Chapter Five

Trident and Tamğa

In 1967, as the Crimean Tatars were being rebranded “the Tatars formerly resident in Crimea,” a secret KGB memorandum flagged correspondence between two strangers as a matter of pressing concern for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (see fig. 6). The memorandum gave an account of an exchange of letters between Mansur Osmanov, a Crimean Tatar driver in Tashkent, and Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, a Ukrainian writer in Kyiv. The two had never met. “I have heard that you are a fair, progressive writer,” explains Osmanov, who initiated the contact, “and that is why I am writing to you.” He reviews the political state of play for Antonenko-Davydovych. “For two years our [Crimean Tatar] representatives have been in Moscow ceaselessly working toward a resolution of our national question – the return to our native Crimea.” It is not long, however, before Osmanov’s tone turns personal – and urgent. “What has become of my life? What awaits my children? I have three sons. My children often come home complaining that they have been called ‘traitors.’ Twenty-two years have gone by, and we are all still traitors.” His letter closes with a note of desperation and an almost impossible question: “Dear Boris Dmitrievich, can you – as a writer – explain any of this to me?”¹

6. KGB memorandum about correspondence between Mansur Osmanov and Borys Antonenko-Davydovych (1967)

Antonenko-Davydovych had been sentenced to death by Soviet authorities in 1935. In the 1920s he had made his career as a prose stylist by treading on sensitive terrain: namely, the psychology of intellectuals who reconciled themselves to the realities of Bolshevik power. In the novel Smert (Death, 1928), his protagonist reasons that “I must kill […] And then I can say to myself, boldly, honestly, without any doubt or hesitation: I am a Bolshevik.”² Antonenko-Davydovych escaped his death sentence only to endure forced labour in the Gulag and then exile in Siberia over the course of two decades. He knew enough not to offer Osmanov any explanations. “I have just returned from your Crimea, to which you and your people – the true stewards of this land – are forbidden to return,” he replied. (The KGB apparatchiks in receipt of this memorandum underlined your Crimea.) “I myself do not understand why justice has not yet been restored […] No people should ever be punished by being deprived of their homeland.”³

After empathizing with Osmanov’s anger and frustration, Antonenko-Davydovych tries to offer him counsel. He starts in what might be considered expected territory: the realm of the political. “I can advise only this – keep sending your representatives to Moscow. Ask the Party and the Supreme Soviet to come to a fair resolution of your national question.” But these political suggestions are brief. Antonenko-Davydovych’s real focus is elsewhere: the realm of culture. “Protect your language and your national traditions,” he emphasizes. But, above all, Antonenko-Davydovych tells Osmanov to reach out to more poets. “The poet Tvardovsky would understand you,” he says, citing the lines from “Za daliu – dal” that are highlighted in chapter 4. Other poets, he continues, “would also understand you and give vent to your grief […] Write to them as you have written to me. Let them know of your suffering.”⁴

The KGB memorandum concludes with warnings about the many copies of Antonenko-Davydovych’s reply that are floating around Tashkent in 1967. Its concerned tone speaks to a seriousness with which Soviet authorities approached the Ukrainian writer’s advice, which included a clear call for the strategic use of literature to mobilize guilt (“I have just returned from your Crimea, where you […] are forbidden to go”) and to cultivate an empathic, solidary connection with the Crimean Tatars (“let them know of your suffering”). But there was another concern evident between the memorandum’s lines – perhaps even an anxiety. After all, the memorandum was addressed not to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, where Antonenko-Davydovych’s letter was circulating and where the Crimean Tatar community was actively mobilizing with growing purpose and direction. It was sent to authorities in Kyiv. What appeared to alarm them, especially after the incorporation of Crimea into Soviet Ukraine in 1954, was a Ukrainian dissident movement making increasing cause with the Crimean Tatars.⁵

As we saw in chapters 2 and 3, this worry was not without basis. Especially from the turn of the twentieth century, Ukrainian writers routinely expressed solidarity with the Crimean Tatars, rhetorically re-Tatarizing the peninsula, in a departure from Russian and Turkish literary fashion. Amid the uncertainties of revolution and civil war in 1917, Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar national leaders publicly professed support for each other, even contemplating political union. In the early Soviet period, Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar cultural figures worked in frequent symbiosis, empowered by what I call cross-korenizatsiia, with Crimean Tatar plays becoming Ukrainian films, and with Ukrainian writers acting as Crimean Tatar historians. What Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar activists shared was, inter alia, a particular concern for national “groupness” under pressure – a concern not simply for their own national identity but for the idea of national identity itself.

In the previous chapter, the lyrical personae of Chichibabin and Nekipelov spoke with little reference or regard to national identity or belonging beyond the Crimean Tatar context. Their we-denomination was essentially civic, governed by an affiliation between Soviet citizens. In texts like “Krymskie progulki” or “Gurzuf,” the Crimean Tatars were ultimately presented as “one of us,” as Soviet compatriots treated unjustly by the state. Their dispossession was also instructive in its metonymicity, in its ability in the singular to comment upon related, “contiguous” Soviet problems in the plural. By contrast, the Ukrainian texts under study in this chapter make an additional figurative move. In the poems of Ivan Sokulsky and Mykola Rudenko and in the prose of Roman Ivanychuk, the struggle of the Crimean Tatars is additionally instructive in its metaphoricity, in its ability to reflect and illuminate a Ukrainian experience of suffering and victimization. These texts cultivate an understanding of the Crimean Tatars as “(like) us.” As Crimean Tatar dissident Rollan Kadyev told Leonid Pliushch in 1968, “[p]olitically Moscow does more for us than Kyiv does, but Ukrainians understand us better.”⁶

1.

The distinction between metonymy and metaphor in this context may seem esoteric, but as Roman Jakobson reminds us, it is of “primal significance” for all human behaviour.⁷ Here the dichotomy not only helps us understand the different ways Soviet Russian and Soviet Ukrainian writers framed Stalin’s Crimean atrocity and its aftermath. It also invites us to focus on the discursive currents and schemas of Soviet dissent rather than on reductive classifications of the dissidents themselves, on forced labels like “intellectuals,” “religious believers,” or “nationalists,” as one report of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) organized them.⁸ The expansive and unqualified use of the last term has been particularly unhelpful. By nationalist, do we mean those who advanced ethnic nationalism, which defines membership in the nation by jus sanguinis (law of blood), or civic nationalism, which defines membership by jus soli (law of the soil)? Or do we simply mean those who celebrated national culture or promoted national consciousness? Even today, in our study of Soviet dissent, there remains a casual inclination to tie, even fuse, non-Russian Soviet dissent with nationalist.⁹ Putting aside the issue of the countless definitions of nationalism or the fact that the term nationalist has highly negative and loaded connotations in the region, this knee-jerk conflation obscures a dynamic spectrum of belief and sentiment and, at worst, risks affirming the charges of “anti-Soviet nationalism” levelled at non-Russian dissidents by Soviet authorities themselves.

The suffix -ism tends to reach back and twist the root of its word into an end. But for most mainstream dissidents in Soviet Ukraine between the 1960s and 1980s – those who became known in the West as civic activists and prisoners of conscience – the national was, in a productive sense, less an end than a means. It was a means of self-realization, collective remembrance, cultural flourishing, and even the development of Soviet socialism. With some notable exceptions – Valentyn Moroz, for instance – the aim of these dissidents was less to make the nation and state congruent than to reboot the Soviet system with a view to Lenin’s critique of “great power chauvinism.” “For some reason Lenin’s positions are forgotten,” proclaimed the scholar Mykhailo Horyn in his “Final Word” before Soviet judges in 1966, “and they should not be!”¹⁰ Standing in a closed chamber in Lviv, Horyn vigorously disputed the charges of nationalism brought against him. “I was raised as much on the works of Dobroliubov and Herzen as I was on the works of Shevchenko and Franko,” he testified. “I have stated, and I state now, that nationalist views are foreign to me.”¹¹

When Ukrainian dissidents condemned what Horyn called Soviet “lawlessness” (bezzakonnia), they not only stood on principle like their counterparts in Moscow did. They stood on principle that in turn stood on another site of political belonging: the nation. Their denunciations of the Soviet state, in other words, were implicit reminders of a competing locus of ethical value and political order. This dynamic made the dissidents who were attuned to national rights especially dangerous in the eyes of Soviet authorities, and it is part of the reason why Ukrainian prisoners of conscience represented the largest group in the Gulag proportionate to their share of the Soviet population.¹² Their quest to reform Soviet authority was an insistent gesture to another authority, one whose potential membership was massive, well defined, and ready made, served up by a Soviet state system that, as Rogers Brubaker observes, “went to remarkable lengths […] to institutionalize both territorial nationhood and ethno-cultural nationality as basic cognitive and social categories.”¹³ The designation “nationality” (natsionalnost), for instance, was displayed on the fifth line of all Soviet passports.

