Chapter Eight
Before Viktor Yanukovych abandoned his role as president of Ukraine, he held the occasional press conference at Ukraïnskyi dim (Ukrainian House) on the northern end of Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s central thoroughfare. The late-Soviet brutalist building, an uneasy marriage of dark glass and white marble and granite, overlooks a square that has gone by many names over the past century. During the Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine, it was Adolf Hitler Platz; after 1944, it became Stalinskaia ploshchad (Stalin Square). It has been called Yevropeiska ploshcha (European Square) since 1996, a nod to the old Hotel Europe that dominated the site for generations.
In January 2014, where the Hotel Europe once stood, a movement called Euromaidan secured a home. As if shrugging off the enforced designations of the past, Yevropeiska ploshcha embraced its name. Ukrainians calling for European democracy and transparency and fighting the corruption of the Yanukovych regime occupied Ukraïnskyi dim, expelling forces of the Interior Ministry who had made it a base. Almost overnight, it became a community centre providing shelter, medical care, and even a library for the protestors. It also served as the headquarters of an initiative called AutoMaidan, which mobilized cars and vans to ferry demonstrators and supplies to Euromaidan encampments and take the protests beyond the city centre, to the dachas of Ukraine’s political elite.
Among the AutoMaidan volunteers was an award-winning filmmaker from Simferopol named Oleg Sentsov. On 26 February 2014, with scores of protestors dead and Yanukovych spirited off to Rostov-on-Don with the help of the Russian military,1 Sentsov was handed the telephone at AutoMaidan headquarters inside Ukraïnskyi dim. A Crimean Tatar activist – Sentsov could not remember the name – was on the line. In Simferopol thousands of demonstrators, organized and led by the Crimean Tatars, had gathered outside Crimea’s parliament building to voice support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity. They chanted “Ukraïna!” in what would become the most visible mass defence of Ukraine’s sovereignty in Crimea, an event now commemorated as the Day of Crimean Resistance against Russian Aggression. Confronting them were activists affiliated with what had long been a very marginal Russian nationalist political party called Russkoe edinstvo (Russian Unity), which had won only three seats in the one-hundred-seat Crimean parliament in 2010. Sentsov’s advice on the phone was succinct and to the point. He told his Crimean Tatar counterpart to “get some tires.” The caller asked, “And then?” Sentsov replied, “Burn them.”2
In Kyiv, burning tires had become a ubiquitous means of defence and fortification for Euromaidan protesters. Nearly impossible to extinguish, they burned for hours, producing a wall of thick, overpowering, impenetrable smoke. In Simferopol they were ultimately not used, but the sky was no clearer. What few could see was an unfolding operation by Russian regular troops and Spetsnaz units to seize Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula by force of arms. On 27 February 2014, the day after the confrontation outside Crimea’s parliament, Russian soldiers surrounded Ukraine’s Belbek Air Base, their lack of insignia an implicit admission of the illegality of the operation. On 28 February they took Simferopol airport and began to airlift reinforcements into Crimea.3 Crimean Tatars, meanwhile, slid food and supplies through the gates of the bases housing encircled Ukrainian soldiers, grasping their hands through the threshold with exclamations of “Slava Ukraïni” (Glory to Ukraine).4 An NGO called KrymSOS scrambled to mobilize volunteers to provide food and supplies to the Ukrainian military and offer foreign journalists access to independent, real-time information on the ground.
Weeks later, Russian tanks stormed Belbek’s walls. Under cover of darkness, tanks and Mi-8 helicopters fired on a base of Ukrainian navy personnel in Feodosiia, dragging servicemen out of their barracks, handcuffing and humiliating them.5 It was a carefully orchestrated, violent takeover – the first time since the end of the Second World War that one European country seized another European country’s territory by force. More than that, it was Europe’s largest country seizing the territory of Europe’s second-largest country by force. And if history is any guide, the de facto Russian-Ukrainian border on the Black Sea that emerged from this seizure – which runs along the Isthmus of Perekop, a stretch of territory less than five miles wide – is very fragile. In the period of the khanate the Crimean Tatars used to call the strategic steppeland north of Perekop “Özü qırları” or “Özü çölleri” (the Dnipro fields). The name is telling. The Crimean peninsula is warm and arid, historically in need of the Dnipro’s fresh water from the Ukrainian mainland. In fact, over the past five hundred years the Crimean peninsula and the adjacent steppeland to its north have never been completely divided between competing states for more than eight months. Until now.
1.
For the region of the Black Sea, 2014 was a threshold year – or, in the words of one Crimean Tatar activist in Turkey, a “disaster year” (felaket yılı).6 The Kremlin’s aggression against Ukraine – not only its annexation of Crimea but also its subsequent orchestration of the war in the industrial region of eastern Ukraine known as Donbas, which has claimed over thirteen thousand lives to date and displaced over two million people – seemed to take the concepts of “before” and “after” hostage, demanding new chronologies and periodizations. As Erdoğan remarked, “in recent years the Crimean Tatars experienced the hope and joy of returning to their ancestral homeland, but now, exactly seventy years after the deportation, they have entered a new era [yeni bir döneme girmişlerdir] reminiscent of past traumas.”7 Suddenly, a term like interwar could be applied to the quarter century between 1989 and 2014 – between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of both a frozen conflict in Crimea and an undeclared war in Donbas between Ukraine and Russia.
