Chapter Six
Long after his hunger strike, on the late morning of 10 February 1984, the sixth day of Mustafa Dzhemilev’s sixth trial was underway in Tashkent. There was a skirmish outside his courtroom as police tried to wrangle Crimean Tatar protesters who were demonstrating their support for him. Dzhemilev by this point had spent most of his adult life incarcerated in the Soviet system, and his sixth trial had become both a local and an international cause célèbre. The charge against him was once again “anti-Soviet agitation.” “The concept of ‘anti-Soviet’ is as vague as it is capacious,” Lidiia Chukovskaia once wrote in a samizdat pamphlet defending Dzhemilev. “It is an insatiable chasm devouring human fates and human thoughts.”1
Dzhemilev was not intimidated by any chasm, however. He approached the proceedings in Tashkent as farce, deploying his wit and hard-earned jurisprudential savvy to outmanoeuvre prosecutors and judges alike. As he put it, he was “long familiar with the Jesuitical thinking of such sedition hunters.”2 Transcripts reveal them to be ill equipped to handle his intellect and disarming humour, which could quickly turn the tables and put them in dock, vulnerable to his withering questions. At one point, after decrying the hypocrisy of the Soviet portrayal of the invasion of Afghanistan as a provision of “fraternal assistance” to a neighbouring country, he turned to the prosecutor and asked, “We live in a very interesting country, do we not?” The judge swiftly intervened: “The prosecutor is not to be questioned.”3
One extended episode on the trial’s sixth day centred on a poem. Written in Turkish by the Ankara-based scholar Şükrü Elçin (1912–2008), “Bahçesaray Çeşmesi” (The fountain of Bahçesaray) first appeared in print in 1981. In a manner similar to Hasan Çergeyev’s Crimean Tatar–language precursor “Közyaş han çeşmesi” (1908), which we examined in chapter 2, the poem transforms Pushkin’s Romantic fountain into a witness to centuries of dispossession, a vessel through which both tears and blood flow. A copy of Elçin’s poem reached Dzhemilev from Turkey in an envelope tucked into the text of Atatürk’s monumental Nutuk (The Speech) – material that was more palatable to Soviet epistolary gatekeepers at the time, presumably given the history of relatively warm relations between Lenin and Atatürk.4 “Bahçesaray Çeşmesi” made a deep and immediate impression on Dzhemilev. After transcribing the poem by hand, he circulated it among a host of friends and colleagues, who then photocopied and distributed it further.
This simple act of propagating Elçin’s “Bahçesaray Çeşmesi” became part of the criminal case against Dzhemilev. His prosecutors even solicited “forensic literary analysis” from “experts” at the nearby Pushkin Institute of Language and Literature in an effort to show that the poem was “thoroughly saturated with anti-Sovietism.”5 Their bumbling attempts at literary analysis took centre stage at the trial:
JUDGE: Why did you decide to propagate [Elçin’s “Fountain of Bahçesaray”]?
DZHEMILEV: Because it is a beautifully written work, and good literary works should be read by as many people as possible. […]
JUDGE: But don’t you consider this “Fountain of Bahçesaray” a slanderous work?
DZHEMILEV: Of course not.
JUDGE: Have you been to Bahçesaray yourself? Have you seen this fountain?
DZHEMILEV: Yes, I have visited and seen the fountain.
JUDGE: So what, blood flows from the fountain, as the poem says?
DZHEMILEV: Well … there is a difference between a poem and an accounting report. If we’re going to think this way, I suppose I can give more evidence of “slander against the Soviet system” and “anti-historicism” in this work.
JUDGE: What evidence? Go on.
DZHEMILEV: For example, the poem says that, after the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, the birds stopped singing in Crimea. This is, of course, anti-historical, so the poet Şükrü Elçin is clearly slandering Soviet birds. They probably continued to sing their songs, regardless of who was deported from where. (Laughter, applause in the courtroom.)6
In disputing the absurd literalism of the prosecutors, Dzhemilev echoes Russian writer Andrei Siniavsky but with more irreverence. In 1966 Siniavsky and Yuly Daniel were on trial for “anti-Soviet agitation”; both were convicted and sentenced to terms in forced labour camps. In his “Final Word,” Siniavsky insisted that “a word is not a deed, but a word; the artistic image is a thing of convention” (khudozhestvennyi obraz usloven).7 Dzhemilev may have mocked the authorities’ argument with a deft reductio ad absurdum, but his point was the same. Literature does not advance a series of propositions and truth claims; unlike “accounting reports,” as he reminds us (incidentally echoing Samuel Beckett, who once declared that “literary criticism is not book-keeping”), poems do not aspire to concrete, determinate meaning or full disclosure.8 They are up to something else entirely.
In the Republic of Turkey, poems like Elçin’s “Bahçesaray Çeşmesi,” which we will examine more closely next, intersected with novels and pulp-fiction “penny dreadfuls” to engage in a poetics of solidarity with the Crimean Tatars throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. Like the dissident Soviet works of the previous two chapters, these literary texts invite the reader to visualize the suffering victim and to grapple with a language of guilt, but their we-relation conceives of the Crimean Tatars very differently, as “part of us,” as ethnic Sunni brethren enslaved by Soviet communism. They are presented as esir Türkler (captive Turks). Especially in conservative pan-Turkist literature, poetry and prose are put to work in the cause of their “liberation”: poetry as incense, summoning the oral traditions of folk poetry as well as the rhetoric of religious sermons and litany, and prose as a drum, pounding images of graphic victimization and heroism into the mind’s eye.
The works of literature in this chapter, published under various censorship regimes, complicate the view that Turkey “ignored the plight” of the Crimean Tatars, as Alan Fisher posits, or failed to take “particular interest in the plight of the Crimean Tatars,” as Isabelle Kreindler writes.9 Such neglect may have been true of a “passive” elite in Ankara consumed by Cold War Realpolitik.10 But on the level of culture, especially popular culture, we encounter a much different picture. As we will see, it is a picture of pan-Turkist journals like Emel publishing poetry about Crimean Tatars alongside digests of Soviet samizdat and tamizdat for a Turkish readership, which included a Crimean Tatar diaspora population numbering as many as five million.11 It is a picture of millions of readers routinely entering into the perspective of dispossessed Crimean Tatars via the bestselling novels of Cengiz Dağcı, which are a staple in Turkish secondary-school curricula today. Through Crimean Tatar characters, also described as “Turks,” tortured by both Stalinism and Nazism, Dağcı’s novels offer readers “prosthetic memories” of the Second World War, false-but-felt memories of a conflict that Turkey had avoided by declaring neutrality. The success of these novels in turn inspired epigones in the realm of pulp fiction, which found particularly receptive audiences and enthusiastic distributors in the Turkish military. All of these texts – from high literature to low literature – contributed to a clear outcome: the installation of the Crimean Tatar Other as a paradigmatic Turkic victim of the twentieth century.
1.
To map the reverberations of Stalin’s Crimean atrocity in Turkish literature is to navigate some of the most tempestuous currents of modern Turkish political thought. It is to feel an irratic push and pull between secularization and Islamicization, to move through a force field of growing tensions between right-wing and left-wing political forces after the introduction of multi-party politics in 1946. Literary activity in Turkey was far less regulated and far more heterogeneous than in the Soviet Union, but it could be just as dangerous, especially in the context of arrests, reprisals, and executions brought on by three military coups over three successive decades, in 1960, 1971, and 1980. Indeed, at the height of the Cold War, Turkish culture and society was afflicted by an often violent polarization between the right and the left, a contest of extremisms that turned academic life, for one, into a political gladiator sport. The Crimean Tatars – or at least their aesthetic representations – always seemed to figure in the arena.
