Chapter Four

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The Guiltless Guilty

While Ivan Kozlov and Arkady Perventsev were collecting Stalin Prizes, Boris Chichibabin was imprisoned in one of the largest Gulag camp systems in the Russian north, a sprawling, overcrowded “spider’s web” of starvation and disease.1 In time Chichibabin would become, in the words of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “one of the most prominent contemporary [Russian] poets.”² But between 1946 and 1951 Chichibabin shuttled between prisons and penal colonies before enduring forced labour in the notorious Viatlag camp complex, logging in the forests of the taiga alongside hardened criminals and political prisoners. Through it all, poetry was a companion. Fellow inmates remember him “mischievously” reciting the experimental poetry of Ilia Selvinsky and, in quieter moments, debating Vladimir Maiakovsky’s views on Soviet authority.³ The putative “crime” that brought him to the camps was “anti-Soviet agitation.”Shortly after returning home from the Transcaucasian front in 1945, he had been pulled out of Kharkiv University in eastern Ukraine and arrested for a stanza warning of the dawn of a new post-war Terror.⁴ What had been a warning became an example.

Chichibabin was released in 1951. Years later he sought solace in what Liliia Karas-Chichibabina called his favourite place on earth: Crimea.⁵ He had been there once before the war, as a teenager. The crisp sea air, the rugged mountains, the verdant flora – Crimea’s hold on him was immediate, and it never slackened. Yet the Black Sea peninsula to which Chichibabin returned after the war, after his trials in the Stalinist Gulag, was as radically changed as he was. The Crimean Tatars were no longer there. As Liliia describes it, this discovery “did not let him rest.” It deeply affected him with “a feeling of guilt [chuvstvo viny] in the presence of the land, a compassion for another’s grief.”⁶ Rather than shaking his head and looking away, rather than succumbing to quiet cynicism or even a sense of self-preservation, Chichibabin confronted the injustice of the deportation and foregrounded it as one of the most consistent themes of his poetry. He and Liliia circulated this verse widely in networks of samizdat (samvydav, in Ukrainian; “self-published”) literature. During poetry readings, at a time when knowledge of the deportation remained confined to hushed whispers, he shouted it from stages.

Such poetry not only exposed Stalin’s Crimean atrocity but also cleared space for greater exposure. It began to rouse the conscience of Soviet publics before appeals and open letters emerged to press for the right of the Crimean Tatars to return to their homeland. The primacy of literature here is no accident. In the Soviet Union, poetry especially was the big bang of samizdat culture; in its wake came constellations of documentary texts at odds with state agendas and practices.7 And so it was with the deportation of the Crimean Tatars: in the revelation of the crime, the role of imaginative literature was paramount. But it was also peculiar. As we will see, these literary texts invite the reader to process an emotion that non-literary works of samizdat largely avoid: guilt.

Most of the documentary chronicles, appeals, and petitions about the deportation present it as an event whose victims are human but whose perpetrators are impersonal and distant or, alternatively, an inhuman few: Stalin, Beriia, NKVD commissar Bogdan Kobulov. They aim to spur the reader to action by enumerating the state’s violations of the laws and principles set down in domestic constituent documents (e.g., the Soviet constitution) and international charters (e.g., the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). Literary texts about the deportation, however, work differently. They engender a deeper introspection, appealing to the reader’s conscience rather than to externally codified law. Through the unique indeterminacies of their form, they co-opt the reader into a unique communicative circuit and approach her, in the words of the poet Aleksandr Tvardovsky, as one of the “guiltless guilty” (vinovaty bez viny).⁸

1.

For writers and poets like Chichibabin and Tvardovsky, Stalin’s death marked a turning point in the relationship between literature and the state, a relationship long tumultuous in the region of the Black Sea. Under Stalin’s rule the relationship in the Soviet Union had hardened into a socialist-realist orthodoxy enforced by arrests and disappearances. Writers held the Party line or suffered consequences under charges of “formalism” or “bourgeois nationalism.” In the eyes of the Kremlin, as Joseph Brodsky remarked, they were either “a slave” or “an enemy.”⁹ In Turkey, by contrast, writers and cultural figures experienced what might be called a thaw after Atatürk’s death in 1938. There, social realism remained a popular genre, but Turkish literature enjoyed a relative diversification and experimentation in artistic form and practice.10 Poets like Orhan Veli discarded what Atatürk called “committed [gayeli] poetry”¹¹ for the surreal, the strange, and the sardonic, sending up Atatürk şiirler (or, more broadly, milli şiirler, “nation poetry”) with the epigram “For the Homeland” (Vatan İçin, 1949): “What haven’t we done for the homeland! / Some of us died; others gave speeches.”¹² Veli and his compatriots brought about what the poet Ece Ayhan likens to a “golden age” in Turkish poetry.¹³ In Stalin’s Soviet Union, however, Party-minded writers dogged by censors (both internal and external) endured an iron age, a period of artistic rigidity, formularism, and cliché.¹⁴

Windows in the “communal apartment” of the USSR opened somewhat after Stalin’s death in 1956 with the landmark publications of such works as Vladimir Dudintsev’s Ne khlebom edinym (Not by Bread Alone, 1956) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Odin den Ivana Denisovicha (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1962) in the journal Novyi Mir (New World). At this time, writers and poets circumventing Soviet censors or shunning official publication found more and more readers in the alleys and gangways of unofficial, samizdat literature. Talent that was free of ideological fetters, of what William Blake called “mind-forg’d manacles” – either from preceding decades (Anna Akhmatova, Mykola Khvylovy) or from the contemporary moment (Joseph Brodsky, Lina Kostenko) – discovered select audiences through typewritten, carbon-smudged onionskin pages passed hand to hand.¹⁵ According to Vladimir Bukovsky, typewriters throughout the Moscow underground were overwhelmed at this time with one task: the transcription of “poems, poems, poems.”¹⁶

These literary texts were often transcribed in samizdat notebooks compiled by individual readers. In turn, these notebooks could become source material for unofficial almanacs published for wider networks of readers. These networks, in the words of Nadiia Svitlychna, “intersected in some places, and diverged in others,” spreading texts thither and yon, as Liudmila Alekseeva put it, like “mushroom spores.”¹⁷ Aleksandr Ginzburg’s Moscow apartment was one point of network convergence for what would eventually become both the Russian and the Ukrainian human rights movements. His 1959 almanac Sintaksis (Syntax), the first prominent exemplar of samizdat, provided an outlet for such Moscow- and Leningrad-based poets as Bulat Okudzhava and Dmitry Bobyshev. It also marked a watershed. In the words of Aleksandr Daniel, the emergence of Sintaksis represented nothing less than a “declaration of independence of the cultural process.”18 As if staking claim to the moment, Ginzburg printed his name on the cover, which he had adopted from his mother in a defiant protest against Soviet anti-Semitism. Two years later he was arrested for “anti-Soviet agitation.”¹⁹

The first issue of Sintaksis in 1959 opened with a loose sonnet without a title by Aleksandr Aronov. Its very first words jettison the reader into an underspecified exchange between anonymous first and second persons: “I would not dare take you / Into that addled age [zaputavshiisia vek].”²⁰ Aronov’s lyrical “I” is disingenuous: his words perforce “take” and seize the reader with a perplexing lack of clarity and pretext. Who is this spoken “you”? Why is the age “addled”? He continues ominously:

В это время, в это время,

Камни по небу скользят.

Им на землю падать вредно,

А не падать им —

нельзя.

(At this time, at this time,

Stones glide across the sky.

They bring peril when they fall,

But fall they must.)

Writing or transcribing such opaque and sullen lines, distributing more political, satirical ones, or simply keeping such literature at home – this creative activity could warrant classification from the 1960s in the West and later in the Soviet Union as “dissidence.” Those who undertook such diverse activity could become grouped, nolens volens, under the term “dissidents” – even they used scare quotes at times, tending to prefer instead the term inakomysliashchye (inakodumtsi in Ukrainian; “other-thinkers”)²¹ – who were romanticized in the West as an army of heroic activists committed to the demise of the Communist regime and vilified in the Soviet Union as a clique of deviant, disloyal “dropouts” (nedouchki).²² The term dissident belonged more to the definers than to the defined.

Literature, particularly poetry, was thus a spark to the flame of Soviet dissent. It exercized a socializing function, integrated diverse readerships, and cleared ground for the cultivation of inakomyslie (Russian) or inakodumstvo (Ukrainian), “other-thinking.” This foundational influence has been universally acknowledged by scholars and activists alike. In fact, Aleksandr Daniel speaks of the first generation of dissidence from the late 1950s to 1965 as literaturotsentrichnyi (literature-centric).”²³ Viacheslav Chornovil, writing anonymously in the first issue of the samvydav periodical Ukraïnskyi visnyk (The Ukrainian Herald), emphasizes that the first stirrings of dissent in Soviet Ukraine were principally belles-lettres.24 More colourfully, the Ukrainian poet Iryna Zhylenko describes the Soviet Union of this era as “Poetry Land”: “Not only Kyiv (and Ukraine), but the entire Soviet Union exploded with poetry.” She continues: “At this time poetry was the only form of protest. It filled an empty hole in the soul of the Soviet person.”²⁵

In the conventional historical account of Soviet dissent, however, literature appears much like the muse in Homer’s epics. It is invoked early as a font of inspiration, often with praise for its otherworldly, “spiritual” power.²⁶ It then recedes into the background.²⁷ Natalia Gorbanevskaia describes this transition as an evolution in samizdat “from a predominant concern with poetry and fiction toward a greater emphasis on journalistic and documentary writing.”²⁸ As a poet turned chronicler who launched the influential periodical Khronika tekushchykh sobytii (Chronicle of Current Events) – modelled after the “information bulletins” of the Crimean Tatars – Gorbanevskaia personified this transformation. She also performed it. With a simple adjustment to her portable Olympia typewriter, she replaced the type-bars that she used for her underground poetry with new ones for Khronika in order to avoid identification by the KGB.²⁹ This is often considered to be the moment when literary samizdat gave way to social samizdat, when the “cultural opposition” became the social opposition.³⁰ This transition was noticed in Turkey as early as 1971 by prominent legal scholar and diplomat İzmet Giritli, who remarked that the Soviet “Literary Opposition” (Edebi Muhalefet), despite ceding attention to documentary samizdat, still occupied a privileged position because it “appeals to a wider audience” (daha geniş bir kitleye hitap etmektedir).³¹

Often downplayed in the story of this social or documentary turn – which can understate the persistence of imaginative literature in samizdat culture well after it³² – is a simple but critical question: why literature in the first instance? Why did literature overwhelmingly predominate in the decisive early years of Soviet dissent? Samizdat has been called many things – a corpus, a culture, a genre, a mode, a field – but it may be also understood (the stubborn fact of Soviet communism aside) as a market. Specifically, it was a parallel market, operating with its own means of exchange alongside, but in competition with, the state. Its prevailing product was knowledge. “Dissidents” were its brokers and entrepreneurs. What kind of knowledge did literature offer in this environment, where information was so tightly regulated and the stakes of exchange so high?

