Chapter Three

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Ethnic Cleansing, Discursive Cleansing

“O frenzied waves, do not rise so high,” wrote Crimean Tatar poet Şevki Bektöre in 1918. “Give way, release me, let me go.”1 Bektöre had crossed the Black Sea no less than three times in the months following the demise of the Crimean Tatar Qurultay. As the Treaties of Brest-Litovsk quelled hostilities between Russia and the Ottoman Empire and recognized an independent Ukrainian People’s Republic, he shuttled anxiously between his home in Istanbul and his ancestral home in Crimea, a young man on a committed search for purpose amid unsettled political waters. “O frenzied waves,” he pleaded, “are you resentful of my passion?” Bektöre’s intrepid movements across the shores of the Black Sea, over fluid imperial and national borders, came at a time when Turks, Ukrainians, and Crimean Tatars were exploring alliances against Russian power, tensing the Scythian bow in an attempt to reverse Catherine’s gains in the Black Sea region.² Like Gasprinsky and Çelebicihan before him, Bektöre deepened the lanes of social and political exchange in a unique zone of contact between what are today Turkey, Russia, and Ukraine. He was, in other words, a region maker.

Arriving in the port of Kefe (Feodosiia) in the spring of 1918, Bektöre witnessed first-hand the destruction wrought by frenzied waves of military advances and retreats in Crimea. He quickly learned of the downfall of the Crimean Tatar Qurultay and of the brutal murder of his friend Çelebicihan at the hands of the Bolsheviks. The tragedy came as a shock; the news had not yet reached Istanbul.³ Communication across the Black Sea was notoriously slow. Atatürk once wrote to Lenin, “Whatever disagreements exist between us are due to the slowness of correspondence [yazışmaların yavaşlığı] between Ankara and Moscow.”⁴ In Kefe, Bektöre was therefore tasked with bringing word of the violent fate of the Qurultay back home. In October 1918 the influential Ottoman-language periodical Kırım Mecmuası carried the story, placing below a photograph of the Qurultay a caption that read, “They sacrificed for the nation in blood.”5

This abatement of Crimean Tatar political authority and autonomy under Bolshevik rule was dramatic, but it was not to last. “Frenzied waves” wax and wane. In the 1920s, with the emergence of a battery of ambitious Soviet policies known by the term korenizatsiia (indigenization), new currents of possibility washed upon the banks of what had become the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) of Crimea. Promoted by Lenin, overseen by Stalin, korenizatsiia was a belated concession to what had been a dangerously underestimated opponent of Bolshevism in the civil wars across the former Russian Empire: nationalism. It was an implicit acknowledgment of the swift force and deep resilience of what Stalin called the “kaleidoscope of national groups” that brought the Tsentralna Rada and the Qurultay, among many other examples, to political power.⁶ In an eager attempt to reassure non-Russian nations that the Soviet project was not a retread of an empire afflicted by what Lenin termed “Great Russian chauvinism,” korenizatsiia sought to “root” and nurture national languages, national cultures, and national elites in tens of thousands of national territorial units – “in their place” (na meste), as Stalin put it⁷ – with the expectation that these national energies would eventually “exhaust [themselves] completely” en route to the construction of a postnational Homo sovieticus.⁸ In a sense, the policy was a breathtakingly bold attempt to affirm the tight bond between native cultural content – what we have been calling personality – and territorial form – place – at the centre of our discussion in part 1.⁹

Korenizatsiia turned out to be fleeting, however. It was caught up among the “contradictory zigzags” of a regime lurching from one thing to the next, as Lev Trotsky memorably put it.¹⁰ After 1927, Stalin’s geopolitical paranoia slowly perverted what had been a policy of ethnophilia into a program of ethnocide. Soviet non-Russian nations along the Black Sea coast, a site of geostrategic sensitivity for Moscow, were especially vulnerable in this new order, and none more so than the Crimean Tatars. The Second World War compounded the peril, and its penultimate year brought cataclysm. When the Nazi threat receded in 1944, Stalin seized an opportunity to obliterate the bond between Crimean place and Tatar personality once and for all – not only by ethnically cleansing the Crimean Tatars from the peninsula but also by discursively cleansing them from Soviet life. It was coordinated physical and epistemic violence that aimed to erase them, and their claims of possession of a homeland, from the face of the earth.

1.

What I call discursive cleansing is an amplification and extension of conventional censorship, a disciplining of representation that is both retrospective and prospective in its application.11 As we will see, it targets not simply the work of writers or artists and their textual traces but also a prevailing understanding of the world, an idea. Discursive cleansing is the traditional handmaiden of ethnic cleansing, from today’s China, where scholarship on Uighur culture is subject to deletion, to today’s Myanmar, where Facebook removes posts documenting crimes against the Rohingya people.¹² In the case of the Crimean Tatars, discursive cleansing abetted Soviet ethnic cleansing by assaulting the most essential of ideas – that a group called the Crimean Tatars existed, or had the right to exist, at all.

It hardly seemed to matter that the indigeneity of the Crimean Tatars had been a pillar of Soviet Crimea in the 1920s. At this time korenizatsiia had “drummed it into Crimea that it was Tatar, Tatar,” as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn emphatically put it. “Even the alphabet was in Arabic [script], and all its signs in Tatar.”¹³ This Tatarization, which established the Crimean Tatars as the indigenous people of the Crimean ASSR, may not have penetrated very deeply beyond the surface level in the political realm – ultimately, Vozgrin calls it a “Bolshevik bluff”¹⁴ – but its effects in the realm of culture were beyond doubt, particularly between 1923 and 1928. This fleetingly golden period marked the tenure of the chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Crimean ASSR, Veli İbraimov, a disciple of Ismail Gasprinsky who had helped operate Tercüman’s Skoropechatnik typesetting machine as a boy and later contributed to the pages of the newspaper Vatan Hadimi as a young man.¹⁵

Under İbraimov’s leadership there was an intense flowering of Crimean Tatar literature, visual art, music, and drama. This cultural renaissance was a selling point in Koç-Yardımı (Resettlement Help), a locally orchestrated initiative led by writer and dramatist Amet Özenbaşlı.¹⁶ Koç-Yardımı sought to pull Crimean Tatar emigrés scattered across the Black Sea region into the Soviet orbit and to facilitate their organized return to Crimea. It was an entrepreneurial exercise of what Terry Martin calls the Piedmont Principle, “the belief that cross-border ethnic ties could be exploited to project Soviet influence into neighboring states.”¹⁷ İbraimov made a grave error in the process of sanctioning the project, however: he failed to secure Kremlin approval.¹⁸ His freelancing prompted the ire of Stalin, who by the end of the 1920s was losing faith in the utility of the Piedmont Principle. Stalin had become captive to the notion that such cross-border activity could cut another way, leading not to an expansion of the borders of Soviet influence but to their penetration and retraction. As Martin makes clear, the exploitation of cross-border ethnic ties – of korenizatsiia’s extra-Soviet potential – came to stoke a fear in Stalin that would later lead to a violent backlash against non-Russian national elites, national institutions, and national cultures.19 İbraimov was an early victim of this backlash. He was executed in 1928.

