CHAPTER EIGHT The Wart on Russia’s Nose: Crimea
The person of Selim Giray is comparable to a rose garden; the son who is born to him is a rose. Each in his turn has many honours in his palace. The rose garden is ornamented by a new flower; its unique and fresh rose has become the Lion of the padishah of Crimea, Selamet Giray Khan.
– Arabic inscription above the portal of the royal mosque at Bakhchisarai
ON THE MALAKHOV bastion at Sevastopol two rows of cast-iron cannon-balls have been laid out in the shape of a cross. They mark the place where, on 28 June 1855, Admiral Paul Nakhimov, laconic, frock-coated commander of the city’s defences for the previous eight months, was shot in the head by a French sniper. He had been viewing the enemy batteries through a telescope, and his last words, before the instrument fell from his hands, were ‘They’re shooting better today.’
It is a quiet grey day in early March. In Kiev there is still snow on the ground; down here the streets are dry and the breeze from the sea smells of spring. Showing me round are Arkady, a journalist from Simferopol, and Nataliya, a student born and brought up in Sevastopol itself. Both are typical Crimeans: Nataliya’s father is a retired naval officer, Arkady’s a Russian bus-driver whose Stakhanovite feats of long-distance travel earned him a nice little vine-covered house in the sunny south. Nataliya’s parents are less fortunate: the tap-water in their housing block is undrinkable, so they heave buckets up five flights from a pump in the yard. Do they have hot water? ‘Oh yes – but only twice a week.’
All the same, Nataliya is proud of her city. ‘This,’ she says, pointing across a ravine with a wrecked bus at the bottom, ‘is where the enemy were camped. They fired on us for 349 days before they took the hill.’ Sandbags and a row of bronze cannon mark the Russian emplacements, and the whole area is dotted with monuments and memorials. A bas relief of Tolstoy, here as a young artillery-officer, shows him beardless and in profile, glaring from between jug-ears. Across the other side of the hill stands the ‘Museum of the Heroic Defence and Relief of Sevastopol’, a giant stone rotunda built in 1905 to mark the siege’s fiftieth anniversary. Niches round the outside wall house a series of busts: whiskered generals and admirals, the surgeon Pirogov – ‘the first person to use anaesthetics on the battlefield’, says Nataliya – and a nun – ‘Dasha of Sevastopol, our Florence Nightingale’. Inside, a woman with a white baton is talking a group of Central Asians through a 360-degree, three-dimensional diorama, all heaped bodies, gleaming bayonets and fluttering tricolors. From her commentary one would never guess that Sevastopol actually surrendered. On the way out we pass a faded little fun-fair, still closed up for winter. ‘On Young Pioneers’ Day,’ Nataliya says, ‘all the schools used to come up here. First we’d go to the cinema – it was free just for that day – then we’d come and take rides on the carousel, all in white dresses.’
Sevastopol is a holy city twice over – sacred not only to Russian military sacrifice, but also to Russian Orthodoxy. On the edge of the town, on a windy, half-drowned peninsula lined with boarded-up summer cottages, stand the remains of Chersonesus, the Greek city where the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius first landed in Rus, bringing the Gospel and the Cyrillic alphabet with them. In the chilly dusk, we wander among sunken streets and shattered columns, lapped by a gunmetal sea. Near the shore a giant bell hangs on a wooden frame. ‘Strike it,’ Arkady says; ‘it’s good luck.’ The clapper has disappeared so I throw a stone at the bell instead, producing a long, melancholy buzz. A nineteenth-century basilica marks the spot where Prince Volodymyr, converter of Kievan Rus, was once thought to have been baptised. Later the archaeologists changed their minds, and now trees are growing through the church’s roof. ‘They’re supposed to be repairing it,’ says Arkady with a shrug, ‘but they haven’t got the money.’
Hypnotised by its glorious past, Sevastopol is caught in a time-warp. The city is tidy in the old, dour Soviet way. There are no billboards, no money-changers or gypsy beggars, few kiosks with their jumbled rows of Western cigarettes and psychedelic liqueurs. Every third man is in uniform – the officer’s handsome black and gold, or the sailor’s bell-bottoms and brimless ribboned caps. The local newspapers are called things like Glory to Sevastopol and The Motherland Flag, and the clock on top of the Sailors’ Club bangs out the tune ‘Legendary Sevastopol’ every hour. On May Day veterans gather at the railway station to lay flowers beside an old steam train painted with the slogan ‘Death to Fascists’. When the Soviet Union collapsed, nearly all the naval base’s officers went over to Russia, refusing to swear new oaths of loyalty to Ukraine and running up the tsarist St Andrew’s Cross over the battleships rusting in the oily harbour. They also hung on to the fleet’s fine neoclassical headquarters, shoving the disgruntled Ukrainians off to dilapidated barracks in the suburbs. Ashamed to let me see his office, a Ukrainian lieutenant gave me an interview outdoors in the rain. ‘It’s all lies what the Russians say about us having four ships and eight admirals,’ he grumbled, as a birch-tree dripped on to his collar. ‘These are very old political tricks – we’ve got four ships, four admirals.’ Back in the old headquarters overlooking South Bay, a Russian officer had told us that he still couldn’t quite believe that Russia and Ukraine were separate countries: ‘It will take dozens of years before we realise that we live in different states. Nobody takes all these customs controls seriously.’ And the Ukrainian ships? ‘We’re always happy when they get back to base by themselves – they don’t always manage it, they’re so inexperienced.’ His father was with the Black Sea Fleet before him, but he didn’t know where he would end up. ‘Most officers think of themselves as citizens of Crimea and of Russia. As for me, I grew up in Crimea, but Russia is my Motherland.’