Answers to such questions seem close at hand, but they tend to have us grasping at air. Alekseeva remarks that in her youth unofficial poetry and prose helped yield “a realistic picture of what was going on in our country.”33 Her comment rests on a presumption that the unreal – anonymous lyrical personae and fictional characters and events – can engender an apprehension of the real. But how do we derive empirical knowledge about the world from imaginary sources? Such eternal questions spawn only more questions, exposing in the process a paradox at the heart of Soviet dissent: namely, that it was an influential social movement for transparency, honesty, and disclosure founded on a rhetoric of concealment, obfuscation, and implication. To live “not by the lie,” as Solzhenitsyn famously put it,³⁴ dissidents frequently turned to something other than the truth. They turned to the imaginary.

In search of an explanation for this appeal to literature, we are tempted to resort to familiar arguments fed by our intuition. One argument relates to the content of a literary work. “Contemplating how the phenomenon of dissidence could have arisen in an isolated society,” writes Andrei Amalrik, “I think first of all about the role of Russian literature [and] the passion of this literature in defence of the individual against the system.”³⁵ Such a characterization only takes us so far. Putting aside the question of conservative collectivist or nationalist samizdat, what are we to make of underground literature in which the lines between the individual and the system are not clearly drawn, in which “everyone is guilty” and complicit in what Vasily Grossman calls “our human indecency” (nashe chelovecheskoe nepotrebstvo)?³⁶ What are we to make of Grossman’s Anna Sergeevna in Vse techet (Everything Flows, 1961), a character who recounts her own eager, callous involvement in the forced starvation of the Ukrainian peasantry in 1932–3? Of Lidiia Chukovskaia’s Sofia Petrovna, who is more willing to believe in “the system” than in her own son?³⁷

Another argument is material. “Samizdat began with poems,” speculates Alekseeva, “perhaps due to the ease with which we could retype them, given their modest size.”³⁸ Her astute remark centres on the question of materiality and practical efficiency: that is, poems were used to yield “a realistic picture of what was going on” because they were relatively short, duplicable, portable, and easy to memorize.³⁹ In the parallel market of samizdat they could facilitate communication about the world with reach and alacrity. Here again, things are not so straightforward. After all, literature, particularly poetry, “pushes communication to the background.”⁴⁰ It does not get to the point, at least not in a conventional sense. Roman Jakobson goes so far as to say that it subjects communication to a form of “organized violence” (organizovannoe nasilie).41 His Formalist colleague Viktor Shklovsky tempers his language, but the point is still the same. Literature revels in the ambiguous and the indeterminate, notes Shklovsky, and increases “the difficulty and length of perception.”⁴² It is, in a word, strange.

Literature’s strangeness was implicitly recognized by Gorbanevskaia in the preparation of Khronika tekushchykh sobytii, which adopted a dry “objective tone” that fled from ambiguity and indeterminacy. Inspired by the informational bulletins produced by the exiled Crimean Tatar community after 1965, Khronika avoided excessive editorial commentary and sought “to be very exact, to lay out the facts, to describe the violation of rights, to quote articles of law.”⁴³ Arrests, court proceedings, demonstrations, and state abuses were chronicled with great precision, names and dates meticulously cited. It appeared to be the farthest thing from the work of literary intellectuals.⁴⁴ What was written was what was meant; there was little place for metaphor or allusion or play. A representative passage: “In the cell of VADIM DELONE [Delaunay], a participant in the Red Square Demonstration of 25 August [1968] and an inmate in a camp in Tiumen, authorities discovered his poem ‘The Ballad of Unbelief’ during a search. For this poem Delaunay was placed in solitary confinement for ten days.”⁴⁵ The editors of Khronika do not give the text of Delaunay’s poem, which had been circulating in samizdat for years. To do so would have been to mingle Khronika’s clinical constative rhetoric with something else: a verse form with a peculiar “expectation of meaningfulness” that exceeds a straightforward expository function.⁴⁶

If samizdat was the “core” of Soviet dissent, as Alekseeva posits, then this core was riven: between the representation of what Aristotle called hoia an genoito (that which might happen) and the representation of ta genomena (that which did happen). In the Poetics this divergence is at the heart of Aristotle’s discussion of poiesis and historia, which leads him to elevate the former over the latter as more “worthwhile.” Here I do not mean to draw a hard and fast line between poetry and history or between the literary and the documentary. To be sure, apart from periodicals like Khronika tekushchykh sobytii, Soviet samizdat could often breach the boundaries between them. Documentary samizdat could mount “experiments in literary investigation,” as in the famous case of Solzhenitsyn’s Arkhipelag Gulag (The Gulag Archipelago, 1973). Likewise, literary samizdat could exercise a documentary function, informing audiences of harrowing events about which no one dared to speak, as in the case of Vasyl Barka’s Zhovtyi kniaz (The yellow prince), a novel that appeared in samvydav in 1962 to confront the Holodomor, Stalin’s man-made famine of 1932–3, which killed millions in Ukraine alone.

Aristotle’s distinction between poiesis and historia is helpful here in its choice of time signature, which in turn clarifies, in his philosophy, the range of objects of literary and historical knowledge. The optative in hoia an genoito conveys a sense of potentiality, allowing poiesis to gesture toward universals. The aorist in ta genomena carries a force similar to that of the perfective aspect in Slavic languages, restricting historia to particulars realized in a specific place and time. Documentary samizdat, exemplified by Khronika tekushchykh sobytii, is time bound in this sense. It is also often, but not always, time sensitive, calling for urgent action on the part of the reader in the real world. By comparison, literary samizdat is never time bound, but it is often time sensitive. It is an open invitation to exercise the optative – to revisit the past, for instance, and make it present in the act of creative reading.

The knowledge on offer in the market of literary samizdat, in other words, was a knowledge-how, a priming of what Kant characterized as the “productive imagination,” a kinetic force actively shaping the contours of human experience anew.47 By revelling in the opaque and trafficking in the disjointed, literary samizdat challenged the reader to work through what Wolfgang Iser calls “suspensions of connectibility” and to engage in the construction of new, virtual worlds of her own. This power is the reason that literature, especially poetry, dominated the early years of samizdat and helped facilitate the rise of Soviet dissent. It was a training ground. It not only provided an outlet for critical views, defended the individual against the system, or promoted efficient communication. Above all, in an environment of restricted thought and speech, literature also exercised muscles of ideation and empowered circles of readers to forge and pursue new itineraries of meaning and action, itineraries that could provide coordinates for social opposition. As we shall see, in the case of literary responses to Stalin’s Crimean atrocity, this pursuit could bear the hallmarks of lived experience and convey an emotional urgency all its own. In pockets of activity across the region of the Black Sea, it spurred prosocial action and enabled across ethnic, linguistic, and religious borders something that was never a given: a flowering of solidarity with an alienated nation thousands of miles away.

2.