The danger of such historical periodization is, of course, its coaxing of teleology, the way it can prime us to conceive of events in retrospect as “bound to happen.” But there was precious little in Crimea in the run-up to 2014 that suggested conditions for anything like secession at all. To be sure, for over two decades Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea had been a locus of interethnic contestation beset by unacknowledged colonialist trauma and, in the 1990s, by separatist rhetoric from some politicians and members of the public alike. But this history was progressively receding into the rear view. By 2014 Crimea had become “well integrated into Ukrainian political structures,” as James Hughes and Gwendolyn Sasse make clear.8 In a survey of twelve hundred Crimean residents in May 2013, the large majority of respondents expressed the view that Crimea should be a part of Ukraine.9 Eleanor Knott’s in-depth, one-on-one interviews reveal that “in the period immediately prior to the annexation (2012–13), separatism was framed as impossible and undesirable, even by the minority who were most vociferously and actively pro-Russian.”10 That Crimea was stony ground for active separatism was precisely why the Kremlin’s annexation operation required a barrage of obfuscation, denial, and disinformation, not to mention a rushed Potemkin plebiscite at the barrel of a gun.11 On 16 March, Moscow reported that 96.7 per cent of Crimean voters cast ballots for union with Russia, with a total turnout of 83.1 per cent. As Andrew Wilson writes, “Russia was used to such dictator-majorities, but this one wasn’t even ethnically plausible – 24% of the population were Ukrainian and 13% Crimean Tatar.”12
In mainstream Russian political discourse, March 2014 marked not an “annexation” but a “reunification” (vossoedinenie) of Crimea with Russia, a well-worn terminological fig leaf that has concealed acts of imperial expansion in Russian and Soviet history for centuries.13 Its destructive nature became evident in mass displacement flows from 2014, when at least twenty thousand residents began to leave Crimea for mainland Ukraine.14 The discovery, on the day before the rushed 16 March vote, of the body of Reshat Ametov, a Crimean Tatar man abducted in broad daylight while he was protesting Moscow’s armed intervention, was an ominous harbinger for those disputing the annexation.15 Since Ametov, there have been over twenty other political disappearances, with six men found dead, all of them Crimean Tatars.16 Hundreds more professing views sympathetic to Kyiv have been arrested and incarcerated. The sheer number and nature of these attacks on civil liberties and human rights have compelled Krym SOS to compile a multivolume “encyclopedia” of repressions in Crimea since 2014.17
Oleg Sentsov was one of these prisoners of conscience. Russian by ethnicity, he stridently opposed the annexation of Crimea in the face of a twenty-year sentence on charges widely decried as politically motivated. His 145-day prison hunger strike in 2018, calling for the release of all the Kremlin’s political prisoners, garnered international attention. In the words of Mustafa Dzhemilev, “Oleg Sentsov’s principled position, courage, and resilience have earned him a special place.”18 During his incarceration the Crimean Tatar community honoured this place by supporting Sentsov’s mother and children with regular material assistance.19 Dzhemilev also appealed to Erdoğan in the hope of securing his help with Sentsov’s release. “‘Name three people,’ Erdoğan said, ‘because getting everyone released at once will be difficult,’” remembers Dzhemilev. “Without hesitation, I named Sentsov first.”20 Sentsov was finally released in a prisoner swap arranged between Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019.
As a young man in 1989, Sentsov had a negative view of the Crimean Tatars. “But when they arrived, when it turned out that they were just people too, that this was their land, that they were illegally deported and persecuted,” he recalls, “of course my attitude changed.”21 Today he takes the gravity of the Crimean Tatar deportation personally. “When I too was expelled from my homeland,” he said, “I truly came to understand the Crimean Tatars.”22 Sentsov met with Dzhemilev and the Mejlis leadership shortly after his release. “Oleg is a real fighter who […] changed the frontiers of Ukraine’s defence,” said Refat Chubarov following the encounter. “Together we will liberate Crimea from Russian occupiers, and together we will return to Crimea.”23
Oleg Sentsov calls the Crimean Tatars “the biggest threat to the stability of [Putin’s] regime in Crimea.”24 He does so for good reason. In accordance with international law, Crimea remains sovereign Ukrainian territory under Russian military and political occupation. In 2016 the International Criminal Court made this point clear, referring to an “ongoing state of occupation” and to “a situation within the territory of Crimea [amounting] to an international armed conflict between Ukraine and the Russian Federation.”25 The Crimean Tatar Mejlis is the most vocal and organized non-state actor enunciating the terms annexation and occupation and contesting them in word and deed both inside and outside the peninsula. Its “primary aim is the return of Crimea to the Ukrainian state,” according to its chair, Refat Chubarov, who like Dzhemilev is forbidden to set foot in Crimea by de facto Russian authorities.26
Beyond the Mejlis in exile, there are thousands of Crimean Tatars on the ground in Crimea whose mere exercise of agency appears to challenge the Russian occupation. They describe being placed in one of two boxes. Secular Crimean Tatars professing political views at odds with Russian power are labelled “extremists”; religious Crimean Tatars professing an adherence to conservative Islam are labelled “terrorists.”27 In June 2019 a young father named Riza Omerov was assigned the second label. He was arrested in a round-up of suspected members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a fundamentalist pan-Islamist group that is legal in Ukraine (and in the United Kingdom and United States) but banned in Russia. When agents of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) took him from his home, a camera captured an intimate moment in which he locked eyes with his pregnant wife through the window of a prison transport vehicle (avtozak). The image inspired poet Emine Üseyin to write “Saqın mennen vedalaşma” (Take care not to say goodbye), published in Crimean Tatar in the journal Emel in 2020:
Ah, canım
………
ne bu avtozaknıñ camı, ne bu yol,
ne bu zaman, ne bu asret bizni ayıramaz
közleriñ közlerime aşıqıp baqa
asret tolu baqışıñ, vedalaşmaq istey
amma menim közlerim saña baqıp ayta,
Ah, canım, saqın mennen vedalaşma.