Şükrü Elçin’s “Bahçesaray Çeşmesi” – the poem that preoccupied Soviet prosecutors during Dzhemilev’s trial in Tashkent, requiring “forensic literary analysis” – offers us a vivid example. Published in the Istanbul-based journal Emel in 1981, only months after the military coup led by General Kenan Evren, “Bahçesaray Çeşmesi” employs the figure of the Crimean Tatar Other to help translate an insurgent Turkish ideological project into a campaign of emotion and action.12 It turns the emblematic fountain from Pushkin’s “Bakhchisaraiskii fontan” and Çergeyev’s “Közyaş han çeşmesi” into a makeshift monument to what is known as the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis (Türk-İslam Sentezi), a conservative political program adopted by the military leadership in one of the most radical changes to the Republic of Turkey since its inception. The Synthesis departed from Atatürk’s strident secularism or laicism (laiklik) and accommodated Islam as a complementary force for national consolidation, placing Turkish culture on two pillars: “a 2,500-year-old Turkish element and a 1,000-year-old Islamic element.”13 The Synthesis was first articulated in the 1970s by a small group of scholars opposed to the growth of the political left, called Aydınlar Ocağı (Hearth of Intellectuals) – Elçin was a member – but after the 1980 coup it became “a popular ideological point of reference for power elites in Turkey, including the military.”14
What are the Crimean Tatars doing in a poem advancing the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis? To an extent, they are performing a function ascribed to them from the time of Ziya Gökalp and Mehmet Emin Yurdakul: offsetting what might be called an unbearable lightness of national being with extranational relevance. For Elçin, and for so many of the writers in this chapter, the Crimean Tatars were broadly understood as proxymate – that is, both proximate and proxy, neighbour and surrogate, Turkic and Turkish. Chapter 1 revealed how poets like Gökalp and Yurdakul helped lay the foundations of this conceptualization in the early twentieth century, abstracting Tatar personality in the service of the ethnonym Crimean Turk. After 1944, as we will see, this peculiar standing – at once outside (Crimean) and inside (Turk) – offered thinkers and readers in Turkey a valued asset in nationalist politics: access to the position of the victim, without the direct experience of victimization. The dispossession of the Crimean Tatars outside of Turkey’s borders could be used to raise the stakes of national agendas inside of them. It could turn what was, for right-wing Turkish activists, a domestic battle against Marxism, for instance, into a righteous struggle with global resonance not just against an enemy but against one’s own oppressor.
In Elçin’s “Bahçesaray Çeşmesi” the Crimean Tatars accordingly help inject a degree of extranational significance into the national design of the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis. Elçin was a prominent scholar and collector of folk culture, and his poem communicates this significance through an assortment of cultural references drawn from centuries past. In fact, his “Bahçesaray Çeşmesi” is less a fountain than a river brimming over with intertexts and allusions. In its flow are currents of both divan poetry and Turkic folklore, with eddies that mix quotations about mystical love from the classical verse of Fuzuli with references to the saz of folk poet Aşık Ömer (who, in Elçin’s view, was of Crimean Tatar origin).15 The language of the poem is often arcane, its metre loose and irregular:
Bahçesaray’da bir Gözyaşı Çeşmesi vardı Akyar mermerinden yapılmış,
Bu çeşme Kırım Giray’ın gönül ikliminde açan nilüferdi.16
(In Bahçesaray there is a “Fountain of Tears” made of Akyar [Sevastopol] marble,
The fountain was a water lily blossoming in the heart of Kırım Giray.)
As with Çergeyev’s precursor, what distinguishes Elçin’s fountain is its constancy, its enduring presence through periods of feast and famine and of suffering and renewal. It quenches the spiritual thirst of national awakeners across the eras, from Gasprinsky to Dzhemilev:
Gaspıralı İsmail bu çeşme başında duydu, sesini tarihin;
Bu çeşmede uyandırdı Cemiller’i, geçmiş zaman hüzniyle hatıralar.
(İsmail Gasprinsky [Gaspıralı] heard the sounds of history standing before this fountain;
At this fountain, the Dzhemilevs were roused by sorrowful memories of the past.)
Elçin does not confine the importance of this fountain to Crimea alone. He positions it as a point of crossing in the region of the Black Sea, a junction between the Anatolian and Crimean worlds. The fountain in Elçin’s vision is not only a touching monument to Khan Kırım Giray’s beloved, Dilara Bikeç, for instance; it also stands to honour Kerem and Aslı, the Anatolian “Romeo and Juliet” who were famous in Turkish folk poetry. In fact, for Elçin, it has significance for all of Islam, from the “ghazis” and the “warrior-saints” (erenler) to the “martyrs” of the faith.
Elçin’s “Bahçesaray Çeşmesi,” in other words, seeks to remind readers of the relevance of Crimea and the Crimean Tatars for Turkey and Islam, to wrench them away from Russian and Soviet historico-political space and stand them on pillars of Turkish culture as “part of us.” To this end, Elçin provides an extended history lesson. His third and fourth quatrains delve into the story of the envelopment of Crimea within the Ottoman sphere of influence in the fifteenth century. He evokes the exploits of Mehmet II (Mehmet Fatih, Mehmet the Conquerer) and his grand vizier, Gedik Ahmed Paşa, against the Genoese, which placed Crimea under Ottoman protection. The message is a reminder of a long-standing Turkish stake in the fate of the Crimean Tatars, of a past of mutual connection and historical obligation.
Establishing this framework of identification – an intricate array of Turkish and Muslim affinities – is the concern of the poem’s first section. The rest presents the effects of Stalin’s Crimean atrocity. Here Elçin’s lyrical persona turns to address the fountain in apostrophe, as in Çergeyev’s poem from 1908: “You are the broken heart of tens of thousands, of hundreds of thousands exiled to Siberia.” He then summons an army of apocalyptic metaphors, from “poisonous winds” blowing across the peninsula to bloody tears and silenced birds (which were raised as “evidence” in Dzhemilev’s trial). Arid soil cracks from thirst; lead covers the sky; the dreams of abducted children sway to and fro in rotting trees. “No one can breathe,” the lyrical persona intones, “in the darkness of night.”
Amid these clusters of metaphor, Elçin highlights the most vulnerable victims of the deportation: children and their mothers, whose “eyes are seized by fear.” He conjures an image of them on crowded cattle-cars in 1944, crawling eastward to destinations unknown. “On the way to Siberia, a girl from Sudak [in southeastern Crimea] holds tightly to a song,” the lyrical persona observes. Upon hearing her singing, he says, “I was tortured by grief” (içimi kemirdi firâk; literally, “grief gnawed at me”). The moment marks the first use of the first-person in the poem. The little girl’s song is “Soğuksu,” a folk song written by Crimean Tatars fleeing Russian rule for the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. Elçin included “Soğuksu” in a collection of Turkish folk poetry that he edited and published in 1981, the same year he wrote “Bahçesaray Çeşmesi.” Here is a characteristic couplet:
Sana hasret gideriz güzel Kırım
Gurbet ellere düşüp ey yar eziliriz.17
(Beautiful Crimea, we die longing for you,
In faraway lands, O beloved, we are destroyed.)
This intertextual allusion to the hymns of Crimean Tatar refugees from an earlier era places Stalin’s deportation in a wider chronological frame, communicating a perpetuity to their victimhood. For readers in the Crimean Tatar diaspora community, whose ancestors transplanted to Turkey in the nineteenth century, the allusion to “Soğuksu” also makes Soviet history personal – not distant or removed but present and familiar. Most importantly, the intertext marks a moment when the lyrical persona assumes a first-person pose to speak of his own grief at the sight of a vulnerable child, modelling guilt-processing for the reader.
This emotional pivot leads the lyrical persona to adopt an explicit language of solidarity at the conclusion of “Bahçesaray Çeşmesi.” The “I” of the poem binds himself to the Crimean Tatar victim, generating a new “we.” “Our saintly dead in Crimea are wrapped in white shrouds,” the lyrical persona laments. “Together we lost our freedom [kaybettik hürriyetimizi]” (emphases mine). But not all is forsaken. After expressing grief and forging a “we” bound by loss and suffering, the lyrical persona promises action in defence of the Crimean Tatars. The action begins with prayer: “Tonight Fatih’s [Mehmet II’s] minarets pray for you.”