Inviting readers to remake the world in conditions hostile to ideological pluralism is, of course, a dangerous undertaking. Boris Chichibabin always seemed to do so from a position on the periphery. His home in Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, less than thirty miles from the border with Soviet Russia, was at a physical remove from the literary circles of Moscow and Saint Petersburg and at an additional linguistic remove from the Ukrainian-language literary circles of Kyiv and Lviv. As he explains in “Rodnoi iazyk” (My native tongue, 1951), in Ukraine “I am a Russian,” but in Russia “I am taken for a ‘topknot’” (khokhol).48

In the 1960s Chichibabin led a Kharkiv poetry studio that regularly drew large crowds and proved a popular venue for up-and-coming poets: Aleksandr Vernik, Yuri Miloslavsky, Eduard Siganevich. Chichibabin used his live readings as an opportunity to reach his audiences with a “political spirit” typically exorcised in his programmatic printed works by Soviet censors.⁴⁹ “In his publications everything was purged, prepared, and selected in advance,” recalls the journalist Feliks Rakhlin. “But on stage his words were much harder for the censors to monitor. The poems Chichibabin read at poetry evenings and the poems he published were often completely different works.”⁵⁰

A mainstay in his performances, “Krymskie progulki” (Crimean strolls, 1959–60) was never published in the Soviet period. Today it stands as the first non–Crimean Tatar literary work to confront the 1944 deportation. For Crimean Tatar poet Şakir Selim, Chichibabin was at the vanguard of a literary defence of their rights, the leader of a phalanx of poets “with conscience” (vicdanlılar).⁵¹ Chichibabin’s frequent recitation of “Krymskie progulki” across the Soviet Union caused friends to worry for his safety. As Rakhlin noted, “I was concerned for Boris. He was very good on stage, where he often delivered his poems directly to the people […] And he consistently read ‘Krymskie progulki,’ a poem that condemned the Stalinist deportation of the Crimean Tatars and other peoples, when it was not possible to hear about such things.”⁵² He recited the poem in the 1960s at Grigory Levin’s renowned Magistral literary gathering at the Railworkers’ Central House of Culture in Moscow (Tsentralnyi dom kultury zheleznodorozhnikov, TsDKZh).⁵³ The Moscow-based poet and critic Vladimir Leonovich underscored the risk he was taking there: “The Crimean theme […] fell under article 58–10 [of the Russian SFSR penal code] and therefore under article 70: anti-Soviet agitation, the distribution of state secrets [gostainy], nationalist propaganda. Chichibabin was a former prisoner of the Gulag [lagernik], and he knew this all too well. But you should have seen and heard how he read the poem in Moscow at TsDKZh.”⁵⁴

Transcribed and passed hand to hand without his name, “Krymskie progulki” circulated in samizdat throughout the Soviet Union for decades. As late as 1987 the poem found its way into an appeal to Mikhail Gorbachev, where it served as a powerful addendum.⁵⁵ But because of the material transience of samizdat – its capacity to be “ephemeral” and to “disappear without a trace”56 – it is virtually impossible to follow closely the poem’s journey in the literary underground. To understand its reception, we cannot turn to stores of letters from readers to a journal editor or publisher, for instance.⁵⁷ At times we are left with only glimpses. Mustafa Dzhemilev – the legendary Soviet dissident widely considered the leader of the Crimean Tatar people – remembers discovering it in Tashkent sometime in the early 1960s. “When I read ‘Krymskie progulki,’ the first thought I had was, ‘How much time in prison will he get for this?’” he said. “Because in Soviet times, you could not write such a thing and escape punishment. Once the poem fell into my hands, we circulated it everywhere.”⁵⁸

What made “Krymskie progulki” ostensibly dangerous from the point of view of Soviet authorities? One evident factor was its treatment of the deportation and the Crimean Tatar “problem” at a time when, as Rakhlin put it, “it was not possible to hear about such things” – even after the many revelations of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” which made no mention of Stalin’s Crimean atrocity.⁵⁹ Viktor Shklovsky, for example, convinced friend and collaborator Sergei Paradzhanov not to pursue a film project based on Pushkin’s Bakhchisaraiskii fontan for this very reason. “The theme of Crimea,” he wrote, “is for us a particularly closed national theme, because in Crimea there are no longer any Crimean Tatars” (v Krymu net krymskikh tatar).⁶⁰ Indeed, the Soviet state continued to remain silent about the deportation operation beyond the 1946 Presidium decree buried in the dense typeface of Izvestiia. Even those like Kozlov and Perventsev who slandered the Crimean Tatars in literary prose declined to detail what their “punishment” actually was. Indeed, the very fact that “Krymskie progulki” could not be published at any point in the Soviet era attests to the deportation’s particular radioactivity: it was an identifiable, ongoing crime committed by the Soviet state, an actus reus whose envelopment in silence and lies betrayed a mens rea, a guilty mind.

A samizdat work of documentary journalism exposing the brutality of the deportation could have performed the same informative function around 1960, when “Krymskie progulki” first circulated in the underground. But Chichibabin’s text is a poem, and its status as a work of imaginative literature is no incidental detail. What accounts for its putative threat to the regime was its literary added value: an efficient manipulation of affect, its “notation of the heart,” as Thorton Wilder would call it.⁶¹ “Writing [in a documentary mode] about a specific injustice has clear practical importance, but great poetry can attract a wider audience,” notes Dzhemilev, adding, “‘Krymskie progulki’ clearly had a huge emotional impact [ogromnoe emotionalnoe vozdeistvie] on people.”⁶² The renowned Ukrainian civic activist and former Soviet dissident Myroslav Marynovych agrees. “The fact that it is poetry increases the emotionality of perception [emotsiinist spryiniattia]. Reading a dry list of historical facts, one works the mind, but reading poetry, one works the heart.”63 Marynovych encountered Chichibabin’s poems when he was a prisoner in the Perm-36 Gulag camp complex, where fellow inmate Genrikh Altunian – a dissident and mutual friend whom Chichibabin celebrated as a “guardian of honour”⁶⁴ – often recited them by heart.⁶⁵

In alluding to the poem’s “emotional impact” and “emotionality,” Dzhemilev and Marynovych do not specify any one emotion in particular. But Chichibabin does. He foregrounds guilt. In correspondence with a Crimean Tatar activist, he discusses how he agonized over Stalin’s Crimean atrocity and “empathized” (sochuvstvoval) with the Crimean Tatar people. The foundational source of this solidarity was guilt (vina). “An individual, or a group of individuals – a people, a nation – who begin to consider themselves guilty,” he explains, “think about how to rectify and expiate guilt and, if possible, about how to atone for it through good conduct.”⁶⁶

What guilt is he referring to? After all, Chichibabin took no part in the deportation operation; in May 1944 he was at the Transcaucasian front with the Red Army. The guilt he has in mind is less a consequence of any action in the service of Stalin’s regime than a consequence of inaction and ignorance in the wake of Stalin’s death – a consequence of what Lidiia Ginzburg described as “adaptation, excuse, and indifference.”⁶⁷

Karl Jaspers calls this guilt “political.”⁶⁸ In contrast to “criminal guilt” – in this case, the guilt of those whose actions directly contributed to the deaths of thousands of Crimean Tatar deportees – political guilt, for Jaspers, blankets all the citizens of a given state, making them fundamentally complicit in its misdeeds. Most of the Soviet writers and artists featured in this book grapple with the implications of political guilt. They evidence an “ethic of moral seriousness”⁶⁹ that accommodates political guilt as an idea and as a condition, a feeling. Some run to it, like Chichibabin, while others struggle to fix its radius and reach.

Indeed, for Chichibabin, burying or forswearing this guilt was deeply destructive. His friend Petro Grigorenko agreed. A Ukrainian former Red Army major-general, Grigorenko was a critical link between Russian and Ukrainian dissident circles and the Crimean Tatar movement. His ardent defence of the Crimean Tatars came at great personal cost. It led to his imprisonment, beating, forced feeding, and – as the Turkish press put it – confinement in the “madhouse” (tımarhane).⁷⁰ In Grigorenko’s view, guilt was in fact the prey of a “cruel, callous” Soviet “machine” powered by “our hands and our heads.” The machine “crushes us mercilessly, destroys the best people in our society, makes everyone guiltless” (delaet vsekh nevinovnymi).71 Like Jaspers, Grigorenko viewed guilt and liberty as consubstantial; one proceeds from the other.⁷² Accepting guilt, then, is to defeat the machine. Chichibabin went further. For him, an acceptance of guilt bore the promise of harmony and redemption. “The feeling of guilt is a feeling noble and fruitful, even in the imagination or in representation” (emphasis mine), he says. “I appeal to every one of you: embrace the feeling of guilt.”

Clinical psychologists would agree: Chichibabin was on to something. He articulated a case for interpersonal guilt as a moral, prosocial emotion at a time when a Freudian view of guilt as aggression toward the self still had considerable currency. Nowhere in his remarks does Chichibabin refer to “shame,” pozor or styd. The omission is important. Guilt and shame are related feelings that emerge out of our ability to fashion ourselves as objects of moral evaluation, but their effects are divergent. In a pioneering study, Helen Block Lewis demonstrates that guilt is an emotional response to a transgression that maintains and even strengthens the integrity of the self, whereas shame is an emotional response to a transgression that adversely affects it.⁷³ Guilt preserves an active, capable self; shame produces a disempowered one. The difference has real-world consequences. In the wake of wrongdoing – real or perceived – guilt provokes reparative action, whereas shame too often prompts retreat and “mobilises avoidance.”⁷⁴ An embrace of guilt, Chichibabin suggests, enables efforts of repair.

The poet keenly intuited what psychologists have illustrated in a series of empirical studies over recent decades: namely, that there is a special bond between guilt and empathy.⁷⁵ This psychological research also indicates that guilt-induced empathy is as robust for individuals who only see suffering as it is for those who feel that they have caused it somehow.⁷⁶ “By its very nature,” argues Judith Price Tangney, “guilt forges a natural bridge to Other-oriented empathic concern.”⁷⁷ Chichibabin sensed that his art was a form of passage over this bridge. After all, in the process of coming to moral terms with wrongdoing, literature can be considered particularly conducive to guilt but relatively inimical to shame, because it is by nature “self-serving.”

I am guided here by Wolfgang Iser’s theory of aesthetic response. For Iser, literature stimulates the reader’s world-making, ideating activity by way of its characteristic indeterminacy, which is fed by what he calls Leerstellen, “gaps” or “blanks” that the reader is meant to fill with the force of her imagination.⁷⁸ This process of “meaning assembly” is not a linear or uniform movement of an interpretative iron, as it were, smoothing out semantic wrinkles. It is the movement of a ratchet, a continual back-and-forth “of anticipation and retrospection that leads to the formation of [a] virtual dimension, which in turn transforms the text into an experience for the reader.”79 In creative reading, we move in two directions at once.⁸⁰ Iser describes this experience as a “repositioning” and “boundary-crossing” in which the reader dislodges preconceptions and assumptions, disrupts the prevailing demands of the social and cultural systems around her, and “stages” new versions of the self.⁸¹

Literature’s self-serving quality is not, however, selfish. Staging new versions of the self in the act of creative reading is to leap among what Charles Taylor calls “webs of interlocution.”⁸² It is always an implicit act of seeing Others, of acknowledging and navigating among a multiplicity of subject positions not our own. Indeed, in the case of the literary texts in this book, there is a consistent attempt to orient the reader in the direction of the Crimean Tatar Other and to induce a feeling of guilt disposed to empathic connection. In other words, there is a consistent cultivation of solidarity.

