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The Crimean Tatars: The Diaspora Experience and
the Forging of a Nation
by Brian Glyn Williams
This work is an analysis of the latest
theories in Russia, the USA, Turkey and Western Europe
on such topics as the ancient ethnic origins of the
Crimean Tatars (in the Mongol and Ottoman periods and
earlier Gothic and Kipchak eras); the nature of the
Crimean Tatar Khanate (from 1475-1783); colonial rule
(by Imperial Russia); displacement and migration (predominantly
in the aftermath of the 19th century Crimean War); settlement
in the Ottoman Empire (in the Dobruca coastal region
of the Balkans and Anatolia); national identity formation
(on the eve of the Russian Revolution and during the
early Soviet period); ethnic cleansing (during the general
conflagration of World War II, May 18, 1944); exile
in Uzbekistan and elsewhere; repatriation to the Crimea
and post-Soviet identity and culture construction among
the Crimean Tatars.
It is intended that this work will have wide applications
for those studying forced diasporic groups such as the
Armenians, Jews, Palestinians, Tutsis etc. as well as
those studying national identity formation among Islamic
groups in Communist Eurasia. Most importantly, however,
this work brings up to date the tragic history of the
Crimean Tatars under Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet
Ukrainian rule using the latest declassified KGB documents,
previously un-translated 19th century Russian accounts,
first hand interviews in the Crimea and Central Asia
with those who survived the deportation of this people,
interviews with Crimean Tatar leaders such as Mustafa
Dzhemilev, and many new Western sources which reflect
the virtual renaissance of interest in the Crimean Tatars
since 1991.
A theme which is traced through this work is the
gradual process whereby this small ethno-religious community
of Muslim peasants developed a modern national identity
and a political attachment to a land defined in secular
terms as a Homeland. This work in effect traces the
forging of the Crimean Tatar nation and their links
to their home territory over time and space, from the
19th century provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the
Balkans to the deserts of Stalin’s Central Asia.
This work challenges many previously held beliefs on
the Crimean Tatars, their ethnicity, the nature of their
indigenous state, their settlement in the realm of the
Ottomans, the rise of a native nationalist intelligentsia,
the controversial role of the Crimean Tatars in the
Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the nature
of the Crimean Tatars’ experience of total ethnic
cleansing, their forced settlement in Central Asia and
the dynamics of their return to the Ukraine-Crimea after
1989.
Chapter One. Origins. The ‘Ethnogenesis’
of the Tatars of the Crimea. This chapter painstakingly
disproves the notion that the Crimean Tatars are ‘Mongols’
who arrived in the Crimea with the invasions of Batu
Khan in the mid 13th century. Using a variety of sources
from many languages, the pre-Mongol, Greek, Armenian,
Goth, Scythian and Kipchak-Turkic origins, culture and
ethnicity of the sedentary, farming Crimean Tatars of
the southern coastal mountains are explored here. In
the process, the ancient origins of the culture of the
south-Crimean sub-ethnic group of Tatars, known as the
Tats, is examined and used to dispute simplistic claims
for the nomadic, Mongol origin of this people who would,
under the influence of Islam and Mongol ruling institutions,
later form the Tatars of the Crimea. This chapter shatters
the image of the Crimean Tatars as a race of nomadsand
proves that the south Crimean Tatars were the direct
descendants of the Pontic Greeks, Armenians, Scythians,
Ostrogoths and Kipchak Turks.
Chapter Two. Dar
al-Islam. The Crimean Tatars from Mehmed the Conqueror
to Catherine the Great. This chapter analyzes the culture
of the Crimean Tatars (both urban and rural) during
the period of the Crimean Khanate and Ottoman rule on
the south Crimean coast. An in-depth analysis of life
in the Khanate and the Ottoman coastal province is provided
here and the differences between the Kipchak Turkic
speaking Tatar sub-ethnic group of the north Crimean
steppes (the nomadic Nogais) and the ancient sedentary
Tatars of the south (the Tats) is further explored.
The continuation of Christian traditions in Crimean
Islam, the culture of such Tatar towns as Bahcesaray,
Karasubazar and Kefe (Kaffa), and the history of sedentarization
by nomads in the Crimea are also explored in this chapter.