Yet condemning Soviet crimes from a national position could be like burnishing a stone in a glass house. A throw risked self-harm. “The national question poses its own moral problems,” notes Leonid Pliushch.¹⁴ He illustrates the dilemma by envisioning, among others, a persecuted Crimean Tatar. “Behind his back is his suffering people,” Pliushch writes, “but behind mine is a formal attachment to the oppressor” (formalnaia prinadlezhnost k ugnetateliam).¹⁵ He alludes to an unspoken, dynamic order of privilege among Soviet nationalities, to moral hierarchies related to experiences of victimization that affected certain nations or groups more than others. One’s victim, in other words, could be another’s oppressor. This problem has understandably complicated the work of national history and memory, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has bedevilled Ukraine in particular, and for good reason.

At the heart of the modern Ukrainian national idea – which finds its most powerful articulation in the Romantic verse of Taras Shevchenko, a serf who became a poet and a poet who, in the words of one Turkish writer, “became a flag”¹⁶ – is a strident anti-colonial ethos. It bears a strong suspicion of state authority, conceives of political liberty and democracy as refuge from historical injustice, and sees allies in oppressed, subaltern nations. But how do adherents to this ethos reconcile themselves to historical moments when they or their compatriots ignored or abandoned it in service to a totalitarian state, “affiliating with the oppressor,” especially in the crucible of total war? The stakes on the collective sense of self, on national identity, are high. How do representatives of a diverse and formerly stateless nation whose narrative of the past is a story of resistance to abusive state power – Polish aristocracy to the west, Russian and Soviet autocracy to the east – confront and process political guilt in abetting state power in the victimization of fellow citizens? Ukraine’s ongoing “memory wars” boil down to the challenge of answering this question while exorcising, at the same time, a legacy of Russian cultural colonialism and Soviet historiographical distortion.

Alongside Russians and Belarusians, Ukrainians were recruited to resettle in Crimea after 1944. Like the character of old Kostiuk in Petr Pavlenko’s “Rassvet,” some of them directly benefited from the dispossession of the Crimean Tatars. Robert Conquest wrote in 1972 that “Ukrainians now demanding their own rights have also expressed solidarity with the [Crimean Tatars] – even though it is to Ukraine that [the Crimean Tatars] have lost their land.”¹⁷ Conquest’s comment is blind to the longer history of Ukrainian–Crimean Tatar solidarity and obtuse in its presentation of Khrushchev’s 1954 transfer of Crimea to Soviet Ukraine, which was clearly not Kyiv’s initiative.¹⁸ But the thrust of his remark, which places guilt and solidarity into contact, merits our attention. How do Ukrainians process political guilt related to the plight of the Crimean Tatars if they resemble the Crimean Tatars as victims of Stalinism targeted on the basis of nationality?

Texts by self-professed Ukrainian nationalists avoid this question. They invariably situate guilt inside the arched gates of the Kremlin. But the dissident literary texts in this chapter, which are framed by a discussion of key events and figures of the Soviet Ukrainian rukh oporu (defence movement), grapple with the historical grounds for and the contemporary implications of this question. They contemplate the conditions for a metaphorical relation of resemblance between the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar nations, as in Ivan Sokulsky’s “Bakhchysarai (Tsykl)” (Bakhchysarai [a cycle], 1968); the tension between a history of antagonism and a history of fellowship among Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars, as in Roman Ivanychuk’s Malvy (The mallows, 1968); and the moral claims of the nation on the individual subject, as in Mykola Rudenko’s “Tataryn” (The [Crimean] Tatar, undated [1969?]). These searching works of poetry and prose not only help account for what will become, in the twilight of the Soviet period, a consequential Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar political alliance, but also shed light on its affective and empathic power.

2.

Around the time of Borys Antonenko-Davydovych’s correspondence with Mansur Osmanov in 1967 – in fact, the very day after the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet issued Decree 493 – the so-called External Units of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (ZCh OUN) drafted a scathing statement about the “Crimean Tatar question.” Decree 493, they wrote, was tantamount to “the criminal magnanimously ‘rehabilitating’ the victim.” Soviet authorities had “mumbled through their teeth: ‘sorry!’ And that’s all. No acknowledgment of perpetration of a crime. No moral atonement.”¹⁹ The authors of the statement explained that the treatment of the Crimean Tatars hit very close to home. “For us, this is not simply a political or economic question; above all this is a human, even emotional [chuttieva] issue,” they claimed. “Over the centuries, the Crimean Tatars have been our closest southern neighbor. Our relations have been complicated throughout this period; we have made war, and we have made peace,” the ZCh OUN authors continued. “Our historical folk songs – as well as their historical folk songs – are rich with echoes of these battles […] In Ukrainian national life, in our language and culture, there are a number of Tatar and Turkish influences. This is our historical heritage – and we do not deny it.”²⁰ Marked up with corrections, excisions, and marginal comments, the draft of the ZCh OUN statement reflects careful preparation and a concern for historical accuracy. Its authors allude to the co-operation between the Tsentralna Rada and the Qurultay in 1917, insisting that “Ukraine never had designs on Crimea.” They then recount dark moments in Crimean Tatar history, framing them awkwardly as acts in a play: “Historians of Crimea enumerate eight periods in the systematic genocide of the Crimean Tatars. For the most part, these acts align with the acts of our own Ukrainian national-political drama.”²¹

What was a rhetoric of metonymical contiguity in the previous chapter – a rhetoric presenting the persecution of the Crimean Tatars as a symptom of what dissidents like Petro Grigorenko characterized as a Soviet disease – is a rhetoric of metaphorical similarity here. For all of our attention to its thirst for contrast and differentiation, nationalism has a keen eye for resemblance. The ZCh OUN statement positions Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars alongside each other and explicitly suggests their historical interchangeability. As we saw in chapter 2, such a metaphorical presentation of the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar experiences – which pivots on the we-relation “(like) us” – has a long history. In the realm of Ukrainian imaginative literature, however, it tends to operate through much more subtle, implicit means. In the novella Pid minaretamy, for instance, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky alludes to strong congruencies between Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars at the turn of the twentieth century, from a common struggle against the inertia of tradition to a common aspiration for a forward-looking “European” culture. But he does so without direct reference to historical conjunctions or without recourse to the declarative.

Kotsiubynsky’s Pid minaretamy, which was discussed in chapter 2, marks an example of what might be called national metaphorization, a process of implicitly mirroring one nation in the image of another nation traditionally conceived as dissimilar. It is a world apart from Frederic Jameson’s controversial concept of national allegory, which posits that in all Third World texts “the story of the individual is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture or society.”²² In Jameson’s concept the modifier national is understood as intranational; in his view, the protagonist of a “third-world text” always represents his or her nation. By contrast, in national metaphorization, the modifier denotes an international relation. And whereas allegory by nature elevates the figurative subject over the literal one, metaphorization achieves a relation of resemblance or equivalence between two subjects without collapsing the difference between them. In Pid minaretamy, for instance, Kotsiubynsky employs national metaphorization in such a way as to invite the reader to encounter an intricately drawn world of Crimean Tatar modernizers and, at the same time, to see the more familiar world of Ukrainian modernists in a new light.

The concept of national metaphorization is not meant to shackle literary texts to the realm of the political, nor does it reduce nations to discrete, bounded objects that can be conveniently held up in a mirror for reflection. It simply seeks to account for moments when literary texts forge, sustain, or modify an image of the nation, not by turning to its own store of myths, heroes, and villains but by smuggling in, as it were, an identification with another nation altogether. The more unexpected the identification, the better. Indeed, for Aristotle, the power of a metaphor often hinges on the “foreign” (allotriou), on the extent of the estrangement between its two component parts, as in his own example of fire and seed corn in the ancient metaphor “sowing flame.”²³ In Ukrainian culture, national metaphorization is fond of challenging convention and expectation in this way. It repeatedly involves, in fact, majority Muslim nations: Circassians, Kurds, and especially Crimean Tatars.

National metaphorization becomes a commonplace in the Ukrainian literary tradition with Taras Shevchenko’s “Kavkaz” (“The Caucasus,” 1845). Nazım Hikmet once proclaimed that Shevchenko’s poetry collapsed the bounds between the national and the international, offering “a song of struggle to be sung in colonies, semi-colonial territories, and developing countries – by people shedding blood for national independence, for land, for democratic rights.”²⁴ “Kavkaz” is one of the reasons for Hikmet’s praise. The poem is a masterpiece of an anti-colonial poetics of solidarity, representing Circassions as victims of oppression at the hands of the Russian tsar and asserting a distinct Ukrainian national identity by way of this representation. Shevchenko draws an implicit parallel between the Caucasus and Ukraine, between the mountains and the steppe, by casting the former in imagery that he deploys throughout his oeuvre to describe the latter – that is, as a landscape of suffering where justice and freedom are crippled but not entirely defeated.²⁵ In “Kavkaz,” the Caucasus is a land of blood (“krov”), tears (“slozy”), and woe (“hore”) forsaken by God (“Za koho zh ty rozipiavsia, Khryste, syne bozhyi?”) where widows weep (“v slozakh udovikh”) and their sons languish in fetters (“kaidany [kuiut]”). In “Son” (“A Dream,” 1844), Ukraine is the same land of blood, tears, and woe forsaken by God (“Chy Boh bachyt iz-za khmary / Nashi slozy, hore?”) where widows are abused (“rozpynaiut vdovu”) and their sons languish in fetters (“syna kuiut”).