Yet there was another backlash as well, one driven not by a fear of cross-border ties but by a fear of cross-ethnic ones. This was a backlash against what might be called, in the realm of the arts, cross-korenizatsiia, whereby the promotion of the work of culture in one non-Russian national space directly affirmed and promoted national consciousness in another. As evidenced in their censorial practices and their targeting of elites, Soviet authorities in the 1930s grew concerned about the work of national actors not only in the advancement of their own distinctive non-Russian national culture but also in the advancement of another’s distinctive non-Russian national culture. Korenizatsiia, after all, was a massive and often confused state undertaking, and its outcomes did not always track along straight lines. While it often involved disentangling and differentiating national cultures from one another – especially among Central Asian peoples, where regional and tribal affiliations could criss-cross through Uzbek and Kazakh national denominations, for instance²⁰ – korenizatsiia also promoted an entanglement of national cultures. This intermingling did more than lay the ground for the conflation of national cultures envisioned as the end game of Soviet policy; it did more than spark cross-cultural understanding or, alternatively, interethnic contestation and conflict.

At times, Soviet korenizatsiia empowered national cultures to reinforce each other in processes of solidary identification. An eloquent testament to this phenomenon can be found in the pages of the Belarusian-language journal Maladniak (The Young) in 1928. Commenting upon a visit to Belarus by the Ukrainian writers Maik Yohansen and Volodymyr Sosiura – who were representing the Kharkiv-based literary organization Hart (The Tempering) at a gathering hosted by the Minsk-based organization Maladniak – the Soviet comparatist Petr Buzuk describes the presence of the Ukrainians as evidence of the “common roads” of Belarusian and Ukrainian cultures.²¹ In his view, these cultures nourish one another in the young Soviet Union not by way of a reductive, mythic East Slavic “brotherhood” but by way of a productive interplay between their “harmonies and disharmonies.”²² Soviet Ukrainian culture, Buzuk proclaims, “echoes proudly in the Belarusian soul.”²³

Amplified by the policy of korenizatsiia, such echoes redounded across cultures as well as within them, making possible mutually beneficial projects of transnational solidarity among non-Russian nations in the early Soviet Union. These projects deserve more study. We understandably tend to conceptualize the objects of affective identification among Soviet citizens as a dual proposition – as identification with “the nation to which they were officially ascribed” and/or with the Soviet Union “as motherland or fatherland,” as Ronald Grigor Suny frames it.24 But a third, more supplementary and ad hoc proposition could exist as well at times, especially in the 1920s: co-identification with another non-Russian nation. It was not without risk. If korenizatsiia organized the Soviet population into thousands of national territorial units with at least some view to a strategy of divide et impera, then moments of incidental cross-korenizatsiia naturally represented a threat to this strategy. The Ukrainian–Crimean Tatar cultural encounter in this period offers vivid examples.

2.

As we observed in chapter 2, a process of identification between Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars had begun to percolate in the poetry and prose of Lesia Ukraïnka and Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky at the turn of the twentieth century. This process was marked by a subtle, implicit metaphorical formulation: Ukrainians are Crimean Tatars. In the early Soviet period this process of identification matured by way of state-sponsored cross-cultural collaboration. An emblematic case is Alim, a play written by Ümer İpçi in 1924. İpçi (1897–1955) was responsible for almost singlehandedly reviving Crimean Tatar drama in the early Soviet period. With Veli İbraimov’s support and the winds of korenizatsiia at his back, İpçi helped develop the Crimean Tatar State Drama Theatre – “Tatteatr” – into a cultural force.²⁵ His dramatic works bore the mark of Toktargazy’s influence, confronting problems of social equality in Crimean Tatar society, from the plight of the poor to the rights of women.²⁶ Alim was one of his most popular plays, a work that reached into the realm of folklore and breathed new life into the legend of Alim Aidamak, a nineteenth-century Crimean Tatar Robin Hood. İpçi’s story of one man’s defence of the downtrodden soon came to grace the silver screen. In a vibrant example of cross-korenizatsiia, İpçi’s Crimean Tatar–language play formed the basis for a film project undertaken by the highly successful All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration (VUFKU).²⁷ It was a work of drama supported by policies of Tatarization in Crimea, which made possible a work of film supported by policies of Ukrainization in Ukraine.

VUFKU billed Alim as a story torn from the pages of “the Crimean Tatar struggle for their own national renaissance.”28 Mykola Bazhan, a Ukrainian poet who was also editor of the film journal Kino, teamed up with İpçi to complete the screenplay. First-time Ukrainian director Heorhy Tasin (1895–1956) took the helm of the project, while Crimean Tatar scholars and cultural activists like Üsein Bodaninsky, director of the Bağçasaray Museum of Turko-Tatar Culture, joined the production to ensure its cultural authenticity and to protect against what Osip Mandelshtam had panned in previous cinematic works as an absurd Orientalist “sterilization” of the Crimean Tatars.²⁹

Alim was an overnight success. After its release in 1926 the film began to play to audiences in France and Germany as well as across the Soviet Union – especially, as Bodaninsky notes, in the Azerbaijan SSR, Tatar ASSR, and Central Asian republics.³⁰ In celebrating its achievements, Ukrainian critics in the journal Kino highlighted one distinction above all others: the recognition among Crimean Tatars that Alim was “their first national film” (svoia persha natsionalna kartyna).³¹ Indeed, if İpçi’s Alim was a Crimean Tatar play that fed the success of Ukrainian cinema, then Tasin’s Alim was a Ukrainian film that fed perceptions of a Tatar Crimea, of a tight bond between Crimean place and Tatar personality. From its opening minutes, Alim avails viewers of broad, visually resplendent vistas of a multicultural nineteenth-century Crimea with a clear titular nation at the centre of everything.