Until 1996 Sevastopol was a closed city. All non-residents, Ukrainian citizens as well as foreigners, needed special permits to visit. After days of fruitless run-around for the right papers in Simferopol, I got past the check-points into town with the aid of a borrowed Ukrainian passport and a discreet twenty-dollar note. ‘I brought some Germans here a while ago,’ Arkady said. ‘They looked really Western in their big anoraks, so I took them in through the vineyards. But you look just like one of ours, so we won’t bother.’ I resolved to take this as a compliment. Months later I collared Sevastopol’s notoriously old-guard mayor at a London conference devoted to Ukrainian economic reform. A beetle-browed, brown-suited dead ringer for Brezhnev, he looked uncomfortable among the chattering, blazered businessmen. ‘So when,’ I asked, ‘is Sevastopol going to stop being a closed city?’
‘I can’t believe, Anoushka’ – eyebrows raised in bonhomous concern – ‘that foreigners have any problems getting in.’
‘But they do – I had to bribe the militsiya.’
‘But you should have called me! We want tourists, but élite, controlled tourism only. We can’t have lots of tourists, because we have no hotels!’
‘Yes, you do – I stayed in one.’
‘They have no water!’
‘But if you stay closed you’ll never get any investment, any new jobs. Your own businessmen say so.’
‘You shouldn’t have been talking to these people – they’re bandits, just little bandits!’ What he wanted, he said, was for Sevastopol to become a ‘free economic zone – because for every economic zone you need a fence, controls. And we have all this already!’ As he manoeuvred away through the crowd, his stubby hands started to shake – whether the effect of too much vodka or suppressed fury, I couldn’t tell.
With its passionate Russian-ness, its stunned refusal to acknowledge the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sevastopol is the whole of Crimea in concentrated miniature. Sixty-six per cent Russian-speaking, the peninsula has not been part of Ukraine for long. Khrushchev handed it over to the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic in 1954 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Pereyaslav; Crimeans say he must have been drunk. Staid and balmy, it was the place where every Russian dreamed of going on holiday, and where Party functionaries and military types came to retire.
When Gorbachev held his referendum on maintenance of the Union in March 1991, 88 per cent of Crimeans voted in favour, the highest percentage anywhere in Ukraine. Crimeans did in fact sign up to Ukrainian independence nine months later, but on a low turnout and by a margin of only 4 per cent. Since then, the peninsula has been a continual thorn in Kiev’s side. It elected a pro-Russian regional parliament, which has twice passed ‘constitutions’ declaring virtual independence, and voted, in an illegal referendum of March 1994, in favour of dual Russian-Ukrainian citizenship. Though the pro-Russian demagogue Yuriy Meshkov was easily booted out of the Crimean presidency once he got into turf-wars with his own parliament, the peninsula remains terminally unenthusiastic about being part of independent Ukraine. Unable to reconcile themselves to the new order, but nervous of demanding outright union with Russia, Crimeans daydream of turning the clock back to a rebuilt Soviet Union, to a make-believe world where Russians and Ukrainians were much the same thing. One of Meshkov’s more irritating achievements was to put the peninsula on to Moscow time.
Crimea’s wistfulness about Russia is reciprocated. If Russians find accepting independent Ukraine painful, taking on board the fact that Crimea – with its Cyprus trees and Massandra wines, its lapis-lazuli sea and shining cliffs – is part of it, is even worse. ‘Crimea is Russian, Russian!’ an otherwise impeccably democratic Moscow acquaintance told me one evening. ‘It’s never been anything else!’ And the Donbass slag-heaps? ‘Oh well, that’s another question.’