Shevchenko’s metaphorical alignment of the Caucasus with Ukraine exercised political force in 2013–14 during the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv, turning a couplet from “Kavkaz” addressed to Circassian rebels of the nineteenth century into an empowering refrain for Ukrainian demonstrators of the twenty-first. On signs, shields, and banners across Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), thousands of Ukrainians protesting the corrupt regime of Viktor Yanukovych brandished the lines, “Boritesia – poborete! / Vam Boh pomahaie!” (Fight – you will prevail! / God is helping you!). In “Kavkaz” these words are explicitly directed to Muslim Circassian rebels fighting Russian imperial forces, not to Ukrainians per se. That this detail was mostly forgotten by Euromaidan protestors indicates the efficiency of Shevchenko’s national metaphorization, which can address Ukrainians without addressing them at all.

Illustrative of the lasting influence of Shevchenko’s “Kavkaz” is a poem by Vasyl Symonenko entitled “Kurdskomu bratovi” (To my brother Kurd, 1963), which cites “Boritesia – poborete” in its epigraph. Symonenko was an early luminary of the shistdesiatnyky (the generation of the “Sixtiers”), a young poet whose lean and lucid anti-colonial verse was wildly popular in Soviet Ukrainian samvydav circles. Pliushch calls him the “poet of the birth of the Ukrainian resistance.”²⁶ Months after the composition of “Kurdskomu bratovi,” Symonenko died of cancer at the age of twenty-eight. After his death, Ivan Svitlychny circulated the poem in the underground and sent it to the West, an act that led to his arrest in an infamous 1965 roundup of Ukrainian intellectuals.²⁷ The poem was then published in the Munich-based Ukrainian émigré journal Suchasnist (Modernity) and broadcast on Radio Liberty soon thereafter.²⁸

Employing the rhetoric of what Fanon calls a “literature of combat,”²⁹ “Kurdskomu bratovi” is an admonitory appeal to an anonymous Kurd addressee urging him to keep watch over his weapons and spare no mercy on his enemies. Although the poem’s precise historical context is unclear – no individuals are named, no places cited, no dates given – Symonenko may be referring to clashes in Iraq in the early 1960s between Kurdish rebels led by Mustafa Barzani (who had studied political science in the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s) and Iraqi forces under the command of Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qassim. In “Kurdskomu bratovi” the lyrical persona passionately describes this distant struggle as one of Kurds defending their right of national self-determination against cruel, manipulative forces who “have come not only for your wealth / But to strip you of your language and your name.”³⁰

While the poem deals exclusively with the plight of the Kurds at the level of content, one word in the fourth stanza allows it to speak to the plight of Ukrainians: “Our most treacherous enemy is chauvinism” (Nash nailiutishyi voroh – shovinizm; emphasis mine). This use of the collective first-person in an echo of Lenin alludes to an interchangeability between the two peoples, presenting them as components of one metaphorical relation: Kurds are Ukrainians. One of Symonenko’s readers, a teacher from Ternopil named Mykola Kots, made this interchangeability explicit, with dire consequences. He replaced the word Kurd with Ukrainian throughout the poem and distributed the amended text in cities across Ukraine. In 1967 a Soviet judge punished Kots for this creative editing by sentencing him to seven years of prison and five years in exile.³¹

A “dear brother” of Vasyl Symonenko, in the words of the journal Ukraïnskyi visnyk (The Ukrainian Herald), was a poet from Dnipropetrovsk in eastern Ukraine named Ivan Sokulsky, who employed national metaphorization in confronting the persecution of the Crimean Tatars. Sokulsky (1940–1992) is often remembered today as the primary author of the 1968 “Lyst tvorchoï molodi Dnipropetrovska” (“Letter of the Creative Youth of Dnipropetrovsk”), an indictment of Soviet authorities that was written in response to and under the influence of Ivan Dziuba’s Internatsionalizm chy russifikatsiia? (Internationalism or Russification?, 1965) and Oles Honchar’s Sobor (The Cathedral, 1968). Dziuba’s treatise meticulously unpacks Soviet departures from Leninist nationalities policy; Honchar’s novel inverts the genre of Socialist Realism in a defence of local Ukrainian history and memory. “Lyst tvorchoï molodi Dnipropetrovska” borrows from them both, but it stands out with a rhetorical ferocity inspired by Symonenko. “In the Party there is a place for murderers and tricksters – spiritual refuse³² – but honest and principled Communists are thrown out from the Party and out of work?” the letter reads. “Monuments are built to Ivan the Terrible, Peter I, Catherine II, but no one will say that they seethed with hatred for Ukrainians, Tatars, Belarusians, Poles, Georgians, and others?”³³ Months later, Radio Svoboda broadcast the letter internationally, and the exposure placed “the creative youth of Dnipropetrovsk” in peril. In 1970 Sokulsky was arrested as he disembarked the Kyiv-Dnipropetrovsk steamship, where he worked on the crew.³⁴ He was sentenced to more than four years in the camps.

For all his outspoken courage, friends described Sokulsky as a “reserved” (zamknenyi), sensitive soul.³⁵ Much of his poetry bears an intimate, confessional tone, mourning a world descending slowly “into a vortex.”³⁶ At a time of physical and moral disintegration, he sees poems as fortifications: “When catastrophe comes, / Place strophes of stone at the door.”³⁷ Some of these “strophes of stone” were written concomitantly with “Lyst tvorchoï molodi Dnipropetrovska” in a poem entitled “Bakhchysarai (Tsykl)” (Bakhchysarai [a cycle], 1968).

“Bakhchysarai” made a considerable impression on writer and friend Viktor Savchenko, who distinctly remembers the first time he encountered the work. He recalls that, during a trip to Crimea, he and Sokulsky “were making our way down a winding road from Ai-Petri on the side of Bakhchysarai. It was raining, the asphalt was slippery […] and behind me Ivan was reading [“Bakhchysarai”], a poem dedicated to the deported Crimean Tatars. The fate of the Crimean Tatars was as painful to him as the fate of Ukrainians.”³⁸ Yet the identification of these two “fates,” so evident to Savchenko, does not find any explicit expression in the poem. Like Vasyl Symonenko’s “Kurds’komu bratovi,” Sokulsky’s text ventures into the realm of the coded and the implicit by way of national metaphorization.

For the Crimean Tatars, the mountains are a site of origin, a cradle of civilization and culture – a “zone of the spirit,” in the words of Neal Ascherson.³⁹ Sokulsky begins “Bakhchysarai” in the mountains but transforms them into a site of loss, less a cradle than a grave. He visualizes the night of 18 May 1944 as an assault on vulnerable women and children:

Гори сиротіли, гори даленіли

Пеленали гори відчай і плачі.

І за ніч останню матері сивіли

І кричали діти - отоді вночі!

…………………… .

Пусткою ці rори, тихі і чужі.

«Земле предків, що тебе не знаєм!» -

Голос дальній чується мені -

Кров татарська вдалині ридає …

Серце в тузі - там, на чужині!⁴⁰

(The mountains were orphaned, the mountains were deserted,

They were enveloped in despair and in tears.

On that last night mothers turned grey,

And the cries of their children pierced the night air!

…………………………………‥

Silent and strange, the mountains now stand empty.

“O ancestral land, we do not know you!”

I hear a distant voice –

The Tatar people weep from afar …

A heart in anguish in that foreign land!)

Sokulsky’s lines remind Myroslav Marynovych of his own encounter with an emptied Crimea, “silent and strange.” Visiting Feodosiia in the late 1960s, he wandered into the mountains and came upon what was clearly once a Crimean Tatar village. “I was stunned,” he remembers. “It felt like I had walked into a massive cemetery where a whole culture was buried.”⁴¹

Buried in Sokulsky’s passage is a series of intertexts with the poetry of Taras Shevchenko. The peculiar evocation of a “heart in a foreign land” is a direct quotation from Shevchenko’s “Do Osnov’ianenka” (“To Osnov’ianenko,” 1839), for example, and the diacope of hory (mountains) in the line “Hory syrotily, hory dalenily” nods to the famous opening of Shevchenko’s “Kavkaz”: “Za horamy hory, khmaroiu povyti, / Zasiiani horem, kroviiu polyti” (Mountains upon mountains, covered in cloud, / sown with woe, soaked in blood). These clusters of allusions to Shevchenko are magnetic; they draw Ukrainian readers toward a lyrical “I” who speaks in a familiar, authoritative language denouncing injustice and empathizing with the victim.

This language is also Shevchenkian in its strategic hyperbole. When Sokulsky gives voice to the Crimean Tatars in his poem, these “distant voices” speak in a fatalistic language of nevers and nowheres. Sokulsky emulates Shevchenko in employing what the rhetoricians of antiquity called accismus, a device whereby what is sought is denied, refuted, or mourned as irrevocably lost: “We will never return. / We will never see this land again!”⁴² Indeed, the refain of the Crimean Tatars in “Bakhchysarai (Tsykl)” is ostannii (the last). They lament “the last step on their ancestral land” and “the last night” of 18 May, which “spared neither young nor old.” Voices of Soviet authorities also appear in the poem to taunt and torment them in a similarly defeatist language: “Now your land has been exchanged for another– / Now you will never recover!”