Chapter
Three. The Pearl in the Tsar’s
Crown. The Crimean Land and People under Russia. This
chapter traces the events surrounding the Russian conquest
and annexation of the Crimea. Using the first-hand accounts
of those who visited the Crimea in the 19th century,
this land and its people are brought to life in an analysis
of agricultural customs, village life, ethnic dialects,
traditional Islam, town life etc. From the terraced
mountain villages of the southern coast and Yaila Mountains
and the bustling bazaars and mosques of the Khanate’s
former capital, Bahcesaray, to the auls (camps) of the
Tatar herders of the north Crimean steppe (the Nogais),
the Crimea of the early colonial period is recreated.
This is done, in part, to juxtapose the later collapse
of this peasant society which occurred largely as a
result of Russian colonial policies.
Chapter Four.
Dispossession. The Loss of the Crimean Homeland. This
is a systematic study of the loss of Crimean land suffered
by the Crimean Tatar peasants and villagers due to Russian
land confiscations in the late 18th and 19th centuries.
As in other areas of colonial rule, in the Crimea Russian
magnates, large-landowners (pomeshchiks) and the nobility
displaced the weaker indigenous population of the Crimea
causing a virtual collapse of their traditional society.
Overwhelming evidence of this loss of communal land,
access to communal wells and the impoverishment of the
Tatars is provided through the use of contemporary Russian
sources. This encroachment and exploitation of the Crimea
at the expense of the apathetic Muslim peasants led
many Tatar Muslims to conceive of the Ottoman Empire
as the true home of pious Muslims and a land of religious
freedom and opportunity.
Chapter Five. Dar
al-Harb. The 19th Century Crimean Tatar Migrations to
the Ottoman Empire. This chapter discusses the collapse
of Crimean Muslim society in the aftermath of the Crimean
War of 1853-6. This chapter is an analysis of the role
that such factors as Russian colonial excesses during
warfare with the Ottomans, war-time depredation by Cossack
units during the Crimean War and internal calls for
hijra (religious migration) to the Islamic -Ottoman
Empire by the Tatar Muslims’ religious leaders
played in causing a strange mass migration of 200,000
of the Russian Empire’s 300,000 Crimean Tatars
to the Ottoman Empire in 1860. This chapter demonstrates
that the Crimean Tatar Muslims were subjected to considerable
loss of land to Russian landowners, deprived of access
to pastures and wells and subjected to a massive disruption
of their traditional agrarian and social systems. All
of these colonial abuses, when combined with war-time
persecution, led many pre-modern Crimean Tatar Muslims
to abandon Russia (which was seen as the Dar al-Harb,
the ‘Land of War’ with the infidel) for
the blessed lands of the Ottoman Muslims. As becomes
evident here, the pre-modern Islamic population of Tatars
in the Crimea had no communal construction of the Crimea
as a ‘Fatherland’ in the Western nationalist
sense in this early period. I translate beautiful Tatar
destans (ballads) which describe the Crimea as un-Islamic
land of the unbelievers ‘consumed by fire’
as a means of demonstrating the lack of territoriality
among the Crimean Muslims who of course had not yet
been exposed to modern, Western nationalism and its
romanticization of home territory (Fatherland).
Chapter
Six. Signs and Portents. The Crimean
Tatars in the Aftermath of the Migration of 1860. This
chapter analyzes the results of this frenzied emigration
of Crimean Tatar Muslims to the Ottoman Empire (mainly
in 1860-1) on the Crimea’s economy and its indigenous
Tatar population. I use Russian sources in particular
to describe the loss of ancient farming techniques,
the collapse of grain growing in the Crimean steppe
(farmed by Nogai Tatars) and the terrible impact that
the loss of the Crimea’s skilled indigenous peasant
class had on this region’s welfare. This chapter
disputes simplistic notions that the Crimean Tatars
were ‘ethnically cleansed’ from their homeland
by their Russian masters. It is the contention here
that the pre-modern, tribal-Islamically defined Tatar
community of the Crimea felt the Crimea to the be the
Dar al-Harb and emigrated to the Islamic Ottoman
Empire (conceived as the Dar al-Islam, the Realm of
Islam and seat of the Caliph) to preserve their religious
beliefs and communal identity. Ironically enough, I
demonstrate here that Russian authorities prevented
the remnant of Crimean Tatars in the south (the Tats)
from following in the footsteps of the emigrating nomadic
Tatars (the Nogais) and thus preserved a Tatar core
in the Crimea which would later form the Crimean Tatar
nation. It is, however, demonstrated here that
land confiscations by Russian landowners and other ‘push’
factors, such as carefully analyzed anti-Tatar discrimination
and Cossack pogroms during the Crimean War, left this
religious community prone to internal ‘pull’
factors which encouraged emigration, such as calls of
hijra (religious emigration) to the lands of the Ottoman
Sultan-Caliph.