Russian or not, one can see why Crimea is worth making a fuss about. In my grandmother’s attic, I found travel diaries written by my great-great-great-uncle, a roving Scottish MP. ‘Climbing to the top of a hill overhanging the sea,’ he wrote in 1878, ‘I lay down under a pine tree and felt like a lotus-eater. Blue water, green trees, wild precipices, smiling orchards and vineyards, stately villas, and rude mountain villages, all lay around me in panorama . . .’ Avert your eyes from the communists’ shabby sanatoria, and the view from the cliffs above Yalta is just as lovely today. Another wandering Victorian, the Reverend Thomas Milner, was patronising – Crimea was no match for the Alps, and its reputation for romantic scenery due only to the flatness of everything else. But most travellers were happy to rhapsodise. ‘If there exist upon earth a spot as a terrestrial paradise,’ wrote the polymath Cambridge don Edward Daniel Clarke in the early 1800s,
it is the district intervening between Kutchuckoy and Sudak, along the south coast of the Crimea . . . The life of its inhabitants resembles that of the Golden Age. The soil, like a hot-bed, rapidly puts forth such a variety of spontaneous produce, that labour becomes merely amusing exercise. Peace and plenty crown their board; while the repose they so much admire is only interrupted by harmless thunder reverberating in rocks above them, or by murmuring waves upon the beach below.1
Like so many ingredients of Russia’s self-image, the Crimea-as-Russian-heartland story has a hole at its centre. For the happy Golden Agers Clarke was talking about were neither Russians nor Ukrainians, but Crimean Tatars – still, when he visited, the large majority of the peninsula’s population.
Muslim and Turkic-speaking, the Tatars arrived in Crimea in the thirteenth century, with Batu Khan’s mighty Mongol army. Intermarrying with the tribes of the interior, they ruled the peninsula for the next 500 years, first as an offshoot of the Horde, and when the Horde crumbled, as a semi-independent khanate under Ottoman protection. ‘Henceforth,’ Khan Mengli Giray promised the sultan in 1478, ‘we are the enemy of your enemy, the friend of your friend.’2 Though Soviet historians tried to deny the Tatars historical legitimacy by painting them as mere Turkish vassals, in fact the arrangement was a loose one. The sultan had the final say in the choice of khan, elected from among eligible Girays by the ‘kurultai’, a Horde-inherited assembly of Tatar nobles. But the khanate had its own legal system, bureaucracy and coinage, and above all its own army, with which it was able to exact yearly tributes from Poland and Muscovy (the Russian payments only came to an end under Peter the Great), and launch regular slave-raids deep into Ukraine.
Baron de Tott, Louis XV’s envoy to ‘the Kam of the Tartars’, accompanied one such expedition into the Zaporozhian lands in January 1769. Armed with bows and scimitars, the Tatar horsemen rode short-stirruped, like modern jockeys, and took two or three horses into battle each, leaping from one to another mid-gallop when under pursuit. The rich wore embroidered caftans trimmed with fox or sable, the poor sheepskin coats with the wool turned outside, so that they looked like ‘white bears mounted on horses’.3 Marching under the green banner of the Prophet, they burned every village they came to, turning the snow grey and blocking out the sun. Mid-campaign, de Tott wrote, the cloud of cinders from 150 burning Cossack settlements stretched a ‘full twenty leagues into Poland’.4 A single Tatar horseman might capture ‘five or six slaves of different ages, sixty sheep and twenty oxen’,5 carrying the infants in saddlebags and herding the rest along in front of him for months at a time. In this, at least, the Tatars compared favourably with the accompanying Turkish Sipharis, who ‘after dragging these wretched people about with them for some time, tired of the trouble, and cut them in pieces to get rid of them.’6
But Tatar life was not all slave-raids. Having dreaded his posting, de Tott found that the khan’s ‘pretended barbarous court’ had a certain rough-hewn Oriental charm. Visitors were received at sunset, after evening prayers, and entertained with clowns and musicians until midnight – a pleasure somewhat marred by the fact that nobody was allowed to sit in the royal presence. Hawking and coursing – 500 horsemen at a time – were favourite pursuits, and de Tott scored a diplomatic triumph with a fireworks display for Khan Makfoud Giray’s birthday. ‘Accustomed as he had been,’ the envoy wrote complacently, ‘to nothing but smoaky gerbs [sic], bad crackers and small rockets, badly filled and ill directed, the success of my exhibition was complete.’7 For his grand finale he administered Makfoud and his nobles with electric shocks; for the next few days ‘Nothing was talked of but electricity, and the number of the curious continually increased’.8
Makfoud’s successor Kirim Giray, a clever, affable man with a weakness for practical jokes involving severed heads, became a close personal friend. Under de Tott’s influence he developed an enthusiasm for French cuisine (especially its wine-based sauces), and requested that Tartuffe be translated into Turkish for performance by the court buffoons. On campaign, the two spent long evenings talking politics inside a giant crimson-lined tent, Kirim delivering his opinions ‘on the abuses and advantages of liberty, on the principles of honour, or the laws and maxims of government, in a manner which would have done honour to Montesquieu himself’.9
By de Tott’s day, the khanate was nearing its end. The Ottoman empire was in decline, and Crimea with it. Fewer successful Turkish-backed wars meant fewer infidel prisoners, and the slave-trade withered. At the same time, Russia was starting to look Crimea’s way, tempted by the Black Sea ports and by the empty ‘wild field’ south of the Zaporozhian Sich. The eighteenth century saw a series of military expeditions against the khanate, and in 1772 the Tatars were forced to exchange Ottoman for Russian protection. Two years later, having thrown the Turks out of Kaffa, Catherine II signed a second treaty with the Porte itself, under which Crimea was not to be interfered with by either side. ‘Independence’ lasted less than a decade, and in 1783 Russia annexed the peninsula outright. Catherine instructed that notices be prominently posted ‘to announce to the Crimeans Our receiving them as Our subjects’.10 The Girays decamped to Constantinople, where they became courtiers to the sultan: the Crimean khanate – ‘one of the most important states in eastern Europe’ according to one modern historian11 – was no more.