Sokulsky uses these repeated, gratuitous professions of finality and embarks on this rhetorical via negativa for a reason. As with Chichibabin’s “Krymskie progulki” and Nekipelov’s “Gurzuf,” for example, they aim to foment the reader’s refutation, to incite action. Hyperbole, after all, always tempts a response. At the conclusion of “Bakhchysarai (Tsykl),” Sokulsky’s lyrical persona directly calls for action. He looks upon Bakhchysarai with cognitive dissonance and declares:

Я бачу Бахчисарай -

Я не бачу Бахчисарая!

Світ почує нехай

Про злочинство безкрає …

Я бачу Бахчисарай –

Я не бачу Бахчисарая!

(I see Bakhchysarai –

I do not see Bakhchysarai!

Let the world hear

about this interminable crime …

I see Bakhchysarai –

I do not see Bakhchysarai!)⁴³

Sokulsky’s lyrical persona sees the space of Bakhchysarai but not the place of Bakhchysarai. The poem concludes with this contradiction in order to gesture to a new beginning. Cognitive dissonance is, after all, an aversive drive state that spurs us to fix it or fight it, making the poem’s ending a cry for resolution. “Let the world hear about this interminable crime,” he implores the reader. “Bakhchysarai (Tsykl)” therefore does not document the suffering of the Crimean Tatars as in a human rights petition or an open letter; in fact, to a significant degree, it “resists demands for closure” and veils this suffering with intertextual codes and strategic inconsistencies.⁴⁴ Its defamiliarization or ostranenie, as Shklovsky called it, leans into the future, toward the prospect of the reader’s solidary sense-making and action-taking. Meanwhile, the poem’s “familiarization,” as it were – its practice of national metaphorization, which posits a relation of familiarity and resemblance between the Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars – leans back into the past, toward Shevchenko’s “Kavkaz,” a work uniquely influential in the development of Ukraine’s national identity.

3.

Ivan Sokulsky’s “Bakhchysarai (Tsykl)” helped spark an epistolary exchange between two leaders of the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar national movements. For over a decade Viacheslav Chornovil and Mustafa Dzhemilev knew each other by reputation, but it took a work of literature to help bring them into direct contact. In the 1970s Chornovil repeatedly wrote to friends asking for information about Dzhemilev’s whereabouts.⁴⁵ News of Dzhemilev’s most recent arrest and exile had travelled fast, and Chornovil wanted to reach out to Dzhemilev and ask about the itinerary or “staging” (etapirovanie) of his exile to Yakutiia in the Soviet Far East. When he composed his letter to Dzhemilev, he cited a passage from Sokulsky’s “Bakhchysarai (Tsykl),” using the verse to express solidarity with his correspondent and the Crimean Tatar people.⁴⁶

From Yakutiia, Dzhemilev replied to Chornovil with what he called probably his “longest letter in the last ten years.” With characteristic wit, he explains that years earlier he had wanted to initiate correspondence with Chornovil but “managed to get myself arrested” instead. Dzhemilev then addresses Chornovil’s questions about his etapirovanie at length.⁴⁷ He details the stages of his journey from Tashkent to Yakutiia, pausing to relay a darkly humorous story of his solitary confinement in Novosibirsk, where his prisoner classification as “anti-Soviet” in his file confused one of his guards, who mistook him as “non-Soviet,” as a foreigner from Turkey. (“How’s the meat there?” the guard asked.) At the end of the letter Dzhemilev returns to the question of the poem that helped spark Chornovil’s contact. “If you can,” he asks, “transcribe for me, even if only in parts, the poems from Sokulsky’s Crimean cycle.”⁴⁸

Chornovil obliges. He also refers Dzhemilev to another Ukrainian literary work, Roman Ivanychuk’s Malvy (The mallows, 1968), which he describes as an expression of “sympathy with your people.”⁴⁹ Originally titled Yanychary (The janissaries), Malvy is an attempt to look at the history of Ukraine from a Crimean Tatar perspective.⁵⁰ Its publication – first in serialized form in the journal Vitchyzna (Fatherland) and then as a separate volume released in a run of over one hundred thousand copies – was a genuine event in Ukrainian culture. Politician Mykhailo Kosiv remembers it as an “explosion.”⁵¹ Part of the novel’s combustibility was due to its genre, which could manipulate, revise, and upset fixed historiographic paradigms and nurture alternative sites of memory: the genre of historical fiction.

Another source of fuel was its time period: the seventeenth century. In the 1920s, as we saw in chapter 3, Soviet Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar writers and artists – people like Osman Akçokraklı and Ostap Vyshnia – seized upon a past of the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar encounter that was not marked by slave raids and warfare against one another. They alluded to another history – one of friendship, alliance, and co-operation – which accompanied the emergence of a Ukrainian Cossack polity during the era of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, or the Khmelnychchyna, in the seventeenth century.⁵² As Orest Subtelny remarks, at this time “when the Ukrainians sought to defend their political individuality, it was to the Tatars that they turned most often for support.”⁵³ Shevchenko alludes to this past solidarity in his sketch Khmelnytsky pered krymskym khanom (Khmelnytsky before the Crimean khan, 1857), in which the composition’s arched perimeter joins together a respectful Cossack hetman and a reclining Crimean Tatar khan in one harmonious visual field (fig. 7).⁵⁴

7. Taras Shevchenko, Khmelnytsky before the Crimean Khan (1857)

In a similar vein, Ivanychuk’s Malvy gathers Ukrainian, Crimean Tatar, and Ottoman characters from the period of the Khmelnychchyna and invites the reader to revisit their entangled relationships. By 1968, historical novels about the Khmelnytsky era were hardly a new phenomenon in Soviet Ukrainian literature, but Ivanychuk’s text stood apart by making Khmelnytsky a marginal character and by upsetting the literary status quo with a biting allegory about national belonging in the Soviet Union.⁵⁵

Soviet authorities were slow to pick up on the allegory, which likened the Soviet Union to a proselytizing and paranoid empire.⁵⁶ But they caught on eventually. Reading groups occasioned by the novel – such as one organized at Lviv’s Ivan Franko University by Ihor Yukhnovsky, a theoretical physicist who would later become the head of the Institute of National Memory in independent Ukraine – were condemned and shut down.⁵⁷ Copies of Malvy were confiscated from bookstores and pulled from library shelves.⁵⁸ In the pages of Pravda Ukrainy, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Ivanychuk (1929–2016) was severely criticized for writing a “historical novel without a history.”⁵⁹ In official circles, as literary critic Taras Salyha explains, he was spared no “bitter word.”⁶⁰ But in unofficial circles, Ivanychuk’s supposed sins only provoked more readers to read the novel closely and to copy passages for circulation through samvydav networks.

At the heart of the novel’s controversy is its intervention into the history of the Crimean Tatar “national question,” which fundamentally challenges Soviet discursive cleansing after 1944. Beyond portraying the Crimean Tatars as complex, “round” characters whose actions defy easy categorization and caricature, Malvy establishes the Crimean Tatars as the indigenous inhabitants of the Black Sea peninsula. This claim to indigeneity was a corrective to a prevailing narrative in official post-war Soviet literature that appears in, for instance, Vasyl Kucher’s novel of 1952, Chornomortsi (Black Sea sailors). The central protagonist of Chornomortsi, an Odesa-born, Second World War midshipman named Samiilo Vykhor, curses the Crimean Tatars for “treason” before reciting, predictably, a passage from Pushkin’s Bakhchisaraiskii fontan. His ire erupts when he intercepts a German communiqué containing instructions “for all [Nazi] officers to support the Crimean Tatars”:

Вихор сплюнув і гірко вилаявся:

— Пригріли гада за пазухою! Кращі виноградники їм дано в Криму, найбагатші сади і землі, випаси і курортні міста! Столицю в Сімферополі […] Так ні ж! Гітлеру п’яти лизать кинулися!⁶¹

(Vykhor spat and cursed [the Crimean Tatars] with scorn: “We warmed serpents in our bosom! They were given the best vineyards in Crimea, the most verdant gardens and tracts of land, the pastures, and the resorts! Even a capital in Simferopol […] But no! They rushed to lick Hitler’s boots!”; emphasis mine.)

This conceit of Crimea as a “gift” to the Tatars intersected with an ascendent campaign of discursive cleansing in the field of Soviet historiography in the early 1950s. It came to a head in June 1952, when leading Soviet Russian historian Boris Grekov published an essay entitled “O nekotorykh voprosakh istorii Kryma” (Concerning a few questions on Crimean history) in the pages of Izvestiia. It is a paean to historical revisionism.