Its second scene is representative. In an open-air market bustling with workers in fezzes and imperial functionaries in frock coats, Tasin focuses attention on the dominant figure of a Crimean Tatar delial (herald) through whom, as we learn in an intertitle, all the business and news of the market moves. Crimean Tatar order, the film suggests, is what makes sense of Crimea’s busy diversity. But this order has a dark side. It tolerates an exploitation of the poor and vulnerable, igniting a rebellion in the wily Alim, who retreats to the forest to hatch plans to upset the status quo. Alim is no bandit, in stark contrast to the hero of Viacheslav Viskovsky’s film of 1916, Alim – Krymskii razboinik (Alim, Crimean brigand); in accordance with Soviet heroization, he is a social revolutionary. The villains he targets are not tsarist colonizers, who linger in the margins of the film, but local Crimean Tatar mullahs and mirzas guilty of hypocrisy and greed.

By every measure, the Crimea of Tasin’s Alim is a land possessed by the Crimean Tatars, where Crimean place and Tatar personality dwell fully and deeply within each other. Tasin’s eloquent use of mise-en-scène makes the point repeatedly: in one scene Alim and his love, Sara, played by husband and wife duo Hayri (Khairi) Emir-Zade and Asiye Emir-Zade, stand between two entangled trees and frame a minaret behind them in the distance. In another, the jagged rocks along the beach cast in relief the undulating lines of their national dress, Alim’s şalvarlar (wide trousers) and Sara’s marama veil (fig. 5). Here Tasin foreshadows the film’s tragic ending, in which Sara and Alim, fleeing at night from authorities, drown in the dark surf of the Crimean coast.

5. Alim, directed by Heorhy Tasin (1926)

As Alim’s artistic and scholarly consultant, Üsein Bodaninsky helped Tasin craft these poignant scenes with “authenticity” and “sincerity.” He also played a pivotal role in another moment of cross-korenizatsiia, one with lasting repercussions for both Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar historical memory. In 1925, Bodaninsky joined the Crimean Tatar ethnographer, archaeologist, and philologist Osman Akçokraklı on the hunt for cönkler, traditional anthologies of folk and devan poetry from the era of the khanate often preserved in family homes. Their expedition had only modest success until they arrived at the village of Kapsykhor (today’s Morskoe) in the Sudak region, where they stumbled upon a major discovery: a seventeenth-century destan by Crimean Tatar poet Canmuhammed (Dzhan-Mukhammed).32

When Akçokraklı and Bodaninsky’s discovery began to circulate in Soviet scholarly circles, it did so by way of Ukrainian journals. Ahatanhel Krymsky alluded to it in Studiï z Krymu (Crimean studies), a collection of articles and resources related to Crimean Tatar culture, history, and demography that was released under his editorship by the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1930. “Soon this Crimean poem, which is so interesting for Ukrainians,” Krymsky observed, “will get to see the world.”³³ What made the poem interesting was its distinctive subject matter: the military alliance between the Crimean Tatar khanate and the Ukrainian Cossacks of the Zaporizhian Host, which had helped produce out of the territory of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth an autonomous Ukrainian Cossack proto-state in 1649. Krymsky assured the reader that Canmuhammed’s text would be published eventually, remarking in a footnote: “The People’s Commissariat for Education of Crimea has given its approval.” He was correct, at least in part; only months later, a gloss of Akçokraklı’s discovery appeared in the journal Skhidnyi svit (World of the East) sandwiched between articles on the class struggle of the nineteenth-century Nogai people and the dialects of the Greeks in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol.³⁴

Only a number of excerpts of Canmuhammed’s destan are extant today. The fragments recount the heroic exploits of Tuğaybey (Tugai-Bey, Tuhai-Bey), the military commander of the Crimean Tatar khan İslâm Giray III heralded by Mykhailo Hrushevsky as “the genuine soul of the Crimean-Ukrainian union.”³⁵ Tuğaybey joins the Ukrainian Cossack fight against the Poles, forging a strong friendship with Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, or “Meleske,” as he is named in Canmuhammed’s rendition.³⁶ He does so after Khmelnytsky’s emissaries petition İslâm Giray III for assistance:

Didiler ki, yey bizim sultanımız,

Baş urıp, selâm qıldı atamanımız.

Batavskiy seksen biñ asker ile,

Kelmek içün tedrik idti bize.

İlimizi, köyimzi yıqsa kerek,

Cümlesini ep ota yaqsa kerek.

Kelecek yıl em Qırıma kelse kerek,

Qırım halqın qoymayıp alsa kerek.³⁷

(They said: “O great Sultan,

Our ataman [Khmelnytsky] sends greetings, bowing his head.

Batavskiy [i.e., Polish commander Stefan Potocki], with eighty thousand troops,

Is slowly advancing upon us.

He seeks to tear down our villages and provinces,

He seeks to lay waste to everything and everyone.

He seeks also to invade Crimea in a year,

He seeks to storm and enslave Crimea’s people.”)

These are the first words spoken by Ukrainians in extant Crimean Tatar literature, and they are warnings of mutual suffering. For amplificatory and dramatic effect, Canmuhammed makes extended use of a redif – literally, “a warrior who rides on the back of another’s saddle” – a word (kerek, in this case) that “rides on the back” of the rhyme yıqsa-yaqsa, kelse-alsa to build momentum.38 The prominent epistrophe turns a Ukrainian entreaty for Crimean Tatar help into something akin to a prayer.

Profound emphasis is also placed on the identity of the prospective victims of the violent conflict: the people (halq, the folk) whom both the khan and the hetman presume to protect. In Canmuhammed’s epic, war is not simply politics by other means; for the Ukrainian Cossacks and Crimean Tatars, it is not a geopolitical venture to extend influence, extract tribute, and enrich elites. It is a struggle for survival. The poet’s ventriloquy of these Ukrainian voices in the Crimean Tatar vernacular facilitates a mingling of the first-person plural and, by extension, the fates of both groups. Indeed, when the warning of Poland’s planned invasion of Crimea is issued at the end of the passage, any distinction between you and us is made largely irrelevant. Canmuhammed portrays both groups as objects of foreign aggression who strike an alliance based on an understanding of the human costs of their inaction and on their mutual self-identification as victim.

By 1930, when Akçokraklı had begun to publicize the discovery of the poem across the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s most sensational writer was promoting a Crimean Tatar national identity resilient in the struggle against settler colonialism. Ostap Vyshnia (born Pavlo Hubenko, 1889–1956) was Ukraine’s “Mark Twain,” the “king of the Ukrainian print-run,” whose fame, it was said, rivalled only two others in early Soviet Ukraine: Taras Shevchenko and Vladimir Lenin. His sui generis usmishky (funny vignettes or feuilletons; literally, “smiles”) appeared regularly in major newspapers, including Visti VUTsVK, the official government periodical promoting ukrainizatsiia.³⁹ In a Soviet Ukraine increasingly beset by rigid ideologization and internal censorship, Vyshnia’s satirical usmishky were a breath of fresh air: topical in content, playful and disarming in tone. Nothing escaped his wit. From the rise of Mussolini to the geostrategic utility of canals, Vyshnia’s usmishky delighted in hurtling readers between domestic and international topics with abandon. And like the simple-minded, light-hearted Ukrainian peasant narrators of Nikolai Gogol and Hryhory Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko before him, Vyshnia’s persona had a forked tongue and spoke at times in the Ukrainian-Russian non-standard linguistic hybrid known as surzhyk.40 There was always something subversive behind his seemingly innocent explorations of the status quo, a cagey wink in the wide eyes.