Chapter
Seven. Ak Toprak. The Formation of the
Crimean Tatar Communities of the Caucasus, Romania and
Bulgaria. This section provides an in-depth analysis
of the settlement of the emigrating Crimean Tatars in
the lands of the Ottoman sultans (known in Tatar as
‘white or holy lands’ or ak toprak) in the
Caucasus (Circassia) and the Dobruca (coastal Romania
and Bulgaria) . The process whereby the Dobruca plain
became known as ‘Little Tatarstan’ as a
result of these costly migrations is given considerable
attention. The continuation of Tatar customs in the
Dobruca is explored in this anthropological chapter
as is the role of the Crimean Tatars in Ottoman Balkan
society and Ottoman military organizations. In many
respects this chapter is the first comprehensive analysis
in a Western language on the Tatars and their culture
in this little studied corner of Europe.
Chapter
Eight. The Great Retreat. The Formation
of the Crimean Tatar Diaspora in Turkey. This chapter
traces the tragic Tatar migrations to Anatolia and brings
to life the loss of life, disruption to emigrating families
and efforts to readapt to life in western Anatolia by
Crimean Tatar muhacirs (religiously-motivated immigrants)
following the bloody collapse of Ottoman rule in the
Balkans (1875-7). This chapter analyzes the socio-economic
role of the Crimean Tatar refugees in Ottoman Anatolia,
their gradual Turkification (especially of the Tat sub-ethnic
group which had close ties to the Ottomans in the Crimea)
and their later efforts to preserve or revive their
identity as a diasporic people in the officially homogenous,
mono-ethnic Turkish Republic.
It is argued here that, while most Crimean Tatar
immigrants assimilated into Turkish society due to the
fact that they had no articulated sense of modern ‘national’
identity or attachment to secular ‘Fatherland’
at the time of their arrival in the Ottoman Empire,
later Crimean Tatar activists have been successful in
maintaining or reviving a continued sense of ‘Crimean
Tatarness’ amongst many Crimean Tatars in Eski
Sehir and other cities in Western Anatolia. While Ataturk’s
policies of Turkification were successful in assimilating
the Crimean Tatars of Turkey, a minority continued to
link themselves to their former Crimean homeland through
cultural associations and diasporic journals such as
Emel (Aspiration). This diasporic community (a ‘sleeping’
community of over a million) has the potential to play
the role of a traditional support diaspora in assisting
their parent community in the former Soviet Union. With
the collapse of the USSR and the relaxation of Ataturk’s
policies of unifying Turkification, the Crimean Tatars
of Turkey have the potential to be a mobilized diaspora
with the real ability to shape events in their former
homeland.
Chapter
Nine. Yeshil Ada. The Construction of
Tatar Diasporic Identity in Romania and Bulgaria. This
chapter explores the construction of an active diasporic
identity among the Crimean Tatars of the Dobruca in
the 20th century. Although this islanded community of
Tatars has undergone repression in Communist Bulgaria
(especially in the 1980s) and loss of land Romania,
it has kept alive its links to its former Crimean homeland
alive and many of the Crimean Tatar diaspora’s
most dynamic leaders hail from the Dobrucan plain. This
unique Balkan diasporic community has gone largely un-studied
by those in the field of comparative diasporic studies
(i.e. the study of Jews, Armenians, Palestinians, Tutsis
etc.) and it is the aim of this chapter and the previous
one to include the Crimean Tatars in larger academic
discussions on diaspora groups of the world. This chapter
also traces the process whereby this diasporic community
constructed symbolic links to the Yeshil Ada (Green
Island) of the Crimea under the influence of nationalism.