…………………………‥
Oğlumız qorqudan soray:
– Qayda alıp keteler sizni, baba?28
(O, my love,
………‥
Neither the glass of this avtozak, nor this road,
Nor this jail sentence, nor this longing can keep us apart
Your eyes rush to meet mine,
In the deep longing of your gaze, you try to bid farewell,
But my eyes look at you and say,
O my love, take care not to say goodbye.
……………………………
Our son asks in fear:
– Where are they taking you, daddy?)
For Omerov’s sister Fatma, “the deportation of the Crimean Tatar people is taking place once again, only this time to prisons.”29 This is a deportation by instalments, an exile through the backdoor that seeks to discipline the Crimean Tatar community and enforce conformity with the Russian occupation.
This “hybrid deportation”30 has exiled mass commemoration of Stalin’s atrocity from Crimea’s most pronounced public square. Before 2014 the Crimean Tatars held large public commemoration events every 18 May on Lenin Square in Simferopol, a space where memory and citizenship had intersected for years.31 Rituals and displays of communal remembrance featuring legions of blue-and-yellow Crimean Tatar flags took place there in full view of Crimea’s Council of Ministers, injecting testimonials of trauma into the public sphere to protest disenfranchisement at the hands of local authorities. The prominent Russian-language Crimean Tatar poet Lilia Budzhurova speaks of the importance of such testimony in working through painful traumatic emotions and warding off a return of the repressed, in “Govori, otets, govori” (Speak, father, speak):
Память крови нельзя задушить,
Боль народа нельзя приглушить,
Говори, отец, о том дне,
Это нужно и важно мне.
Не щади меня, не щади,
Вновь из дома родного иди,
Вновь теряй по вагонам родных,
Вновь считай, кто остался в живых.32
(The memory of blood cannot be silenced,
The people’s pain cannot be stifled,
Speak, father, about that day,
It is necessary and important to me.
Do not spare me, do not hold back,
Relive the way you left your family home,
Relive the way you were separated from loved ones on different train cars,
Relive the way you counted who was still alive.)
In May 2014, in the immediate wake of the Russian annexation, the people’s pain was indeed stifled. The Crimean Tatars were forbidden by decree to gather in public and commemorate the deportation across the peninsula. To speak and mourn their dead together, they had to break what posed as law. Today public commemoration of the deportation in Crimea – in much less conspicuous sites of memory, always at a remove from loci of political power like Lenin Square – is tightly controlled and monitored by Russian authorities. What was once protest memory, as it were, is now policed memory.
In Turkey the journal Emel describes such restrictions on Crimean Tatar testimony and civil society as the actions of an “expansionist, invasive, and colonialist” (yayılmacı, işgalci ve sömürgeci; emphasis mine) Russian state that has “attacked Ukraine and annexed Crimea for a third time,” after 1783 and 1917.33 The editors’ reaction is representative of a Turkish political and cultural class more keenly aware of Ukraine’s geopolitical importance. As state leaders in Ankara pressed to support the Mejlis and affirm Ukraine’s territorial integrity after 2014, Turkish cultural activists began to rediscover Ukraine and express a new-found solidarity with their neighbour across the Black Sea. In 2017, for example, an issue of the prominent cultural journal Ihlamur (Lime Blossom) featured a series of articles about and reflections on Taras Shevchenko, “the foundation of Ukrainian literature” whose humanism was a “committed stance against imperialism.”34 With war and conflict looming in the background, poet Hüsamettin Olgun travels to Kyiv and bows before the monument to the “great master” (büyük Usta):
Gökyüzünde kara kara
Bulutlar dolaşmasın,
Dinyeper’in suları,
Bır daha asla
Kızıla boyanmasın,
Şevçenko’nun mezarında
Kan gülleri açmasın,
Ne Ukrayna, ne dünya acıya uyanmasın!35
(Pitch black in the sky,
May the clouds disappear;
May the waters of the Dnipro
Never again
Be the colour of blood;
On Shevchenko’s grave
May red roses bloom;
And may Ukraine and the entire world never again awake to pain!)
A driving force behind the renewed Ukrainian-Turkish solidarity in the wake of Russian aggression is the Crimean Tatar diaspora in Turkey itself, whose size, activity, and domestic political influence are formidable. Organizations like the Kırım Türkleri Kültür ve Yardımlaşma Derneği (Crimean Turk [sic] Culture and Solidarity Association, or “Kırım Derneği”) routinely host Ukrainian dignitaries and organize Ukrainian cultural events, public demonstrations of solidarity, and even commemorations of Holodomor, Stalin’s 1932–3 terror-famine in Ukraine.36 The reach of Kırım Derneği is vast, with over twenty physical branches across Turkey; it is highly organized, well funded, and steadfast in its support of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis, a commitment enshrined in its mission statement.37 Understanding this regional network of loyalties and alliances is key to assessing the long-term viability of unelected “alternatives” to the Mejlis promoted today by the Kremlin, such as Qırım Birliği (Crimean Unity).38 Such institutional analogues may have local sway on the peninsula, but they have none of the transnational reach and influence enjoyed by the Crimean Tatar Mejlis across both shores of the Black Sea.
