Note on Translation, Transliteration, and Terminology
With some exceptions, I quote from Crimean Tatar, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian documentary or critical sources by giving an English translation only. Quotations from imaginative literature, due to their importance, are often given in the original language with a simple English translation. All translations are my own, unless indicated otherwise.
For quotations from Russian and Ukrainian texts, I follow the Library of Congress transliteration system, with some modifications. References in the notes and the bibliography hold to the LOC system, but in the body of the text I dispense with the apostrophe that marks the soft sign, render the –yi and –ii endings of proper names of individuals as –y, and replace the initial iotated vowels ia-, iu-, and ie- with ya-, yu-, and ye-. As for Turkish texts, the most distinctive characters have the following orthographical and phonological features:
c j as in jam
ç ch as in church
ğ silent, lengthens preceding vowel
ı e as in open
ö oeu in French oeuvre, or German ö
ş sh as in shape
ü u in French tu, or German ü
The modern Crimean Tatar language has two (often competing) orthographical systems: Cyrillic and Latin. For quotations from Cyrillic-based Crimean Tatar–language texts, I convert to the Latin-based system, which largely corresponds to Turkish orthography with these exceptions:
â a, with the preceding consonant palatalized
ğ voiced velar fricative [ɣ]
h voiceless velar fricative [x], similar to the Cyrillic kh or the ch in loch
ñ velar nasal [ŋ], similar to the Polish ń
q uvular stop [q]
For Crimean place names, I deliberately problematize usage. Crimea is legally a part of Ukraine occupied by the Russian Federation and cherished by the Crimean Tatars as their ancestral homeland; to apply one standard to its toponyms is to whistle past this contestation and enforce a uniformity that does not exist. Unless it risks confusion, I therefore tend to use the form that accords with the linguistic and cultural focus of the chapter or chapter section. The former capital of the Crimean Tatar khanate can be Bağçasaray (Crimean Tatar), Bahçesaray (Turkish), Bakhchisarai (Russian), or Bakhchysarai (Ukrainian), depending on the context. As an exception to this general rule, I privilege the traditional Crimean Tatar names for towns and villages that were assigned Russian toponyms after 1944 in Stalin’s ethnic cleansing and “discursive cleansing” of the peninsula.
Finally, I avoid the shorthand Tatar in favour of Crimean Tatar, even when context may make it obvious. The term Tatar can refer to many distinct ethnic groups and nations across Europe and Eurasia, and Soviet authorities attempted to leverage this fact to de-territorialize Crimean Tatar national identity after 1967, referring to them as “Tatars, formerly resident in Crimea.” Given this history, and with thousands of Crimean Tatars now displaced after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea, I consistently underscore the specific territoriality of this identity.
BLOOD OF OTHERS
1. The Black Sea region
In 1963 Liliia Karas attended a poetry reading in the centre of her hometown of Kharkiv, in eastern Soviet Ukraine. The venue was the city’s central lecture hall near Televev Square, today’s Maidan Konstytutsiï (Constitution Square). Its seats were filled to capacity. Only months earlier, Liliia had returned to Kharkiv from Siberia, where her Jewish family had settled upon Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Simple chance and a vague longing for home brought her back to the place of her birth toward the end of Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw. And curiosity brought her to Kharkiv’s lektorii to hear a group of local poets, one of whom was eliciting excited whispers from the crowd. His name was Boris Chichibabin (Boris Polushin, 1923–1994).
Liliia would later save this poet’s life.1 In 1967 she would become his wife, his best friend, his muse. But on this evening in 1963, Liliia Karas and Boris Chichibabin were strangers. He strode on stage at the end of the evening, a tall man with a striking red beard, facing what had become a tired crowd. He proceeded to take their breath away. “People were not breathing,” recalled writer Renata Mukha in 2008. “And Boris was not breathing either. There was not one pause between one poem and the next. Not one second.”2 He recited his verse from memory in loud but lissom tones, his head nodding to and fro to keep pace with each metrical foot. His only pause came at his conclusion. Shaking his gaze from a distant point in space and steadying it on the audience, Chichibabin met complete silence. “I had often read in books how people fail to applaud or speak when they are staggered by something they see,” said Mukha. “I only witnessed such a thing once in my life. And that was then.” Seconds later, the auditorium erupted in applause. As Mukha put it, “it was a kind of liberation of the soul.”3
Liliia Karas felt shivers up her spine during Chichibabin’s performance. In a volume of reminiscences, she recalls a particular unpublished poem “searing itself into her memory” that evening. It was called “Krymskie progulki” (Crimean strolls, 1959–60).4 Despite its innocuous title, the work confronts one of the most indelible crimes of the Stalinist period: the brutal 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars from their ancestral homeland along the Black Sea, an event that ultimately claimed the lives of tens of thousands of victims – mostly women, children, and the elderly. It was Stalin’s Crimean atrocity, an act declared “barbaric” by the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) itself in 1989.5 Today, especially after Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, the demographic, political, and cultural fallout from the deportation blankets the entire Black Sea region in ways both seen and unseen.