Chapter
Ten. Vatan. The Construction of the
Crimean Tatar Homeland. This chapter takes the story
of the Crimean Tatars back to the largely Russified
Crimean homeland of the late 19th and early 20th centuries
in the aftermath of the great emigration of 1860. This
section explores the role of such seminal Crimean Tatar
leaders as the modernist, Ismail Gaspirali, early nationalist
Abureshid Mehdi, and later nationalist leaders such
as Cafer Seydahmet, Ahmet Ozenbashli, and Numan Chelebi
Cihan in constructing the Crimea not as a adjunct of
the Russian Empire, or an infidel-ruled land to be abandoned
in order to preserve one’s Islamic identity (the
Dar al-Harb) , but as a unique ‘Fatherland’
or ‘Homeland’ (Vatan) for the Tatars of
the Crimea. It is argued here that indigenous intellectuals
among the Crimean Tatars were exposed to Western nationalism
and borrowed allegories of blood mixed with soil, the
sacredness of one’s home place, the rights of
nations to a territory defined as a Faterland or Patrie
etc. to construct the Crimea as a (Vatan) Homeland in
the Western nationalist sense.
In the process, it is argued here, the Muslim
Tatars of the Crimea were encouraged by an educated
elite to see themselves as an ethno-linguistic nation
with a unique national claim to the idealized soil of
the Crimean homeland. It is the contention here that
the great Islamic reformer Gaspirali started this process
by emphasizing the ethno-linguistic (Not Islamic) aspects
of his imagined community which was the greater Turkic
nation (the Crimean Tatars were seen by Gaspirali as
simply a component of a much larger Eurasian Turkic
nation made up of Azeris, Volga Tatars, Kazakhs, Uzbeks
etc.). Younger Crimean Tatars with a more narrowly-defined,
political outlook took Gaspirali’s ethno-cultural
ideas and applied them not to the Turkic people as a
whole, but to their more narrowly defined imagined community,
the Tatar national-community of the Crimean Peninsula.
In the process these early nationalists began
to compete with the Crimean Tatars’ traditional
communal leaders, the Islamic ulema, for the hearts
and minds of their people. In so doing this small nationalist
intelligentsia condemned religiously-sponsored migration
to the lands of the Muslim Empire (the Ottoman Empire)
as a betrayal of the Crimean Tatar ‘nation’
and ‘homeland’. This was a revolutionary
break with a time honored Crimean Muslim tradition of
abandoning the Crimea for the ak toprak (holy or white
soil of the Ottoman Caliph) and laid the seeds for the
later dissemination of a sense of territorialized national
identity to the Crimean Tatar masses. In the process
the concept of the Crimea as a Homeland began, for the
first time, to reach the Muslim masses in the Crimea.
Chapter
Eleven. Soviet Homeland. The Nationalization
of Crimean Tatar Identity in the USSR. This chapter
explores the position of the Crimean Tatars in the Soviet
Union prior to their deportation in 1944. This is a
contentious issue today as the Crimean Tatars argue
that the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic
(ASSR) of 1921-45 was established, as were all other
territorial autonomy-homelands in the USSR, in recognition
of the republic’s indigenous ethnic group (i.e.
the Crimean Tatars in this case). Most Russians in the
Crimea today, however, point out that the Crimean ASSR
was never a de jure Crimean Tatar ASSR, rather they
argue it was a multi-national territorial republic,
not a national republic established for the minority
Crimean Tatars (who represented only 25% of the Crimean
ASSR’s population). This chapter proves that the
republic was indeed established in recognition of the
Crimean Tatars as the autonomy’s officially recognized
native population (korennoi narod) and that all the
state institutions of this republic recognized the Crimean
Tatars’ unique status in the Crimea and claim
to this republic.
This policy of ‘positive discrimination’
towards the Crimea’s de facto state-sponsored
native people was best demonstrated in Lenin’s
policy of korenizatsiia (‘rooting’ of indigenous
populations in the administration of their homeland-republics).
During this period the Tatar head of the Crimean ASSR,
Veli Ibrahimov, used all of the vast resources suddenly
made available to him by the new Bolshevik Communist
regime (Tatar language newspapers, education in primary
and secondary schools by Tatars, increased literacy,
Tatar language publishing houses and libraries, state-sponsored
archeology, Tatar language programs in the university
etc.) to nationalize his backward Islamic peasant people
and contribute to the territorialization of their identity
in their state-sponsored homeland-republic.
In the process Islam as a competing basis for
communal identity was disrupted in the Soviets’
drive against religion and obscurantism. The Crimea
thus became a secularly-defined homeland for most secular
Crimean Tatars who now linked themselves to this territory
in a way their religiously defined, aterritorial ancestors
had not a generation earlier. The Crimea had both emotive
and bureaucratic claims to the Crimean Tatars’
allegiance as a homeland by this time period and this
territory was seen as the only place for Soviet citizens
of Crimean Tatar origin to live. This fascinating chapter
in Crimean Tatar history (the role of the Soviet state
in completing the construction of the Crimea as a homeland
by its native population) has gone largely unrecognized
by Crimean Tatars today.