The intense activism of the Crimean Tatar emigré community in Turkey has coincided with a return of the Crimean Tatar protagonist in contemporary Turkish literature since 2014, particularly across an array of genres of prose. Like Şamil Alâdin and Oles Sanin, Turkish prose stylists are notably delving into the pre-colonial past in particular. The eponymous hero at the heart of Yedikuleli Mansur, for instance – a fantasy novel set at the height of Ottoman power – is an itinerant Crimean Tatar at war with a menagerie of vampires, ghouls, and monsters let loose in the dark streets of early seventeeth-century Istanbul.39 In Gözyaşı Çeşmesi: Kırım’da Son Düğün (Fountain of tears: The last wedding in Crimea, 2017), meanwhile, novelist Sevinç Çokum wrests the fountain of the hansaray back from Pushkin and returns us to the heyday of the khanate. She transforms Pushkin’s love triangle into a sweeping epic of historical fiction that explicitly seeks to “bring us ‘closer’ to Crimea and the past.”40 Whereas Pushkin’s fearsome khan is steely and silent, Çokum’s Khan Kırım Giray is thoughtful, benevolent, and erudite, an enlightened leader of a proud people at the centre of the narrative. Peppered with Crimean Tatar idioms and folk songs, the novel restores the bond between Crimean place and Tatar personality, transporting the Turkish reader to an eighteenth century when the Crimean Tatars exercised political and cultural dominion over the Black Sea littoral. The Crimean khan tussles with the Sublime Porte; he is not subservient to it. With Muscovy in mind, he declares that “no invader will ever enter my lands.”41
By contrast, in Russian literature after 2014 there is little to be found of the past of Crimean Tatar sovereignty, even in the work of writers with little patience for the vossoedinenie or “reunification” euphemism. The Yevpatoriia-born, New York-based poet and journalist Gennady Katsov, for example, makes a point of emphasizing anneksiia in interviews and condemning the Russian operation for its breaches of international law.42 In 2014, Katsov joined forces with Igor Sid to flip the triumphalist meme KrymNash (Crimea Is Ours) on its head with a Russian-language poetry anthology entitled NashKrym (Our Crimea).43 Published in 2015, the collection is a diverse selection of texts about Crimea from 120 contemporary Russian-language poets from nine different countries. It is a self-styled “peace-keeping mission,” an attempt to return Crimea “from a space of discord to a space of literature and intellectual dialogue.”44 As we saw in the previous chapter, Sid conceived of “geopoetics,” the intellectual touchstone of his Crimean Club, as an antipode and even antidote to geopolitics. In the midst of a geopolitical crisis, he and Katsov could put this antidote to the test.
It turns out to be a placebo. The geopoetics of NashKrym is simply an ideology of possession convinced of its own apoliticism. Poets who love Crimea, Katsov and Sid write, find meaning in it; “on this basis, and on this basis only, Crimea is ours.” As presented in the anthology, Crimea is above all a canvas of rugged mountains, roaring waves, and fragrant orchards – a territorial object of desire to which the elect are entitled. This elevation of place, which skirts the legacy of Crimea’s settler colonialism entirely, only serves to affirm the geopolitical status quo, a point which Sid virtually concedes elsewhere.45 There are no Crimean Tatar voices featured in the anthology, and no languages other than Russian. NashKrym marks yet another stage in the elevation of Crimean place over Tatar personality, whereby the latter is expunged even as the geopolitical designs of a former imperium are called into question.
For all its hopes of inspiring concord, the NashKrym anthology sparked controversy upon its publication. The title of the collection was particularly polarizing, causing figures like Russian poet German Lukomnikov and Ukrainian poet Boris Khersonsky to back out of the project. Lukomnikov called the title “odious,” too similar to the meme it sought to subvert. KrymNash or NashKrym – “this is six of one and half a dozen of the other” (chto v lob, chto po lbu), he said.46 Lukomnikov also rejected the framing of Crimea and the war in Donbas as two separate events; the relationship between the two was, for him, simultaneous and interconnected. “The seizure of Crimea has started a war, and the war is ongoing. Many thousands of people killed, wounded, crippled on both sides. Hundreds of thousands of refugees.”47
2.
War has a track record of dividing national communities into competing tribes and uniting them around orthodox, monolithic ideologies. “War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us,” writes Chris Hedges. “It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought.”48 The intuitive truth of this observation makes the work of a number of prominent writers, artists, and filmmakers in today’s Ukraine all the more remarkable. On the whole, they do not circumscribe and enforce boundaries of a national “we”; in the wake of the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas, they explicitly probe and question them.
This introspection takes place as war-time Ukraine sees an entrenchment of what may be the most dynamic civic national identity in Europe. It is an identity for which figures like Oleg Sentsov and Mustafa Dzhemilev have sacrificed – a voluntarist, inclusive Ukrainian identity grounded not in language or ethnicity but in an anti-colonial ethos, in the values of democracy and the rule of law. Sentsov calls it being “Ukrainian in spirit,” and a clear majority of Ukrainians embrace it as the primary mode of national belonging today.49 The Ukrainian–Crimean Tatar solidary relationship is at the vanguard of this expanding identity project, advancing its boundaries in the realms of culture and social communion. Since the 2014 annexation, Ukrainians have received Crimean Tatar IDPs in their local communities,50 while Crimean Tatars IDPs have embraced the Ukrainian language, for instance, as “a political language associated with liberty and freedom.”51
To be sure, at times of demonstration and display, the introspection at the heart of this relationship can give way to declarations. In the US House of Representatives, for example, former president Petro Poroshenko channelled John F. Kennedy by proclaiming, “I am a Crimean Tatar,” in 2014.52 Demonstrators in marches and processions in Ankara, Kyiv, and cities across the world display signs with similar nominal metaphors and solidary proclamations: Je suis l’Ukraine, Ukraina – Krym, Qırım – Ukraina. Speaking in a visual idiom, the protest art of graphic designer Andry Yermolenko reappropriates the Russian meme KrymNash and transvalues it with typographical play, rendering the m of Krym as the Crimean Tatar tamğa and the sh of Nash as the Ukrainian trident.