In their determination to cast the Tatars as little better than nomadic tribesmen, and Crimea itself as virtually unsettled land before their own arrival, the Russians tore down almost all reminders of the Tatar past – hundreds of mosques, palaces, medressas, caravanserais and hammams. One of the few buildings to have survived more or less intact is the khans’ palace at Bakhchisarai, spared only because Pushkin versified about it and because Catherine II stopped there on her way to Sevastopol. (Its star attraction used to be a specially installed royal bathtub.)
Though its contents and most of the interior decoration have long gone, Bakhchisarai still carries a whiff of sybaritic glamour, of the Krim Tartary of fairy-tales. The buildings are homely, ramshackle, with stumpy minarets, fretworked eaves and open verandahs, quite lacking the aesthetic rigour of Samarkand or the spooky claustrophobia of Topkapi. When the Rev. Mr. Milner came here in the mid nineteenth century the rooms were painted with ‘flowers, fruit, birds, beasts, stars, scrolls, villages and landscapes’ – all vanished now, but proof, as he pointed out, that the Girays ‘were free-thinking Mohammedans; for the Koran expressly forbids the representation of living objects’.12 The empty fountains in the overgrown garden are carved with rose-bushes, goldfish and baskets of pears; the turban-topped tombstones in the royal cemetery with Arabic verses, sunflowers and scimitars. Nothing grows there now but dusty steppe grass, but Milner saw nut-trees and lilacs. From inside an octagonal mausoleum – it once had a gilded cupola – comes the sound of hammering. ‘No we’re not doing repairs,’ a workman tells me when I poke my head in, ‘this is a carpentry shop.’ Over the whole seductive complex, at the top of a flight of granite steps, looms a large grey Russian tank. Officially it is a war memorial; unofficially, a reminder of just who is – or was until recently – in charge in Crimea.
Nineteenth-century travel-writers all waxed furious at the cultural havoc Russia wreaked on its newly conquered territories. One of the most splenetic was Cambridge’s indefatigable Clarke, visiting in 1800:
We were in a Turkish coffee-house at Caffa, when the principal minaret, one of the antient [sic] and characteristic monuments of the country, was thrown down, and fell with such violence, that its fall shook every house in the place. The Turks, seated on their divans, were smoking; and when that is the case an earthquake will scarcely rouse them; nevertheless, at this flagrant act of impiety and dishonour, they all rose, breathing out deep and bitter curses against the enemies of their Prophet. Even the Greeks, who were present, testified their anger by similar imprecations. One of them, turning to me, and shrugging his shoulders, said, with a countenance of contempt and indignation, SCYTHIANS!13
At least a third of the buildings in Bakhchisarai, he wrote, had already been demolished. Aqueducts and fountains were being stripped of their lead, and cemeteries of their tombstones, despite the fact that the country afforded ‘most excellent limestone, capable of being removed from the quarries with almost as little trouble as the destruction of the grave-stones occasions to the Russians’.14 Kaffa’s ancient Greek remains were being broken up to build barracks, and at Chersonesus marble was up for sale by cubic measure. Clarke wanted to buy a bas-relief – on offer, ‘together with a ton weight besides of other stones, for a single rouble’ – but purchase was prohibited ‘because we were strangers; and, worse than all, we were Englishmen’.15 ‘If it be now asked what the Russians have done in Crimea,’ he concluded furiously,
the answer is given in few words. They have laid waste the country; cut down the trees; pulled down the houses; overthrown the sacred edifices of the natives, with all their public buildings; destroyed the public aqueducts; robbed the inhabitants; insulted the Tatars in their acts of public worship; torn up from their tombs the bodies of their ancestors, casting their reliquaries upon dunghills, and feeding swine out of their coffins.16
Clarke exaggerated. In reality, the Tatars were no harder hit by tsarist rule than the other newly conquered nations of the expanding empire, and in some ways, they were better off. Though Russians staffed the local bureaucracy, police force and courts, the government did not interfere in religious matters or with the clergy-run schools. The old khanate lands were distributed among royal favourites – Catherine II alone gave away a tenth of the whole peninsula – but Tatars, unlike Ukrainians, were never subjected to serfdom, paying the same taxes to their new Russian landlords as they had to the old Tatar nobility.