Elçin’s “Bahçesaray Çeşmesi” was first published in Emel, a journal of import in the post-war cultural history of the Black Sea. Inspired by Gasprinsky’s Tercüman, Emel (connoting both “hope” and “longing”) has been a long-standing region maker, relaying from shore to shore news reports, historical essays, and literary texts from and about the Crimean Tatars and other Muslim Turkic peoples to thousands of readers in the Republic of Turkey and beyond.18 Emel first emerged in 1930 under the leadership of the Crimean Tatar lawyer Müstecib Ülküsal. After a long hiatus prompted by the outbreak of the Second World War, it reappeared in 1960 to follow in the footsteps of Gökalp and Yurdakul and “realize pan-Turkism” (Türkçülük yapmaya çalışmak) by drawing attention to the suffering of the Crimean Tatars, among others, “in Siberia, Solovki, and Chekist prisons.”19
Emel announced a pan-Turkist mission at its inception. Cultural journals in Turkey typically wore their ideology on their sleeves, avoiding political eclecticism and addressing readers as believers. After the Second World War, when the Kremlin began to encroach upon Turkey’s eastern provinces and profess designs on the straits of the Bosporus and Dardanelles, a number of journals also emerged to agitate for the rights of Turkic-speaking peoples ensconced within the borders of the Soviet Union.20 Invariably at the centre of these pan-Turkist publications were the Crimean Tatars, alongside Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Kazan Tatars, and more – distinct peoples presented to the reader collectively as “outside Turks” (diş Türkler) or, more dramatically, “captive Turks” (esir Türkler).21 In the campaign to free these “Turks” from captivity, lyric poems were the most widely solicited texts for publication.22
Everyday readers responded by sending in hundreds of poems to such journals as Toprak (The Land, 1954–76), a pan-Turkist monthly with a triadic orientation on “thought, art, and ideals.” Their submissions were published alongside verse by more established poets like Refet Körüklü, whose lyrical persona decries the Soviet oppression of the esir Türkler and the Soviet dominion over the territory of Turan, the mythical Shangri-La of Turkic peoples extending from Anatolia into Asia: “In Turan my people are now oppressed, / While my heart overflows with hatred for Moscow.”23 Earlier in chapter 1, we saw how Turan became an object of desire for poets like Gökalp and Yurdakul, who mapped its vast borders with the posture of prophets. In journals like Toprak, poems are again put in the service of this imaginative cartography, tracing the vast expanse of Turan “from Karakorum [the thirteenth-century Mongol capital] to Crimea.”24 The guiding coordinates are first-person pronouns, an army of we, us, and our seeking to incorporate and assimilate Others into the “Turkic World.” What we see in such pages is a pan-Turkist poetic worldview no longer confined to intellectuals but gradually embraced by everyday readers during the Cold War.
Two poems entitled “Gelsin” (Let them come) – one by an amateur poet named Halık Bikes Ulusoy, published in Toprak in 1954, and another by a village teacher named Göktürk Mehmet Uytun, published in Toprak in 1956 – provide an instructive example. They strike pan-Turkist chords and employ the first person with constructive ambiguity, facilitating what could be both a call to liberate the esir Türkler and an appeal to fellow Turks to join the pan-Turkist movement. Here is Ulusoy:
Bayrak için, Vatan için,
Canı cana katan için,
Bu toprakta yatan için,
Bize bizden olan gelsin.25
(For the flag, for the homeland,
In order to join soul to soul,
In order to settle in this land,
Let those who are part of us come to us; emphasis mine.)
And here is Uytun:
Eli ele vermek için
Moskofu devirmek için
Bu murada ermek için
Bize biziz, deyen gelsin.26
(In order to join together hand in hand,
In order to overthrow Moscow,
In order to fulfil this dream,
Let those who say “we are the ones” come to us; emphasis mine.)
There is a tension in this verse between a Kemalist idiom and a more aggressive, even mystical pan-Turkist message. Each in its own way, these poems echo Atatürk’s well-known remark, “Biz bize benzeriz” (We resemble ourselves).27 Atatürk’s message is not only that Turks are singular and unique, capable of doing what others cannot, but also that the Turkish “we” has no other measure of itself than itself.28 Yet these poems also depart from Atatürk’s politics by calling to “overthrow Moscow,” opposing the conciliatory Kemalist posture toward the Soviet Union. They also enshroud this call in an aura of the spiritual by deploying the syllabic metre, four-line strophe, and internal rhyme common to religious folk poetry, particularly the ilahi form. The appeal to the reader “to overthrow Moscow” and to free the Crimean Tatars and all the other esir Türkler is delivered in the cadence of a hymn.
The expansive, assimilatory impulse of this poetry aligned with the ethnonym that was assigned to the Crimean Tatars in these pan-Turkist periodicals: Kırım Türkleri (Crimean Turks).29 For Ismail Gasprinsky at the fin de siècle, “Türk” was used to exorcise the negative Russian connotations of “Tatar”; for pan-Turkists in Turkey after the Second World War, it was used to efface ethnic and linguistic difference and extol a homogenous Turan. For Crimean Tatar emigrés in Turkey, meanwhile, the term was accepted as a way to petition the Turkish public for support, to communicate that “we are part of you.”30 By contrast, Crimean Tatar activists in the Soviet Union like Mustafa Dzhemilev – who, as we recall, had to contend with Decree 493, which labelled his people “the Tatars, formerly resident in Crimea” – employed krymskie tatary (and, if necessary, Kırım Tatarları) to appeal to the international community for the right to return to the homeland. As Aleksandr Nekrich suggests, in the Soviet period this mixed situational usage may have hindered the transnational coherence and outreach of the Crimean Tatar movement as a whole.31 It remains contested to this day.32
In the Ankara-based journal Türk Birliği (Turkish Unity), the bounds between “Turks” and “Crimean Turks” were so porous that they seemed to produce a demographic explosion.33 An article entitled “Türkleri nasıl parçaladılar?” (How have the Turks been scattered?) by Turkish journalist and civic activist Tekin Erer referred to “continuous deportations” that had flung over “six million” “Crimean Turks” across Soviet territory. The number was of course grossly inflated – the Crimean Tatars in the Soviet Union numbered in the hundreds of thousands at the time. But for Erer and the editors of Türk Birliği, Kırım Türkleri came to serve not as an ethnonym denoting a people with a specific territorialized history but as an ethnic category encompassing many Turkic peoples with histories on the Black Sea peninsula, from the Karachay to the Karaim.34
From 1969 such awkward attempts at historical and sociological editorializing became much more sophisticated and better informed. The distribution of Soviet documentary samizdat and tamizdat in Turkish circles was the primary reason. Emel in particular became a channel of Soviet underground literature in the 1970s and 1980s, regularly offering Turkish readers excerpts and digests of information from Khronika tekushchikh sobytii and Russian emigré journals like Posev (Sowing, based in Germany) and Novoe russkoe slovo (New Russian Word, based in New York). Edige Kırımal, a Munich-based Crimean Tatar scholar and activist, was an envoy of samizdat for Turkey. “Some samizdat materials are spirited into the hands of foreigners visiting the Soviet Union,” Kırımal explained to Turkish readers, “who then relay it to journalists in countries in the free world [dahil hür dünya memleketleri] as well as to the Russian and Ukrainian emigré press.”35 Like Ukrainian dissidents, Kırımal and his colleagues paid particular attention to the Soviet persecution of “supporters of nationalism [milliyetçilik taraftarları] in the non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union, particularly in Crimea, Ukraine, and the Baltic states.”36 In Emel, specific accounts of the persecution of the “Crimean Turks” became mainstays in a segment entitled “News about the Crimeans in Exile,” which was compiled from samizdat reports and international news clippings.