Aider Rustamov, mufti of the Crimean Tatars in mainland Ukraine, is one of the tens of thousands of IDPs who left Crimea after 2014. Born in exile in Uzbekistan, Rustamov says, “Crimea is Ukraine. We feel free here. People who flee to mainland Ukraine say it even feels different to breathe here.”53 The most prominent representative of this Crimean Tatar–Ukrainian solidarity in popular culture is the singer Jamala, who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2016 with the song “1944.” In the words of Mustafa Dzhemilev, citing an American diplomat, “Jamala did in three minutes what we have been trying to do to bring the Crimean Tatar issue to the world’s attention for decades.”54 Her efficiency is active in shaping Ukrainian national identity as well. “Crimea is Ukraine,” says Jamala. “And I believe for me it’s my motherland. It’s where I gave birth to my first son, where I make music inspired by Ukrainian melodies, by Crimean Tatar melodies.”55
If this solidarity has quickened since the annexation, it has also matured in Ukraine’s cultural sphere, which is so often a bellwether of deeper social changes. In the long-standing meditation on the Ukrainian–Crimean Tatar relation, discourses of encounter and entanglement have made way for a discourse of enclosure. This is a discourse concerned with questions of mutual ontological security, of home as both body and shelter, which for Ukrainians begin with a reckoning – the loss, temporary or not, of Crimea itself. “In the Ukrainian collective consciousness,” writes Kateryna Mishchenko, “Crimea is a wound, a trauma of the outbreak of war, a lost home.”56 Or in the words of V’iacheslav Huk, “like an incurable wound, Crimea bleeds in the distance.”57 For Mar’iana Savka, the bond between Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars can help suture it:
Хоч різні ми, брате, лінія долі спільна -
Як нитка, якою зшито пекучу рану.58
(Although we are different, brother, the line of our destiny is joined,
Like a thread stitching a burning wound.)
Kateryna Kalytko amplifies the metaphor. She likens the loss of Crimea to an amputation. Her prize-winning collection of stories, Zemlia zahublenykh, abo malenki strashni kazky (Land of the lost, or Little terrible tales, 2017), is set in a nameless no man’s land exhausted by the spectre of war where water is in short supply. It is an eerie, otherwordly vision of a Crimea suspended perpetually “in-between.”59
Elsewhere, in her essayistic prose, Kalytko reflects on the treatment of this amputated Crimea in contemporary Ukrainian literature, characterizing reductive and even Orientalist representations of the peninsula as constituting a “flimsy plastic prosthesis.”60 Like Savka, she sees the project of Ukrainian–Crimean Tatar solidarity as offering something much more organic, palliative, and “alive.” She also returns us to the question of the role of culture in guilt-processing:
We all bear so much guilt [my vsi duzhe zavynyly] before the Crimean Tatars. Before those whose homes, with bread still warm on the table, were seized in 1944 by “liberators,” whose children and grandchildren now walk the same streets as we do […] Before those who stood next to us on Maidan. Before those who came out on 26 Feburary [2014] to the Crimean parliament with Ukrainian flags and on 27 February woke up in a completely different Crimea […] Before those who are now being persecuted, thrown in jail on trumped-up charges, and killed. […] No, now it is not in the power of every single citizen […] to clean the long-standing Augean stables of Ukrainian politics […] and regain control over state borders […] But it is in the power of each individual citizen to try, for example, to learn the basics of the Crimean Tatar language – and at least in this way to offer them something of home.61
Awareness, much less acknowledgment, of the role of Ukrainians as unwitting accomplices in the history of Crimea’s settler colonialism remains rare. Kalytko addresses it directly and explicitly, seeking to cultivate empathy and establish a framework of identification in which Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars can offer each other “something of home.”
Nariman Aliev’s debut feature film Evge (Homeward, 2019) is both a product and a proponent of such home work. Awarded the distinction of “Un Certain Regard” at Cannes Film Festival in 2019, Evge is a predominantly Crimean Tatar–language film funded by the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture. It was selected as Ukraine’s entry for competition in the ninety-second Academy Awards, following in the footsteps of Tasin’s Alim of 1926 as a Crimean Tatar film that is also a milestone of Ukrainian cinema. A resounding success on the international festival circuit, Evge presents Ukraine in all its complexity as a multi-ethnic, multiconfessional, and multilingual country exploring itself as a homeland of homelands.
In Evge the concept of home is plural and mobile. It is also a source of intense devotion to which one sacrifices his life. At the centre of the film is a Crimean Tatar named Mustafa who journeys across Ukraine to return the body of his estranged son Nazim to Crimea for burial. Years before, Nazim had left Crimea for mainland Ukraine, where a sense of duty to his country led him to fight and die in the war against Russian and Russian-backed forces in Donbas. Reluctantly travelling with Mustafa is his younger son, Alim, who like his brother has also found a home in Ukraine beyond Crimea. At one point he announces to his father that he has no desire to return and live under Russian occupation. Instead he sees his future in Kyiv, where he is a university student. Mustafa demands that Alim give up his plans. Mustafa exclaims: “There is nothing for you back there [in Kyiv]. Can you even imagine what we went through to return to Crimea?” Alim replies: “Who gives a damn about this Crimea?! There is no life there, and there never will be.”