The maverick prose stylist and polemicist Mykola Khvylovy, Vyshnia’s close friend and advocate, celebrated the heteroglossia of the usmishky in the pages of his journal Prolitfront. “I fell in love with them because of their piquancy, their delicacy, their rudeness, their humour,” wrote Khvylovy, “and because of their profound tragedy.”⁴¹ Vyshnia’s collection Vyshnevi usmishky krymski (Vyshnia’s funny Crimean vignettes; literally, Vyshnia’s Crimean smiles) fits Khvylovy’s description perfectly. In the feuilletons, inspired by a trip to Crimea in the early summer of 1924, Vyshnia riffs on the foibles of plump tourists from Moscow and, with characteristic self-deprecation, ridicules the sedentary lifestyle of the writer. But his tone veers dramatically toward the tragic when he approaches the subject of the Crimean Tatars, an object of his sustained attention.

In “Tatarynove zhyttia” (The life of a [Crimean] Tatar), one of three usmishky dedicated to the Crimean Tatars in the collection and originally published in the weekly arts supplement of Visti VUTsVK, Vyshnia departs from the world of satire to deliver a searing indictment of the colonial oppression of Crimea’s indigenous people. The voice of his narrator echoes the righteous anger and sarcasm of Taras Shevchenko. It also summons Shevchenko’s empathy, evoking from the outset an image of a tearful Crimean Tatar elder named Akhmet, who gazes off into the distance and says, “It was better before.” What changed everything for Akhmet’s people, Vyshnia’s narrator explains, was an invasion of Crimea by imperial forces “from the north,” a “deadly whirlwind across the steppes” that “beat, ravaged, destroyed” his home.⁴²

Here Vyshnia’s use of “whirlwind” and verbal asyndeton (pobyly, potroshchyly, poruinuvaly) is an intertextual trigger. For the Ukrainian reader it can invite reference to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Cossack dumy, lyrico-epic poems that thrive on characterizations of the Crimean Tatars as a fearsome horde attacking Ukrainian victims, a “black cloud”⁴³ whose violent actions are listed without conjunctions in breathless end-rhymed lines.⁴⁴ In “Tatarynove zhyttia,” Vyshnia flips the script, transferring the role of victim from Ukrainian to Crimean Tatar. He then exposes, with astringent wit, the imperial conceit of colonization as a “civilizing mission.”

Vyshnia’s narrator approaches the reader with a hand on the shoulder. “Listen, my good people, to the ways in which the tsars and his spawn united ancient ‘Muslim’ Crimea with ‘Christian civilization’! Listen carefully!”45 In an extraordinary move, he then gives the floor to someone else. Vyshnia quotes – at great length, and virtually verbatim – a Russian writer and historian named Yevgeny Markov, whose seminal work Ocherki Kryma (Sketches of Crimea, first published in 1872) followed Aleksandr Herzen in expressing an admiration for the Crimean Tatars and a sympathy with their plight after the Crimean War.⁴⁶ Markov addressed his Russian readers directly and asked them to question the benefits of empire: “Speaking frankly, did we really give the Crimean Tatar a better life?”⁴⁷ His answer: no.

Markov’s message circulated widely in the late imperial period, but the Soviet era was a different story. Even though it was released in no less than four editions between 1872 and 1911, Markov’s Ocherki Kryma was not reprinted at any point in the twentieth century in the Soviet Union. As we will see in chapter 5, the revisionist work of Soviet historians after the Second World War would eventually frame Crimea as ancient Russian territory, consigning Markov and his ilk to the dustbin of historiography.⁴⁸ Vyshnia’s conspicuous recycling of Markov here – a footnote even refers readers to the third edition of Ocherki Kryma – was therefore a very prescient circumvention of the censor.

Vyshnia clearly appreciated Markov’s own penchant for sarcasm. Translating from Russian into Ukrainian, Vyshnia quotes Markov’s quip that “in order to avail Crimea of the benefits of Christian civilization, we first had to bring it low.”⁴⁹ Critically, he repeats Markov’s metaphor of the Russian conquest of Crimea as an act of ethnic “cleansing.” Using the Ukrainian verb chystyty (to clean) where Markov uses the noun chistka (cleansing or purge), Vyshnia exposes his many thousands of readers to a history that saw Count Khristofor Minikh (aka Burkhard Christoph Graf von Münnich) in 1736 “painstakingly cleanse Crimea to such an extent that Bakhchysarai and other cities in his path became ruins, and the steppe a desert.” A year later Count Petr Lassi (aka Peter Lacey) assumed Minikh’s mantle, “laying waste to the cities and the steppe, with a particular German pedantry. He burned down nearly 1,000 villages – that is, those villages only left untouched by Minikh because they did not fit his itinerary.”⁵⁰ In the nineteenth century this “embrace” of Christian civilization manifested itself grotesquely as a rejection and expulsion of innocent people. “At last, civilization began to engulf the Tatars,” forcing “two-thirds of the entire population” to flee their ancestral homeland. Vyshnia quotes Markov drily: “the benevolence of European civilization is at least open to question.”51

Vyshnia’s cut-and-paste of Markov’s text, which makes up over half of the entire usmishka, is occasionally broken up with exclamatory intrusions from his narrator: “Did you hear that? Keep listening.” At the end of “Tatarynove zhyttia,” however, the narrator climbs back in the driver’s seat to ensure that his readers understand that this history of colonial exploitation is no thing of the past. It is alive in the Soviet present. Vyshnia’s narrator explains how Akhmet, the old Crimean Tatar man whose tears of nostalgia open the usmishka, is manipulated by Soviet tourists who ask him to show them Crimea but act like he is their guest. These are tourists who profess to “love” him but pay him little for his trouble. In other words, Vyshnia deftly connects the dots between Russian imperial oppression and Soviet cultural exploitation.