At the time of Chichibabin’s performance in 1963, the deportation of the Crimean Tatars – a Sunni Muslim national minority numbering nearly 170,000 at the time – was deeply shrouded in silence and secrecy. Soviet authorities had officially vilified and blacklisted the entire Crimean Tatar people as collaborators with Nazi occupiers during the Second World War. In the so-called Secret Speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in 1956, Khrushchev exposed Stalin’s mass deportations of the Chechen, Karachay, Kalmyk, Ingush, and Balkar peoples and condemned them as “heinous” (vopiiushchie) acts.6 He also decried the sweeping accusations of treason used as justification for their punishment. As Party member Fedor Burlatsky recalled, the revelations were like a bomb detonating in the Soviet consciousness.7 But there was unexploded ordnance as well. Speaking in Moscow, Khrushchev made absolutely no mention of the Crimean Tatars (or the similarly exiled Meskhetian Turks and Volga Germans), who were still languishing in far-flung, restrictive “special settlement camps” in Central Asia and Siberia. They were Soviet “unpersons”: expelled, forgotten, effaced from society.8
Chichibabin railed against this injustice in Kharkiv on that evening in 1963. He was a Red Army veteran and a Gulag survivor whose moral compass could quiver but never break. “He read ‘Krymskie progulki’ with such rage,” remembers Liliia. His poem condemned as perverse the Soviet presentation of the ethnically cleansed peninsula as a “Russian riviera.” It defiantly declared Crimea a land nourished by the “blood of Others,” the Crimean Tatars. After his performance a woman from the audience rushed to the stage with accusations of treason. According to Liliia, Chichibabin was unfazed. “But I was shocked by the poem,” she recalls. “I knew nothing about the deportation of the Crimean Tatars. No one knew anything about it.”9
“Krymskie progulki” did more than simply inform Liliia and the audience about the deportation. “One of the first things the poem roused in me was tremendous empathy [ogromnoe sochuvstvie] for the Crimean Tatar people, who endured such terrible suffering.”10 It ignited a solidarity in Liliia Karas-Chichibabina that would endure for four decades, as the Crimean Tatars fought for social and cultural recognition and for the right to return to Crimea, mobilizing in the process “a mass movement unprecedented in Soviet history.”11 While her husband read “Krymskie progulki” in studios and gatherings in Kharkiv and Moscow, she circulated the poem in manuscript copies throughout the Soviet underground. Today, well after Chichibabin’s death, “Krymskie progulki” appears in news articles and social media posts, a clarion call with new relevance after the 2014 annexation.12 Liliia Karas-Chichibabina worked to secure a lasting place in cultural and social discourse for this appeal to conscience. Her encounter with literature inspired her to take action in the world, not without personal risk.
1.
This book is about the possibility of such encounters. It is about the way literature can reach us, change us, and make us actively disposed to the welfare of strangers, often against all odds. That literature presumably possesses such power has been an eternal refrain of writers and readers since Aristotle. It even became an early talking point in the 2020 campaign for the United States presidency.13 Artists in war-torn countries equate it to a “moral vitamin.”14 But what makes this power possible, if it exists at all? How can poetry and prose help engender solidarity with Others who are distant and removed from us?
In recent decades, scholars outside the traditional bounds of literary studies – where, in fits and starts, prominent names from F.R. Leavis to Wayne Booth have advanced “ethical criticism” for generations – have answered such questions by variously positing that literature stretches the nets of kinship through a unique capacity to “manipulate sentiments,” as Richard Rorty memorably put it.15 They claim that its expansion and inflation of an “empathy circle” have facilitated the rise of human rights and led to a precipitous decline in cruelty and violence in the modern era.16 They argue, in other words, that reading stops bleeding.
But what kind of reading? Much of this research rests on a series of observations of historical co-emergence rather than on close textual analysis. Steven Pinker, for instance, observes that the humanitarian revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries unfolded when Europe witnessed an explosion in book production and literacy.17 Lynn Hunt connects the dots between the birth of human rights and the publication of epistolary novels like Richardson’s Pamela and Rousseau’s Julie, whose sympathetic and vividly drawn “ordinary” characters captivated readers across Europe.18
With a wide-angle lens, such historical-cum-sociological studies pan over centuries of intellectual history to reveal intriguing intersections between literature, law, and ethics. But they do not tighten focus enough on the dynamics of style, genre, and rhetoric to explain what makes these intersections possible. Part of the reason for this neglect is disciplinary, a product of what has come to be known since C.P. Snow as putatively discordant academic “cultures.”19 Scholars in the social sciences are trained in the structures and institutions of human relations; they are at home in the world of the empirical and the verifiable. Scholars in the humanities are trained in the vagaries of culture and the mechanics of artistic form; they are at home in the world of the imaginary and the unverifiable. Shuttling between these worlds – between text and reader, word and deed, artifice and affect – is a journey fraught with methodological and practical pitfalls.