The argument between father and son is visceral and revelatory, laying bare the divergent conceptions of home and tradition between two different generations.62 Mustafa’s home is Crimea; Alim’s and Nazim’s home is Crimea in Ukraine. There is another divergence as well: in the previous exchange, Mustafa speaks in Crimean Tatar, Alim in Ukrainian. At a moment of bracing honesty, director Nariman Aliev (b. 1992) has his characters test their bonds of intimacy while speaking different languages. In fact, he crafts a cinematic moment in which monolingual accommodation gives way to bilingual non-accommodation, as Alim first converses with his father in Crimean Tatar before switching to Ukrainian. Aliev presents this multilingualism casually, as a simple fact of Ukrainian life; neither Mustafa nor Alim remarks upon their language use or requires any translation. There are no misunderstandings, only outbursts of fear, anger, and desperation. Their confrontation is only one of a number of scenes in Evge in which citizens of Ukraine dialogue with one another about matters of life and death, war and peace, and past and future across the Crimean Tatar, Ukrainian, and Russian languages. No matter their viewpoint, ethnicity, or linguistic profile, they exercise a bond, however tenuous, with one another. As Mustafa’s brother asks, “Biz, ozumizge kerek olmasak, kimge kerekmiz?” (Who will need us if we do not need each other?)
In Evge, Crimea is, in effect, an island. Due to a violent confrontation at the de facto border checkpoint at Chonhar, Mustafa and Alim cannot reach Crimea by car. Instead they row to the peninsula in a boat across the shallow lagoons of the Azov Sea’s western shore. Transporting Nazim’s body, they turn the Syvash under cover of night into a river Styx. It is unclear whether they ever really reach their final destination. As Alim drags Nazim’s enshrouded body along the shore – repeating the basmala refrain recited before each sura of the Qu’ran, “bismillah Rahmani Rahim” (in the name of Allah the most gracious, the most merciful) – an infirm Mustafa collapses behind him (fig. 10). Just as the son Nazim dies for Ukraine, so the father Mustafa dies for Crimea. Alim survives them both, moving along the border between Crimea and mainland Ukraine. In this way, his character promises a suture of the wound, but a suture that comes at great cost – through loss, sacrifice, and trauma. As Roger Luckhurst observes, trauma is “a breach of the border that puts inside and outside into a strange communication.”63 For Alim, this strange communication is the prayer from Sura 112 that he learns and desperately recites at the end of the film, a prayer whose plaintive hope he must embrace to find his way home.
10. Evge, directed by Nariman Aliev (2019)
The character of Mustafa in Evge is played with depth and sensitivity by Akhtem Seitablaiev, the director of Khaitarma who has been called Ukraine’s Spielberg after the success of Kiborhy (Cyborgs, 2017), a feature film dramatizing a defence of the Donetsk airport by Ukrainian military forces in the autumn and winter of 2014–15.64 Like Jamala, Seitablaiev is helping nurture civic nationalism in contemporary Ukrainian culture and society, not only through his art but also through his activism. His work as the director of Krymsky dim (Crimean House) – together with colleague Alim Aliev, a tireless and creative Crimean Tatar activist who settled in mainland Ukraine after the annexation – has been less glamorous but no less consequential. Established in Kyiv in 2015 “to protect the rights and freedoms of citizens of Ukraine, most especially the national minorities and the indigenous peoples on its temporarily occupied territory,” Krymsky dim has become a flagship of Ukrainian–Crimean Tatar cultural exchange and interaction, a hub of concerts, film screenings, and Crimean Tatar language teaching. It positions Crimea as a constitutive force for all of Ukraine, as if inspired by Pierre-Jean Jouve’s maxim “Car nous sommes où nous ne sommes pas” (We are where we are not).65 One of its most impactful initiatives is the literary festival Qırım inciri (Crimean Fig), which celebrates the best contemporary Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar writing about Crimea, including translations between the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar languages. It builds on the legacy of the late Yunus Kandym and Mykola Miroshnychenko, whose prodigious bilingual collections of Crimean Tatar poetry and prose have contributed to a rebirth of krymskotataroznavstvo (Crimean Tatar Studies) in Ukraine. Such projects of translation used to be seen as tools for cross-cultural understanding; now they are understood more as forms of nation-building.
Among the most resonant contributions to the 2019 Qırım inciri anthology are works by women writers and translators working in the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar languages. In a cycle entitled “Toponimy” (Toponyms), for instance, Ilona Chervotkina mourns the discursive cleansing of Crimea that has effaced ancient Crimean Tatar towns from the consciousness of residents and visitors. One of these towns is Solkhat, known instead by its Russian toponym Stary Krym. In an extended apostrophe Chervotkina’s lyrical persona pleads with Solkhat to forgive a local bus driver who has turned a blind eye to its heritage, turning to his passengers to ask instead, “Who got on at Stary Krym?”:
о, Солхате, він нічого не розуміє -
пробач йому.
він не бачив
середньовічний святковий базар
і тополі мінаретів,
він не дихав твоим повітрям.66
(O, Solkhat, [the bus driver] doesn’t understand a thing –
Forgive him.
He didn’t see
The medieval holiday bazaar
And the minarets like poplars,
He didn’t breathe in your air.)