Solidarity is a famously polysemous term. It has been used variously as a shorthand for sympathy, altruism, unity, social cohesion. It can have a universalist (“we are the world”) or a particularist (“we alone”) flavour. I define it here as an active convergence of interests and fellow-feeling between groups that bridges a distance. In adding to the terminological mêlée, I want to underscore two key elements. The first is convergence. Solidarity realigns the borders of an in-group and an out-group to create new avenues of trust and communality for the individual to travel – while affirming, crucially, the respective group identities at the same time. As we will see, Russian, Ukrainian, and Turkish literary expressions of solidarity with the Crimean Tatars sought to secure ethical deliverables for the respective in-groups – among them a perception, however modest, of recovered or enhanced moral authority. They also helped – demonstrably so – to consolidate Crimean Tatar identity by performing recognition of the Crimean Tatar Other and positioning him as an object of concern.

The second element is activity. Solidarity is a dynamic, searching force testifying to our need to co-operate with Others, to our desire for community. David Goodhart understands solidarity as static and given, framing it in the context of the question “Who is my brother?”⁸³ I would ask instead: “When is my brother?” Solidarity emerges, and it emerges to contest the atomization of human life, to bridge distances in age, gender, language, ethnicity, religion. It is fluid, not fixed. Nor is it limited to a contest in which a gain of interests and fellow-feeling here presumes a loss of interests and fellow-feeling there. In a sense, solidarity is always plural. And importantly for our discussion, it emerges through imagination and affect.

To be sure, solidarity can result from a cognitive transaction in which we infer relations with each other based on a common interest or point of reference.84 But very often it is empathic, a product of face-to-face interaction or a real-time moment of direct observation or experience of an Other’s emotions. Seeing the Other feel, in other words, is an invitation for the self to connect. But when such direct observation or experience is impossible, Adam Smith offers a prescription: “conceive it in a very lively manner.”⁸⁵ By stimulating ideation and conceiving “surrogate experiences” for the reader – experiences that are live at the moment of creative reading – literature can enable solidarity to develop in circumstances in which the reader and the Crimean Tatar Other, for instance, find themselves separated by both time and space.⁸⁶ According to Iser:

Even though the literary text has its reality not in the world of objects but in the imagination of its reader, it wins a certain precedence over texts that seek to make a statement concerning meaning or truth […] Meanings and truths are, by nature, influenced by their historical position and cannot in principle be set apart from history. The same applies to literature, but since the reality of a certain text comes to life within the reader’s imagination, it must, again by nature, have a far greater chance of outlasting its historical genesis.⁸⁷

In the face of historical and physical distance, literature allows us, as Colin McGinn writes with appropriate emphasis, “to see and feel […] in a way no [constative] tract can.”⁸⁸ Among the works explored in this book, both seeing the victim and feeling guilt are at the heart of the poetics of solidarity.

3.

Literary texts active in this poetics of solidarity – like Chichibabin’s “Krymskie progulki,” which we will explore more closely – approach the reader with at least three invitations. The first is to endeavour to see the victim in light of the event that led to his suffering, an event previously withheld or obscured from the reader’s view. I emphasize endeavour not only because both prose and poetry use words to paint a visual image but because they oscillate between offering and withholding a clear view of the image itself, compelling the reader to work to establish coherence and consistency on her own. Literature “enables visual practices to come into being,” such that the reader sees, in this case, a victim not in the text but through the text.⁸⁹ This effort turns the reader into a stakeholder; she has to pay regard to an Other, who becomes an object of concern.

The second invitation pertains not to object but to subject. Literary texts that are active in the poetics of solidarity invite the reader to gravitate toward or adopt the voice of a lyrical “I” or a narrator who at times speaks a language of guilt, even modelling confession. Take this example from poet and singer-songwriter Bulat Okudzhava:

Простите меня, крымские татары!

Когда вас под конвоем вывозили,

когда вы на чужбине вымирали,

вы ведь меня о помощи просили,

ко мне свои ладони простирали.

Когда на мушку брали вас подонки,

вы ведь меня просили о защите…

Когда-нибудь предъявят счет потомки

мне одному… Я вас прошу: простите!90

(Forgive me, Crimean Tatars!

When you were deported at gunpoint,

When you were dying in a foreign land,

You asked me for help,

You extended your palms to me.

When thugs placed you in the cross-hairs,

You asked me for protection…

Someday my descendents will hold

Me to account… I beg you: forgive me!)

Invariably this voice exposes an inconsistency between reality and a communal standard or value. It evokes the ethos of the in-group. “You cannot persuade people to feel guilty,” notes Alyson Brysk. “You can only mobilize guilt by activating some underlying identity.”⁹¹ The third invitation at the heart of the poetics of solidarity is accordingly for the reader to access a meaningful framework of identification with the out-group. The literary texts under study here present this framework by way of two interdependent components: a “we-denomination” (how the “we” of the in-group primarily sees itself, as civic, national, or ethnic) and a “we-relation” (how this “we” conceives of its connection with the Other, as either “one of us,” “like us,” or “part of us”).

In “Krymskie progulki,” Boris Chichibabin unveils a framework of identification with the Crimean Tatar Other by way of an immediate reference to empire in the poem’s first word. He places the question of the colonization of Crimea front and centre but then leaves it there like the elephant in the room:

Колонизаторам — крышка!

Что языки чесать?92

(The colonizers are finished!

What is there to wag your tongue about?)

This startling opening, which literally places a “lid” (kryshka) on the text, is a disorienting remark that calls attention to the poem’s désancrage or “uprootedness” from a clear context.⁹³ The very condition of the poem’s existence, a pre hoc “wagging of tongues” about colonizers and colonization, is missing. This is less an absence than a vacancy for the reader to fill. To make sense of these lines, she must make room for the assertion that colonizers are not “finished” but are still present and even active in Crimea. Chichibabin’s onset couplet is what might be termed apopha(n)tic: it denies the existence of colonizers but, in doing so, asserts their existence by calling on the reader to supply what is not there. The poem continues:

Перед землею крымской

совесть моя чиста.

Крупные виноградины…

Дует с вершин свежо.

(Before this Crimean land

My conscience is clear.

Voluptuous grapes…

A fresh wind blows from the peaks.)

As if ticking a box, the lyrical persona ventriloquizes the poets in chapter 1 who fetishize Crimean place and celebrate the zemlia krymskaia as an exquisite specimen of physical, rather than human, geography. Yet couched in this celebration is something else: an implicit expression of guilt amplified by a variant, unsettled metre, Sovest moia chista.⁹⁴ The line’s placement in the quatrain calls attention to sovest (conscience, moral faculty), the watchword of such Russian civic poets (grazhdanskie poety) as Aleksandr Radishchev and Nikolai Nekrasov, to whom Chichibabin expressed admiration throughout his career.

This intrusion of the ethical alters the trajectory of the text, displacing what was a fawning tribute to the Crimean arcadia and proffering a sudden and defensive denial of complicity in unspecified crimes of pillage and robbery:

Я никого не грабил.

Я ничего не жег.

(I have not robbed anyone.

I have not burned anything.)

This convulsive alternation between the pleasant and the unpleasant – between colonizers and refreshing winds and criminal wrongdoing – is a minus-priem or “minus device.”95 By calling attention to the poem’s instability, it engages the reader in a heightened process of communication, one inflected by the vagaries of the lyric form. While “Krymskie progulki” seems representative of what T.S. Eliot calls poetry of the first voice – “the voice of the poet talking to himself, or nobody”⁹⁶ – the interrogative orientation of the opening couplet and the defensive tone of the last quoted lines suggest an address to an unspoken “you” by the lyrical persona’s “I.”

As this address is unsettled, the poem at once welcomes the reader’s identification with the lyrical persona – a default identification, as it were, according to those who hold that “the lyric is a script written for performance by the reader, who, as soon as he enters the lyric, is no longer a reader but an utterer”⁹⁷ – and prompts him to explore the participant role of an interlocutor to whom the lyrical persona’s questions and guarded assertions could be directed. In effect, the beginning of “Krymskie progulki” invites the reader to stage himself as a guilt-ridden and self-persuasive “I” (Chto iazyki chesat? […] Sovest moia chista […] Ia nikogo ne grabil) and as a right-behaving “you” with a concern for justice.

The remainder of the poem reveals the tragedy behind these rhetorical contortions and seeks to make sense of it as a symptom of a larger disease afflicting what Grigorenko called a “seriously ill” body politic.⁹⁸ After its disorienting beginning, it settles into a more consistent strophic and metrical pattern tending toward iambic octaves. The lyrical persona catches a stride as well. Discarding a defensive pose for a more contemplative one, he wanders from the beaches of the Black Sea into the mountains, searching for a lost Crimea:

Волны мой след кропили,

плечи царапал лес.

Улочками кривыми

в горы дышал и лез.

Думал о Крыме: чей ты,

кровью чужой разбавленный?

Чьи у тебя мечети,

прозвища и развалины?

………………… .

Люди на пляж, я — с пляжа,

там, у лесов и скал,

«Где же татары?» — спрашивал,

все я татар искал.