As we saw in chapter 4, Soviet samizdat journals like Khronika tekushchikh sobytii cordon off their clinical reports from imaginative literature with consistent discipline. By contrast, Turkish journals like Emel always muddle the line between the two, placing samizdat synopses above, below, and alongside lyric poems related to them in topic and tone. The effect of this mixed format – juxtaposing journalistic discourse about the injustices wrought by Soviet Communism with recitative poems calling upon the reader to defeat Communism – is to leverage imaginative literature as an agitational tool, as a means of rousing the reader to act on the information presented in the constative, documentary mode. When a taunt from Yurdakul’s “Ey Türk Uyan” – “Tell me, what has happened to your all-conquering Golden Horde?” – prefaces an essay on the history of the Crimean Tatars, for instance, the reader is invited to trace a circuit between the history text and its poetic epigraph in which the events of the past become a question to be answered.37 Poems lend these journals an expectant, even impatient air, communicating that action should be taken.
In Emel these texts invite the reader to speak from the position of the Crimean Tatar exile and model empathy and solidarity with him. Some poems express a topophila that resembles desire for a distant lover:38
Çatır göğe yaslanmış,
Salgır nazlı akarmış,
Her gün güller açarmış,
Ne güzel Vatan Kırım.39
(Çatır-Dağ [a moutainous massif] leans against the sky,
The Salgır River flows softly,
Every day roses bloom –
Crimea, what a beautiful homeland.)
Such passages echo one of the most popular songs among the Crimean Tatars in the Soviet Union at the time, “Ey Güzel Qırım” (O beautiful Crimea), but with an important difference. They openly use a word that is largely avoided or even forbidden among the displaced in Soviet Central Asia: vatan.40
Other poems in Emel, meanwhile, feature lyrical personae who observe, catalogue, and then deeply internalize Crimean Tatar suffering. In a text based on the ağıt, a verse of mourning derived from the popular koşma form, the Istanbul-based poet Azmi Güleç condemns the Soviet Union as an enemy “without a conscience” (vicdansız), detailing its abuses against the Crimean Tatars and other esir Türkler with an anaphora underscoring distant exile:
Orda susturulmuş bütün ezanlar
Orda boğdurulmuş dertli ozanlar
Orda kurban olmuş kızlar, kızanlar
İcimde bir büyük vatan ağlıyor.41
(There [in the Soviet Union] the call to prayer is completely silenced
There aggrieved poets are strangled
There girls and boys become sacrifices
And inside me the great homeland weeps.)
For poet Halil Abdülhakim Kırımman this internalization of suffering is a simulated journey of solidarity. In “Kırımlı Sürgünler” (Crimean exiles), published in Emel in 1969, he chronicles the deportation in detail, speaking initially from the first-person perspective of the Crimean Tatar victims:
Bindokuzyüz kırkdört, bir sabah namazı
İslamlar el açıp edereken niyazı
Köyümüzde esti bir felaket rüzgarı.
Her evden çıktı feryat, figan avazı.
………………………‥
Azaba dayanamıyan hasta ihtiyar
Öldüler, kaç yüzü de etti intihar.
……………………… .
Bilemedik, aceb ne idi suçumuz
Haykırıp, duyurmaya yetmez gücümüz.42
(1944, during morning prayer
As Muslims held out hands in supplication,
A wind of catastrophe blew through our village.
From every home came a shout, a cry of pain.
……………………………… .
The sick and the old who could not endure the torment
Perished; how many others took their own lives?
…………………………………
We could not understand: whatever was our crime?
We have the strength neither to speak nor to scream.)
In “Kırımlı Sürgünler,” these Crimean Tatar victims “search for joy” in the faintest of smiles; far removed from society, they “hang on every word of even the smallest news.” They also search “in this deaf-blind world” for a bard (ozan) to represent “destitute Crimea and its people” and to render their experiences in poetry. Kırımman’s lyrical persona, no longer speaking from the first-person perspective of the Crimean Tatar exiles, reveals himself as the poet for whom they are searching. “Halil Kırımman wrote you this destan [epic],” he explains:
Ben ozanım, ne sazım var, ne rübabım.
Bağrımı döğen yumruğumdur mızrabım.
Izdırabınız bana etti intikal,
Ben de sizler kadar perişan, harabım.43
(I am the bard, but I have no lyre, no instrument,
Only a fist pounding against my breast.
I have embraced your agony,
I suffer as much as you.)
Solidarity unfolds in Kırımman’s “Kırımlı Sürgünler,” emerging as the consequence of “hearing of the suffering of the Crimean people.” The poem informs readers of the tragic details of Stalin’s Crimean atrocity and, like Elçin’s “Bahçesaray Çeşmesi” and the poems of chapters 4 and 5, visualizes its vulnerable victims, even assuming their voices. In pan-Turkist journals like Emel, such verse was actively solicited and regularly printed over the course of the twentieth century for its poetics of solidarity. It could not only sanctify ideology with sonic allusions to the prayerful and the mystical; it could also envelop documentary discourse in an air of anticipated future action.
The circle of readers of this poetry was not insignificant. Emel for one enjoyed a circulation in the thousands throughout the twentieth century. But in the 1970s, as the Crimean Tatar movement and its most visible leader, Mustafa Dzhemilev, garnered global attention, even the editors of Emel understood the need to reach larger audiences that were well beyond those attracted to cultural journals with scholarly aspirations. To help rally not thousands but millions in Turkey in response to Stalin’s Crimean atrocity, the editors of Emel enthusiastically promoted the novels of one man: Cengiz Dağcı (1919–2011).44
2.
Happenstance first introduced the name Cengiz Dağcı to Mustafa Dzhemilev. At the Lenin Library in Moscow, Dzhemilev stole a look into the spetskhran, the “special holdings” department for sensitive material accessible only to party members with KGB clearance. (The network of these spetskhrani has been dubbed the “book Gulag.”45) He remembers spying a file inside marked with the name “Cengiz Dağcı-Suvarsky” (Suvarsky was an early pseudonym) as well as a book title rendered in both Turkish and Russian: Onlar da İnsandı, Oni tozhe byli liudmi (They were people too).46 When he returned to Uzbekistan, Dzhemilev raised Dağcı’s name to Eşref Şemi-Zade, who was soon to leave for Kharkiv, where he would meet Chichibabin for the first time. Şemi-Zade had much to say. Not only did he reveal that he had known Dağcı personally before the war, but he also told Dzhemilev that he had engineered a way into the spetskhran to read Dağcı’s quarantined book – by pretending to consult it in order “to counteract Western propaganda.” With a KGB officer looking over his shoulder, Şemi-Zade perused the pages of Onlar da İnsandı. He was permitted only to take occasional notes about its “anti-Soviet” content, which Dzhemilev would later share in Crimean Tatar samizdat for years to come.47
This content made Dağcı one of the biggest names in Turkish popular fiction of the mid- to late-twentieth century. He remains a fixture of Turkish secondary-school curricula whose prolific output regularly enjoys new print runs in Turkey today. He helped install the Crimean Tatars as a major concern of Turkish culture, offering a blueprint for writers like Hasan Nail Canat, whose popular play Moskof Sehpası (The gallows of Moscow, 1968) cast the Stalinist persecution of the Crimean Tatars as a perfect storm of Soviet corruption, Islamophobia, and hypocrisy. In the 1950s, footballers on the Turkish national team read Dağcı’s books in training camp; in the 1970s, newspapers advertised his novels alongside works by Flaubert, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, and Homer.48
Dağcı’s sustained popularity, especially since the 1980s, is all the more remarkable for this fact: he never stepped foot in the Republic of Turkey. He was born in the long shadow of Aiu-Dag in the Crimean Tatar village of Kızıltaş, today’s Krasnokamenka; he died not far from leafy Wimbledon Common in London. Dağcı’s life journey between Crimea and Great Britain – marked by an experience fighting on both sides of the Eastern Front, first in the Red Army and then in the Wehrmacht as part of the Turkestan Legion49 – was fodder for eighteen Turkish-language novels, especially his two sets of twin semi-autobiographical sagas: Korkunç Yıllar (The terrible years, 1956) and Yurdunu Kaybeden Adam (The man who lost his home, 1957), which focus on the events of the Second World War; and Onlar da İnsandı (They were people too, 1958) and O Topraklar Bizimdi (That land was ours, 1966), which address more broadly the Soviet dispossession of the Crimean Tatars in the first half of the twentieth century.