A short story in the Qırım inciri anthology entitled “Pro shcho lysty Nasymy” (The messages of Nasyma’s letters) by Yevheniia Svitoch centres on an epistolary exchange between a Crimean Tatar woman named Nasyma and an aspiring Ukrainian journalist named Olesia. They form an intimate connection, with Olesia sending Nasyma poems by Lesia Ukraïnka and with Nasyma sharing lessons from her life as “a woman who has succeeded in uniting the roles of a mother, a wife, and a leader in business and culture.”67 Nasyma’s letters become reflections on events and movements in Crimean Tatar history and on the role of women in driving them – such as Ismail Gasprinsky’s daughter Sefika, who helmed the first magazine for women in the Muslim world. Nasyma fashions these letters for Olesia as ethnographic introductions to Crimean Tatar mores and traditions, which are meant “to promote the strengthening of peace and love between our peoples.”68
One of the most prominent contemporary Crimean Tatar–language poets and translators is Seyare Kökçe (b. 1971), who is based in Simferopol. Her deft rendering of Serhiy Zhadan’s “Yak my buduvaly svoï domy” (How we built our homes) from Ukrainian into Crimean Tatar won the 2019 Qırım inciri Prize for Best Translation. Zhadan is an artist who is unafraid of painting in dark hues on canvases of urban peripheries and barren steppelands. At the same time, he is unafraid of uplifting and inspiring the reader – a “black Romantic,” as Ivan Dziuba dubs him.69 In “Yak my buduvaly svoï domy,” published in the 2015 collection Tampliiery (The Knights Templar), Zhadan explores home work as an engagement with the land by way of spirit as well as shovel and spade, an act of building in an environment of risk and threat. As he has made clear in public readings, the poem is inspired by the Crimean Tatars,70 but he makes no reference to them in the text, which instead positions Crimea as an ellipsis, a halting silence on the tip of the tongue. In her translation “Bizim evlerimiz nasıl qurula?” Kökçe maintains Zhadan’s elusive tone and explores a similarly unspecified space of both sacred attachment and violent intimidation, but with an intertextual allusiveness that positions Stalin’s Crimean atrocity as an event with present-day urgency. Read together, the poems present Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars grappling with the stakes of belonging and attachment at a time of crisis and insecurity, each through the other’s defence of home.
“Yak my buduvaly svoï domy” offers a corrective to a quip by Zhadan’s fellow writer and performer Yuri Andrukhovych that there are two types of places in life: those you escape from, and those you escape to.71 Zhadan gives us something else in the poem – a place escaping from us. His lyrical persona is stationary; it is the sky that pivots and floats away:
Як ми будували свої доми?
Коли стоїш під небесами зими,
і небеса розвертаються й відпливають геть,
розумієш, що жити потрібно там, де тебе не лякає смерть.72
(How did we build our homes?
When you stand beneath winter’s skies
And the heavens turn and float away,
You understand you need to live where you are not afraid of death.)
Zhadan is a writer with a penchant for aphorisms, and the poem has its share. Yet it never loses sight of its abiding thematic orientation, which is how the intimate bond between place and personality, between culture and territory, subtends our appreciation of home. Assaults on this bond lead not only to forced expulsion and exile, Zhadan reminds us. Under the shifting skies of occupation, your home can be taken from you even when you do not leave it at all.
Kökçe’s translation underscores the tragedy of these shifting skies, likening them to an abandonment. Whereas Zhadan uses the past tense in his first line, she refers to the present. And whereas Zhadan’s lyrical persona “stands” beneath winter’s skies, Kökçe’s lyrical persona is “left” deserted beneath them:
Bizim evlerimiz nasıl qurula?
Qışnıñ kökleri altında qalğanda,
em olar aylanıp ketseler avlaqqa,
sen añdaysıñ: tek ölüm qorquzmağan
mekân lâyıq ayatqa.
(How do we build our homes?
When you are left beneath the winter’s skies,
And they turn and move into the distance,
You understand: the right place for life is one without fear of death.)
In the face of this threat of a loss of home, Zhadan calls for digging, for nicking and slicing the “hard black earth”:
Будуй стіни з водоростей і трави,
рий вовчі ями й рови.
Звикай жити разом з усіма день при дні.
Батьківщина — це там, де тебе розуміють, коли ти говориш вві сні.
(Go and build walls from reeds and grass,
Dig wolf pits and trenches.
Get used to living together with neighbours day after day.
Homeland is where they understand you when you talk in your sleep.)
In Kökçe’s translation, Zhadan’s reeds become saman (adobe), the material used in the makeshift huts built by Crimean Tatars upon their return after 1989:
Divarlarnı köter ottan, samandan,
Çuqkur arıqlar qaz topraqta.
Kuñ küñden yaşap ögren er kesnen birlikte.
Tüşüñdeki aytqan sözlerni añlasalar – Vatanıñ o yerde.73
(Build walls from grass and saman,
Dig deep pits in the land.
Live day to day and learn with everyone.
Your homeland is the place where they understand the words you speak in dreams.)
Zhadan’s poem abounds in directives like a dog-eared omnibus, a guide to ontological security that urges the addressee to “place stone against stone” and “pick coal and salt from the pockets of land.” Here he channels the naturalist mysticism of Bohdan Ihor Antonych (1909–37):
Поближче до сонця, подалі від пустоти.
Дерева будуть рости, діти будуть рости.
На тютюновому листі виступає роса.
Ми будували так, ніби вивершували небеса.
Мов упорядковували висоту.
Ніби словами наповнювали мову пусту.
Ніби повертали речам імена.