Шел, где паслись отары,

желтую пыль топтал,

«Где ж вы, — кричал, — татары?»

Нет никаких татар.

(Waves splashed against my footprints,

The wood scraped my shoulders.

Along crooked lanes

I clambered toward the mountains and breathed deeply.

I thought about Crimea: to whom do you belong,

You, soaked in the blood of Others?

Whose are these mosques,

ruins and place-names?

…………………

People went to the seaside, but I left it,

And there, amongst the cliffs and woods,

I asked, “Where are the Tatars?”

I searched everywhere for them.

Off where a flock of lambs grazed,

I walked along and trampled yellow dust,

And cried “Where are you, Tatars?”

But no Tatars remain.)

The Crimea that elicited metaphysical reverie among Pushkin and the Russian poets of the nineteenth century oppresses Chichibabin’s lyrical persona: it constricts his physical movement and haunts him like a spectre. The eerie absence of Tatar culture and society resounds in a question – “Gde zh tatary?” – repeated as a mournful apostrophe – “Gde zh vy, tatary?”

Here Chichibabin is intertextual with Pushkin’s Bakhchisaraiskii fontan: “Gde skrylis khany? Gde harem?” (Where have the khans gone? Where is the harem?) Pushkin’s questions are exoticized and rhetorical; Chichibabin’s questions demand an answer. They are made urgent by a claim about Crimea and the question of possession:

А жили же вот тут они

с оскоминой о Мекке.

………………‥

Не русская Ривьера,

а древняя Орда

жила, в Аллаха верила,

лепила города.

([The Tatars] lived right here

With reverence for Mecca.

…………………‥

This is not the Russian Riviera,

The ancient Horde

Lived here, worshipped Allah,

And built cities.)

Ne russkaia Riv’era – Chichibabin contests the rhetorical and physical deterritorialization of the Crimean Tatars. He portrays the settler colonial encounter in Crimea as a folly of noblesse oblige, a shortsighted “civilizing mission” that, in the words of one admirer of Russian imperial power, sought to “spread light” among “a [Tatar] population that […] had lived in ignorance.”99 In “Krymskie progulki” this ignorance is ascribed not to the Tatars but to a collective “us”:

Конюхи и кулинары,

радуясь синеве,

песнями пеленали

дочек и сыновей.

Их нищета назойливо

наши глаза мозолила.

Был и очаг, и зелень,

и для ночлега кров.

(Cooks and grooms,

Enjoying the blue [of the sea],

Swaddled in songs

Their sons and daughters.

But their poverty intrusively

Calloused our eyes.

After all, they had food, a hearth,

And a roof for a night’s shelter.)100

This first-person plural nash (our) operates “vertically” here: it gathers the “I” of the lyrical persona and the unspoken “you” of the reader according to an established set of historical, linguistic, and cultural affinities that they are thought to share – in this case, as part of a Russian and Soviet in-group. It also suggests that they are not simply descendants of the colonizers who dispossessed the Tatars but colonizers themselves. In this way, “Krymskie progulki” challenges the reader to assume responsibility for a legacy of wrongdoing against the Tatars, a legacy that culminated in May 1944:

Стало их горе солоно.

Брали их целыми селами,

сколько в вагон поместится.

Шел эшелон по месяцу.

Девочки там зачахли,

ни очаги, ни сакли.

Родина оптом, так сказать,

отнята и подарена, —

и на земле татарской

ни одного татарина.

Живы, поди, не все они:

мало ль у смерти жатв?

(The grief [of the Crimean Tatars] grew bitter still.

Entire villages of them were taken,

As many as could be stuffed into a train car.

The convoy travelled for a month.

There girls withered away,

Without a hearth, without a home [sakla].

Their homeland was, as it were,

Taken and given away wholesale.

And now on Tatar land

There is not one Tatar.

Not all of them are alive:

After all, does death have small harvests?)

What the 1946 Presidium decree characterized as a benevolent “relocation” is chronicled here as a cruel assault on the innocent (“Devochki tam zachakhli / Ni ochaga, ni sakli”) that killed thousands (“Zhivy, podi, ne vse oni”). The lyrical persona dwells on the deportation “not to disturb the dead,” he says, but to urge the reader to contemplate its gravity and its meaning: “To deport an entire nation – / How could they come up with such a thing?”

Chichibabin’s “Krymskie progulki” concludes with a savage indictment of the Soviet civic compact. His lyrical persona condemns a societal system bound in a corrupt “circle of mutual responsibility” (krugovaia poruka) – by lies, fear, and naked careerism. Soviet authorities sit and plot campaigns of deception, which the radio and the newspaper attentively carry out before a passive public, while bureaucrats “abandoning their honour, slither across bodies toward power and exultation.” Presiding over this grotesque scene are monuments to Stalin, “before which,” the lyrical persona tells the reader, “you bow.”

Addressed for the first time by way of the second-person singular, the reader is directly implicated in this krugovaia poruka – a term for a system of enforced “all for one and one for all” mutual oversight and reliance, which “generated some of the most attractive and most unattractive features in Russian social life”101 – as a functionary who surrenders her agency to granite idols and sacrifices her fellow citizens in the process. In “Krymskie progulki” the crimes of the Soviet state are not the fault of one man who cultivated, as Khrushchev famously insisted before the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in 1956, a cult of personality (kult lichnosti). For Chichibabin, they ultimately stem from the Soviet “we,” the civic collective that abets the state or, at best, stands aside as fellow citizens are slandered and dispossessed.

4.

Boris Chichibabin never travelled to Central Asia, but “Krymskie progulki” did – swiftly. The poem reached Crimean Tatar readers in exile in the early 1960s soon after its composition. But Chichibabin left his name off the text, and his identity was largely a mystery to Crimean Tatar readers until Eşref Şemi-Zade travelled from Tashkent to Kharkiv on a research trip in 1966. A Crimean Tatar poet, literary scholar, and translator, Şemi-Zade already knew “Krymskie progulki” well, but it was in Kharkiv that he learned the identity of the man who had written it. A journalist friend introduced Şemi-Zade to Chichibabin, and their connection was immediate. The two men were Gulag survivors with a passion for poetry; they spoke for hours. Chichibabin embraced Şemi-Zade as a “wise, tender, quietly intelligent man full of pain for his people,” and Şemi-Zade, in an inscription to a gifted volume of his Crimean Tatar–language poetry, called Chichibabin “the best friend of the long-suffering Crimean Tatar people.”¹⁰²

Their encounter in Kharkiv in 1966 inspired Chichibabin to write another poem about the deportation, “Chernoe piatno” (Black mark, 1966). Before Şemi-Zade returned to Tashkent, Chichibabin rushed to present it to him with a dedication. He later apologized for the hurried composition of its iambic tetrameter lines, which begin with a collision of two images:

Я видел Крым без покрывала,

он был как высохший родник.

(I saw Crimea without its veil,

It was like an arid spring.)

Chichibabin’s haste, however, had an upside when it came to samizdat distribution and circulation. It led to a text with highly portable, memorizable quatrains packed with salient images and aphorisms. “Chernoe piatno” is less intertextual and lyrically variant than “Krymskie progulki,” but it has its moments of unpredictability. In the second strophe, for instance, the historical fact of the deportation abruptly careens into an array of impressionistic visuals:

Росли цветы на камне твердом

и над волной клубился пар,

но в девятьсот сорок четвертом

из Крыма вывезли татар.

Сады упали на колени,

земля забыла имена.103

(Flowers grew on hard stone

And steam swirled above the waves,

But in 1944

From Crimea they expelled the Tatars.

Gardens fell to their knees,

The land forgot its names.)

Stalin also enters the poem, perverting its strophic pattern with an odd five-line stanza stuffed with a stretch of warped metre in the middle, an aside about his savagery:

Их всех от мала до велика

оговорил и закатал,

как это выглядит ни дико,

неограниченный владыка

и генеральный секретарь.

(All of them, young and old,

Were slandered and cast in fetters

– No matter how savage it appears –

By the insatiable master

And General Secretary.)

Chichibabin makes sure to place the Crimean Tatars first – “ikh vsekh” – and Stalin last (“the General Secretary”) in the stanza’s order. His lyrical persona also invites the reader to envision those persecuted in the deportation as children, reminding her that, while the Ingush and Balkar people have already returned from exile, the “evil” of Crimean Tatar dispossession is alive in the present of 1966. He then calls attention to the shattered bond between Crimean place and Tatar personality – “there can be no body without a soul” – and urges the reader to help make things right.

This restitution pivots on an assumption of guilt and an avoidance of shame:

Чтобы нам в глаза смотрели дети

без огорченья и стыда,

да будет всем на белом свете

близка татарская беда.

(So that we might look our children in the eyes

Without sorrow or shame,

Let everyone the world over

Feel the plight of the Tatars.)

The lyrical persona moves from the misery of Crimean Tatar children to the expectant gazes of “our” children, literally calling for the reader to be “close” (blizka) to the Crimean Tatars. He then proceeds to speak in a series of directives – “return this people to their homeland” and “do not cloak shameful acts in euphemism” – which project a voice of moral authority. His last command is the poem’s culmination, disclosing a we-denomination that again places the “you” of the reader and the lyrical “I” under the Soviet umbrella:

скорей с лица советской власти

сотрите черное пятно!

(Now go and wipe the black spot

From the face of Soviet power!)