Doing so marked “Tatarynove zhyttia” for deletion. After 1930, it never saw the light of day in print again. Vyshnia was arrested in 1933 and sentenced to ten years in the Gulag on absurd charges of conspiring to assassinate Pavel Postyshev, whose involvement in overseeing the Holodomor, the murderous artificial famine of 1932–3, led to his sobriquet as “butcher of Ukraine” (kat Ukraïny). Then the Second World War intervened. In a desperate move, Vyshnia was released in 1943 to rally a beleaguered war-time Ukrainian public. Nearly destroyed by Stalin, he was dusted off to serve him at a moment of need.

After Vyshnia’s death in 1956, the Vyshnevi usmishky krymski collection remained immensely popular.⁵² But “Tatarynove zhyttia” was carefully excised from every single subsequent reprinting. In fact, this cleansing of “Tatarynove zhyttia” from literary discourse has been so effective that Vyshnia’s feuilleton remains largely unknown in Ukraine today. Even a recent volume entitled Vyshnia’s Funny Vignettes: Banned Works (Vyshnevi usmishky: zaboroneni tvory), prepared by the Institute of Literature at Kyiv State Taras Shevchenko University, fails to include it.⁵³

The film Alim too was banned. In a memorandum marked “not subject to disclosure,” Soviet censors pulled the film from circulation in 1937.⁵⁴ Most of its copies were destroyed. It was expunged so thoroughly from Soviet cinematic history that even today Western film scholars neglect to include Alim in Tasin’s filmography, citing his next film, Order na arest (Arrest warrant, 1927), as his directoral debut.⁵⁵ Osman Akçokraklı and Üsein Bodaninsky, who uncovered Canmuhammed’s source material of a premodern Ukrainian–Crimean Tatar alliance, were arrested under charges of pan-Turkism, counter-revolutionary activity, and espionage. On 17 April 1938 the two were shot in Simferopol by the NKVD alongside dozens of other members of the Soviet Crimean Tatar intelligentsia. Their compatriot Ümer İpçi, who had collaborated with Mykola Bazhan on Alim’s screenplay, was arrested in 1937. He remained imprisoned until his death nearly two decades later, unable to protect his daughter Dzhevair from the tragedy of May 1944.

3.

In the middle of the night of 18 May 1944, Dzhevair İpçi awoke to the sound of “strong blows on the door.” She was fourteen years old. Two soldiers with machine guns gave her mother fifteen minutes to gather their belongings. The family’s Singer sewing machine was among the things she collected. “Leave it,” they told her mother, “or we shoot.” The armed men, Dzhevair remembers, treated them “like cattle” (kak skot), cursing at them while loading them onto the train. “In the train car,” she says, “there was no water, no toilet. For eighteen days we endured inhuman conditions.”56 At the same time, some fifty miles away, a sixteen-year-old Russian student in Yalta named Zoia Khabarova awoke to the sounds of shooting and screaming. She rushed out onto her balcony to find “men in military uniforms pushing and shoving our neighbours – Tatars – onto trucks.”⁵⁷ She grew worried about her Crimean Tatar friend Rita. In the morning of 19 May, Zoia ran to check on her: “Rita was gone. The apartment was open, everything strewn around […] I learned that they seized all the Tatars and sent them away last night. Rita’s father was a [Soviet] partisan. Why was she taken?”⁵⁸

Why? The Ukrainian writer and journalist Vasyl Sokil asked the same question in the late spring of 1944. He remembers waiting at a remote railway crossing in Kazakhstan and seeing a hand grasping tobacco leaves through a small opening in a waiting eastbound train car opposite his own. An urgent voice exclaimed from within the car: “Bread!” Moving closer, Sokil spied an old man desperate to exchange the tobacco for food. Behind his fragile, emaciated frame stood a group of figures barely clothed. There was a frantic exchange:

Confused, I asked the old man, “What happened? What’s wrong with these people?” The old man quipped with irritation, “Take the tobacco and give me some bread!” “How much?” He shot back, “However much you’ll give me, just make it quick! The train’s about to leave!” I rushed back and grabbed half a loaf […] The old man nearly ripped the bread out of my hand.

The trains had not yet left the junction, so I asked once again, “Where are you going?” The old man darkened and said in a detached voice, “Wherever they take us.” “But where are you from?” “What, haven’t you read the papers?” he replied angrily. “From Crimea. We’re Tatars […] Now there are none of us in Crimea.”

The whistle sounded, and the train went eastward with its prisoners […] Slowly the train cars passed by me, and staring out from the narrow cracks of its doors were old women, young women, children, grey-haired grandfathers.59

“Ty chto, gazet ne chital?” (What, haven’t you read the papers?) Sokil’s encounter lays bare a central paradox of the events of May 1944: namely, that a deportation of an entire people on a peninsula of over ten thousand square miles – carried out by NKVD agents in plain sight “with the speed of a landing attack,” in the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn – was not perceived by the Soviet public in the years immediately following the Second World War.⁶⁰

To an extent, this failure to perceive was wilful on the part of many Soviet citizens, particularly in Russia and Ukraine. Sokil recalls: “On my train there were many passengers [who had exchanged food for] these golden leaves of tobacco. But no one uttered a word about the encounter. They were silent. Some refused to let it in and did not understand, while others were frightened to address what was a dangerous subject.”⁶¹ For others scattered across the Soviet Union, however, this failure to perceive was the result of the Stalinist regime’s perverse adherence to George Berkeley’s dictum, esse est percipi. Removed from the field of perception, the Crimean Tatars would no longer exist.

Their discursive cleansing began suddenly. Only days before the deportation, the newspapers Pravda and Izvestiia had considered the heroism of Crimean Tatars good copy. The 12 May edition of Pravda, for instance, extolled the valour of Amethan (Amet-Khan) Sultan, whose reputation, the reader was told, struck fear in the hearts of the Germans.⁶² Born in 1920 in Alupka, where a bronze bust now stands in his honour on a boulevard in his name, Sultan was a Crimean Tatar pilot who was twice named a Hero of the Soviet Union.⁶³ His exploits as an ace pilot were legendary: in 1942, for example, discovering that his guns were jammed, Sultan rammed and forced down a German aircraft before parachuting to safety.⁶⁴

Between 12 and 18 May – between the authorization of the deportation and the first moments of its execution – Pravda and Izvestiia gave no indication whatsoever of the coming accusations of mass treason and betrayal that would be levelled against the Crimean Tatars. In fact, on Wednesday, 17 May, only hours before the NKVD began to execute Stalin’s Decree 5859ss, Pravda ran a front-page article with a headline in large, bold typeface, “Slava geroiam Kryma!” (Glory to the heroes of Crimea!), which celebrated the Red Army’s success in retaking the peninsula from the Germans, now in retreat. “Everyone,” the article read, “has become a hero in our country” (Geroem v nashei strane stanovitsia kazhdyi).