“In shedding light on the history of Crimea, there have been many distortions,” writes Grekov, because “Crimea has been the object of desire of many nations hostile to Russia for many centuries.” He continues: “It is therefore not surprising that bourgeois scholars of various countries, in order to please the political agendas of their governments, have made every effort to falsify the history of Crimea.”⁶² The first “distortions” that Grekov targets in Izvestia pertain to the Crimean Tatars: “In the pre-war period, the role of the Crimean Khanate was exaggerated – unjustifiably and completely without proof – in some historical works in order to please Tatar bourgeois nationalists. The issue of the inclusion [vkliuchenie] of Crimea in Russia [in 1783] was completely misinterpreted. This historically progressive event was usually portrayed as a colonialist capture, as a terrible evil in the historical life of the population of the Crimean peninsula.”⁶³ Grekov’s critique of previous “bourgeois” works of Crimean history comes down to the issue of possession. He claims Crimea for “the Russian people” (russkii narod) who, he argues, have resided in Crimea since antiquity. Yet Crimea’s Russian inheritance “did not interest prior researchers,” writes Grekov, with incredulity. “Bourgeois archaeologists did not even look for traces of Slavdom there.”⁶⁴

Joining Grekov on a quest to make amends for these “distortions” was a former censor with little formal historical training named Pavel Nadinsky (Savely Posiagin). In 1952 Nadinsky published a work of popular history entitled Ocherki po istorii Kryma (Sketches of the history of Crimea). It was first intended as a brochure. Its title appropriated that of a prominent, highly successful precursor, Yevgeny Markov’s Ocherki Kryma (Sketches of Crimea, 1872), whose condemnations of Russian colonial oppression were recycled in Ostap Vyshnia’s feuilletons, as we saw in chapter 3. But Nadinsky brushed off Markov’s work, vigorously asserting that Crimea was ancient Russian territory. “Crimea should never be characterized as a colony, because Crimean territory has been Russian territory since ancient times,” he writes. “Crimea’s economic development came at the hands of the Russian people, its towns were built by Russian workers, its fields were tilled by a huge majority of Russian peasants and farm labourers.”⁶⁵ Today, when Vladimir Putin presents reasons for the 2014 annexation, his words echo those of Grekov and Nadinsky: “Crimea is native [iskonno] Russian land.”⁶⁶

This historical revisionism – weaponized in a broader campaign of discursive cleansing, promulgated by the Party across the Soviet Union, and perpetuated by the Kremlin – is the mottled backdrop to Ivanychuk’s Malvy. Following in the footsteps of Kotsiubynsky in Pid minaretamy, Ivanychuk centres his novel on a Crimea dominated by the Crimean Tatars, who – pace Grekov and Nadinsky – are shown developing the economy of the peninsula, building towns, and tilling fields. The novel ascribes an innate Muslim alterity to the peninsula – it is a land most decidedly, to cite Chichibabin, “not Russia” – and portrays the Tatars as its autochthonous inhabitants to whom Polish, Muscovite, Cossack, and Ottoman dignitaries pay tribute. Ivanychuk’s Malvy restores and projects, in other words, a tight bond between Crimean place and Tatar personality.

Malvy is the story of Mariia, the wife of a Cossack captain whose children are abducted and spirited off to Crimea and the Ottoman Empire, where they assume new lives, pursue divergent destinies, and largely forget their Ukrainian origins and common family past. Mariia’s young son Semen, sold to the Tatars, takes the name Selim and joins the palace guards of the Crimean Tatar khan, whom he calls his only “father and family.” Her other son, Andry, taken by the Tatars and dispatched to Istanbul, becomes a çorbaci or janissary colonel named Alim in the service of the sultan at the Sublime Porte. Her daughter, Solomiia, who is renamed Malva (mallow) after the small, resilient steppe flowers common to Ukraine and Crimea, enters the palace of İslâm Giray III at the age of twelve and eventually falls in love with the khan.

Mariia, meanwhile, converts to Islam in order to survive in Crimea, where she seeks to find her lost, scattered children and return home. She is the most morally virtuous and sympathetic character in Malvy, and she repeatedly speaks of guilt (provyna). To save her children’s lives, she surrenders them. To recover her children, she commits apostasy. Political discord and military cruelty force her into untenable situations, and her choices burden her with guilt, for which she pledges to atone with “prayer, blood, and life itself.”⁶⁷ Like Taras Shevchenko’s eponymous biblical heroine in “Mariia” (1859), who courageously stewards her son’s message after the crucifixion, she is indefatigable, long suffering, and self-sacrificing. There is another resemblance as well. “Am I not Ukraine,” Ivanychuk’s Mariia asks, “alienated and broken like my native land?”⁶⁸

Ivanychuk did not conceal the fact that his characters are meant as symbols and his novel as a complex allegory for the psychological colonization of Ukrainian society in the Soviet period.⁶⁹ As one who eventually parts ways with his suzerain, Selim represents what we might term the mazepinets, a figure cut from the cloth of Ivan Mazepa who ultimately sides with his nation over the imperial sovereign to whom he once swore allegiance.⁷⁰ After he absorbs the truth about his identity and heritage as a Ukrainian, Selim joins the Cossacks and perishes in battle. Alim, meanwhile, represents an apostate maloros, a “Little Russian” who holds his Ukrainian origins in contempt and becomes a murderous servant of empire. In his hatred for Ukraine he resembles the spiteful Polonophile Masia in Anatoly Svydnytsky’s Liuboratski: Simeina khronika (The Liuboratskys: A family chronicle, 1861–2). The character of the janissary that Alim embodies had particular figurative purchase in the Soviet period: Sviatoslav Karavansky, to cite one example, eviscerates members of the Soviet Ukrainian Union of Writers in 1968 as “Janissaries” who carry from prisons “the corpses of murdered brothers” in silence and in darkness.⁷¹ Finally, Malva represents the Wallenrodist, a character cast in the vein of Adam Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenod who walks the corridors of imperial power and, like the eponymous protagonist of the epic Ukrainian duma “Marusia Bohuslavka,” uses this access to save her tormented compatriots.

Leading these compatriots against Polish rule in Ivanychuk’s novel is the Cossack hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, comrade to Malva’s deceased father and ally to Khan İslâm Giray. The alliance between the hetman and the khan is the same one that was chronicled by Canmuhammed in the seventeenth-century destan discussed in chapter 3. In Ivanychuk’s novel the eventual breakdown of this alliance, provoked largely by external forces, is the narrative climax. Malva appeals to her husband, İslâm Giray – her “wise tsar, the light of [her] eyes” – to remain loyal to the Khmelnytsky and the Cossacks, speaking to him in a tone alternating between confidence and anxiety:

… подаруєш волю своєму і моєму народові.

— Якому твоєму, Мальво? […] Ти ж мусульманка, як і я, і мій народ є твоїм народом.

— Я люблю тебе, хане, і Крим теж став моєю батьківщиною. Але ти зрозумій, що не байдужа журавлеві, коли він у теплих краях, холодна в’ялиця на півночі.

(“…You will bestow freedom upon your people and upon mine.” “Upon whose people, Malva? […] You are Muslim, as I am, and my people are your people.” “I love you, my khan, and Crimea has also become my homeland. But understand that the crane is not indifferent to the withering cold in the north, even when it resides in warm lands.”)⁷²

İslâm Giray ultimately does not heed Malva’s entreaty. He aligns with the Poles against Khmelnytsky – and against the wishes of the Ottoman sultan – and orders his cavalry to abandon the Cossacks at the Battle of Berestechko of 1651. In Malvy, Ivanychuk employs artistic licence – by his own admission, his interest is less in historical accuracy than in the communication of the story’s “psychological sense”⁷³ – and interprets the khan’s betrayal of the Cossacks as a gesture of resistance against a demanding and presumptuous Istanbul, which considers him “putrescence and dust” (porokh i tlin) before the likes of the sultan.⁷⁴ This prideful act of self-assertion, however, is his undoing. The Poles forsake him, Khmelnytsky aligns with Muscovy, and his beloved Malva avenges the Cossacks and poisons him for “the blood [he has] spilled in vain.”

For Ivanychuk, Crimean Tatar khan İslâm Giray stands as a “great politician and diplomat” for whom it is impossible not to feel sympathy.⁷⁵ The ambivalence of his nature and the complexity of his geopolitical position are continually highlighted in the novel. Although he betrays Khemlnytsky and Malva, he is “distinguished,” in the words of Ivanychuk, “by his courage and, most importantly, by his audacious move to break free of the Porte forever.”⁷⁶ Selim, then, is not the only mazepinets in Malvy. By foregrounding İslâm Giray’s discontent with and “betrayal” of the Ottoman Empire – and thereby underscoring the agency and sovereignty of the Crimean Tatars in this period – Ivanychuk contradicts a post-war Soviet historiographical discourse that reduced the khans of the seventeenth century to puppets of the sultan.