The Tatars’ response was to vote with their feet, emigrating en masse to Turkey. Out of a population of half a million on annexation in 1783, over 100,000 had already left by the early years of the nineteenth century. More major exoduses followed each of the four Russo-Turkish wars, especially the Crimean War of 1854–5, during which Tatars were pushed out of their farms on the fertile southern coast into the dry steppe interior. By mid-century, the Tatars made up only just over half the population, and as Crimea filled with Slav settlers with the opening of the railways, they fell into the minority. By 1897 they were down to a third of the population, by 1921, to a quarter.17 The few Tatar noble families who did not emigrate were coopted, like the Ukrainians before them, into the Russian nobility, becoming to all intents and purposes Russians. (One such was Rasputin’s murderer Felix Yusopov.) Outside the mosques, Tatar culture atrophied and died, only reviving again at the end of the century, with the first stirrings of the modern national movement under a new middle-class intelligentsia.
Through the chaos of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the Tatars’ national aspirations ran a doomed and familiar course. On Nicholas II’s abdication in March 1917 the leaders of the various Tatar parties raced home from exile in Constantinople and Switzerland and began agitating for self-rule under the slogan ‘Crimea for the Crimeans’.18 In December the radical wing of the Tatar movement, the Milli Firka or National Party, held a national assembly – dubbed a ‘kurultai’ after the old khanate gathering – in Bakhchisarai, electing the Young Turk-affiliated Noman Celebi Cihan as head of a new Crimean Tatar government. But while the Tatars established their headquarters in Simferopol, the Bolsheviks took control among the Russian sailors of Sevastopol. In January the Bolsheviks marched on the capital, easily defeating the Tatar cavalry they met on the way. The kurultai disbanded and its members fled to the mountains or to Turkey. Celebi Cihan, who had stayed behind hoping to come to a modus vivendi with the new regime, was killed and his body thrown into the sea. Wholesale slaughter of Tatar and Russian civilians followed: taking over under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in May 1918, the German army uncovered fresh mass graves. The Germans left again in December, and for the next year and a half the peninsula was in chaos, changing hands four times before finally falling permanently to the Bolsheviks in October 1920. A new wave of terror followed, as Lenin’s Cheka set about rooting Tatar partisans out of the hills, and slaughtering the Tatar and Russian intelligentsia. Sixty thousand Crimeans were killed in less than six months,19 and another 100,000 died of starvation. An émigré newspaper described conditions in Yevpatoriya:
Bands of gypsies live in the suburbs of the city, dying of hunger. Robberies are innumerable during the night. The soldiers of the Red Army, in rags and bare feet and dying of hunger, attack the inhabitants at nightfall and steal their clothing. The Communists are not exempt from these attacks. The lack of fuel requires that doors and windows are used for heating . . .20
The ‘taking root’ policy of the 1920s, aimed at reconciling non-Russians to Bolshevik rule, saw a brief cessation of hostilities. Tatar schools, libraries, museums and theatres opened; Simferopol got a new university and returned to its old name of Akmecet. Permission was given for the publication of Tatar-language books, and Tatars – including many old Milli Firka members – got senior posts in local government. But the period of grace did not last long. In 1928 the Tatar Bolshevik Veli Ibrahim, leader of korenizatsiya in Crimea, was executed, signalling a new round of purges. Collectivisation meant the deportation of 30–40,000 Tatar ‘kulaks’21 and thousands more deaths through starvation. The Tatar alphabet was first Latinised then Cyrillicised – not just a cosmetic change, since it cut off the younger generation from Arabic-script pre-revolutionary Tatar literature. Mosques were closed, and Muslim clerics exiled to Turkey or Central Asia.
Up to the Second World War, the Tatars’ experience of communism was nothing unusual. Executions, deportations, famine – these were the common lot of all Soviet subjects, including the hapless Russians themselves. But in 1944 the Tatars became one of a select group of nationalities for whom Stalin had reserved a special fate: wholesale deportation – not just of collectivisation-resistant peasants and the urban middle classes, but of the entire population.