One of these heroes was Şamil Alâdin (1912–1996), a Crimean Tatar poet who had commanded a Red Army platoon on the southwestern front. After the Nazi retreat from Crimea, he deserved a joyous homecoming. What he experienced instead was a nightmare. In the late spring of 1944 he made his return to Simferopol only to find strangers living in his home. His wife, Fatma, and young daughter, Diliara, had been rounded up in the deportation and exiled to Central Asia, and a family by the name of Frankovsky had taken their place. There was an altercation at the door. The poet remembers the man at the threshold becoming “amused” when he realized Alâdin was a Crimean Tatar. “He understood that in front of him was a man, albeit in the uniform of an officer, who had no civil rights, whom no law would protect.”65 Alâdin set off eastward to find his family, evading imprisonment and fleeing from Crimean authorities. He later discovered Fatma and Diliara in Uzbekistan, near death from hunger in a special settlement camp.

Not far from Alâdin’s family, an eighteen-year-old poet named İdris Asanin confronted the trauma of the deportation through poetry in a special settlement camp near Samarkand. His “Menim antım” (My pledge), written in September 1944, is the first poem to resound in Crimean Tatar culture after the deportation. It is an echo of Noman Çelebicihan’s “Ant etkenmen,” the anthem composed in the haze of revolution and civil war that was discussed at the end of chapter 2. In 1951, “Menim antım” would be used against Asanin in a trial that sentenced him to twenty-five years in prison:

Yurtsız qalğan hor milletim, ğurbetlikte yüresiñ,

Açlıq, horluq, hastalıqtan sürü-sürü ölesiñ.

Mezarcılar yoruldılar, cenazeler qılınmay,

Dua-hatim bir yaq tursın, … olgen eske alınmay.

……………………………………

Bu ğarip halq aqsız yerde mında ölip bitsinmi,

Yurtnı basqan yağmacılar körip bayram etsinmi?

Millet artıq ğayıp ola, qaldı duşman şerine.

Tatar adı tarihlardan şan-şüretsiz siline.

…………………………… .

Nefretlenem, göñlüm taşa, kozlerimden yaş kele,

Tek bir Niyet — Küreş yolu… irademe kuç bere.

Men ant etem, ant etkenniñ izlerinden ketmege,

Milletimniñ aqqı içün canım feda etmege!66

(My aggrieved, homeless people, you are living in exile,

You are dying in droves from hunger, want, and disease.

The gravediggers have grown tired, our funerals are mocked,

Let alone the prayers… no one remembers the dead.

………………………………………‥

Should this poor nation unjustly die and perish here?

Should plunderers who have raided the homeland enjoy seeing this?

Your people are now lost, captive to an evil enemy,

While the Tatar name has been expunged from history, stripped of fame and glory.

…………………………………………………………… .

My heart boils over with hatred, tears are flowing from my eyes.

Only one purpose, the path of struggle, strengthens my will:

I pledge to follow in the footsteps of those who have pledged,

To sacrifice my soul for the rights of my people!)

Like Çelebicihan’s “Ant etkenmen,” Asanin’s poem centres on an explicit illocutionary moment – a pledge, an oath – whose utterance is also an act with social force. It models and performs an act of individual self-ascription to a beleaguered national community in need of reinforcement and cohesion, addressing a “you” that is ultimately a “we.” Through an intertext with the seminal work of the leader of the Qurultay, the poem also asserts the community’s historical continuity, restoring a circuit of memory that the event of the deportation sought to sever. These two concerns – national cohesion and historical continuity, grounded in and guided by the concept of the Crimean vatan – are at the heart of nearly every single work of Crimean Tatar–language literature after the deportation.

There is another notable attribute of this literature, evident only between the lines: an avoidance of direct mention of the deportation itself. Asanin’s poem rails against the consequences of an event of which it does not speak. There are no allusions to a fateful knock on the door, no references to a torturous journey in crowded cattle-cars bound to destinations unknown. This silence, as Jay Winter observes, “is a space where nobody speaks what everybody knows.”⁶⁷ In Crimean Tatar literature, with the exception of impressionistic stories by Ervin Umerov in the late Soviet period,⁶⁸ the deportation is only present in its effects: mass death, displacement, humiliation, despair. The exile experience is driven underground, into subterranean coded references that are hidden, for instance, in poetry dedicated to the nineteenth-century Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, who withstood years of brutal exile in Central Asia. A vibrant example is a poem by writer and teacher Yunus Temirkaya (1914–2004) entitled “Taras Şevçenkoğa” (To Taras Shevchenko, 1961):

Şuña sıltav etip olar quvdı seni,

Uzaqtaki yat-yabancı ülkelerge.

Yaş başıñdan bahıtsızlıq urdı seni,

Meşaqatlı qara künde kirdiñ yerge.69

(The [tyrants] sentenced you and drove you

To strange, alien, far-flung lands.

Misery beat the youth from your face,

And on that painful, black day you were exiled.)

In Crimean Tatar discourse, the deportation event is referred to as Qara Kün (The Black Day), and Temirkaya slides the term into a poem ostensibly about a Ukrainian poet in order to articulate, only obliquely, the pain and suffering of the tragedy. Such elusiveness is emblematic of much of the literature written by victims of Stalinist trauma. Reading this corpus is not unlike using sonar to plumb the recesses of an uncharted sea: we apprehend the object only by way of the disturbances and discontinuities its presence exerts on our frequency. In poems like Asanin’s “Menim antım” or Temirkaya’s “Taras Şevçenkoğa,” the deportation is not quite absent, nor has its trauma gone unrecognized or, in the words of Cathy Caruth, “unclaimed.”⁷⁰ It has been hastily entombed, its existence only evident at surface level – in a shifting of the textual ground, in pockmarks and debris.

The Crimean Tatars and countless other victims of Soviet state violence buried such trauma out of concern for survival both psychic and physical, out of an awareness that there was both no “Other to which one could say ‘Thou’ in the hope of being heard” and no secure public context in which this Other might emerge.⁷¹ This is the perverse double bind of Stalinist trauma: the challenge of bearing witness, and the prohibition to try. Decades after the deportation, Şamil Alâdin was asked why he had not used the event as fodder for a short story or novel. Shrugging his shoulders in exasperation, he replied: “What for? And who would publish it? We are forbidden not only to write but also to think about the past.”⁷²

4.