Dağcı’s sustained popularity – which led to a 2014 cinematic production of Korkunç Yıllar, distributed by Warner Bros. and entitled Kırımlı (The Crimean, directed by Burak Cem Arliel) – can be attributed to one key factor beyond his dynamic storytelling: his novels offer Turkish readers an ample store of prosthetic memories. Alison Landsberg develops the concept of prosthetic memories to account for artificial memories, often traumatic, that are consumed through media representations but felt as though they have been truly lived. This artificiality is not to be taken as superficiality. As Landsberg argues, prosthetic memories can exercise force, especially in the realm of prosocial political action: “two elements of prosthetic memory are particularly relevant: their indebtedness to commodification and mass culture on the one hand, and on the other, their unique ability to generate empathy, a crucial step in the formation of political alliances and solidarities.”50
In his most popular novels Dağcı facilitates such empathic solidarity by availing the Turkish reader of intimate access to two intersecting realms of traumatic memory. The first is the Second World War, which Turkey avoided by declaring neutrality. As Talat Halman notes, “Turkey miraculously escaped entry into World War II; consequently, Turkish authors did not experience the violence and devastation of that cataclysmic event, [except the] notably talented […] Cengiz Dağcı, who has written gripping novels and stories of war’s brutality.”51 Dağcı’s war-time sagas throw the Turkish reader into the chaos of the Second World War and position him as a unique stakeholder. As the journal Emel noted, “through Dağcı’s pen, [Turkish] readers become one of the heroes of his novels.”52 These heroes are “Turks” who happen to be Crimean Tatars. “I am a Tatar,” one of his protagonists declares, “a Turk, a Turk.”53 The prosthetic memories offered by these “Turks” are neither those of the victor nor those of the vanquished; they are the memories of the universal victim. Dağcı’s novels confront the war by turning the condition of neutrality on its head. Instead of taking no side in the war, Dağcı’s heroes in Korkunç Yıllar and Yurdunu Kaybeden Adam take both sides. Instead of suffering at the hands of one totalitarian enemy, they suffer at the hands of two. They are tortured by both Stalinism and Nazism and enlisted to fight for Moscow and for Berlin in turn. Forced through borders and across fronts, in and out of enemy uniforms, they are consumed by only one abiding desire: vatan, Crimea.
The second realm of traumatic memory encompasses the Second World War but extends well beyond it. It is the past of a dispossession of territory and identity, of place and personality, at the hands of a Communist enemy. Dağcı once remarked that he felt Crimea like “an amputated arm,”54 and in his prose he fashions this limb as a prosthesis for the Turkish reader, affixing the brutal past of a victimized group to the present of Turkish nationalist conservatism. “Thousands [in Turkey] have come to know Crimea through him,” writes Zafer Karatay.55 This is a peculiar kind of knowledge, more universal than local, more symbolic than specific. With a persistent tone of melancholy and dread, his most prominent novels depict Crimea as a stage for an admonitory morality play comprising two acts. The first presents the assault on Tatar personality as an ontological war waged by Stalin’s regime. In Korkunc Yillar the central protagonist Sadık Turan recalls his father’s warnings about Soviet power during collectivization: “‘They are afraid of us, Sadık! They are afraid of our very existence.’ How right he was! […] They want to Russify us shamelessly.”56 Sadık’s lessons in the pre-war Soviet classroom are little more than attempts at organized mind control: “They want to get into our minds and occupy all our thoughts” (Bütün düşüncelerimizin sahibi olmak ister).57 As a young boy he is scarred by Stalinist efforts to eviscerate his culture and religion. The demolition of the minaret of the town mosque is for him a destruction of childhood innocence: “The minaret was demolished, and with it, something inside of me died as well.”58
The second act of this morality play features Stalinist authorities violating the sacrality of Crimean place and violently transforming its physical landscape. For the Crimean Tatars of Kızıltaş, “there was no power that would part them from the land,” remarks the narrator in Onlar da İnsandı, which has been listed among the Turkish Ministry of Education’s top-one-hundred recommended books, alongside works by Atatürk, Cervantes, Dickens, and Faulkner.59 “They would live on this land, the home of their ancestors for thousands of years; they would bury their tired, worn bodies in its soil, and only then would they surrender their souls to the sky, to the peace and silent repose of the sky.”60 The establishment of Soviet collective farms is therefore nothing less than a nightmare. Trucks and tractors encroach Kızıltaş like a “monster” (canavar), “uprooting hundreds of years of oak, pine, and cypress trees” and “sweeping away heavenly vineyards […] and gutting the soil tilled by the dry, chapped hands of our ancestors.”61
Dağcı’s vivid portrayal of a Soviet assault on Crimean place and Tatar personality intersected with a pan-Turkist movement that was more assertive in the post-war world, particularly in its critique of leftist intellectuals in Turkey. In June 1969, for instance, the Turkish daily newspaper Milliyet published an article entitled “Kırım Türkleri ile Niye İlgilenmiyoruz?” (Why are we indifferent to the Crimean Turks?), complaining that “[o]ur intellectuals, who follow closely the troubles of the Vietnamese and of black Americans [Amerikan siyahları], are to a surprising degree indifferent to the plight of the Crimean Turks. Only one or two touch upon the ‘Tatar’ situation [‘Tatarların’ durumu] with any interest in newspapers. By contrast, foreign outlets have published very compelling pieces about Soviet Russia’s act of genocide against our Crimean countrymen [Kırımlı soydaşlarımıza] during the Second World War.”62 Turkish monthlies also joined in this chorus: “It is not championing liberty when our so-called intellectuals cry ‘Vietnam-Vietnam’ but do not say a word about the 100 million Muslim Turks who have fallen into Russian captivity […] It is the duty of humanity, beyond the bonds of blood or religion, to support the righteous cause of the Crimean Turks by all possible means.”63
Such opinion pieces seek to shame intellectuals – “so-called intellectuals,” in their phrasing – for their indifference and silence in the face of the dispossession of the Crimean Turks. They cast these faults as a failure of recognition that amounts to a betrayal of one’s own people. Dağcı’s novels, meanwhile, have little interest in shame. They invite readers to process guilt over this presumed betrayal, by visualizing for the reader noble victims at their most vulnerable and modelling a commissive language of confession that gestures to the possibility of prosocial action. Dağcı’s deft manipulation of affect led Ahmet Tanpınar’s protégé Mehmet Kaplan, director of the Turkish Studies Center in Istanbul, to declare: “I am convinced that the power of art takes precedence today […] Works of art inspire people by appealing to emotions. For these reasons I have great appreciation for Cengiz Dağcı.”64
Characterization is Dağcı’s most consistent source of such appeals to emotion. His heroes are consistently marked by a vulnerability that invites the reader’s protective concern. Even those who wage war for the enemy or sacrifice themselves in brave, valiant gestures are routinely portrayed as meek and sensitive at their core. Sadık Turan, the controversial semi-autobiographical protagonist of Korkunç Yıllar who joins the Turkestan Legion of the Wehrmacht after fighting in the Red Army and languishing in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, appears early in the novel as a tender, devout child in an extended flashback. Here he recounts a memory of racing from school to his mother after witnessing the assault on his local mosque:
Sınıftan nasıl çıkacağımı bilmiyorum, merdivenleri nasıl indiğimi hatırlamıyorum. En çok hatırlıyorım, şehrin sokaklarında, alnımdan, yanaklarımdan terler aka aka koşmamdır. Evimize girer girmez annemin ayaklarına sarıldım. Annem, zavallı annem, ne olduğunu bilmiyordu. Durmadan gözlerimden öperek:
– Söyle yavrum, söyle, deye ağlıyordu.
