“And Everything Around is So Non-Russian”: Crimean Tatars Against Late-Soviet Crimea

This post won the Grand Prize in History in the Jordan Center Blog's fourth annual Graduate Student Essay Competition.

Marsel Khamitov is a Tatarstan-born PhD student in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include the Soviet "friendship of peoples," ethnic deportations, and multilingual literature of the Soviet Union.

The first issue (1978) of the unofficial samizdat magazine Poiski (Quests) opened with an appeal to all peoples of the Soviet Union to unite in resisting authoritarianism and chauvinism. The introductory article was followed with an example of such solidarity—Boris Chichibabin’s (1923-1994) poem dedicated to Stalin’s deportation of the Crimean Tatars. Chichibabin, a Soviet Ukrainian “Sixtier” poet from Kharkiv, describes a Crimea deprived, in 1944, of its historical monuments and its indigenous people: 

Old Muslim cemeteries are turned into a state-organized resort. The shashlik (shish kebab), originally a Crimean Tatar word, is now cooked by Russian tourists: along with other monuments and ruins of non-Russia, it now serves the colonizers. In an earlier poem, “Crimean Strolls” (1959), Chichibabin called this “touristified” Crimea a “Russian Riviera,” in which one can find only tourists enjoying picturesque beaches: “’Where are you, Tatars?,’ I shouted. / But there were no Tatars.” The people had been deprived of their autonomous republic and forcedly transported in cattle cars to Central Asia. 

The Crimean Tatar case is of special relevance today for many reasons, apart from the global media attention to their homeland since Russia annexed the peninsula in 2014. Unlike most other “punished” peoples, they were banned from returning even after Stalin’s death. The problem of a strategically located, and already resettled, Crimea turned out to be insoluble for the state without the radical transformation of that state itself. The Crimean Tatars, however, did want to transform this vertical structure, in which all national republics were subject to arbitrary change, or even abolishment, by the Moscow authorities. Starting with the late 1950s, they demanded the restoration of their republic and a guarantee of equal rights with all other Soviet citizens. They campaigned not only for their return to Crimea, complete with a restoration of rights, but also for equal rights for all ethnic groups 'punished' in earlier decades of Soviet rule

Most importantly, they managed to organize a grassroots political movement unprecedented in the history of Soviet dissent. With the notable exception of Rory Finnin’s recent book Blood of Others (2022), the history of the movement remains mostly unknown to Western audiences. In a sharp contrast to the famous Soviet dissidents, this was a large-scale mass movement embracing tens of thousands of peoples of different socioeconomic backgrounds. In the 1960s–1980s, they developed various forms of protest action, from official petitions to the Party to strikes, mass demonstrations, and squatting on Crimean land. 

Crimean Tatars also became pioneers of Soviet samizdat. Poetry in particular became one of the main media driving alternative political imaginations. “Reading anti-Soviet poems” was among the most common “crimes” with which the government charged their activists. 

An impressively high number of the movement’s leaders resorted to poetry as an effective mobilizing weapon. One of them was Seitumer Emin (1921-2004), deported in 1944 despite receiving military awards during the war. In the 1950s, he gained popularity as a poet, but under increasing pressure from the authorities, Emin had to leave Uzbekistan and move to Novorossiysk—the closest to Crimea a Crimean Tatar could live. To find a readership there, Emin had to switch to Russian.

 It is this intermediate linguistic and cultural space where the encounter between the “Sixtiers” Soviet intelligentsia and the mass national movement takes place. One of Emin’s Russian poems, “Siren” (Sirena, 1977), presents an analysis of the touristification of colonized land that recalls Chichibabin’s poem:

The main moral and political challenge the poem declares is to not allow the discrepancy between the tourist highway and the memory of mass executions—a discrepancy Chichibabin called “indecent”—to be ignored or obscured through the entertainment industry. Unlike Chichibabin, Emin had to tell the story in Aesopian language, recoding it as “Nazi crimes” against Crimean Tatar partisans. However, “Siren” intentionally focuses not on mourning the tragic past, but on sending signals to mobilize the present. Poetry is thus redefined as a globally oriented political act:

The poem’s name is telling. A siren’s call is not about mourning or remembering, but about awareness and militance. Its song is an alarm as a summon to arms. In 1987, Emin became one of the leaders of a protest march that went down in history as the “Taman’ March” (Tamanskii pokhod). Thanks to Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841), the stanitsa Taman’ in Krasnodar Krai is known as “the worst small town of all the coastal towns in Russia.” In Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1840), its danger derives from its status as an imperial frontier zone. In 1987, the frontier fired back. 

Hundreds of people, led by Emin and other Crimean Tatar activists, started an organized march headed directly to Crimea. The authorities took the march quite seriously, immediately attacking it via the police and the army, with the support of several helicopters. Although the march did not reach Crimea, it showed the people’s power, since the crowd managed to defend and free detained activists and the authorities began making concessions. The Taman’ March highlighted the Soviet state’s failure to govern its multinational population and address the continuing legacy of Stalinism.  It also demonstrated the people’s capability to conduct politics on their own behalf, renegotiating its relationships with a state that had failed them. 

A few years later, Crimean Tatars managed to outlive the state that persecuted them and actively participate in building the multiethnic civic nation of independent Ukraine. Emin, who in 2001 became an Honored Art Worker of Ukraine, died on 21 March 2004, exactly ten years before the Russian Federal Council ratified the annexation of the peninsula. Since 2014, Crimea has again been promoted as a perfect tourist destination. The Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People refused to acknowledge the occupiers. In retaliation, many of Emin’s comrades from the national movement were detained or declared outlaws by the Russian authorities. The Crimean Tatar experience of fighting a totalitarian state and self-organizing, unfortunately, remains relevant. Their “siren” continues to spread awareness, militance, and hopes for solidarity and perseverance.