In Borba moskovskogo gosudarstva s Tatarami v pervoi polovine XVII veka (The struggle of the Muscovite state against the Tatars in the first half of the seventeenth century, 1948) – which is considered “the most comprehensive work about Muscovite-Tatar relations of the period”⁷⁷ – Soviet historian Aleksei Novoselsky claims, for example, that the conduct of the khanate was essentially “a form of Turkish aggression.”⁷⁸ “Behind Crimea always stood Turkey,” he writes, even though Bakhchysarai and Istanbul conducted independent, and sometimes discordant, diplomatic relations with their neighbours in this period.⁷⁹ In Novoselsky’s view, the khan was the sultan’s subservient representative and nothing more, so any move toward “independence” for Crimea in this period could only have been a fanciful venture of Tatar princes.⁸⁰

Ivanychuk advances a much different view. He gives us İslâm Giray as a guileful leader in the vein of Byron’s “Mazeppa.” Indeed, what unites all the narrative events and characters in Malvy is a theme of duplicity – not simply as double-dealing but as “double-being.” This duplicity is both a quality of Ivanychuk’s characters – Solomiia/Malva, Semen/Selim, and Andry/Alim, for example – and a quality of the text itself, which is meant as a synthetic allegory for Soviet Ukraine. Ivanychuk consistently invites us to read for the figural rather than the literal, and his early presentation of Istanbul as the seat of a lumbering, dogmatic power defended by janissaries welcomes associations with the Kremlin and its “apostate” Ukrainian functionaries.⁸¹ The allegory does not end there, however. İslâm Giray’s rebellion against Ottoman power, not to mention his relatively sympathetic portrayal, suggests that the Crimean Tatar khanate – struggling with sovereignty and dependency as a “periphery” bound by confessional and ethnic ties to an imperial “centre” – is a reflection of Soviet Ukraine itself. By extension, Maria and the displaced, suffering Ukrainians of the seventeenth century are reflections of the displaced, suffering Crimean Tatars of the twentieth. Amid the allegory, in other words, we can discern another process of national metaphorization.

Ivanychuk hinted at this reading. “I was interested in […] the problem of solidarity between peoples [problema solidarnosti narodiv] who struggle for their freedom,” he writes, “as well as the problem of the enlightenment of a people compelled to subjugate others due to the force of historical conditions.”⁸² There is a constructive ambiguity in this remark. Is Ivanychuk referring to the seventeenth century or to the twentieth? His invitation to read Malvy allegorically – to tie the source context of the Crimean khanate to the target context of Soviet Ukraine – activates both periods in this exploration of the problem of solidarity between Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars, layering one century on top of the other. Across the centuries, despite their common aspirations to live in freedom, Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians were thus “compelled to subjugate” each other “due to the force of historical conditions.” For Ivanychuk, Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians are bound by mutual guilt but absolved by mutual victimization. As we will see, this idea – a variant on Tvardovsky’s “guiltless guilty” – occupies discussions of Ukrainian–Crimean Tatar relations after 1968.

4.

Shortly after Malvy’s release, the notion of oppressed nations pitted against each other becomes a theme that is advanced by self-professed Ukrainian nationalists, who return to the Crimean Tatar question in another public statement, in 1969. In the émigré journal Suchasnist the External Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (Ukraïnska holova vyzvolna rada, UHVR), a political organization in exile formed from both the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, declare the “contemporary struggle of the Crimean Tatars” as “one very important link in the wider struggle of the peoples of the Soviet Union.”⁸³ This sentiment, which assigns a pars pro toto function to the Crimean Tatars, echoes the messages of the poems discussed in the previous chapter. Yet the authors of the UHVR appeal go further, supplementing a rhetoric of metonymical contiguity with one of metaphorical similarity: “The violent deportation of the Crimean Tatars from their homeland in 1944 must be qualified as a crime of genocide [narodovbyvstvo], similar in character to the deliberate starvation of nearly four million Ukrainian villagers in 1933.”⁸⁴

The UHVR appeal foregrounds two national groups with a history of mass suffering under Stalinism and positions this suffering as the basis of solidarity between them: “We have no doubt that the Ukrainian people sympathize [spivchuvaie] [with the Crimean Tatars] in their struggle […] All Ukrainians, no matter where they may live, should support the lawful struggle of the Crimean Tatars.”⁸⁵ This message had particular urgency in 1969. According to Crimean Tatar activists Rollan Kadyev and Zampira Asanova, KGB agents were spreading rumours among Crimean Tatars in Central Asia that “Ukrainian nationalists” stood between them and Crimea.⁸⁶ (Leonid Pliushch remembers laughing aloud at the idea.)⁸⁷ The UHVR appeal rails against this disinformation, condemning the Kremlin for attempts to divide and rule: “Forbidding the Crimean Tatars to return to Crimea, Russian chauvinists are spreading rumours that Ukrainians are agitating against the wishes of the Crimean Tatars. Such insidious manoeuvres on the part of Moscow must be judged and dismissed as provocations, as traditional tools in the politics of Russian imperialism to divide its enslaved peoples. Chauvinism of all kinds is foreign to the Ukrainian people, and [we are] bound to the Crimean Tatars by the ties of a common destiny, common interests, and friendship.”⁸⁸ The image of the nation projected in this passage is of an organic, autonomous, discrete, and coherent unit with a homogeneity of viewpoint. The collective authorship of the appeal, which bears no individual names or signatures, simulates the voice of uniformity and consensus idealized in nationalist pedagogy. There is no diversity of opinion, no contestation of identity, no exception to the rule: each and every Ukrainian at least tacitly supports the Crimean Tatar cause and dismisses “chauvinism of all kinds.” It is a laudable message. It is also an impossible one. “The danger is in the neatness of identifications,” as Samuel Beckett once explained.⁸⁹ No national identity, not even one deeply sensitive to the injustices of “chauvinistic” state power, can shield individuals who ascribe to it from acts of complicity in crimes of their state, or from Jaspers’s political guilt.

Prominent Ukrainian dissidents at this time – equally concerned with relationships between groups that were grounded in mutual suffering – surveyed this same terrain but dug much deeper. One of them was Ivan Dziuba, author of the sensational treatise Internatsionalizm chy rusyfikatsiia? (Internationalism or Russification?, 1965) that helped inspire Ivan Sokulsky’s activism in Dnipropetrovsk. In 1966 Dziuba stood outside of Kyiv at Babyn Iar (Babii Iar), where Nazi Schutzstaffel squads had murdered nearly thirty-five thousand Jews in 1941. Borys Antonenko-Davydovych was next to him, waiting to address a crowd that had gathered to commemorate the massacre. Dziuba spoke first, reminding the assembled about the “tragic” histories of the Ukrainian and Jewish peoples: “The history of our peoples is so similar in its tragic nature that in his biblical-themed [poem] ‘Moses’ Ivan Franko recast the path of the Ukrainian people in the sacred vestments of Jewish legends, and Lesia Ukraïnka began one of her most powerful poems about the tragedy of Ukraine with the words, ‘And you once struggled like Israel, [O my Ukraine].’”⁹⁰

These tragedies, according to Dziuba, persist in the Thaw period because of a departure from the Leninist principles that were opposed to anti-Semitism and Great Russian chauvinism and because of a Stalinist tradition of manipulating the prejudices between Jews and Ukrainians.⁹¹ To make his case, he offers examples of prominent Jewish and Ukrainian historical figures who supported Jewish-Ukrainian “brotherhood”: Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880–1940), the Zionist leader and ally of the Ukrainian national movement during the revolutionary period; and Taras Shevchenko, one of whose “last civic acts was a protest against the anti-Semitic policies of the tsarist regime.”⁹² These examples, among others, represent for Dziuba “a robust solidarity” between the groups in “a struggle for mutually held ideals of liberty and justice.”⁹³

Yet in highlighting this solidarity, Dziuba casts a glance at the other scene – at a history of discord and hostility between the Ukrainian and Jewish communities.⁹⁴ “In the past we have suffered from blind hostility and painful misunderstandings,” he confesses. “As a Ukrainian, I feel ashamed that there is anti-Semitism among my own people.”⁹⁵ Dziuba’s recognition of the fraught, complex nature of the Ukrainian-Jewish historical encounter reflects a tension between the individual and the in-group in the process of what has been called “identity correspondence,” the “linkage of individual and collective identities.”⁹⁶ When the in-group is a nation, an imagined community offering a sense of belonging across time, the individual must weigh nolens volens, in the process of national self-ascription, a particular moral burden posed by the actions of the collective in both the past and the present. In identifying as a member of the nation, in claiming proprietary access to its constellation of symbols, traditions, and achievements, the individual abnegates the stance of the moral individualist and takes on obligations arising from national identification – including those related to historical wrongs committed against Others. As in Dziuba’s case, this negotiation of an internal, in-group solidarity can come at the moment of an assertion of an external, intergroup solidarity.

The poet and human rights activist Mykola Rudenko (1920–2004) joined Dziuba in facing the fraught problem of guilt and national belonging. And he did so through the image of a Crimean Tatar Other. Rudenko was “the archetypical Ukrainian dissident,” a Party loyalist betrayed by the system that he sought in good conscience to reform.⁹⁷ Born the son of a coal miner in Donbas, he served as a political commissar in Leningrad in the Second World War. After being seriously wounded in October 1941, Rudenko convalesced in a hospital for nearly a year before leaving for the front once again. He returned from the war as a highly decorated veteran and became editor of the literary journal Dnipro and secretary of the Party Committee of the Union of Writers of Ukraine. Rudenko enjoyed success in the post-war period as both a poet and a prose writer whose novels, such as Ostannia shablia (The last sabre, 1959), became bestsellers.