The deportees came from eight different nationalities – about 1.6 million people in total.22. They were the Crimean Tatars; the Chechens, Ingush, Meskhetians, Karachai and Balkars, all Muslim nations from the Caucasus; the Volga Germans and the Buddhist Kalmyks, from the Caspian steppe. The Volga Germans were deported in the summer of 1941, as the Wehrmacht advanced, the rest from 1943 to ‘44, as it retreated again. In what was by now a familiar pattern, the victims were arrested, piled into wired-up cattle-trucks and shipped, food- and water-less, to ‘special settlements’ in Central Asia and Siberia. In the Tatars’ case, the round-up was completed in three days. Recently released NKVD statistics say that 5 per cent of Tatars died in transit, and another 19 per cent in the first five years in the settlements.23 According to the Tatars themselves, 46 per cent of deportees died during the journey or within a year of arrival.
Nothing was publicly announced about the deportations until June 1946, when a Supreme Soviet decree, published in Izvestiya, announced the abolition of the Crimean and Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics:
During the Great Patriotic War, when the peoples of the USSR were heroically defending the honour and independence of the Fatherland in the struggle against the German-Fascist invaders, many Chechens and Crimean Tatars, at the instigation of German agents, joined volunteer units organised by the Germans and, together with German troops, engaged in armed struggle against units of the Red Army . . . meanwhile the main mass of the population of the Chechen-Ingush and Crimean ASSRs took no counter-action against these betrayers of the Fatherland. In connection with this, the Chechens and the Crimean Tatars were resettled in other regions of the USSR, where they were given land, together with the necessary governmental assistance for their economic establishment.
A minority of Tatars had indeed collaborated. Erich von Manstein, commander of the German Eleventh Army, headquartered in Crimea until late in 1942, was able to recruit some 20,000 Tatars into anti-partisan battalions and ‘village defence units’, designed to protect homes from marauding Russian and Ukrainian irregulars. But more than twice as many Tatars fought alongside the Russians in the Red Army, only to be deported on discharge along with everybody else. (These included several bemused Tatar Heroes of the Soviet Union.) As for the Chechens and Ingush, their lands had never even been occupied by the Germans, so they had had little opportunity to collaborate whether they wanted to or not. The real reason for the deportations seems to have been the NKVD’s desire to justify its existence, since it had not done any front-line fighting (letters from Beria to Stalin show him vigorously supporting the scheme24), combined with Stalin’s customary paranoia about the non-Russian nationalities. As Khrushchev observed in his earth-shattering ‘Secret Speech’ to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, ‘the Ukrainians avoided meeting this fate only because there were too many of them . . . Otherwise, he would have deported them also.’ (A statement greeted with ‘laughter and animation in the hall’.25) Though Khrushchev condemned the deportations as ‘monstrous’, officially rehabilitating five of the deportee nationalities, he made no mention at all of the Tatars, Volga Germans or Meskhetians, who had to wait for the dying days of perestroika before being allowed home to their native lands.
Saide Chubukshiyeva is one of the oldest returnees. Before the war she lived with her husband and two children at 23 Rosa Luxembourg Street in Bakhchisarai. She had a job in a printing shop, under a friendly Russian boss, and her husband worked as secretary to the city council. At five o’clock in the morning of 18 May 1944, she says, the family were woken by a knock at the door. ‘Two militiamen were standing there. They shouted – you have ten minutes! The children were small then – you can imagine what one could collect in those ten minutes.’ By the end of the day all the Tatars in the town had been taken to the station and loaded into railway-cars. There were 133 people in Saide’s wagon, ‘all women and children – I can’t imagine now how they managed to squash us all in’. The next morning the train set off for the east. Though Saide was occasionally let out to get food and water, there was never enough for everybody, and the older women and the children started dying – ‘we just had to throw the bodies out of the window’. At the stations, she says, ‘people called us traitors, betrayers – they threw stones.’ Twenty-eight days later the convoy arrived at Perm in the Urals. ‘We were all ordered to the forest to work as lumberjacks. The salary was in kind – they gave us 400 grams of bread a day. My youngest sister was nineteen then. She had to load those six-metre logs into wagons – can you imagine? If you didn’t complete your quota for the day you weren’t allowed out of the forest. There were these slogans painted on the trees – “If you don’t finish your work, don’t leave the forest.”’
Forty-seven years later Saide made her way back to Crimea with a daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren. Not, of course, to the old house on Rosa Luxembourg Street, but to a one-room trailer in a new Tatar shanty-town on the windswept hills above Bakhchisarai. Though the cold bites straight through the trailer’s paper-thin walls, they have done their best to make it cosy. There are rag rugs on the floor, and a picture of a cocker spaniel hangs above the wood stove in the corner. Six people live here at the moment, says Saide, but last winter there were eleven. The rest of the settlement still looks like a refugee camp. Half-built houses cobbled together out of bricks and breeze-blocks alternate with tiny shacks made of sheets of polythene tacked to wooden frames. Hens and goats scratch about in the coarse dry grass, which stretches away in treeless billows to the horizon. The returnees have rigged themselves up an electricity supply, pirated from the mains, but there are no drains or standpipes. Drinking-water comes in a lorry twice a week.