Ben hiçbir şey söyliyemiyordum, ağlıyamıyordum bile.65
(I don’t know how I got out of class, I don’t remember how I got down the stairs. All I remember was sprinting down the city streets, sweat pouring from my cheeks and my forehead. As soon as I entered the house, I threw my arms around my mother’s legs. My mother, my poor mother, didn’t know what had happened. Kissing my eyelids gently, she said through tears: “Tell me, darling, tell me.” I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t even cry.)
For the character of Sadık Turan, this is a flash-bulb memory, a vivid and emotionally resonant moment that lingers in his mind like photopsia in the eye. For the reader the passage has a flash-bulb effect as well: this poignant image of a boy at his gentle mother’s feet, burdened with traumatic knowledge that he is unable to share with her, reverberates through the novel to inflect and soften the perception of his subsequent actions as an adult combatant in wartime. This originary vulnerability enlists the sympathetic reader to his side.
Children also take centre stage elsewhere in Dağcı’s corpus, especially as first-person narrators who navigate with a mixture of whimsy and confusion a Crimea that has been overcome by death and despair.66 The collision of cruel violence and childhood innocence unsettles the reader. “My friends, my kin, my loved ones have deserted me,” a young boy named Haluk asks. “What will I say if the green uniforms [yeşil üniformalılar] come and find me?”67 Women and the elderly also feature prominently among Dağcı’s dramatis personae, with characters making dark, chilling reference to “the fate of women […] whose babies are lanced by enemy bayonets! The fate of old men dragged by their white beards!”68
One of these old men is the hard-working Bekir in Onlar da İnsandı (1958), who manifests such a love for Crimean place that he speaks to it. As he plants tobacco leaves, Bekir kisses the soil. He tells Selim, a fellow villager who reappears as the central protagonist in Bu Topraklar Bizimdi, that “I love my home, this land […] I love everyone and everything, every place and every person on this land.”69 He and his wife, Esma, till the soil while singing türkü folk songs, acting as faithful stewards of the culture of their ancestors. Yet Bekir’s warmth, hospitality, and open-heartedness are turned against him, as “Ruslar” (Russians) gradually overwhelm Crimea in the run-up to collectivization. The encroaching Russian-Bolshevik threat – Russians and Bolsheviks are conflated in Dağcı’s prose – is personified in the treacherous Ivan, whom Bekir hires out of pity to help work the land and, despite warnings from neighbours, welcomes into his home. “They are people too,” Bekir says, in a gesture to the novel’s title.70 Ivan proceeds to lead a reign of terror in the village and to assault Bekir’s daughter, Ayşe, who gives up her young son, Alim, to Selim out of concern for his safety. She expresses the wish that Alim grow into another Alim Aidamak, the Crimean Tatar Robin Hood whom we see as a hero of Soviet film in chapter 3. At the climax of the novel, Bekir dies defending the land, martyring himself as it is ravaged by dynamite: “Even if the entire Russian army comes, runs me over, breaks my bones, and shatters my body and my mind into pieces, I will not leave my land!”71
In a didactic gesture amid the novel’s last pages, Dağcı’s own voice enters to address the reader and discuss his hero’s motivations. “When he first saw Ivan,” he says, “Bekir did not flee from him or drive him off his land. He said, ‘Whoever he is, whatever his appearance, he is a person.’ I halted for hours on Bekir’s words and repeatedly thought to myself, ‘Who knows, maybe Bekir is right.’” But something interrupts Dağcı as he tries to come to terms with his own story. “At this moment there is a magazine on my desk, a Russian magazine […] My eyes spy a picture on one of its pages, and I see clearly: [my hometown] Kızıltaş.”72 Accompanying the picture in the magazine is the text of Petr Pavlenko’s “Rassvet,” the short story examined in chapter 3 about Ukrainians and Russians claiming Crimean Tatar property as if it were manna from the sky. Dağcı translates the entire story into Turkish, giving an unaware Pavlenko an audience of millions in Turkey. Working through rage, his eyes darkening, Dağcı then resolves to pray. “Pavlenko has the right to be happy, to be delighted in the dawn, to gaze at the warm sun rising into sky beyond Aiu-Dag […] Why not write about it? Isn’t he a person too? […] My God, they are people too. Pity them. Make them believe that others, just like them, are people too. Others, who were driven out of Crimea like animals. They were people too.”73
Dağcı’s prayer of empathic understanding, even forgiveness, offers the reader yet another exemplar of quiet, noble vulnerability. It is a voice to admire and emulate. For a Turkish reader silent or indifferent to the plight of the Crimean Tatars, it can also be a voice through which to process guilt. In the sequel, O Topraklar Bizimdi (1966), set in the fateful period of 1941–4, Dağcı enriches this guilt-processing by modelling for his readers an act of redemption as well as a rhetoric of confession. The novel’s protagonist is Selim, who leaves Kızıltaş at the end of Onlar da İnsandı and comes to terms with Soviet power. In suffering from false consciousness and self-alienation, he resembles Roman Ivanychuk’s own Selim in Malvy (introduced in chapter 5), a character who first clashes with his people, only to realize his transgressions, confront his guilt, and redeem himself by the end of the novel. Yet unlike Ivanychuk’s Selim, who has no memory of his Crimean Tatar origins, Dağcı’s duplicitous Selim is fully aware of his background. He simply chooses to sacrifice it on the altar of Communist ideology.
For most of O Topraklar Bizimdi, Selim is indifferent to the suffering of his fellow Crimean Tatars. He is a man so seduced by authority and status that he becomes split in two, between a “human” and “genuine” Selim and a “demonic spirit” (şeytanca bir ruhu) known by the Russified version of his surname, Çilingirov.74 “Sometimes Çilingirov wanted to take Selim in his hands and strangle him,” observes the narrator, while at other times “Selim wanted to crush Çilingirov’s head with the heel of his boot.”75 As head of a collective farm in the village of Çukurca near Simferopol, Dağcı’s Selim “cannot part” from his despotic alter ego. Instead he succumbs to it and systematically dismantles Crimean Tatar culture and society to satisfy Stalin’s five-year plan. His friend Hasan tries to break the hold of Soviet ideology on Selim, demanding with sarcastic taunts that he face up to his behaviour: “Don’t be a coward! Don’t say, ‘I’m doing this all for the people’ […] Tell the truth! Say clearly, ‘I am working with my enemies to decimate my own people!’”76 His voice trembling, Hasan tells Selim that his actions are an assault on the bond between Crimean place and Tatar personality, using the metaphor of the nation as a tree planted in the soil: “You are not pruning the tree, Selim. You are ripping it out of the ground, cutting it from its roots. You don’t see it. Don’t you understand? This tree has grown in this soil for thousands of years […] and you are cutting it to pieces! Don’t you see it, Selim?”77
In these desperate questions Hasan implies that Selim’s betrayal is a failure to understand, to recognize, to see. War brings him clarity. Selim loses his arm as a soldier in the Red Army. While convalescing in Novorossiisk, he learns of the violent persecution of Crimean Tatars at the hands of the NKVD in Çukurca. The scales begin to fall from his eyes. He becomes a penitent man, returning to Crimea on a quest to find Alim, the son Ayşe had entrusted to him in O Topraklar Bizimdi. Along the way he confesses his sins: “I forgot myself. I turned my back on my own home, my own people; I was contemptuous of my kin. I became a traitor to my own people. I spurned their very existence, blood of my blood, bone of my bone.”78 In a sense Dağcı offers a script for the Turkish reader who had been previously indifferent to the plight of the Crimean Tatars, a rhetoric of confession that acknowledges guilt while offering resurrection as a fearless hero. At the end of the novel, against all odds, Selim finds young Alim amid the post-deportation landscape of Crimea. Alim wants to run for safety to the mountains, but Selim pledges to return with him to Çukurca, where they may be killed. “Do not be afraid,” Selim tells Alim. “Sometimes dying is better than living.”79
3.