The trajectory of Rudenko’s life changed dramatically in the 1960s. After attending Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” he began to express doubts, both privately and publicly, that the crimes of Stalinism were nothing more than the consequence of one man’s abuses and delusions. “When Khrushchev disclosed who Stalin really was, I was deeply shocked. I said to myself: something is not right here. The issue is not Stalin. How could a paranoid sadist assume such high office, wield such power, and shape the state? […] I had to answer these questions for myself.”⁹⁸ Myroslav Marynovych describes such Damascene conversions around the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party as a “psychological breakdown” that elicited among some Soviet elites “a sense of collective guilt.” Marynovych makes particular mention of Petro Grigorenko in this context as well. “Grigorenko, who was at first a stalwart Communist, was shocked by the sin the Communist regime had assumed. His decision to support the Crimean Tatars had not an ethnic impetus, but an ethical one.”⁹⁹

Grigorenko was the Ukrainian most prominently involved in the Crimean Tatar cause, but he was hardly alone. Between periods of lengthy incarceration, the poet and philologist Sviatoslav Karavansky proclaimed in a 1966 letter to the Soviet Council of Nationalities – notably, months before the 1967 decree – that the deportation of the Crimean Tatars was a “screaming injustice.”¹⁰⁰ Party member Taras Franko and biologist Mariia Lysenko publicly criticized the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in 1970 for preventing the Crimean Tatars from returning to their homeland, especially when the economy of Crimea was in such well-recognized need of a larger workforce.¹⁰¹ Among Ukrainian academics the historian Mykhailo Kulychenko condemned the deportation of the Crimean Tatars and other nations as a “tangible blow to their national development” and “an offence” (narushenie) enabled by Stalin’s “cult of personality,” in his work of 1972, Natsionalnye otnosheniia v SSSR (National relations in the USSR).¹⁰²

In 1975, while convalescing in a Moscow hospital, Grigorenko met Rudenko for the first time. It was a pivotal juncture in the lives of both men. Months before, Grigorenko had been released from his second sentence at a psychiatric hospital, which captured the world’s attention. Rudenko, meanwhile, had recently been expelled from the Writer’s Union, stripped of his privileges as a member of the Party, and forced to take up work as a night watchman in a sanatorium outside of Kyiv. He had also finished a lengthy analysis of Marx’s Kapital entitled Ekonomichni monolohy (Economic monologues), which Andrei Sakharov helped distribute in samizdat and passed directly to Grigorenko, who read it with interest. Ekonomichni monolohy, as Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky puts it, “reads as if it were written by an intellectual Robinson Crusoe” who was unaware that Marx’s theory of surplus value “had been [critiqued] by economists for the past hundred years.”¹⁰³ Yet it also reveals a well-intentioned artist who was convinced that the system could still be reformed and that Soviet authorities might heed, or at least appreciate, his warnings.

Around the time of his first meeting with Grigorenko, Rudenko composed a poem entitled “Tataryn” (The [Crimean] Tatar), which was immediately distributed in samvydav and later published in a tamvydav (Ukrainian equivalent of tamizdat) collection of the poet’s work in 1978. The poem stands out in Rudenko’s oeuvre for a number of reasons, not least of which is its dark depiction of the villagers of the Donetsk basin before the war. On the whole, Rudenko tends to convey a strong fondness and nostalgia for Donetsk and the surrounding countryside in his verse. In “Donbas,” for example, his lyrical persona professes an everlasting love for this “hearty” land in whose “silty streams” he swam as a child and on whose rocks he learned to write with pieces of coal.¹⁰⁴ Walking along village roads and across the shadows of trunks of pine trees, he addresses locals as trusted, long-time friends. These childhood memories of Donetsk often offer refuge and solace in trying times. In “V Donetsku” (In Donetsk, 1977), written after his second arrest, his lyrical persona travels “home, to my distant childhood,” where “everything is full of hope, everything is as it should be.”¹⁰⁵ While his hometown is not quite the unblemished idyll evoked by Taras Shevchenko under similarly trying circumstances in “Sadok vyshnevyi kolo khaty” (“The Cherry Orchard by the House,” 1847) – herbs from the meadow stave off smells of dung and sweat in the Rudenko family home, for instance – it is still a place of innocence, bathed at night in the light of shining stars.

In stark contrast, the Donetsk of “Tataryn” is a site of savage violence against an innocent man. The poem is undated, but Rudenko’s widow, Raïsa Kaplun Rudenko, believes that it was written around 1975, not long after his first encounter with Grigorenko in Moscow. She also makes clear that the “Tatar” referred to in the poem – and recalled in Rudenko’s memories – was specifically a Crimean Tatar, despite the more prevalent number of Volga Tatars in cities in the Donbas region.¹⁰⁶ (According to KGB memoranda, there were nearly seven hundred Crimean Tatars in the Donetsk oblast around the time of the poem’s composition.¹⁰⁷) The poem, whose alternating twelve- and thirteen-syllable lines evoke the cadence of a lament, is a meditation on a haunting childhood memory:¹⁰⁸

Ніби душу лікую від давніх ошпарин —

Років сорок це лихо забути велю:

У багнюці конає побитий татарин,

Його руки мотуззям зап’яті в петлю.¹⁰⁹

(Trying to heal my soul from old wounds,

I have told myself to forget this evil for forty years:

A beaten Tatar languishes in mud,

His hands bound with rope in a slipknot.)

Oshparyn/tataryn, zeliu/ petliu – at the level of form, Rudenko plays it safe as a technician; throughout his poetic corpus, his strophes, metres, and rhymes have an almost militant regularity. The tightly ordered “Tataryn” does not surprise in this regard. At the level of content, his poems also tend to avoid inconsistency of mood or unpredictability of thought, keeping within a stable “ideological system” or “program,” in the words of George Shevelov.¹¹⁰ Here “Tataryn” decidedly breaks the mould, as the memory of the tortured Tatar provokes an “unprogrammatic” experience of confusion and despair:

Я не знаю за віщо дядьки завелися —

Дико люди жили у донецьких степах.

Душу й досі пече голова його лиса

І той камінь, що людською кров’ю пропах.

Хто ж він був, цей татарин? … Не відаю досі.

Били, мабуть, за те, що він череп голив.

Чи за те, що у зайшлого очі розкосі.

Чи за жменьку порічки, за пригорщу слив.

(I do not know what drove the villagers to do this –

Wildly did people live on the Donetsk steppe.

The sight of that blood-soaked rock

And his bald head still sears my soul.

Who was he, this Tatar? I do not know to this day.

Perhaps they beat him because he shaved his head.

Or because he was a stranger with oblique eyes.

Or because of his handfuls of red currants and plums.)

At play in “Tataryn” is a push and pull of two discourses, testimony and confession, and of two discursive temporalities, childhood and adulthood. Rudenko’s lyrical persona “watches” his memory of the tormented Crimean Tatar from the point of view of a younger self – a boy approaching the world in largely spatial-visual terms – and reflects upon its deeper meaning from the point of view of an adult subject with particular conceptions of self and Other. When focused explicitly on the memory of the assault, the poem becomes a testimony, an externally directed discourse shuttling between chronicle and condemnation:

То не люди були — дикі звірі неначе.

Стала просто багном нежива голова.

І відтоді запала у серце дитяче

Недовіра до вашого, люди, єства.

(They were not human – they acted like wild animals.

His lifeless head became a swamp of gore.

And from that time, you people, my young heart was filled

With a distrust of your true nature.)

The same “kind and friendly” (dobri, i pryvitni) villagers who populate “Donbas” and “V Donetsku” are now “beasts” whom the young boy attempts to stop from murdering the Crimean Tatar in cold blood. This encounter with the disturbingly dual nature of his neighbours inspires not only his “distrust” but also a cognitive dissonance as profound as Sokulsky’s in “Bakhchysarai (Tsykl)”:

Я ненавиджу вас, дикуни-односельці.

Я люблю вас без міри, мої земляки.

(I hate you, savage fellow villagers.

I love you without measure, my countrymen.)

In denouncing his own people for violence against Others, Rudenko echoes Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s “Babii Yar”:

О, русский мой народ! –

Я знаю –

Ты

По сущности интернационален.

Но часто те, чьи руки нечисты,

Твоим чистейшим именем бряцали.¹¹¹

(O, my Russian people! –

I know –

You

Are international by nature.

But often men with impure hands

Have disgraced your pure name.)

For all its power, “Babii Yar” exhibits a certain emotional distance that “Tataryn” lacks. Yevtushenko’s lyrical persona stands in judgment over the anti-Semitic crimes of his own people; he is no danger of being implicated in them.

Rudenko’s “I” speaks from a different subject position – one more immediate and personal. He struggles to reconcile individual innocence (his position as a child witness to the Crimean Tatar’s murder) with collective responsibility (his national fellowship with the Crimean Tatar’s murderers). In other words, he struggles with the moral claims of national belonging, and it is precisely the “question of belonging” that testimonial literature “puts into action.”¹¹² The figure of the Crimean Tatar, the Other victimized at the hands of Ukrainian compatriots, impels the lyrical persona to interrogate the grounds for his identification with the collective. For Rudenko, this interrogation involves an inward turn. Here the poem shifts from testimony to confession, to an internally directed discourse of guilt, in the final lines:

Ніби душу лікую від давніх ошпарин,

Несучи у душі той донецький “рощот”.