Among the scholars who have undertaken this journey with a sense of purpose is Martha Nussbaum. In Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990) and Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (1995), among other works, she ascribes to literature a central role in the cultivation of our moral imaginations. Matters of literary technique, structure, and style – from narrative voice in Beckett’s Molloy trilogy to characterization in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl – are never far from her field of view. Following Aristotle, she holds that the literary text offers the reader emotionally rich “patterns of possibility – of choice, and circumstance, and the interaction between choice and circumstance – that turn up in human lives with such a persistence that they must be regarded as our possibilities.”20 Following Adam Smith – who investigated the relation of sympathy to the imagination well before the relation of the market to human labour – Nussbaum explains that literature enlists us in exercises of entering into the perspective of literary personae, which in turn prepare us to step inside the shoes of Others in the real world.21 Such perspective-taking is critical to the development of civil society, she argues, not without a penchant for the categorical.22 For Nussbaum, literature “develops moral capacities without which citizens will not succeed in making reality out of the normative conclusions of any moral or political theory.”23 It is a space of what she calls, after Henry James, “projected morality.”24
This space is largely narrative space in Nussbaum’s work. In fact, in most research on the interplay between literature and ethics, there is little attention paid to anything beyond the novel or the short story.25 This book attempts to redress the imbalance by including as an analytical concern the ethical potentialities of lyric poetry, which Nussbaum, with some exceptions, sets aside.26 This avoidance of lyric poetry is understandable. Unlike the novel and the short story, lyric poems do not package instructive plots for our consumption or fashion characters for our emulation or disdain. They do not offer us a seat as an “impartial spectator,” to use Smith’s term, or promote perspective-taking in any conventional sense.27 Taking presumes giving, and lyric poems do not give perspective per se. More often than not, they suspend it, they disguise it, they mourn its futility or question its very possibility.
Literature, in other words, obscures morality as much as it projects it, subjecting it to a play of revelation and concealment that provokes a reader’s search for meaning. The outcome of this search – even its very perpetuation – is never a given. The reader can come and go as she pleases, and many stars must align to light the way toward prosocial destinations.28 What this book seeks to understand are the textual conditions for those moments – inconsistent, infrequent, even rare, but precious all the same – when the work of the imagination makes us more attuned and responsive to the welfare of strangers. In pursuit of this understanding, I neither suggest that literature has an innate, unidirectional, autonomous connection to the ethical nor wish to imply that the value of literature and art is dependent on ethical outcomes. A key verb in this book is invite. Literature can just as well invite our boredom, feed our indifference, indulge our sensation-seeking, or impede our prosocial behaviour. In fact, as coming chapters will show, literary texts can co-opt readers in the legitimation of imperial conquest (chapter 1), spout state propaganda (chapter 3), and promote cultural stereotypes with militant fervour (chapter 6).
At the heart of this study, however, is a corpus of poems, novels, and short stories that work differently. These texts are the protagonists of the book, and they engage in heavy lifting. They strive to summon the better angels of our nature and to cultivate – however imperfectly – bonds of solidarity with Others, often where and when they are least expected. Like Chichibabin’s “Krymskie progulki,” many of these texts were transcribed privately, recited publicly, and passed hand to hand underground by the hundreds, when such activity could lead to arrest, imprisonment, or exile. Some were published with official sanction, only to attract controversy upon their release. As we will see, most of them are recognized as having been effective in the work of solidarity. Their real-world consequences are not a matter of conjecture or thought experiment. They were cited in court cases, military correspondence, and memoranda of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (KGB, Committee of State Security). Especially among Stalin’s victims, these texts are remembered as having mattered. So what makes this efficacy possible?
The experiences of readers like Liliia Karas-Chichibabina – who chanced upon a poem and then undertook the risks of its circulation to support the rights of a group to which she did not belong – demand new approaches to such questions. To this point, our prevailing practice has been to attempt answers by sampling on the dependent variable. We tend to cherry-pick canonical English-language texts to substantiate claims without much cultural or historical context, a kind of interpretative reverse engineering. Nussbaum, for instance, gestures to a variety of pregnant moments of literary perspective-taking in the canonical works of Dickens, Ellison, and Henry James and then uses these moments as evidence of literature’s utility as “moral technology,” to use Pinker’s term.29 Rorty selects Nabokov – and through Nabokov, Dickens – to argue that literature short-circuits human cruelty “from the inside,” inviting the reader to re-examine and “redescribe” herself.30 Scholars in the growing field of cognitive poetics, which seeks to apply insights from cognitive linguistics and cognitive science to the study of works of literature, often operate in a similar fashion, peppering their conceptual models with emblematic and supportive passages from Shelley to Keats, for example.31
Blood of Others, by contrast, attempts an answer by exploring a diverse array of both canonical and non-canonical literary works across different languages but within an organized territorial and temporal frame. Rooted in the traditional tactics of comparative literature studies, it seeks to understand what I call the poetics of solidarity by following the cultural repercussions of a historical event wherever they lead. These itineraries may be unpredictable, but they are not without logic or structure. Imagine for a moment the breathtaking experiments conducted in the field of cymatics, which reveal the effects of vibrations on physical surfaces.32 In controlled agitations of grains of white sand on acoustic plates, they make manifest the power of a sonic frequency to move and organize or reorganize matter in space. Sound a frequency, and the sand grains race across the plate to create a pattern, from rudimentary ovals to elaborate forms reminiscent of mandalas or zodiac wheels. Adjust the frequency, and a new pattern emerges.