Such directives are the farthest thing from aesthetic detachment. After all, Chichibabin dedicated “Chernoe piatno” to Şemi-Zade but did not address it to him. As in “Krymskie progulki,” its intended addressees are Soviet citizens outside the Crimean Tatar community who are meant to envision the deportation and its victims, come to grips with its “savage” nature, and act to save face for future generations. In this sense, the poem is less an expression of solidarity with the Crimean Tatars and more a tool configured to generate solidarity with them, to induce guilt and spark empathic connection and prosocial action on their behalf. When Chichibabin rushed to give “Chernoe piatno” to Şemi-Zade, he did so in the knowledge that it would be reproduced and circulated in samizdat. He was handing him, as Dmitry Furmanov would put it, a weapon.104

It was also a salve. Like “Krymskie progulki,” Chichibabin’s “Chornoe piatno” became a source of comfort for the displaced and dispossessed Crimean Tatar people. His work was regularly read at gatherings of the so-called initiative groups (initsiativnie gruppy) of the National Movement of the Crimean Tatar People in Uzbekistan, which met regularly to elect delegates to travel to Moscow, Kyiv, and Simferopol and campaign on behalf of their cause. The Crimean Tatar journalist and cultural activist Aider Emirov explains: “[In exile], we devoured every kind word addressed to us with hunger and excitement […] Two poems were especially popular in those difficult years: ‘Krymskie progulki’ and ‘Chernoe piatno.’ These lines literally brought tears to listeners’ eyes. We transcribed them secretly and read them at meetings of the initiative groups. The authorities reacted in a typical fashion: the KGB chased us down for distributing these poems.”¹⁰⁵ At meetings of these Crimean Tatar initiative groups, poems were not ornamentation; they did not serve as mere ceremonial preludes or codas to political discussion and debate. They were declarations of existence. Read alongside Şevki Bektöre’s “Tatarlığım” and Noman Çelebicihan’s “Ant etkenmen,” two anthems of the Crimean Tatar people, Chichibabin’s verse testified to the coherence and continuity of the Crimean Tatar national community and recognized the legitimacy of their struggle – from the outside.¹⁰⁶ Its use in such settings is striking evidence of the power of the poetics of solidarity. “Even in Uzbekistan we knew Chichibabin,” remembers one Crimean Tatar activist. “I will never forget his name.”¹⁰⁷

5.

The Crimean Tatar initiative groups reciting Chichibabin’s “Krymskie progulki” and “Chernoe piatno” in the 1960s were at the vanguard of a lawful and well-organized rehabilitation and repatriation campaign based largely in Uzbekistan. This movement was pivotal to the evolution of Soviet dissent, an unacknowledged godfather. As Ukrainian dissident and mathematician Leonid Pliushch explains, “the Crimean Tatars impressed us all with […] their understanding of things still inaccessible to the ‘average Soviet intellectual.’”108 In the face of arrest and imprisonment, Crimean Tatar activists regularly met in large numbers in Bekabad, Angren, Fergana, and Tashkent and appealed to Soviet authorities in Moscow with massive petitions calling for their return to Crimea. In 1962, for example, they presented a letter to the Twenty-Third Congress of the Communist Party with over 125,000 signatures, or roughly the entire Crimean Tatar population at the time.¹⁰⁹ Between 1965 and 1967 they sent Moscow a staggering number of letters and telegrams: over 53,000.¹¹⁰ Meanwhile, activist leaders like Mustafa Dzhemilev, whose repeated arrests and historic hunger strike would soon become a rallying cry for the Crimean Tatar cause, worked to instil in younger generations a knowledge of their history, language, and culture in order to sustain and refresh the movement with new energy.¹¹¹ Put simply, the Crimean Tatar movement was the largest and most organized of its kind in Soviet history.

The war of attrition waged by the Crimean Tatars against the Kremlin eventually led to a breakthrough. In September 1967 the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet issued Decree 493, “On Citizens of Tatar Nationality, Formerly Resident in Crimea,” which finally absolved the Crimean Tatars of the charges of mass betrayal and treason. Yet unlike the June 1946 decree that had condemned the Crimean Tatars as traitors, it was published neither in Izvestiia nor in Pravda but only in local Central Asian newspapers. It was buried there for a reason. Decree 493 was a step forward and two leaps back. While it effectively rehabilitated the Crimean Tatars as rights-bearing citizens within the Soviet system, it claimed that they were now “rooted” (ukorenilis) in Central Asia, thereby precluding the legitimacy of their right of return to Crimea.¹¹²

The terminology of rooting from the period of korenizatsiia was resurrected. Petro Grigorenko attacked it with ridicule: “What are the Crimean Tatars – seedlings?”¹¹³ Grigorenko had been enlisted in the support of the Crimean Tatars by the writer Alexei Kosterin, whose widely distributed samizdat essay “O malykh i zabytykh” (About the small and forgotten, 1967) reflected upon the crime of Stalin’s deportations. The friendship between Grigorenko and Kosterin was brief – less than three years – but it contained “an entire lifetime,” in Grigorenko’s words. Their relationship was deeply consequential and uniquely Soviet, involving a Russian writer who inspired a Ukrainian general to become a spokesperson for the Crimean Tatar people.114 Especially after Kosterin’s death, Grigorenko was transformed from “a rebel into a fighter.”¹¹⁵ With an academic rigour (he held a doctorate in military science) and a soldier’s fearlessness (he wrote directly to Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, and “respectfully” threatened the agency in 1968), Grigorenko advocated passionately for the Crimean Tatar cause and connected activists in Tashkent with counterparts and foreign journalists in Moscow.¹¹⁶ When Turkish readers learned of Grigorenko at this time, he was introduced with admiration as “the stubborn Ukrainian who does not know when to shut up.”¹¹⁷

Grigorenko understood well that Decree 493 represented a backhanded act of discursive cleansing that sought to sever the relationship between Crimean place and Tatar personality, because it referred to them as “tatary, ranee prozhivavshie v Krymu” (the Tatars, formerly resident in Crimea). This classification, which openly denied them their distinctive national identity, was replicated in official Soviet discourse from internal passports to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. As Grigorenko observed in a speech to the Crimean Tatar community in 1968, Decree 493 was a logical cul-de-sac: “You were subjected to repressions as Crimean Tatars, but after this ‘political rehabilitation,’ it turns out that there is no such nation on this earth. The nation has disappeared, but the discrimination remains.”¹¹⁸ Leonid Pliushch had one word for the decree: “vile.”¹¹⁹ Across the Black Sea, Turkish periodicals reacted to it with sarcastic exclamation points: “So this is Soviet justice (!), Soviet freedom (!), and Soviet humanity (!).”¹²⁰ Another lamented: “Stalin’s reign of terror has not ended. The Crimean [Tatars] still cannot live as human beings [hala insanca yaşayamiyor].”¹²¹

While Decree 493 was mainly a political concession made to appease a vocal, mobilized national minority, its knock-on effects were profound. Within days, thousands of Crimean Tatars from Uzbekistan and beyond tested this “rehabilitation” by travelling to their ancestral homeland, which had become not only a massive dacha for the Soviet elite but also a unique frontier of Soviet identity building, given the collusion of ethnic cleansing and ethnic cloning, as we saw in chapter 3. KGB memos from the autumn of 1967 reveal a scramble to track the activities of these “inflammatory elements among the Crimean Tatars” and to prevent them from settling back in Crimea. “They are looking around the homes they used to live in before the deportation, taking photographs and suggesting to locals that they will be returning soon,” one KGB report reads.¹²² One of the Crimean Tatar pilgrims was Timur İbraimov, son of the executed Soviet Crimean Tatar leader Veli İbraimov. “He was raised in the Russian Federation and does not even know his native tongue, which he considers a disgrace,” the report continues, almost sympathetically. “For him the Crimean land is sacred.”

For İbraimov and the thousands of Crimean Tatars who attempted to return to Crimea in 1967, Decree 493 brought about what Talat Halman – “Turkey’s most distinguished man of letters”123 – called in his influential Milliyet column a “second deportation,” another tragedy of a people “beset by all manner of punishments and tortures.”¹²⁴ The decree represented a crack in the mortar that held up the flimsy legal façade justifying the dispossession of the Crimean Tatars. As it crumbled, other poets joined Chichibabin in an aesthetic defence of the Crimean Tatar cause. One was the influential editor of the journal Novyi Mir, Aleksandr Tvardovsky (1910–1971), who is remembered today in Crimean Tatar poetry as “courageous” (cesür).¹²⁵ In 1961, Tvardovsky had composed a long poetic panorama of life after Stalin. Entitled “Za daliu – dal” (“Distance beyond Distance”), it includes a couplet that gestures to Stalin’s mass deportations at the end of the Second World War:

Он мог на целые народы

Обрушить свой верховный гнев.¹²⁶

(On entire peoples he could

Rain down pure wrath.)