When the Tatars arrived three years ago the hillside was completely deserted. ‘We waited and waited for official permission to start building,’ says Saide, ‘but nothing happened, so we divided it into plots ourselves. They came and told us to stop, but we weren’t going to move. It’s so stupid – in Glory to Labour I saw an article saying “the Tatars have occupied a fertile peach-orchard”. Can you see any orchard here?’ Relations with local government have improved a bit since, but ordinary Russians still resent the returnees. ‘Quite recently I went to get my pension. Three or four other Tatar women were there too. And the girl behind the counter said – hey, you’ve brought the whole tribe, and you won’t go away until you’ve taken everything! That’s mostly the Russians who’ve arrived recently – the ones who were here before the war know the Tatars; their reaction is completely different.’
The man responsible for holding the line between Tatars and Russians is Mustafa Cemiloglu, head of the Milla Mejlis, the organisation Crimean Tatars think of as their national parliament, and one of the grand old men of the Soviet human-rights movement. After an hour’s driving about the Simferopol suburbs, we found the Mejlis’s headquarters in a cottage on one of the straggling streets where town starts turning into countryside. In the courtyard a group of weatherbeaten men in felt boots and padded jackets stood round a burned-out Mercedes. They were a generation younger than Saide – born in exile in Uzbekistan, they had no memory of pre-war Crimea. One had spent his life in a silk factory in Samarkand; another had worked on a collective farm, only survivor of seven brothers and sisters. The car, they said, had burned out the previous night, when somebody threw a petrol bomb over the wall.
In a back room decorated with a star-and-crescent flag and a portrait of Celebi Cihan, head of the stillborn Tatar government of 1917, Cemiloglu gravely gave me my interview. Though only in his early fifties he looked twenty years older, with draggly silver beard and an old lag’s nervous nicotine-yellow fingers. “The first time I was arrested,’ he said, ‘was in 1966, when they wanted to send me to the army. I told them I couldn’t serve in the Soviet army because I couldn’t serve the Motherland – I had no Motherland. There was nothing for me to protect. That’s how I got my first year and a half’s sentence.’ The brave, lonely life of the dedicated ‘uncorrectable’ followed – seven more arrests and a total of fifteen years in prison, two in Vladivostock, three on the arctic Magadan peninsula in a camp for violent criminals. When he was released for the last time in 1986 it was thanks to the support of better-known non-Tatar dissidents. His mentors were Andrey Sakharov, who put him on the list of political prisoners whose freedom he made a condition of his return from Gorky to Moscow, and General Petro Hryhorenko, a Ukrainian army officer who, magnificently and improbably, adopted the Tatar movement for his own in middle age, suffering five years’ torture in psychiatric clinics as a result. Cemiloglu lived with him between prison sentences. ‘He was,’ he says, ‘my second father.’
In 1989 Gorbachev finally allowed the Tatars to start returning home. Now they faced a new problem: how to make themselves felt in a Crimea where they were vastly outnumbered by defensive and disoriented Russians. Around 260,000 Tatars have returned so far, giving them just under 10 per cent of Crimea’s population. It is an awkward number – large enough not to be ignored, but too small to give them much electoral clout, especially since they are thinly dispersed throughout the peninsula. For a while, it looked as though things would turn violent: in October 1992 the Crimean government bulldozed a Tatar settlement on the coast, arresting and beating up several protesters in the process. (‘You might consider it a violation of human rights,’ a Crimean official told me, ‘but we call it making order.’) The Tatars responded by storming the Simferopol parliament, breaking every window in the building. The following winter two prominent Tatar moderates, a businessman and a parliamentary deputy, were assassinated – whether for political or financial reasons is unclear, since neither man’s murderer has ever been brought to trial.
Since then, although officialdom still puts bureaucratic obstacles in the way of Tatars getting land and jobs, and filches Western resettlement aid, things have quietened down. In the autumn of 1993 Cemiloglu succeeded in negotiating a quota of fourteen Tatar seats in the ninety-six-member Crimean parliament – not as many as he wanted, but generous none the less – while simultaneously reining in violence-prone factions in the Mejlis. What he fears most now is pro-Russian separatism. ‘It’s not that we love Ukraine any better than Russia,’ he says. ‘We simply realise that we need a stable situation here in Crimea. Changing boundaries means war.’ He has accordingly come out strongly on Kiev’s side in its periodic bust-ups with Crimea’s Russian nationalists, a tactic which should have earned favours for the future.
But however cunningly Cemiloglu parlays Tatar influence, their basic grievance is not going to go away. Like stateless nations everywhere, the Tatars regard themselves as a conquered people unjustly sidelined in a country morally their own. ‘But how can you have a Tatar Crimea,’ I ask, ‘when 70 per cent of Crimeans are Russians?’ Tapping his yellow fingers on the desk with the star-and-crescent flag, Cemiloglu has heard this question all too many times before. ‘Of course we don’t represent a majority of the Crimean population. But it isn’t our fault. The fact that we were annihilated doesn’t lessen our rights to our native land.’