Historical events behave in much the same way. They push us toward and away from each other, crafting our understandings of self and Other, in-group and out-group. As Hayden White explains, historical events “shock” the system and “spread out” across time and space, swaying individuals and groups and their interrelationships.33 Their vibrations at once scatter and shape forms of human attachment, which materialize at a fundamental level in cultural expression.34 This book accordingly envisions historical events as vibrational phenomena organizing or reorganizing human relationships across cultural surfaces. It not only tracks vibrations as artistic allusions, intertexts, and representations across linguistic and national borders – thereby mapping what Rilke, a poet enamoured with the idea of artistic expression as vibration, might call a “vibration-sphere” (Schwingungs-Sphäre)35 – but also considers via close reading the responses of implied readers to these meetings of text and event, to these intricate patterns of grains of sand.
My approach seeks to pre-empt two persistent habits in the study of literature and culture. The first is our recourse to dichotomies of canonical versus non-canonical, official versus unofficial, high versus low, centre versus periphery. Entailing the study of any literary text through which a particular event lingers and resounds – regardless of standing, prestige, or position – this methodology is cold to such Manichaean enthusiasms. The second habit is our delimitation of analytical itineraries at the borders of the nation-state, our tether to national predicates.36 By exploring a vibration-sphere over, under, and through national borders, I seek to avoid methodological nationalism and combat what René Wellek memorably called the “false isolation of national literary histories.”37 At the same time, sensitive to the multidimensionality of cultural exchange, I do not dismiss or discount national borders in a postnational or cosmopolitan reverie. Behind my approach is an acknowledgment that the need to perforate and transcend such boundaries is always and already a measure of their ubiquity and political and cultural force.
In this book I explore a region of the world where borders and boundaries are disproportionately unsettled, a “wobbly geography” where the political condition of “in-between” is never very far from home.38 At the centre of our attention is the historical event whose repercussions were powerfully felt in the first encounter between Boris Chichibabin and Liliia Karas in Kharkiv: the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in May 1944. As we will see, this Stalinist atrocity has coursed through Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine to reveal a vibration-sphere with particular urgency today, a cultural space broadly shaped, as the geographers of antiquity once mused, like a Scythian bow. This space is the Black Sea region; its nexus is Crimea.
2.
Strabo was among the first to envision the Black Sea according to the contours of the fabled weapon of the ancient Scythians, who ruled the lower Dnipro delta and the Crimean peninsula with legendary ferocity in his lifetime. They “ate the flesh [of their enemies],” Strabo intones, “and used their sculls as drinking-cups.”39 In his colourful imagination the Scythian bow evoked the shape of the Black Sea by way of its four key components. The wooden stave of the bow is formed of two arcs, with a handle inset between them; for Strabo, it mirrored the two undulations of the Black Sea’s northern shore – today dominated by Ukraine and Russia – which are joined by the “protruding” (προπίπτω, propipto) peninsula of Crimea (fig. 2). For Strabo, the bow’s string followed the “straight line” of the Anatolian coast, which is now the northern border of the Republic of Turkey.40 This seminal conceptualization of the Black Sea focuses our attention on the territories of Ukraine, Russia, and Turkey – which are today “the major players in the region by all important measures of power”41 – and refashions their boundaries as interdependent elements of one cohesive apparatus, with Crimea as their fulcrum. In other words, it integrates what has been conventionally disconnected in academic work, divided between the fields of Slavic Studies and Middle Eastern Studies. This book adopts Strabo’s vision, conceiving of the Black Sea as a site and a source of connection and exchange for Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine – in contrast to a prevailing scholarly practice that, as Charles King notes, situates its shores in several different regional specializations but at the centre of none of them.42
2. The Black Sea and the Scythian Bow
Such a realignment of our intellectual horizons is long overdue. The Black Sea sits “at the crossroads of the main axes of interaction across Eurasia.”43 It has long been considered “one of the cornerstones of Euro-Asian stability,” and today the stone has been shaken. Not far from its shores are no less than six controversial breakaway polities – from criminogenic no man’s lands to Kremlin puppet statelets – vying for diplomatic recognition from the international community. Since 2008 alone the Black Sea region has seen two wars, a revolution, and an audacious Anschluss. Russia’s illegal seizure and annexation of Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea in 2014, which has produced “an international armed conflict between Ukraine and the Russian Federation,” according to the International Criminal Court, has drawn back the Scythian bow, subjecting relations between the three countries to increasing tension.44 Today, engaged in an undeclared war with Moscow, Ukraine calls on Turkey to close the straits of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles to Russian vessels; Russian generals celebrate a new dominance over the Turkish navy while masking and denying aggression against Ukraine; Turkey fires on Russian jets and partners with Ukraine in exercises of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).45 In the words of Neal Ascherson, “the world has learned to worry about the Black Sea region.”46