After Decree 493, Tvardovsky returned to this sensitive subject in “Po pravu pamiati” (“By Right of Memory,” 1966–9), a work now considered the “brother” poem of Anna Akhmatova’s seminal “Rekviem” (“Requiem,” 1935–40) for its cathartic mourning and heartbreaking candour.¹²⁷

The son of a blacksmith exiled to Siberia during collectivization, Tvardovsky wrote “Po pravu pamiati” toward the end of his life. Completed in 1969, it is an intensely personal lyric meditation on the problem of political guilt as well as the tortured movement of private and public memory in the Soviet Union. While it circulated in samizdat and tamizdat (literature smuggled abroad for publication) soon after its composition, “Po pravu pamiati” was only published after Tvardovsky’s death, in 1987 in the journals Znamia and Novyi Mir.¹²⁸ “Po pravu pamiati” consists of three main parts: “Pered otletom” (Before departure), a reminiscence of youth; “Syn za ottsa ne otvechaet” (The son does not answer for the father), an indictment of Stalinism that is rendered as a dark, terrifying psalm; and “O pamiati” (On memory), a premonitory appeal to the reader not to forget his past and sacrifice his memory on the altar of the state. In “Syn za ottsa ne otvechaet,” the poem’s controversial centrepiece, Tvardovsky shares with the reader a devastating personal confession of guilt: he repudiated his exiled father, labelled by the Stalinist regime as a “vrag naroda” (enemy of the people), in the service of another “father,” Stalin. Twisting the language of Matthew’s Jesus, the voice of the Stalinist state counsels him with a series of sinister imperatives, inserting among them an allusion to a vague injustice against the Crimean Tatars:

Любой судьбине благодарен,

Тверди одно, как он велик,

Хотя б ты крымский был татарин,

Ингуш иль друг степей калмык.129

(Be grateful for your fate, whatever it may be,

And swear one thing: that he is great,

Even if you are a Crimean Tatar,

Ingush, or Kalmyk, friend of the steppe.)¹³⁰

The passage is intertextual with Pushkin’s “Exegi monumentum” (“I Erected a Monument,” 1836), a work that positions the national minorities of the Russian Empire as exotic vessels of memory bearing the promise of the poet’s immortality.¹³¹ The nineteenth-century Tungus and Kalmyk of “Exegi monumentum” become, in Tvardovsky’s rendering, three deported nations forced to bury the memory of their homelands and express gratitude to the regime that oppresses them. His word order in the line “Khotia b ty krymskii byl tatarin,” separating “Crimean” and “Tatar” with the past tense of the verb to be, also gestures to the effect of Decree 493, which declared them “Tatars, formerly resident in Crimea.”

Tvardovsky’s allusion is brief and oblique. There is no vision of the vulnerable victim, no focused exploration of guilt, no accessible framework of identification. It took a contemporary with less prominence in official literary circles to engage more directly in a poetics of solidarity: Viktor Nekipelov. Nekipelov (1928–1989) is often remembered outside of the former Soviet Union as the author of Institut durakov (Institute of Fools, 1976), a documentary chronicle of his 1974 detention in the Serbsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatry (Institut sudebnoi psikhiatrii im. V.P. Serbskogo), the most infamous of the Soviet psikhushki, or psychiatric hospitals, where Petro Grigorenko had also been interned.¹³² Nekipelov was central in exposing what Grigorenko called the Soviet “system of Chaadaevization,” which turned intellectuals (like Petr Chaadaev in the nineteenth century) into residents of insane asylums.133 That he is, in the words of Andrei Sakharov, a “wonderful poet” is not as well known.¹³⁴ Yet it was Nekipelov’s poetry, declared an instrument of “anti-Soviet agitation” under Article 190 of the Soviet penal code, that offered the regime a pretence to send him to Serbsky in the first place. His arrest in 1973 was originally prompted by the discovery of a number of his poems amid the samizdat collection of the biologist and dissident Sergei Miuge, whose literary Thursdays were popular happenings in the Moscow area.¹³⁵

These poems included a 1968 Crimean triptych – “Chufut-Kale,” “Gurzuf,” and “Ballada ob otchem dome” (Ballad about the ancestral home). According to Mariia Petrenko-Podiapolskaia, who played a central role in the formation of the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in 1969, Nekipelov often gave stirring performances of these three poems in Moscow in the late 1960s.¹³⁶ At the centre of his Crimean triptych are three distinct journeys among the “cold ruins” (kholodnye ruiny) of a Crimean place devoid of living Tatar personality. In “Chufut-Kale” the lyrical persona moves through an ancient fortress situated in the rock exposures high above the valleys radiating north from Bakhchisarai. Çufut Qale was a centre of life for the Jewish Karaim (or Karaites) of Crimea, “yet another disappeared people” (eshche odin ischeznuvshii narod) in Nekipelov’s words, from the late fifteenth to the nineteenth century.¹³⁷ Before the arrival of the Karaites, it served as a stronghold for what would become the first Crimean Tatar khanate. For all its vibrant history, the site strikes Nekipelov’s lyrical persona as frustratingly enigmatic and distant, as inaccessible and inhospitable to memory. A past of death and sufffering marks the remnants of its honeycomb cave dwellings, markets, and temples carved from stone.

In “Gurzuf,” which like Chichibabin’s “Krymskie progulki” gestures to the tradition of peripatetic poetry, Nekipelov’s lyrical persona wanders a space seemingly more hospitable to human life. Windswept Gurzuf seems free of the decay and the thick patina of suffering that afflict Çufut Qale. It abounds in sites of religious and social communion, from minarets to teahouses (chaikhany). His lyrical persona soon discovers that these sites are uninhabited; they are “empty amphorae” rather than vibrant human dwellings. He then encounters a mysterious doppelganger, a Crimean Tatar poet in whose weary memory “a tragic night surfaces”:

Когда трусливо и послушно

Орда опричная –

`как скот,

Вдруг растолкала по теплушкам

Его талантливый народ.

И бедняков, и бонз высоких,

И виноделов, и купцов,

И седовласых, и безногих,

И звездочетов, и слепцов.138

(When cowardly and obediently

The horde of the new oprichnina

– like cattle,

Suddenly pushed his talented people

Into railway cars:

The poor, the esteemed clerics,

The vinters, the merchants,

The old, the amputees,

The astrologers, the blind.)

Nekipelov suspends the alliterative pair orda oprichnaia before a hanging indent to endow the terminal foot kak skot with economical ambiguity: it can either modify the antecedent orda (horde) or the punished narod (people) in the final line of the quatrain. “Like cattle,” the agents of the NKVD executed their orders to deport the Crimean Tatars without a protest of conscience; they forced human beings out of their homes, prodding and corralling them onto waiting train cars, “like cattle.” The conspicuous visual positioning of orda oprichnaia also draws attention to a pregnant metaphor that Nekipelov employs later in human rights appeals: the metaphor of the Brezhnev era as a new oprichnina, a twentieth-century incarnation of Ivan IV’s notorious reign of terror.¹³⁹

Like the ruthless oprichniki who ravage villages and towns with indiscriminate regard for human life in Ivan Lazhechnikov’s verse drama Oprichnik (1867), the Soviet NKVD officers in Nekipelov’s “Gurzuf” persecute the vulnerable and dispatch them without remorse to remote settlements in Central Asia. The proliferative catalogue of human victims, underscored by the anaphoric conjunction i in the previous excerpt, compels the lyrical persona to confront his own guilt:

Моё преступное молчанье

Простишь ли мне, Гурзуф-Ага?

(Do you forgive

My criminal silence, Gurzuf-Ağa?)

Ağa is an honorific in Crimean Tatar, and Nekipelov’s lyrical persona uses it to model for the reader a confession of guilt before a respected authority. If “the lyric is a script written for performance by the reader,” then “Gurzuf” facilitates the reader’s performance of this confession in the act of reading.140 But in the world of the poem, this confession seems destined to fall on deaf ears. Gurzuf is overcome by silence:

Теснятся мысли вереницей

Измятых чувств, безсильных слов …

Гурзуф молчит.

(My thoughts cluster in rows

Of haggard emotions and powerless words …

Gurzuf is silent.)

Not unlike the conclusion of Chichibabin’s “Krymskie progulki,” these sombre lines dangle powerlessness and silence as bait. They seek to catch the reader and spur her to respond and restore the conditions of felicity for this painful confession – to contest the discursive cleansing that silenced the voices of the Crimean Tatars and to advocate for their rightful return to Crimea.

With each poem in Nekipelov’s Crimean triptych, the lyrical persona becomes progressively attuned to his physical surroundings and the human lives that imbue them with meaning. An exploration of the ruins of Çufut Qale, cold to human life, alienates the lyrical persona. In “Gurzuf,” by contrast, a nocturnal stroll along the welcoming streets of the seaside town sees him increasingly sensitive to the absence of the Crimean Tatars and mournful of his passive, “silent” complicity in the deportation. In “Ballada ob otchem dome,” the final poem of the triptych, the lyrical persona proceeds to identify completely with his subject, internalizing the perspective of a Crimean Tatar who visits his homeland in 1967 in the wake of Decree 493, only to be displaced from it once more:

Я — крымский татарин. Я сын этих солнечных гор,

К которым сегодня прокрался украдкой, как вор.¹⁴¹

(I am a Crimean Tatar. I am a son of these sun-drenched mountains,

Where today I must creep furtively like a thief.)

His lyrical persona is a Crimean Tatar to whom “a grumbling bureaucrat” has given a permit to visit Crimea for only twenty-four hours. He travels to the home of his forebears near the mountain of Aiu-Dag outside Gurzuf:

Поклон Аю-Да́гу и сизой, туманной Яйле́!

Как долго я не́ был на горестной отчей земле!

Вот дом глинобитный, в котором родился и жил.

Ах, как он разросся, посаженный дедом инжир!

А наш виноградник и крошечный каменный сад,

Как прежде, наполнены праздничным звоном цикад.

Тверды и упруги, темны от дождей и росы,

Как дедовы руки — бугристые мышцы лозы.

Мускат дозревает! Да мне урожай не снимать.

Крадусь по задворкам отцовского дома, как тать.

(I bow to you, Aiu-Dag, and to you, misty-blue plateau!

How long it has been since I was here in my sorrowful ancestral home.

Here is the clay dwelling where I was born and where I lived.

O, how the fig tree planted by my grandfather has grown!

And our vineyard and small rock garden are there

As before, filled with the convivial ring of cicadas.

Hard and resilient, dark from rain and dew,

The sinewy muscles of the vine are like my grandfather’s hands.

And how the Muscat ripens! But it is not for me to reap the harvest,

Creeping along the back of my ancestral home like a thief.)