І приходить до мене забитий татарин,

І скривавленим ротом питає: за що?

(Trying to heal myself from old wounds,

I still bear in my soul that Donetsk beating.

The murdered Tatar comes to me,

And with a blood-stained mouth asks: why?)

In his memoirs Rudenko returned to this problem of the complex moral claims of the nation on the individual, again with reference to the Crimean Tatar question:

A Ukrainian writer once had the nerve to say this to me in conversation: “I don’t understand Grigorenko. To suffer in the psikhushki [psychiatric hospitals] […] And for whom, if not for [the Crimean Tatars] whose ancestors plundered Ukraine for centuries? It seems to me that something is just not right here. To give your life for your enemies – this is nonsense.” This was not some ordinary writer, but one whose work was studied by Ukrainian schoolchildren. This man, crowned with laurels by state leaders, disturbed me. There is nothing more primitive or banal than sermonizing about the collective responsibility of descendants for the actions of their ancestors.¹¹³

In place of a sermon about “the collective responsibility of descendants for the actions of their ancestors” – sermons that would threaten to reduce internal solidarities and external solidarities to zero-sum propositions – Rudenko proposes testimony and (like Nekipelov in “Gurzuf”) confession, modelling both for the reader in “Tataryn.”

5.

In November 1976, not long after writing “Tataryn,” Mykola Rudenko sat in central Moscow in the apartment of a physicist, dissident, and laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize, Andrei Sakharov. Before a clutch of foreign journalists, Rudenko declared the establishment of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHG) – or the Ukrainian Civic Group for the Promotion of the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords (Ukraïnska Hromadska Hrupa spryiannia vykonanniu Helsinkskykh uhod) – which was committed to monitoring, on the territory of Soviet Ukraine, compliance with the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, which made human rights the crux of a fledgling détente between the Soviet Union and the West.¹¹⁴ The setting of Rudenko’s announcement in Moscow was not arbitrary: foreign journalists and dignitaries visited Kyiv only rarely.¹¹⁵ They were very familiar with Sakharov’s apartment, however, which had long become – in the words of KGB boss Yuri Andropov, his quotation marks dripping with condescension – “a place of pilgrimage for various kinds of ‘victims’ of ‘arbitrary actions’ by Soviet authorities.”¹¹⁶ Rudenko came to this place of pilgrimage by following in the footsteps of Yuri Orlov, who had announced the birth of the Moscow Helsinki Group (Moskovskaia Khelsinkskaia gruppa) earlier in May.

Rudenko’s press conference may have appeared something of a sequel to Orlov’s original, but, in the words of Liudmila Alekseeva, it was an “extremely significant event.”¹¹⁷ It demonstrated that the Helsinki phenomenon was not a flash in the pan confined to a cell of Moscow intellectuals, but an organized, interconnected movement penetrating republics across the Soviet Union. Testament to this significance can be found in the fact that, notwithstanding the relative novelty of the UHG, Rudenko was arrested for his Helsinki-related activism before Orlov, in February 1977. The KGB in Kyiv – operating at a remove from the watchful gaze of Western journalists and international observers in Moscow – was widely viewed as the most “vicious” in the Soviet Union.¹¹⁸ It moved quickly against Rudenko – arresting him alongside a compatriot from the Donbas, Oleksa Tykhy, who was a UHG founding member – and targeting in turn UHG founding members like Myroslav Marynovych. Rudenko was sentenced under Article 62 of the Soviet Criminal Code to seven years of hard labour and five years of exile. The verdict enraged Boris Chichibabin:

Он чистое дитя, и вы его не троньте,

Перед его костром мы все дерьмо и прах.

Он жизни наши спас и кровь пролил на фронте,

Он нашу честь спасёт в собачьих лагерях.¹¹⁹

([Rudenko] is a good man, and don’t you dare touch him,

Before his great fire, we are all shit and dust.

He saved our lives and shed blood at the front,

And in the wretched camps he will save our honour.)

By 1981, only four years after its inception, all members of the UHG – numbering roughly forty – had been imprisoned. According to Vasyl Ovsiienko, this group endured a total of 550 years in incarceration or exile. Four died in bondage: Tykhy, Yuri Lytvyn, Valery Marchenko, and Vasyl Stus, one of the most talented Ukrainian poets of the twentieth century. One, the historian Mykhailo Melnyk, committed suicide after years of harassment.¹²⁰

The Kremlin swiftly and brutally cut back the growth of the UHG for a number of reasons. Not only was the UHG the first Soviet Ukrainian independent civil society organization to be founded on international legal principles, but it also united Ukrainian dissidents of various ideological persuasions, from Marxists like Pliushch to national democrats like Chornovil, into one coherent body.¹²¹ Its announcement in Moscow was also an implicit recognition, particularly among Russian dissidents like Sakharov, that rights work could have different national valences. The Moscow and Ukrainian Helsinki Groups sought to hold Soviet authorities particularly accountable to Principle VII of the Helsinki Final Act, “Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief,” and to expose any violations of such principles before domestic and international audiences. Yet their respective adjectival descriptors – Moskovskaia and Ukraïnska – spoke to two different concepts of locality – city and nation – which in turn revealed different dispositions to the social order. For Orlov, Moscow was where the group was active; for Rudenko, Ukraine was why the group was active.

“[For the UHG] the national question is at issue above all,” Rudenko writes in the first UHG memorandum in 1976.¹²² Ukrainians and other non-Russian nations, in his view, are subject to persecution on the grounds of not only doing something “anti-Soviet” but also being something “anti-Soviet.” His attention to the national question was not myopic or exclusivist, however. It was global, even cosmopolitan, and invested in the edification of the individual, because Rudenko saw the nation as an instrument in and a “context of choice” for individual self-identification. After his break with Marxism, Rudenko dabbled in eighteenth-century physiocracy in an attempt to articulate this political philosophy, animating early UHG advocacy documents with a poetic eccentricity that is often absent in political samvydav. “Civilization is united – this is seen well from the Cosmos,” he writes. “There are no boundaries on the globe for the ray beaming down from the Sun. The human is formed from the rays of the Sun; he is a child of the Sun.”¹²³ For Rudenko, the sun is the conduit of all living energy – material, intellectual, and moral – endowing each individual with worth, wisdom, and inherent rights upon which the state cannot infringe.¹²⁴

For the UHG and the Ukrainian human rights movement, Petro Grigorenko was a luminary embodying this “radiated,” rooted cosmopolitanism. He was seen as a Ukrainian who bridged two expanses. As a founding member of both the Moscow and the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, he dovetailed the struggle of ethical individualists in Moscow and the struggle of communitarians devoted to the problem of minority national discrimination in Ukraine and beyond. And as the “Ukrainian general” (tuğgeneral Ukraynalı, as the Turkish press referred to him) most visibly advocating the Crimean Tatar movement around the world, he represented a Ukrainian prepared to sacrifice not only for the rights of his own people but for the rights of Others displaced and dispossessed thousands of miles away.¹²⁵ Founding documents of the UHG punctuated his defence of the Crimean Tatars, while Chornovil and the editors of Ukraïnskyi visnyk (The Ukrainian Herald) – the Ukrainian counterpart to Khronika tekushchykh sobytii that served as an informational organ of the UHG in the 1980s – held him up as the pre-eminent example of Ukrainian–Crimean Tatar solidarity.¹²⁶

These tributes understate the matter. “Grigorenko did much more for the Crimean Tatars than anyone among the Crimean Tatars themselves did,” says Mustafa Dzhemilev, a man given the sobriquet Qırımoğlu (son of Crimea) who draws comparisons to Nelson Mandela today. In 1968 Dzhemilev lived for six months with Petro and Zinaida Grigorenko in Moscow, where he became a part of the family. He served as Petro’s secretary; he called Zinaida “mama.”¹²⁷ Their friendship – between a former Red Army general and a conscientious objector half his age, twice imprisoned for avoiding the draft – was unlikely, but Soviet dissent was a calling that could forge diverse bonds. “All the dissidents passed through the Grigorenko apartment,” Dzhemilev remembers. “It is thanks to him that I joined the human rights dissident movement.”¹²⁸ After leaving the Grigorenkos, Dzhemilev would be arrested, tried, and sentenced under all manner of “anti-Soviet” charges no less than five times. He would embark on what is considered the longest hunger strike in the history of human rights movements, surviving over 303 days only due to the torture of force-feeding. Across the Black Sea on Turkish television, the drama of Dzhemilev’s protest triggered false news reports of his death.¹²⁹ Turkish newspapers repeated the rumours.¹³⁰ Days passed before the truth became known. On the front page of the leading Turkish daily Milliyet, a face of a Soviet dissident appeared to call on “all Muslims” to continue defending Dzhemilev, who was very much alive. It was the face of Leonid Pliushch, who was described in national terms as “a famous Ukrainian.”¹³¹