These developments grab occasional newspaper headlines and spark the industry of think-tanks and geopolitical forecasters, but we direct little study to the transnational sociocultural factors that may drive and underpin them. Indeed, what Georges Bratianu once termed the “Question de la mer Noire” remains overwhelmingly the domain of economics, ancient history, and international relations – but not the study of literature and culture.47 Behind this book is a conviction that more comparative humanistic inquiry must be brought to bear on our understanding of this complex, unstable region, which only coheres as such due to a network of human relationships and to the individuals who seed and cultivate them: region makers. Over one hundred years ago the Azerbaijani poet Ahmad Cavad forever bound the Black Sea to one verb – çırpınmak (to convulse).48 As the region convulses today in fits of fellowship and fear, we need now more than ever to chart and navigate the flows of ideas, narratives, and identities between Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine. We need what the Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky called a deeper “Black Sea orientation” – a more dynamic interdisciplinary field of Black Sea Studies.49
Literature is fertile soil in such a field. Traditionally, in the region of the Black Sea, literature has been or has been thought to be serious business. “The business of literature,” wrote the Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky in 1841, should “not be some respite from life’s troubles, a nap in plush armchairs after a rich meal … but a res publica, a public thing, powerful and significant.”50 In a similar vein, the Ukrainian writer Panteleimon Kulish called on readers in the journal Osnova (The Foundation) in 1860 to view literary texts “not as written trifles but as a part of our common public life.”51 The leading Ottoman intellectual Namık Kemal, writing in the pages of Tasvir-i Efkâr (Interpreter of Ideas) in the 1860s, put the matter more succinctly and with Romantic flourish: “Literature should be the soul of a nation” (Edebiyat, bir milletin ruhu … olmalıdır).52
What Eric Hobsbawm calls the “short twentieth century” thus began in Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine with dictatorships vigorously positioning literature as an instrument of policy. The Soviet Union and the early Republic of Turkey each embarked in the 1920s on ambitious top-down reform agendas designed under one-party rule to delegitimize imperial pasts and to secularize and modernize “backward” societies. Vladimir Lenin called for the popular distribution of “serious and valued literary material [and] the best classical fiction” ahead of agricultural and industrial textbooks to facilitate the passage “from capitalism to Communism.”53 Soviet Ukraine’s Commissar for Education Mykola Skrypnyk, meanwhile, greeted a prominent literary conference by saying that “in Ukraine, where not long ago virtually every political activist was also a writer … belles lettres bears tremendous significance in the elevation and development of the wide working masses.”54 Across the Black Sea, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk designed his Ministry of Culture in the belief that literature was “one of the most fundamental teaching tools” (en esaslı terbiye vasıtalarından) in the project “to protect and preserve the present and future” of the young republic.55 He celebrated the figure of the poet as one “who hears and enables others to hear delicate, lofty, deep, and pure emotions.”56 To this day, Turkish verse celebrating the state and its progenitor often falls under the name Atatürk şiiri (Atatürk poetry).57 Nazım Hikmet, arguably the greatest Turkish poet of the twentieth century, was a devoted Communist at ideological loggerheads with Atatürk, but on the subject of the place of literature in society the two men saw eye to eye. In a poem dedicated to Ukraine’s godfather Taras Shevchenko, Hikmet declares, “Şiir düşmeli […] halkın önüne” (A poem should always lead the people).58 Times have changed, but literature still bears unique political and social currency in the region. In 1999, years before becoming prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan went to prison for five months in western Thrace. His purported crime was reading a poem that, in his words, made “the people spirited.”59
The Russian language has a term for this central standing of literature in society: literaturotsentrichnost. “Literature-centrality” both reflects and promotes a role for literature in key processes of social integration and interaction, and it makes the Black Sea region a unique laboratory for the study of the poetics of solidarity. For the Crimean Tatars, one of the indigenous peoples of the Black Sea region, literature has been a cherished but besieged source of social cohesion, as we will see in chapters 2 and 3. The Crimean Tatar poet Şakir Selim describes its pivotal significance by way of two vibrant metaphors: “The homeland and poetry [vatan ve şiiriet] are twins of the same blood,” while “the homeland without poetry is a stone lying in the road.”60
3.
The modern history of the Crimean Tatar vatan (homeland) is a story of cycles of displacement, expulsion, and resistance. It takes place against the backdrop of settler colonialism in Crimea, a defining historical and political phenomenon too often swept under the academic rug and ignored in political discourse. Descended from an array of ethnic groups with roots in antiquity and from the Mongol nomads of the thirteenth-century Golden Horde, the Crimean Tatars are an indigenous people of Crimea whose khanate wielded significant political and military control over the peninsula and the inland steppe region for more than three centuries (1443–1783).61 In 1783, after invading Crimea four times between 1772 and 1782, Catherine II annexed the peninsula to the Russian Empire. The demise of the khanate triggered an infusion of Russian imperial subjects and foreign colonists and a slow-burning physical and cultural displacement of the Crimean Tatars from their homeland. Successive waves of Crimean Tatars fled to the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century, with migrations spiking after the Crimean War, when the Crimean Tatars were falsely accused, not for the last time, of mass treason.62 In 1857, Tsar Aleksandr II spoke explicitly of “the cleansing [ochishchenie] of the Tatars from the entire Crimean peninsula” and their replacement by “peasants from internal provinces” of the empire.63
