isn’t our fault. The fact that we were annihilated doesn’t lessen our rights to our native land.’