Dağcı’s novels of Crimean Tatars in the vice between Stalinism and Nazism – novels that offered readers prosthetic memories and invited guilt-processing – were so popular that they spawned a host of pulp-fiction imitations. One was a purported “memoir” of a Crimean Tatar spy who wreaked havoc in a war-torn Soviet Union, entitled Kırım Kurbanları (Crimean sacrifices, 1969) by Mehmet Pişkin and Mehmet Coşar. What makes this work particularly notable was its active promotion by the Turkish Armed Forces. In March 1969, Major-General Hayri Yalçıner, who would later become a member of the so-called 9 March junta associated with the 1971 military coup, declared Kırım Kurbanları “useful” (yayarlı) and recommended it to the Gendarmerie General Command in his capacity as head of the military’s Education Department.80
In October 1969 the novel made its way to the gendarmerie, where Major-General Zeki Erbay announced that “it is clear from committee reports […] that the book Kırım Kurbanları is useful for our units.”81 Erbay assigned a preferential price of six lira to the work, which sold well enough to appear in three editions (1969, 1972, and 1976). The back cover of the third edition bears this quatrain:
Minareler ezansiz
Camiler bomboş
Yurtlarından sürulenler
Kim bilir şimdi nerde?
(Silent minarets
Deserted mosques
A people driven from their homes
Who knows where they are now?)
Why did the Turkish military consider Kırım Kurbanları useful? In the late 1960s, after a period of rapprochement with the Soviet Union, the Republic of Turkey became troubled by an increased Soviet naval presence in the Mediterranean and by a domestic leftist movement that was taking to the streets in growing numbers.82 The military appeared especially concerned about this leftist ascendency and, upon taking power in 1971, immediately outlawed the socialist Turkish Workers’ Party, which was sympathetic to Soviet ideological positions. The strong anti-Communist tenor of Kırım Kurbanları provided something of a propitious response to the advance of the Turkish left. The authors Pişkin and Coşar proclaim in their preface that “as long as the Communist world is not confined to its own borders, the rest of the free world will never know peace.” They make explicit the intended instrumental nature of their work, exhorting the reader “to make this realization [about the evils of Soviet Communism] and to work accordingly [buna göre çalışmalıdır].”83
Pişkin and Coşar contextualize the anti-Soviet message of Kırım Kurbanları with little of Dağcı’s complexity. They see a perpetual struggle of Turkish good versus Russian evil, citing the “Muscovite infidel’s hostility to Turks” from time immemorial. In twentieth-century Crimea this hostility manifests itself as a betrayal of the political aspirations of Crimean Turks after 1917 and as a “cowardly rape” of the people through the Stalinist purges, deportation, and exile.84 As one character declares, “the Crimean Turks endured the most pain during Stalin’s reign.”85 Despite the singularity of this experience, the Crimean Turks are meant to stand for all esir Türkler, who collectively have fewer rights than “cannibals in Africa” (Afrika’da yamyamlar), as the authors argue with racist overtones in the preface.86 Once again, this attention to an in-group victim who suffers subhuman treatment at the hands of the foreign enemy is meant as a reposte to pro-Communist and anti-American Turkish leftist groups protesting the war in Vietnam: “We hope that some of the breath being expended on Vietnam […] will be directed toward the captive Turks after this book is read.”87
Like Dağcı’s prose, the novel is also designed to be entertaining in a way that the often sermonizing poems of the journals Emel, Toprak, and Türk Birliği are not. Kırım Kurbanları is a work for young male soldiers, a tale of espionage, sabotage, double agents, and beautiful Russian defectors to the Turkish cause.88 Its hero and narrator is Ahmet Hamdi, a “Crimean Turk” from Sudak who becomes a Communist in the 1920s, during the Crimean “Golden Age” presided over by the popular local administration of Veli İbraimov. After İbraimov’s execution Ahmet joins the “Crimean Turk” anti-Soviet underground, determined not to become “a servant to the Russians” (Rus uşağı). He infiltrates the NKVD and “begins an adventure” which leads to an assignment at a bomb factory in an unnamed city. Ironically his NKVD superiors want him to “follow and study” anyone he may find “with a bad intention – like committing sabotage.”89 The mole becomes the mole-hunter. After numerous fits and starts that build narrative suspense, he and a team of conspirators succeed in blowing up the bomb factory. Along the way Ahmet kills a number of “cowards” and “dogs” and dispatches “their foul souls to hell” (pis ruhlarını cehenneme).
For authors Pişkin and Coşar, Ahmet is not a Crimean Tatar; he is simply a Turk from Crimea who frequently and enthusiastically attests to his Turkish identity throughout the novel.90 He represents one of the scattered children, the esir Türkler, separated from the bosom of the mother: “Turkey is the motherland [anayurdu] of all the world’s Turks, isn’t it?”91 The novel’s narrative works to resolve this separation and division, albeit not by envisioning a defeat of the Soviet Union that would lead to an establishment of a pan-Turkist state from Anatolia to Central Asia. These overtly irredentist designs are put aside in Kırım Kurbanları. Instead, Ahmet ends up only escaping to Anatolia, a “captive Turk” in captivity no longer.
In addition to being an exubertantly anti-Communist, pro-Turkish dime novel, Kırım Kurbanları also offers a revisionist historical account of the Second World War and its aftermath for the Turkish reader. In one of the novel’s more striking moments Pişkin and Coşar give us a member of the Soviet elite – a boss at the bomb factory, no less – who knows before the war of Stalin’s plan to deport the entire Crimean Tatar population. He confesses to Ahmet, who is still under his NKVD cover: “They will deport all of you from Crimea to Central Asia at the first opportunity, using any reason or pretext to do so.”92 The scene invites the reader to conclude that collaboration with German occupiers, who are treated with kid gloves in Kırım Kurbanları, amounted to a practical necessity.
Issues of content and characterization aside, the utility of Kırım Kurbanları resides to a significant degree in its exploitation of a seam between the genres of the first-person novel and autobiography to allow the reader to experience the world of Ahmet’s “I” and to persuade him of its verisimilitude. In the foreword Pişkin and Coşar claim that Kırım Kurbanları is “not a novel, but a hair-raising account of a life lived.”93 This is a convenient conceit, fiction forswearing its fictionality. Verifiable extradiegetic biographical information about Ahmet Hamdi is not presented to the reader, nor is the relationship of the protagonist to the authors explained. The novel’s flat narrative style – devoid, for instance, of Dağcı’s swift pacing and descriptive colour or the allusory and allegorical flourishes of Hüseyin Nihal Atsız’s pseudo-autobiographical Ruh Adam (The man of the soul, 1977) – manifests little of what Michał Głowiński calls “formal mimetics,” the imitation of a particular style or form of discourse.94 Ahmet’s “I” speaks with no phonic, syntactic, or dialectical individuality. Kırım Kurbanları is a third-person novel poorly dressed in first-person costume.
The reasons for such literary accoutrement are clear. This narrative first-personalization invites the reader to stage himself as an esir Türk and to view the world from his perspective. The novel’s autobiographical pretence, meanwhile, seeks to persuade the reader of the verifiability of the world invoked in its pages – a world in which factory functionaries have pre-war intelligence of the 1944 deportation. For the young male soldier in training, Kırım Kurbanları offers what purports to be both a primer in anti-Communist ideology based on empirical, “lived” reality and a passage to an experience of the self as hero – and victim.