By the turn of the twentieth century the Crimean Tatars had dwindled from the majority to a minority on the Black Sea peninsula. A glimmer of hope for a recovery of lost sovereignty and independence came in the winter of 1917, when young activists led by Noman Çelebicihan convened a national assembly, the Qurultay, which sought to govern as a national parliament for all Crimeans amid the chaos of revolution. The demise of the Qurultay and the rise of Bolshevik power in 1918 soon unleashed mass killings and eventually famine on the peninsula. Clouds started to lift, however, from 1921, when the Soviet government began to foster the development of Crimean Tatar institutions within the bounds of a newly declared Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) in accordance with its broader policy of korenizatsiia (indigenization).64 Under the leadership of Veli İbraimov as chairman of the Crimean Central Committee (1923–8), Crimea saw a “Tatarization” of political culture, a redistribution of land to Crimean Tatar villagers, and a growth of new Crimean Tatar–administered schools and cultural production.65 Yet the halcyon days of the İbraimov era were soon brought to an abrupt end by Stalin, who used the slightest pretext to arrest and execute İbraimov in 1928.66
The entire Crimean Tatar nation was subjected to Stalin’s violence after the three-year Nazi occupation of the peninsula during the Second World War. Beginning on the night of 18 May 1944, the Crimean Tatars were given minutes to collect their belongings, ordered from their homes at gunpoint, and herded onto the cattle-cars of waiting trains bound for destinations in Central Asia and the Ural Mountains by thousands of officers of the Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del (NKVD, People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs).67 According to witnesses, the sick and injured who were not fit for transit were “liquidated.”68 Those who openly defied the deportation order were shot.69 This act of ethnic cleansing, which also engulfed Crimea’s Greek, Armenian, and Bulgarian communities, came at the prompting of NKVD chief Lavrenty Beriia, who noted on 10 May 1944 the “undesirability [nezhelatelnost] of the continued residence of the Crimean Tatars in the border areas of the Soviet Union,” and at the order of Stalin, whose secret Decree 5859ss of 11 May accused “many Crimean Tatars” (mnogie krymskie tatary) of collaborating with Nazi occupiers during the Second World War and then mandated the expulsion of “all of them” (vse tatary).70
Like all ethnic groups in Crimea – including Russians, Ukrainians, and even Jewish Karaites – a number of Crimean Tatars did collaborate with Nazi forces during the war.71 The scholarly consensus places this number at roughly twenty thousand, or 10 per cent of the Crimean Tatar population at the time.72 In Crimea, as elsewhere in the war-torn Soviet Union, the reasons for this “betrayal” were various: forced conscription; a legacy of arrests, executions, and artificial famines under Stalinist rule; and provocations and offences committed against Crimean Tatar communities by Soviet partisans during the Second World War.73 Nevertheless, the large majority of Crimean Tatars fought on the Soviet side and “put their lives on the line in the struggle against Nazi invaders both on Crimean soil and on other fronts.”74 Thousands won medals and orders from the Soviet state for their service in the Red Army; six became Heroes of the Soviet Union.75 Among the Soviet partisans fighting the Germans in the Crimean underground, the Crimean Tatars were the second largest ethnic group after the Russians.76 Stalin’s decision to exile the entire Crimean Tatar nation – largely women, children, and the elderly, given that most of the Crimean Tatar Hilfswillige (or Hiwis, “helpers”) had already retreated westward with the Wehrmacht by the time of the deportation77 – therefore seems to have been less about punitive retribution than about contingency planning for future military conflict. As Beriia implies in his communiqué of 10 May 1944, the Crimean Tatars were seen as an “undesirable” Muslim fifth column, particularly in a potential war with Turkey over control of the straits of the Bosporus and Dardanelles.78 Geostrategic anxiety was the real reason for the deportation.79
Stalin’s Decree 5859ss was enveloped in such secrecy that the NKVD soldiers who carried out the deportation learned of it only moments before the victims themselves did.80 The operation was directly overseen by leading NKVD commissars Bogdan Kobulov and Ivan Serov, whose telegrams to Beriia document its rapid execution: an average of nearly seventy thousand men, women, and children were “loaded” (pogruzheny) onto trains each day between 18 May and 20 May 1944.81 According to witnesses, this loading was often preceded by the forcible separation of children from their parents. “Between the threshold of their home and the door of the train car,” observes historian Valery Vozgrin, the Crimean Tatar deportees all considered “the violent separation of families the greatest tragedy of all.”82 Because the order of train cars was reconfigured and redirected along the routes eastward, families initially divided by only one railway coupling were often divided forever, scattered between the Urals, Siberia, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan.83
What Beriia, Kobulov, and Serov term the operation in their internal communication is now remembered as Sürgün (The Exile) in the Crimean Tatar language, an event of brutal dispossession and mass death.84 Train cars marked for “40 people or 8 horses” were packed with roughly 150 men, women, and children.85 The doors to the cars did not open for eighteen days.86 There were no toilets. There was no drinking water: deportees survived on rain run-off collected through gaps and holes in the cars. As a result, thousands of the deportees died over the course of the journey from inhumane conditions, lack of water and food, and vicious treatment by the NKVD.87 Even after their arrival, thousands more perished from hunger, exposure, and disease in spetsposeleniia (special settlement camps).88 Many Crimean Tatars believe that half of the entire population died in the first years of exile.89
This ethnic cleansing of Crimea had two other co-conspirators: “discursive cleansing” and “ethnic cloning,” both of which are explored in chapters 3 and 7. Traces of the Crimean Tatars were wiped off the map and torn from encyclopaedias, their dwellings and property redistributed to the Slavic settlers recruited by the Soviet state to replace them. In 1944 Crimea also fell in the Soviet administrative hierarchy from an ASSR to a mere oblast of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), where its economy languished without the Crimean Tatars.90 It became “poorer, wanting, confused.”91 According to Dmitry Poliansky, who served as head of the Communist Party in Crimea from 1953 to 1954, Khrushchev believed that “Russia had paid little attention to Crimea’s development” and that “Ukraine could handle it more concertedly.”92 In February 1954 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet accordingly announced the formal transfer of the Crimean oblast from Soviet Russia to Soviet Ukraine, with Russian politician Mikhail Tarasov opening discussion of the decision by describing Crimea as a “natural continuation of Ukraine’s southern steppe,” whose economy was “closely tied” to that of Ukraine.93