The conspiracy between discursive cleansing and ethnic cleansing is an indiscriminate assault on the past and the future, a crime of both body and name. As the bodies of the survivors of Stalin’s Crimean atrocity endured conditions in “special settlement camps,” their names were effaced from the land that they had called home for centuries, as if they had never been there. Traces of their past presence on maps and signs were thrown into what Robert Conquest, after Orwell, calls “the memory hole.”73 Before the deportation there were, by one count, 1,775 towns and villages in Crimea bearing a Crimean Tatar toponym.⁷⁴ After the deportation only a small number remained.

This reterritorialization of Crimea took place at breakneck speed. In October and December of 1944 the Crimean oblast party committee and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR issued decrees calling for Crimean Tatar (and German and Krymchak) names of cities, towns, and villages to be replaced with Russian ones.⁷⁵ Pushkin seemed to have helped exempt Bakhchisarai from this process; the fame of his Bakhchisaraiskii fontan was a small finger in the dike of this discursive cleansing.⁷⁶ The daunting task of renaming most of the rest of the peninsula fell to a fastidious “old newspaper man,” the executive secretary of Krasnyi Krym (Red Crimea), who came up with the new toponyms by hastily consulting a nineteenth-century fruticulture book, on the one hand, and a recent account of the Red Army’s Crimean offensive, on the other.⁷⁷ Hence the descriptive and patriotic functionalism of the post-1944 onomastics: Kiçkene, a village near Simferopol with only 156 recorded residents in 1939, became Malenkoe (Small); Aşağı Camin, a small settlement in the Sak region, became Geroiskoe (Of Heroes); Bağça-Eli became Bagotoe (Rich). Some villages saw their unique place names – which could bear sacred religious meaning or allude to a founding family or a particular regional economic identity⁷⁸ – replaced by unimaginative collective ones: Alma Kerman (Apple Fortress), Savurçı (Tanner), and Yanış Taqıl (a Crimean Tatar family name) all became Zavetnoe (Cherished), for example.

These saccharine toponyms often “forgot” the many tragedies endured by local Crimean communities during the war. Qutlaq, a village in the Sudak region first cited in historical records in the fifteenth century, had a majority population of 1,636 Tatars in 1939. For assisting the Soviet partisan movement during the war, its residents had to watch as Nazi occupiers retaliated by burning the village to the ground. Qutlaq was later named Veseloe (Happy). Büyük Özenbaş, a village near Bakhchisarai, was overtaken by the Nazis one fateful dawn. “With lashes and the butts of rifles, [the Germans] rounded up the fleeing villagers, mocking them cruelly. Many of the villagers, looking for rescue, ran to the mosque. Once praying had begun inside, the Nazis doused the mosque with gasoline and incinerated it.”79 After May 1944, Büyük Özenbaş was named Schastlyvoe (Lucky).

These mawkish place names echo in Petr Pavlenko’s short story “Rassvet” (Dawn, 1945). It is an unwittingly chilling text that recounts the distribution of Crimean Tatar homes and property to Ukrainian and Russian Soviet settlers – without breathing a single word about the owners who had been deported only months earlier. “Rassvet” reveals what happened immediately after the ethnic cleansing of Crimea: ethnic cloning. Soviet authorities repopulated the peninsula with Slavic peoples, describing the project of changing its demography as the task of “making Crimea a new Crimea with its own Russian form” (sdeliat Krym novym Krymom so svoim russkim ukladom).⁸⁰

Pavlenko’s story is not widely read in Russia today, but thanks to Cengiz Dağcı, it has notoriety in Turkey, as we will see in chapter 6. Pavlenko is typically remembered as a “Stalin cult specialist” responsible for some of the most egregious panegyrics to the General Secretary, including his popular Stalin Prize–winning novel Schaste (Happiness, 1947) about the revival of a Crimean collective farm at the end of the war.⁸¹ He was an enthusiastic apologist of the Stalinist regime, who cruelly taunted an ailing Mandelshtam during an NKVD interrogation.⁸² Earlier, in the 1920s, he had also become something of an amateur Orientalist, serving as a Soviet trade officer to Turkey and penning travelogues about Central Asia and the Far East. In 1945, finding himself in Crimea at the close of the war, he was therefore primed to see the remnants of Crimean Tatar culture all around him. But in “Rassvet,” Pavlenko carefully curates their absence. It is an audacious feat of discursive cleansing.

At times Pavlenko almost lets slip the truth that he strains so hard to conceal. He describes Alushta as “quiet, truly deserted” (tikhaia, tochno ubezliudevshaia).⁸³ “Orchards and tobacco plots glimmer on warm hills” – the identity of those who cultivated them is ignored – while across the sea, the horizon touches Turkey. His protagonist, an elderly Ukrainian man known by his surname Kostiuk, tours a house given to him by the head of the collective farm. It is a former Crimean Tatar residence, although its provenance is unspoken: “The house was small, but tidy and strong. The glass veranda overlooked a tiny, vine-covered courtyard […] A few strange trees with aromatic foliage stood around the edges of the courtyard.”⁸⁴ Pavlenko peppers the story with the odd Ukrainian word to convey a sense of Kostiuk’s provincial nature and his intimate attachment to Ukraine – and to paper over, with sympathetic character traits, an act of complicity in Stalin’s Crimean atrocity. Kostiuk embraces his new Crimean home, because “the local beauty stung [uzhalila] him and conquered him forever.” Taking off his hat, he proclaims with gratitude at the end of the story, “You gave us paradise, dear Comrade Stalin. God give you strength – and good luck to us!”85

Pavlenko’s “Rassvet” is the first portrait of Crimea as a new Soviet frontier, as red virgin soil awaiting, in the manner of a novel by Zane Grey, caravans of dewy-eyed settlers. It makes transparent the Soviet project of settler colonialism in Crimea, whereby tens of thousands of indigenous inhabitants were forcibly removed and replaced by tens of thousands of exogenous Russians and Ukrainians. Between 1944 and 1946 alone, over sixty-four thousand settlers from five oblasts of the Russian SFSR and four oblasts of the Ukrainian SSR were transported to Crimea, where they were allotted Crimean Tatar homes and offered state subsidies for their repair.⁸⁶ Tens of thousands more arrived in the 1950s.⁸⁷ As Patrick Wolfe explains, “settler colonies are not primarily established to extract surplus value from indigenous labour. Rather, they are premised on displacing indigenes from (or replacing them on) the land; as Deborah Bird Rose points out, to get in the way all the native has to do is stay at home.”⁸⁸ Crimea was not only settler-colonial territory but territory freighted with particular ideological significance in the Soviet and Russian imaginaries: a homogenous space thick with rhetoric of “glory” and “heroism” divorced from, and silent about, the living past of its indigenous peoples.