For the inculcation and promulgation of ultra-nationalist politics, this last point is crucial. Ultra-nationalism, after all, “needs its victims.”95 When Ahmet returns to Crimea after sabotaging the bomb factory and enduring his five-year term in Solovki, he is reunited with his distraught mother and enquires after the rest of his family. In a reversal of Dağcı’s scene from Korkunç Yıllar, in which young Sadık runs to his mother, Ahmet’s mother is the one burdened with traumatic knowledge:
Sorma yavrum, dedi annem; başımıza gelenleri sorma. Babanı, albanı, enişten, kardeşini beş yıl önce öldürdüler. Küçük kardeşin Osman’ı da alip gotürdüler. Hala dönmedi yavrum. Sağ mı, ölü mü bilmiyorum. […] Evimizi soyup sovana çevirdiler, tamtakır bıraktılar. Bağımızı, bahçemizi, tarlalarımızı da elimizden aldılar.
(“Don’t ask, my dear,” my mother said. “Don’t ask what befell us. They killed your father, sister, brother-in-law, and brother five years ago. They took your little brother Osman as well. He still hasn’t returned, my dear. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead […] They ransacked our house and left it completely empty. They took our vineyards, gardens, and fields right from our hands.”)
Ultra-nationalism has the propensity “to create and perserve reservoirs of pain,” and Pişkin and Coşar allow the reader to tap these reservoirs from a distance. The Crimean Tatars “captive” in the Soviet Union become proxy victims for Turkish soldiers (among other readers) who are safely ensconced within the borders of an independent, sovereign state. They offer proprietary access to national victimhood where it might be considered otherwise unavailable.
Pişkin and Coşar underscore Ahmet’s assumption of responsibility for his family’s suffering: “I brought this disaster upon my family. Yes; I was guilty [Evet; suçlu ben idim]. The bloodthirsty, cruel, pitiless enemy – out for me – took revenge upon my family instead.”96 Kırım Kurbanları frames Ahmet’s actions, as well as the accepted consequences of those actions, as a kurban or sacrifice, a ritual generative of communal solidarity. “Common sacrifice is a sign of common interests, and an act which asserts and promotes them,” notes the anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt. “It represents a common life, and not only on an ideal or metaphorical plane, but in the day-to-day practical affairs of human cooperation.”97
This solidarity becomes an objective of other pulp-fiction novels that are consumed by the problem of the dispossession of the Crimean Tatars, including Kırım: Türk’ün dramı (Crimea: The drama of a Turk), which appeared in serialized form in 1980 in Yozgat’s Sabah newspaper. Written by a young author from Nevşehir named Ali Gündüz, Kırım swells with scenes of violence and sensationalized tragedy. At times the violence is so gratuitious that it prompts the narrator to address the reader with passionate hortatory, as at the novel’s conclusion:
Sovyet Rusya’nın bu insanlık dışı tutumunu birlikte protesto edelim. Kırım Türkleri bu acı işkencenin içindeyse […] Yarın komünizm yumruğu seni de böyle ezecektir. Onun için uyanalım […] Komünizme karşı omuz omuza duralım […] Mücadele verelim.98
(Let us join together in protest against Soviet Russia’s inhumane attitude. If the Crimean Turks are enduring bitter torture today, the fist of Communism will crush you too in the same way tomorrow […] So let us wake up […] Let us stand shoulder to shoulder against Communism […] Let us fight.)
Again the Crimean Tatars are presented as emblematic of “100 million captive Turks,” a stirring symbol of Turkish victimhood. In the hands of writers like Gündüz, this symbolization tends to efface their individuality and their historical, cultural, and linguistic differences. Indeed, in Kırım, the tragedy of their deportation in 1944 is not a Tatar drama (Tatar draması), much less a Turkish or Turkic drama (Türk draması). It is, as the novel’s subtitle insists, a drama of the Turk (Türk’ün dramı).
4.
In 1991 the man who helped inspire this school of Turkish pulp fiction about Stalin’s Crimean atrocity received an unexpected invitation. The Soviet Union had not yet collapsed, but Cengiz Dağcı was in London, gripped by the drama of unfolding events, by an enduring dream becoming reality. Perestroika had quickened the Crimean Tatar movement, and its momentum had become unstoppable. Thousands of Crimean Tatars were finally returning to their ancestral homeland, and their leaders had sent Dağcı a letter.
What had sparked the dramatic return of the Crimean Tatars was, in part, the concerted intervention of writers and cultural figures in a barrage of appeals to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Following a mass demonstration of Crimean Tatars in Red Square in the summer of 1987, writers like Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Anatoly Pristavkin had written to Soviet authorities and declared that “it was finally time to speak out loud” about the “unjust” deportation and dispossession of the Crimean Tatars.99 Their advocacy was highlighted in a segment devoted to the “complex” Crimean Tatar problem on the news program Vremia. What had been solely the domain of samizdat was now material for Soviet broadcast television.100
Meanwhile, in Kyiv, Ukrainian national activists were demanding the organized, state-subsidized return of the Crimean Tatars to Crimea. At the founding congress (Ustanovyi z’ïzd) of the political party Narodnyi rukh Ukraïny (People’s Movement of Ukraine) – a party populated by dissidents like Ivan Sokulsky and led by Viacheslav Chornovil and Mykhailo Horyn – the assembled made a series of proclamations from a dais at the Kyiv Polytechnical Institute in March 1989. Among them was this pledge: “Let us help our brothers, the Crimean Tatars […] Let us help them revive their autonomy, their culture, their educational system, their sovereignty! Let us stop those Ukrainians or Russians without a conscience who repeat Stalin’s and Beriia’s lies about the Crimean Tatars […] Long live the revival of our fraternal Crimean Tatar people!”101
The Kremlin could no longer ignore the writing on the wall. In November 1989 the Supreme Soviet of the USSR condemned the 1944 deportation as “barbaric” and finally announced the “unconditional restoration” of the rights of the Crimean Tatars, on the front pages of Izvestiia and Pravda.102 It was the dramatic culmination of decades of tireless work and sacrifice among Crimean Tatar activists and Soviet dissidents, galvanized by brewing political crises in the Soviet metropole under perestroika. Yet as we will see, there was a “cunning of recognition” behind this announcement, an unspoken conditionality that sacrificed a deeper restitution of the rights of the Crimean Tatars in Crimea in exchange for a public acknowledgment of their right to return to Crimea.103
Dağcı had been following these developments closely. The invitation from the Crimean Tatars that he held in his hands in 1991 was to Simferopol, where he was to participate as a guest of honour in a historic event billed as the successor to the first Qurultay led by Noman Çelebicihan in 1917. This invitation to the “second Qurultay,” Dağcı remembers, was “an invitation like any other” – a simple piece of paper nestled inside two envelopes. “But for a moment, I held it in shock. I trembled.” Would he accept it? He had waited for this moment for nearly fifty years. “You were born out of this tragedy,” he told himself, “but you cannot remain trapped in it.”104
Dağcı struggled with the decision. It was a lot to ask of himself at the age of seventy-two. He debated with himself late into the night: “Can you even make it up the stairs easily anymore? Don’t you have to rest against walls when walking down the street?” His mind could go to Crimea, but his body was a different story. “If you go back,” he told himself, “your heart will not stand it.” As he lay in bed on the edge of sleep, Dağcı began to see his old haunts in Aqmescit (Simferopol), his mind’s eye flooding with memories. “The streets are filled with people […] But they are not the people of Aqmescit; they are the people of Simferopol.” He asked himself, “Do you really know them?”105 Dağcı declined the invitation, and he would die without ever returning to the homeland that he remembered but no longer knew.