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away from their homeland, the Crimean Tatars responded to the trauma of their displacement by mounting the largest, most organized, and most sustained movement of dissent in Soviet history. It was a highly disciplined campaign for recognition and repatriation founded on principles of non-violent resistance against state injustice and oppression, and its influence on the organizational infrastructure and moral direction of Soviet dissent as a whole was indelible and profound. Crimean Tatar “information bulletins” documenting state abuses were the inspiration behind the meticulous and clinical Khronika tekushchykh sobytii (Chronicle of Current Events), for instance, while their “initiative groups” were the model and the eponym for the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR, the “trailblazing” collective hailed as the first autonomous non-governmental organization (NGO) in the Soviet Union.94
Among the leaders guiding the Crimean Tatar movement in this period was Mustafa Dzhemilev (Mustafa Cemiloğlu, aka Mustafa Abdülcemil Qırımoğlu). Although short in stature, Dzhemilev is a giant. As an infant, he survived the deportation to Central Asia. As a young man, he survived the Gulag, enduring a 303-day hunger strike in the mid-1970s that garnered headlines around the world and prompted false pronouncements of his death. His leadership helped the Crimean Tatars prevail over the Soviet system and win the right to return to Crimea in the twilight of Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule. In 1989, Dzhemilev settled in the homeland that he fought his entire life to reclaim for his people.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union, however, offered few “happily ever afters.” It brought poverty and a new struggle against local political and cultural chauvinism on the peninsula. Dzhemilev and the elected assembly of the Crimean Tatar people, known as the Mejlis (or Meclis), responded by working with newly independent Ukraine and with Turkey to facilitate their reintegration into Crimean life. Despite many flaws and frustrations, the relationship between the Mejlis and Kyiv after 1991 was a “unique, almost singular example in the entire post-Soviet ethno-political space of a small nation’s loyalty to a young independent state,” as Svetlana Chervonnaia explains.95 But by 2013 it still had not led to a key desideratum of the Crimean Tatar movement: formal recognition as an indigenous people of Ukraine. That would only occur in March 2014, after Russian forces had taken control of the peninsula – after it was too late.
Russia’s breakneck annexation of Crimea changed everything. Almost overnight, activists associated with the Mejlis began to endure arrests, detentions, and expulsions at the hands of de facto Russian authorities. Public commemorations of the deportation on 18 May were banned. Tens of thousands of Crimean Tatars fled Crimea for mainland Ukraine, becoming the largest group of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the country. Dzhemilev and his compatriot Refat Chubarov, chair of the Mejlis, were forbidden to set foot on the peninsula. Others like Ilmi Umerov, deputy chair of the Mejlis – who declared to Russian security services in May 2016 that “I do not consider Crimea part of the Russian Federation” – were subjected to forced treatment in a psychiatric hospital.96 These new crackdowns on Crimean Tatar civil society have become arrows in the Scythian bow, tensing ties between Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine.
4.
For the Black Sea region as a whole, Stalin’s Crimean atrocity may be considered the most enduring centripetal event of the twentieth century. No other historical event has fixed the attention of publics and political actors in Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine and directed them to a single regional problem with such geopolitical, ethical, and religious import for as long.97 Its peculiar force was evident on the world stage during the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest, when Crimean Tatar singer Jamala and her song “1944” represented Ukraine and became an international cause célèbre. The song is a galvanic ballad interspersing indirect English-language references to Stalin’s Crimean atrocity – “When strangers are coming / They come to your house / They kill you all” – with Crimean Tatar–language lyrics from the Soviet-era lament “Ey Güzel Qırım” (O beautiful Crimea) that mourn a life and a home stolen: “Men bu yerde yaşalmadım / Yaşlığıma toyalmadım” (I could not live in this place / My youth was taken from me).98 Jamala’s victory at Eurovision caused Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians to rejoice, Russian state television to cry foul, and Turks, led by President Erdoğan, to applaud.99 It was a pop cultural manifestation of the way in which the deportation and its legacy have long ensnared Crimean Tatar civic activists, Ukrainian national democrats, Russian neo-imperialists, and Turkish secular and Islamist interest groups in pitched battles over public memory, human rights, historical reparation, and political representation.
Powering this centripetal force has been a perennial push and pull over the very issue of possession of the Crimean peninsula. After centuries of colonial rule, Stalin’s attempt to efface Crimea’s indigenous population was a paroxysm of ontopolitical insecurity that sought to settle this issue once and for all. As we shall see, it did the opposite, exacerbating rather than exorcizing these anxieties of possession. The deportation sacralized the territorial nationalism of the Crimean Tatars, sparked outrage among the Turkish military, and – by becoming a symbol of rot at the roots of Soviet society – mobilized readers like Liliia Karas-Chichibabina in protest against crimes of the state. In other words, the deportation represents a key source of what Gwendolyn Sasse describes as Crimea’s “structural predisposition” to conflict.100 It is a kind of originary fault in the design of Crimean sovereignty to which contemporary fissures directly or indirectly refer.