До брили брила, до цвяха цвях, до стіни стіна.
(Closer to the sun, farther from the void.
Trees will grow, children will grow.
On the tobacco leaf, dew gathers.
We built our homes as if we were completing the heavens.
As if we were fixing their height.
As if filling empty language with words.
As if returning names to things:
Brick for brick, nail for nail, wall for wall.)
For Zhadan, such home work bears cosmic significance. It brings purpose to human experience as well as meaningful contact with the natural world. “Water is worth something,” he writes, “when it is water for drinking.” Kökçe holds tightly to these lines, translating them faithfully.
At the poem’s conclusion, however, Zhadan and Kökçe part ways. They diverge in their presentation of what is for Zhadan a mysterious, empowering image:
Ночі не мають сенсу без темноти.
Світи наді мною, чорне сонце, світи.
(Nights have no sense without darkness.
Shine over me, black sun, shine on.)
As Ivan Dziuba points out, black is the most popular “colour” in Zhadan’s palette and, moreover, an “aggressively life-affirming” force in his verse.74 Zhadan’s “black sun” is akin to Camus’s “sun with shadow,” an interdependence of light and dark from which each draws its significance and power.75 Kökçe turns this peculiar image into a coded reference to 18 May 1944:
Qara gecenin maiyeti qaranlıqta,
Qara kün töpemde parılday, töpemde yana.
(The black night finds its essence in darkness,
Black Day, shine over me, burn over me.)
It is a poignant, deliberate mistranslation. Where we expect Qara kuneş (black sun), we find Qara kün (The Black Day), a name by which the deportation is remembered by Crimean Tatars today. Kökçe alludes to its enduring, even searing legacy in the present – using the verb yanmaq, meaning “to burn” and “to ignite” – in a defiant enjoinder against forgetting. Like Budzhurova, she presents memory of the deportation as a kind of spiritual fire, a weapon of resilience in a time of insecurity.
3.
“The occupation of Crimea is no distant thing,” says Zhadan. Poems like “Yak my buduvaly svoï domy” pull it closer. “We built our homes […] as if returning names to things: brick for brick, nail for nail, wall for wall.” In 2018, his words – alluding to the sacred meaning of even mundane material traces of our presence at home – began to take on a troubling poignancy in a scandal over a “restoration” of the hansaray, the palace of the Crimean Tatar khans. Undertaken by a Moscow firm with no experience in historical preservation, this “Potemkin renovation,” as Crimean Tatar activists have called it, shows at best an aggressive indifference to the call to “respect original material” at the heart of the 1964 Venice Charter (the International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites).76 Lilia Budzhurova worries that the hansaray “is being literally destroyed before our eyes.”77 Photographs and videos taken by citizen journalists reveal ancient wooden beams ripped from the interior of the palace and discarded outside, exposed to the elements; they show workers tossing ceramic artefacts from deep within the khan’s old stables into a heap, as if harvesting potatoes.78 In the almost mystical world of “Yak my buduvaly svoï domy,” such a localized material assault on the vestiges of Crimean Tatar personality – on the bricks, nails, walls of its past – becomes an event of universal spiritual import, a tear in the fabric of a common human heritage.
It has urgent relevance for Ukrainians. “The plight of Crimean Tatars is the plight of Ukrainians,” Zhadan continues. “Our future path with the Crimean Tatars is narrow and long – because they are our compatriots.”79 Reading “Yak my buduvaly svoï domy” alongside “Bizim evlerimiz nasıl qurula?” offers a view of Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars searching for what it means to be at home through the experience of the other – and exploring what it means to be at home together, as “compatriots.”
As a cultural and political matter, the Crimean question for Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars after 2014 is therefore about restoring home. It is about restoring Ukraine’s territorial integrity as well as the rights of Crimea’s indigenous people to exercise political and cultural agency without fear of arbitrary arrests, disappearances, or backdoor deportations. One proposed mechanism for this joint restoration is an amendment to Ukraine’s constitution that would recognize the “national-territorial autonomy” of the Crimean Tatars and, in effect, vest Crimean sovereignty in them. It would be a powerful rebuke to KrymNash chauvinism. A majority of Ukrainians support the idea, but fears of precedent-setting and a creeping federalization of Ukraine have prompted politicians in Kyiv to kick the can down the road, despite repeated promises of action.80 Recently the administration of President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that the proposal needed wider debate in Ukrainian society, pulling it back from the constitutional amendment process.81 “We are working on it,” insisted Zelensky’s spokesperson.
Where politics often stalls, culture forges ahead. As we have seen, prominent works of literature and film have enmeshed the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar quests for home, for ontological security, so deeply as to blur the lines between them. In this cultural discourse the national-territorial autonomy of the Crimean Tatars is nearly a fait accompli. As Myroslav Marynovych argues, it is “the key to restoring justice on the peninsula.” After all, he says, “the Crimean Tatars are the only truly organizing force in Crimea.”82 In recent years they have become an organizing force in mainland Ukraine as well, a driver of civic nationalism at a time of war. Our glimpse into the evolving cultural reflections of the solidary relation between Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars – from discourses of metaphorical encounter and entanglement to a discourse of enclosure – therefore reveals a startling picture, with potential lessons for European liberalism and even global Islam. It is a model of interethnic fellowship in the region of the Black Sea, a portrait of Crimea’s Sunni Muslim indigenous people helping shape the national identity of a country that Karl Schlögel calls “Europe in miniature.”83 Ukraine may have lost control of Crimea for the foreseeable future. But at least in one sense, Crimea has not lost control of Ukraine.