These lines, written in an amphibrachic tetrameter traditionally employed to express solemnity and melancholy, may be read as a poetic translation of an account written by Anatoly Yakobson in a pamphlet of 1968.142 Entitled “The Judgment of the Crimean Tatars,” it highlights the ongoing process of settler colonialism on the Crimean peninsula: “Crimea is a forbidden zone for the indigenous [korennykh] Tatars. There is no law to this effect, but there are obviously secret instructions […] Groups and families are returning to Crimea one by one. They return only to endure the hardships of a vicious cycle: local Crimean authorities do not register them, because they have no home; and they cannot buy a home, because they are not registered [net propiski]. Yet at the same time the state sends to Crimea an unstoppable flood of settlers [pereselentsev] from Russia and Ukraine.”¹⁴³ This passage from Yakobson’s pamphlet simulates for the reader an aerial perspective from which to observe the Russian and Ukrainian settlers of Crimea and the Crimean Tatars, a “they” to whom concern and sympathy should be directed.

The optics in Nekipelov’s “Ballada ob otchem dome” are decidedly different. Not only does the poet present the tragedy of an abortive return to the homeland from the perspective of a Crimean Tatar “I” – grafting the reader’s unspoken “you” onto his subject position – but he also gives settler colonialism a distinctly human face, displacing the state from the centre of the equation:

В саду копошится какой-то лихой отставник.

Он погреб копает (а может быть, новый сортир?).

Ах, что он наделал — он камень в углу своротил!

Плиту вековую под старой щелястой айвой,

Где все мои предки лежат — на восток головой!

Он думает — козьи, и давит их заступом в прах, —

Священные кости… Прости нечестивца, Аллах!

(In the garden an old pensioner putters about.

He is digging a cellar (or maybe, a new latrine?)

Oh, what has he done? He dislodged a stone in the corner,

An ancient slab under an old, cracked quince,

Where my ancestors lie buried, facing east!

He thinks, “Goats!” – and crushes these sacred bones

Into dust with a spade … – Forgive this inhumanity, Allah!)

In Nekipelov’s poem the villain is not an impersonal, amoral state but a puttering “old pensioner,” someone like Kostiuk from Pavlenko’s “Rassvet” decades after the deportation. His desecration of the bones of the lyrical persona’s ancestors is based on similar acts described in samizdat documentary accounts. In a letter published in the second issue of Khronika tekushchikh sobytii on 30 June 1968, for instance, a group of Crimean Tatars led by the physician Zampira Asanova decries “the defilement and effacement of the graves of our ancestors from the face of the earth.”144 Whereas the authors of the letter avoid attaching an agent to these acts, using past passive participles wherever possible, Nekipelov prominently features an individual responsible for such defilement, an elderly man who does not occupy the corridors of power in the Kremlin or the shadowy backrooms of the KGB. In doing so, the poet confronts the uncomfortable truth that the dispossession of the Crimean Tatars was, to an extent, a state crime enabled by ordinary Soviet citizens.

Not unlike Ukraïnka and Çergeyev, Nekipelov frames the encounter between the Crimean Tatar victim and the “everyday” perpetrator by way of an anti-colonial sightedness:

Как долго и трудно мы смотрим друг другу в глаза.

Он кличет кого-то, спуская гривастого пса.

Не надо, полковник! Я фруктов твоих не возьму.

Хозяйствуй покуда в моём глинобитном дому.

Я завтра уеду обратно в далёкий Чимкент.

Я только смотритель, хранитель отцовских легенд.

Непрошеный призрак, случайная тень на стене,

Хоть горестный пепел стучится и тлеет во мне.

Я — совесть, и смута, и чей-то дремучий позор.

Я — крымский татарин, я сын этих солнечных гор.

(How long and hard we looked one another in the eyes.

He calls someone who lets loose a rabid dog.

Don’t worry, colonel! I won’t take your fruit.

Go keep house in my home.

Tomorrow I go back to distant Chimkent.

I am only a custodian, a keeper of ancestral legends.

An uninvited spectre, a chance shadow on the wall,

Even if mournful ashes knock about and putrify inside me.

I am conscience and dismay, someone’s great disgrace.

I am a Crimean Tatar, I am a son of these sun-drenched mountains.)

In these poignant concluding lines, the “I” of the lyrical persona laments his fate as a custodian of identity, a vessel for the ashes of past generations. His tone of resignation and defeat stands in some contrast to the rousing force of the imperative, emphasized in capital letters, that ends Asanova’s letter of 1968, for example: “POMOGITE NAM VERNUTSIA NA ZEMLIU NASHIKH OTTSOV!” (Help us return to the land of our forefathers!) But the power of Nekipelov’s poem resides precisely in its dour, tempered restraint. Like Chichibabin’s “Krymskie progulki,” Nekipelov’s “Ballada ob otchem dome” leverages despair for perlocutionary ends. Rather than positioning the reader as a mere recipient of information or a follower of commands, the poet ushers her into a more active, albeit decentred enunciatory pose, inviting her to stage her unspoken “you” as a Crimean Tatar “I.” This act of staging is an act of solidary identification: “Ya – krymskii tatarin.”

6.

Years after the composition of the Crimean triptych, Viktor and Nina Nekipelov sent a postcard to Petro Grigorenko and his wife, Zinaida, who had travelled to the United States for medical treatment. While abroad, the former Red Army general was stripped of his Soviet citizenship. The Nekipelovs’ postcard is a reminiscence of Grigorenko in happier times, of the lifelong military man reading poetry. On the front of the card is a portrait of the poet Gavriil Derzhavin; on the back, an inscription with the lines “alive in the movement of matter, eternal in the flow of time” from Derzhavin’s metaphysical poem “Bog” (“God,” 1784). Grigorenko had recited the poem in Nekipelov’s company years earlier. It was not clear at the time whether the two men would ever see each other again, but the postcard’s allusion to the “eternal” gestured to their lasting bond as friends and as citizens who had endured the Serbsky psychiatric hospital and spoken out in defence of the rights of the Crimean Tatars.

Today Grigorenko’s archive is a meeting place of the Soviet Russian, Crimean Tatar, and Ukrainian dissident movements, marking the many convergences and divergences between them. It is a vivid reminder that Soviet dissent was both a mosaic and a palimpsest, a phenomenon of diverse agendas and of overlapping, often contradictory messages: unnational, national, supranational, transnational. Enclosed in the archive’s folders are letters across the Russian and Ukrainian languages to and from Nekipelov, Mustafa Dzhemilev, and Ukrainian poet and activist Mykola Rudenko, whose work is featured in the next chapter.145 In these folders are batches of poems as well – most of which were written by Chichibabin.¹⁴⁶

Among the nearly fifty pages of Chichibabin’s verse in Grigorenko’s archive is “Sudakskie elegii” (Sudak elegies, 1974), a lyric meditation of tail-rhyme stanzas set in Sudak on the northern shore of the Black Sea, a “forsaken Eden” whose spirit courses through the blood of the lyrical persona “like a sweet infection.” One passage in particular would become a refrain among Crimean Tatar activists:

Как непристойно Крыму без татар.

Шашлычных углей лакомый угар,

заросших кладбищ надписи резные,

облезлый ослик, движущий арбу,

верблюжесть гор с кустами на горбу,

и все кругом - такая не Россия.¹⁴⁷

(How obscene Crimea is without the Tatars.

The delightful intoxication of shashlik on coals,

The carved inscriptions of overgrown graveyards,

The old donkey pushing its cart,

Shrub-covered mountains like camel humps, and

Everything around us – this is not Russia at all.)

As in “Krymskie progulki,” Chichibabin presents the Crimean Tatars as Crimea’s indigenous people, evoking in an Orientalist vein the symbols and relics of its Muslim alterity, which now stand as empty and obsolete as a “shepherd without his flock.” “This is not Russia at all,” he insists. Indeed, after 1954, Crimea was no longer part of the RSFSR; Khrushchev had placed it within the administrative boundaries of Soviet Ukraine, where it began to emerge from economic depression.148

In the twilight of the Soviet period, Chichibabin was invited to publish “Sudakskie elegii” in Novyi mir, the journal made legendary by Tvardovsky. There was one problem, however: the word obscene (nepristoino) in the line “How obscene Crimea is without the Tatars.” It was arresting. The journal’s editors politely suggested an alternative: uncomfortable or distressing (neuiutno). Echoing Voloshin, Chichibabin replied:

“How uncomfortable [neuiutno] Crimea is without Tatars” – this is not what I want to say at all. This is not my feeling and not my word […] Without the Tatars, Crimea is not Crimea, not the real Crimea […] It is some kind of artificial, exotic nature reserve invented and designed especially for tourists and holidaymakers […] [The Crimean Tatars] were the original local population of this land; they were the people who took root in this soil. Having settled on it and spiritualized it [odukhotvorivshim ee] with the names of mountains, tracts, villages, a mythology, a memory, a faith, and a dream, they became and were the soul of Crimea. And when such a soul is artificially, violently removed from the body, and the body is left without a living soul […], not only is this tragic, sad, and frightening, but there is in it something inauthentic, false, unnatural, shameful, obscene.¹⁴⁹

As we will see, Soviet Ukrainian dissidents felt this obscenity as keenly as Chichibabin did. “The struggle of the Crimean Tatars in a sense united Russian and Ukrainian dissidents,” says Myroslav Marynovych. “We could differ in our understanding of our own Russian-Ukrainian relations, but we were aligned in our solidarity with the Crimean Tatars.”¹⁵⁰ For Ukrainian writers active in the 1960s and 1970s, the obscenity condemned by Chichibabin was keenly felt because it was also intimately familiar. It was seen as a toll exacted by a hegemonic, “chauvinistic” state on non-Russian nations, the price of imperialism in the guise of “internationalism.”