Today, three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union and over eight years since Russia’s annexation, Crimea remains a territory upon which possessive pronouns clamber. Russian writer and filmmaker Arkady Arkanov satirized this condition by proposing a video game called Chei Krym? (Whose Crimea? Or to whom does Crimea belong?)101 Since 2014, despite the clear international legal consensus that Crimea is sovereign Ukrainian territory under Russian military and political occupation, many Russians have replied to the question “Chei Krym?” with a defiant meme – KrymNash (Crimea is ours) – whose very ubiquity and ipse-dixitism betray a fundamental uneasiness about possession of the “fateful peninsula.” As Edward Said observes, “if you belong in a place, you do not need to keep saying and showing it, [but] colonial appropriation requires such assertive inflections.”102 The anxiety behind such assertive inflections has sparked a widespread contestation of identities. When Jamala was producing “1944” in advance of Eurovision, for instance, the Simferopol band Undervud released a radically different song whose bouncy, even maudlin whistling melody clashes with a telling chorus: “Tell me who Crimea belongs to, and I will tell you who you are.”103
Possession and its conceptual siblings, dispossession and repossession, help to structure the chapters of this book into three parts, which traverse three centuries and explore artistic works in four languages to offer a unique cultural history of the Black Sea. Part 1, “Possession,” delves into the past to explain the cultural conditions of the very possibility of Stalin’s Crimean atrocity and of its ultimate failure. Solidarity is about overcoming distance, and here I take care to establish the historico-cultural framework that allows us to measure distances across the literary landscapes of Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine. My points of orientation are representations of and by the Crimean Tatars, a people caught in 1783 between an expanding Russian Empire and a contracting Ottoman Empire. These two imperial powers antagonized and repelled each other, but they were kept in contact by a Russian project of settler colonialism in Crimea that turned the Black Sea into a highway of migrants and refugees.
Settler colonialism occurs when an empire displaces and replaces a conquered native population. In our study of Crimea it is a historical phenomenon rarely acknowledged outright, but its legacy is responsible for making the peninsula a geopolitical flashpoint. I explore this legacy through the operation of what I call a dialectic of imperial possession in Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Crimean Tatar literatures – in classics by such writers as Aleksandr Pushkin, Namık Kemal, Lesia Ukraïnka, and Üsein Şâmil Toktargazy. As we will see, the texts engaged this dialectic by conceptually de-Tatarizing or re-Tatarizing Crimea. In spite of their differences, they all proceeded from the same starting point: the idea that Crimean territory and Tatar culture were bound together. How these canonical texts then treated this bond can teach us a great deal about national imaginations across the shores of the Black Sea.
Part 2, “Dispossession,” represents the book’s centre of gravity. It is the untold story of responses in Crimean Tatar, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian literatures to Stalin’s attempt to eviscerate the human, material, and cultural traces of Crimea’s indigenous population through acts of both ethnic cleansing and discursive cleansing. Many of these texts, such as the samizdat or samvydav (self-published, in Russian and Ukrainian respectively) poetry of Boris Chichibabin and Ivan Sokulsky, were produced clandestinely and circulated at risk of arrest under Article 70 of the Soviet Criminal Code. Other texts, like the novels of Cengiz Dağcı and his imitators, became assigned reading for students and recommended literature for soldiers in the Turkish military. Nearly all of them, I argue, seek to foster relations of solidarity with the Crimean Tatars by inviting readers to confront and process reparative guilt rather than avoidant shame. This literary “guilt-processing” is a vital agent of the poetics of solidarity. As I define it, solidarity is an active convergence of interests and fellow feeling between groups that bridges a distance. It is achieved, not given – a dynamic physics of human connection that can turn outsiders into insiders. The story of these texts in the service of solidarity is vivid evidence of a productive intervention of art into socio-politics and a reminder of the power of culture to transform, as Timothy Snyder would put it, “bloodlands” into “brotherlands.”104
Part 3, “Repossession,” surveys the politico-cultural landscape of the Black Sea region after the return of the Crimean Tatars to their ancestral homeland and in the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, this landscape was especially bumpy and uneven. Due to a failure to acknowledge and address the unique demands of its decolonization, Crimea became a space of ad hoc political strategies and fitful cultural activity, where a Crimean Tatar, Ukrainian, and Russian interliterary discourse did not evolve. Over time, however, one potent selective affinity emerged from this space: Ukrainian–Crimean Tatar solidarity. From the prose of Şamil Alâdin to the poetry of Serhiy Zhadan, from the poetic cinema of Oles Sanin’s Mamai (2003) to the nostos drama of Nariman Aliev’s Evge (Homeward, 2019), I follow its development through discourses of encounter and entanglement to a discourse of enclosure, of home. As we will see, this relationship has helped secure civic nationalism as the main driver of Ukrainian politics, turning a small Sunni Muslim people into a shaper of national identity in the largest country within Europe – and advancing a promising model of interethnic co-operation for the entire region of the Black Sea.