A year after the publication of Pavlenko’s “Rassvet,” Soviet authorities finally made public mention of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars – but only vaguely. On Wednesday, 26 June 1946, Izvestiia published a series of decrees of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from the preceding day. Under the heading “Concerning the Abolition of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR and the Transformation of the Crimean ASSR into the Crimean Oblast,” the following text appeared on the third page, positioned below a prosaic announcement about the formation of a ministry of cinematography at the union republic level:

Во время Великой Отечественной войны […] многие чеченцы и крымские татары по наущению немецких агентов вступали в организованные немцами добровольческие отряды и вместе с немецкими войсками вели вооруженную борьбу против частей Красной Армии […] [О]сновная масса населения Чечено-Ингушской и Крымской АССР не оказывали противодействия этим предателям Родины.⁸⁹

(During the Great Patriotic War […] many Chechens and Crimean Tatars, at the instigation of German agents, participated in volunteer brigades organized by the Germans and conducted an armed struggle against units of the Red Army together with German soldiers […] A critical mass of the population of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR and Crimean ASSR did not show opposition to these traitors to the Motherland.)

The decree continues euphemistically that, for failing to rise up against those who presumably collaborated with German occupiers, “the Chechens and Crimean Tatars were relocated [pereseleny] to other regions of the Soviet Union. In these new regions they were allotted land and given the government assistance needed for their economic development.”

Despite its heading, the 1946 Presidium decree has little to do with “the abolition of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR and the transformation of the Crimean ASSR into the Crimean oblast.” These administrative changes had been made de facto a year before, on 30 June 1945.90 Instead, the decree offered Moscow an opportunity to legitimate quietly the post-war deportation campaigns – the bureaucratese of its heading and its relegation to Izvestiia’s third page did not encourage close reading – and at the same time to advance the main elements of the narrative of mass Crimean Tatar (and Chechen and Ingush) treason, for uptake in the sphere of cultural discourse. After all, the year 1946 saw Andrei Zhdanov, the resurgent ideological boss of the Communist Party, forcefully repeat the maxim that where the state leads, literature follows. Soviet literature, he declared in an infamous rebuke of the journals Zvezda (Star) and Leningrad, “does not have, nor can it have, any interests besides […] the interests of the state.”⁹¹ The 1946 Presidium decree articulated these interests with respect to the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, furnishing fabula for a siuzhet that would emerge on the pages of Soviet documentary and historical novels.

The negative effect of these post-war novels would be felt for decades. In a petition to the United Nations written decades after Stalin’s death, Crimean Tatar activists would in fact condemn what they called a “special school dedicated to the distortion of the past and the present of the Crimean Tatars” and populated by such figures as Ivan Kozlov, whose popular novelistic memoir V krymskom podpole (In the Crimean underground) won a Stalin Prize in 1948, and Arkady Perventsev, whose novel Chest smolodu (Childhood of a Hero) won a Stalin Prize in 1949.⁹² V krymskom podpole, which recounts Kozlov’s exploits as a leader of the partisan underground based in Simferopol, follows the 1946 decree and declares that “the Tatars were traitors [predateli] from the very beginning of the war.”93 Moreover, when confronted with facts that testify to the participation of Crimean Tatars in the partisan movement against the Germans, Kozlov obscures the truth so as not to contradict the Presidium’s pronouncement. He refers to the Simferopol-based underground organization of the Crimean Tatar Abdulla Dağcı (Abdulla Dagdzhi), for example, only by a Russian nickname, “Diadia Volodia” (Uncle Volodia).⁹⁴ He also catalogues a number of individuals who, judging by their surnames, were Russian and Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi forces, but he never makes explicit mention of their respective nationalities. Crimean Tatars are not afforded the same courtesy.⁹⁵ The reader encounters, for instance, “Mirka the Tatar prostitute” and the “Tatar Karabash,” “leader of an [anti-partisan] retribution detachment.”⁹⁶ As the scholar and activist Refik Muzafarov notes, this telling double standard calls to mind Maksim Gorky’s famous remark in The Life of Klim Samgin (Zhizn Klima Samgina, 1927–36): “When a Russian steals something, they say, ‘A thief stole it,’ but when a Jew steals something, they say, ‘The Jew stole it.’”⁹⁷

The UN petition expresses particular scorn for Perventsev’s Chest smolodu (Childhood of a Hero, 1949), which is also set during the war. The novel’s protagonist and narrator, the komsomolets (member of the Soviet youth movement) and partisan Sergei Lagunov – whose beloved Liusia, toward the end of the novel, finds a volume of Pushkin’s poetry and recites a passage from the coda of Bakhchisaraiskii fontan – expounds at length about an egregious “betrayal” of the Soviet Union perpetrated by the Crimean Tatar people. Lecturing his Crimean Tatar friend Fatih (Fatykh), Lagunov proclaims:

При советской власти крымские татары получили республику, братское содружество русского и других народов СССР, свободу от эксплуатации. Советская власть подняла этот народ, поставила на ноги, дала все для развития, для настоящей жизни, а они послушались своих злейших врагов и качали массовое предательство […] Многие крымские татары, ты знаешь, Фатых, по наущению немецких агентов вступили в организованные немцами добровольческие отряды, ведут вооруженную борьбу вместе с немецкими войсками против Красной Армии, против партизан. Как можно продавать свою совесть, свою страну? Ведь большинство населения крымских татар не оказывает противодействия этим предателям родины, помогает им, и тем самым весь народ теряет свою честь […] А если потерял честь, значит потерял все…

(Under Soviet rule the Crimean Tatars received their own republic, the fraternal friendship of the Russian people as well as the other peoples of the USSR, and freedom from exploitation. Soviet authorities embraced the Crimean Tatar people, stood them on their feet, and gave everything they could for their development, for a genuine life, but [the Crimean Tatars] obeyed their own worst enemies and initiated mass treason […] Under the instruction of German agents, many Crimean Tatars, you know, Fatih, joined volunteer brigades organized by the Germans and embarked on an armed struggle together with German troops against the Red Army and the partisans. How could they sell out their conscience, their country? The majority of the Crimean Tatar population did not oppose these traitors to the Motherland and helped them, and the entire nation by its own devices lost its honour […] And if you lose your honour, you lose everything.)98

With care and precision, Perventsev incorporated the text of the 1946 Presidium decree verbatim into his narrative, offering evidence of the top-down, hand-in-glove working relationship between the Soviet state and its writers at the height of zhdanovshchina (Zhdanov era). Decades after the publication of Chest smolodu, Perventsev would confess to Crimean Tatar activists that his exploitation of the defamatory stereotype of the Crimean Tatar traitor came not at his own initiative but on order from above.⁹⁹