Coda
At the centre of a region of occupied and disputed territories, Crimea juts into the map of the Black Sea like a trigger. We forget its significance at our peril. Yet since the dramatic events of 2014, media outlets have largely consigned Crimea to afterthoughts and back pages. Prominent international relations pundits in the West have declared it “surely lost for good,” making little effort to connect geostrategic dots between its annexation and the war in Donbas, two sites of armed conflict – one “frozen,” the other “hot” – only three hundred miles away from each other.1 Such throes of “Crimnesia” do not change the fact that the peninsula remains a global flashpoint whose “structural predisposition” to conflict has only worsened under Russian occupation. According to the United Nations General Assembly, the Kremlin has overseen a “gravely concerning” “transfer of nuclear-capable aircraft and missles, weapons, ammunition, and military personnel” to Crimea.2 This militarization of infrastructure has coincided with a militarization of consciousness, which today normalizes draconian crackdowns on independent civil society, most especially among the Crimean Tatars.
In the words of Crimean Tatar activist and Amnesty International prisoner of conscience Emir-Usein Kuku, this militarization of consciousness has done swift work to turn Crimea into a space of Orwellian “thoughtcrime.” “Doesn’t it seem strange,” he asked in his “Final Word” while on trial in Rostov-on-Don in 2019, “that in the twenty-three years under Ukrainian authority there were no ‘extremists,’ no ‘terrorists,’ and no ‘acts of terror’ for that matter? But then Russia arrived with its FSB, and suddenly all of these things appeared together?”3 This book has traced the anxieties of possession behind this militarization to Stalin’s Crimean atrocity, which was a culmination of a project of settler colonialism that sought to expunge Crimea’s indigenous people from the territory that helped define them. As a cultural study of the Black Sea, it has cast the Crimean Tatars not as “intermittent presences” in the history of the region but as key determinants of its past, present, and future trajectories.4
At the same time, Blood of Others has also sought to combat a different “Crimnesia” – a forgetting of acts of transnational literary solidarity in the aftermath of this atrocity. “Solidarity wavers,” writes Avishai Margalit, “when the memory of a strong feeling of solidarity fades away.”5 The book has traced the disruptive vibrations of Stalin’s deportation of the Crimean Tatars across the cultural spaces of Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine to renew memory of this solidarity and to consider how literary texts can inspire its strong feeling. Myroslav Marynovych calls this corpus of poetry and prose “invaluable” today. It exposed audiences to the brutal realities of the Sürgün, often well before news reports or other documentary sources, and aimed to elicit a prosocial response in the empirical world. “It is a testament from the past,” Marynovych continues, “that we, as heirs to these writers, must fulfil.”6 From the Soviet underground to the realm of Turkish popular culture, these texts invited readers to process an emotion with quiet motivational utility – guilt – and engaged them in a poetics of solidarity that ultimately played a role in achieving something many thought impossible: the return of the Crimean Tatars to their ancestral homeland after nearly half a century in exile.
Today, in an era of disconnected connectivity, when social networks spawn thought-silos based more on the putative threat of enemies than on the comfort of friends, solidarity can seem a rare commodity. In a region of the world beset by contestation and conflict, where a persecuted indigenous people is targeted once more, it can even appear naive. But the literary works at the heart of this book – texts of poetry and prose composed under similarly challenging historical conditions – see little point in cynicism. They speak instead to the way culture can empower us to envision new alternatives to the political status quo and to foster empathic human connection in the face of difference and distance. With uncanny foresight, Carol Weaver wrote in 2013 that “the Black Sea region is still an area where some people are afraid of invasion, ethnic cleansing, or general oppression.”7 Blood of Others has sought to show how the Black Sea region is also an area where people have succeeded in comforting Stalin’s victims with verse and in spurring people to activism with stories. It is an area where people embraced imaginative artistic expression in a fight against invasion, ethnic cleansing, and oppression – and secured a victory whose remembrance today is not indifferent to tomorrow.