Potemkin called Crimea ‘the wart on Russia’s nose’, and it still itches. Were a civil war to break out in Ukraine, it would most likely begin in Crimea. So far, things have been quieter than expected. Kiev has handled the peninsula coolly, giving it substantial autonomy and resisting pressure from Ukrainian nationalists to impose direct presidential rule. Kiev’s timing has been canny too: when the pro-Russian firebrand Yuriy Meshkov was elected Crimean president in January 1994, Ukraine’s President Kuchma waited until Meshkov had squandered his popularity by failing to deliver on economic promises before giving him the boot. The Crimean presidency has now been abolished, and at the time of writing Kiev and Simferopol are still half-heartedly bickering over the fine print of a new Crimean constitution.
But like so much in Ukraine, Crimea’s future hangs largely on what happens in Moscow. The Yeltsin government has been restrained on the issue, repeatedly declaring Crimean kerfuffles ‘Ukraine’s internal affair’ and agreeing, as part of the 1994 deal on Ukraine’s surrender of its nuclear weapons, to mutual respect of national borders. When Meshkov visited Moscow the month after his election, Yeltsin and the Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin both refused to meet him, leaving the disconsolate Crimean president boasting unconvincingly about contacts with anonymous ‘big pine-cones’ in the ‘capital’. And though Ukraine and Russia spent five years squabbling over the fate of the Black Sea Fleet, rotting at anchor in Sevastopol, the protraction of negotiations probably had more to do with both governments’ reluctance to give ammunition to their nationalists than with the fleet’s actual strategic importance, which is negligible. The Chechen war has worked in Ukraine’s favour, since as well as spoiling Russia’s taste for imperialist adventure, it has given Ukraine the moral high ground. Having bombed its own would-be secessionists to pieces in the Caucasus, Moscow can hardly object to Kiev using a few sharp elbows in Crimea.
There is no guarantee that Russia will be sensible for ever. Many politicians would like to take a more aggressive line on Crimea, among them two of Yeltsin’s likeliest successors, Aleksandr Lebed, the gravel-voiced ex-head of the Russian army in Moldova, and Yuriy Luzhkov, the populist mayor of Moscow. Both talk about the ‘historic Russian-ness’ of Sevastopol; Luzhkov has declared it ‘the eleventh district of Moscow’. All this is music to the ears of the Russian parliament, which has twice condemned Khrushchev’s transfer of Crimea to Ukraine, and in 1993 passed a resolution declaring Sevastopol to be Russian territory. Were a President Lebed or a President Luzhkov to successfully re-ignite the secessionist movement in Crimea, it could even spark a chain reaction in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine.
Kiev’s best pre-emptive bet is to get to work on the Crimean economy. With local government dominated by conservative ex-communists, in terms of economic reform the peninsula is one of the most backward places in Ukraine. In Simferopol milk queues outnumber pavement kiosks, and until the summer of 1996 there was a moratorium on all privatisation. Nothing will stop Crimea’s Russians being Russian, but if Kiev can start creating jobs and improving living standards, the lure of nationalist demagogues will be weaker.
Back in Sevastopol, in a café down by the waterfront, I asked a group of young men lounging round a card-table if they felt like Ukrainians. They looked at me as if I were mad. ‘Of course not!’ exploded one. ‘They put new stamps in our passports without asking us – they did it by force! I don’t speak Ukrainian at all – but they didn’t care if you were Russian, Jewish or whatever!’ It was all Gorbachev’s fault: ‘That man was a real bastard. He let the country collapse. No one managed it in seventy years but he managed it in one with his perestroika!’ Like his friends, he was out of work – yesterday he had been offered a job as a security guard, but with a salary of less than five dollars a month it wasn’t worth taking. The girl behind the counter chipped in: ‘There’s no sense in any of it – we should have stayed together! Suddenly me and my sister live in different countries! You’ve got your hard currency, you can go anywhere in the world with it – but with our coupons we can’t even go to Moscow!’ Grimacing, she slapped at a wad of scuzzy notes: ‘It’s paper, not money – what is this stuff? I don’t know!’ Her friends, she said, were all leaving – not just for Russia, but for anywhere abroad. She hadn’t voted in the elections ‘on principle’ – because I don’t believe in these borders. It’s like a play – they know in advance who’ll win, who’ll lose.’
As I got up to leave one of the men started to laugh. ‘If I was commander of the Black Sea Fleet, you know what I’d do? I’d start a war with Turkey, then surrender, and become a Turk in a leather jacket!’ Russians wanting to turn into Turks? Admiral Nakhimov would be turning in his grave.