Chapter
Twelve. Surgun. The Crimean Tatar Exile
in Central Asia. This chapter analyzes the role of the
Crimean Tatars in World War II and recreates the horrors
of the deportation of 1944. Using previously off limit
NKVD (KGB), German and Tatar sources this chapter provides
hitherto unpublished information on the role of the
Crimean Tatars as fighters in the Red Army, partisan
units and the invading German Wehrmacht. This chapter
demonstrates that, according to NKVD sources, 20,000
Crimean Tatars fought in the ranks of the Red Army and
20,000 for the Nazis. All sources agree that most of
those who fought for the Nazis were either captured
by the Germans and given the choice of dying in prison
camps or being used as cannon fodder or fought in the
German ranks in the hopes of achieving Crimean Tatar
independence from Stalin’s brutal regime. Many
Tatars who fought for the Germans did so in order to
further Crimean Tatar national agendas (not assist the
Nazis) and the majority of the Crimean Tatar people
were strongly anti-German by the end of the war (due
to confiscation of livestock and grain by the Gestapo
and the forced deportation of Crimean Tatars to work
in German factories as Ostarbeiters-Eastern Workers).
Regardless of the complexity of the issue, it
is the contention here that the NKVD deported the Crimean
Tatars probably to preempt their collaboration with
Turkey which Stalin intended to invade in order to seize
two provinces lost to Russia at the end of World War
I (Kars and Ardahan). This chapter subsequently traces
the deportation routes and resettlement of the Crimean
Tatars, largely in eastern Uzbekistan, and makes use
of interviews with survivors (carried out by the author
in Uzbekistan and the Crimea) and newly declassified
NKVD-KGB sources to reconstruct this tragic event. Such
issues as new statistics on the mortality rate, conditions
in the ‘special settlement’ camps, relations
with the indigenous Central Asian populations, and efforts
to ‘de-Tatarize’ the Crimea after 1944 are
discussed here.
Chapter
Thirteen. Return. The Post-Soviet Migrations
of the Crimean Tatars from Central Asia to the Crimea.
This chapter provides a history of the exiled Crimean
Tatars’ long struggle against the Soviet regime
to return to a homeland that this nation, which had
become very territorialized and nationalized during
the early Soviet period and even more so during the
surgun (exile), saw as its only legitimate home place.
It is argued here that the Crimean Tatar people’s
attachment to the Crimean homeland went from passive
to politically active as a result of their communal
deportation and continuing ethnically-based oppression
under the Soviets.
Of interest here is the analysis of the trans-generational
narratives of the homeland which linked new generations
of Tatars growing up in exile in Central Asia to the
Crimea as a romanticized homeland (the so called Yeshil
Ada-Green Isle). This unique example of an entire people
living in exile but refusing to accept their places
of ‘resettlement’ as permanent has gone
largely unnoticed by the outside world. Those studying
ethno-political mobilization, diasporic identity construction,
the durability of nationalism etc. have in the Crimean
Tatar exile been offered a unique comparative case study
on the salient nature of territoriality and nationalism.
Far from assimilating into the Central Asian Turco-Islamic
milieu as the Soviet government obviously intended,
the exiled Crimean Tatars were led by such dynamic dissident
leaders as Mustafa Dzhemilev Kirimoglu in fighting for
the right to return to their national homeland. All
efforts to provide alternative solutions to the Crimean
Tatar ‘problem’ (such as state-sponsored
discussions on the establishment of an autonomous Crimean
Tatar homeland-autonomy in Uzbekistan) or to de-nationalize
the Crimean Tatars were rejected by this politically
mobilized people who waged a determined dissident struggle
to sustain their group identity and return their entire
nation to its historic homeland.
The irony here is that the secularized descendants of
those 19th century Tatar Muslim emigrants who left the
Russian-dominated Crimea for the Islamic Ottoman Empire
were now engaged in a determined struggle to return
to the very land abandoned by hundreds of thousands
of their religiously-defined ancestors a century earlier.
With the implementation of Gorbachev’s policy
of openness-glasnost and the collapse of the USSR, approximately
half of the CIS’s population of 500,000 Crimean
Tatars have returned with great difficulty to the Crimean
‘Homeland’. It is argued here that this
strange migration of car convoys, whole collective farms
and neighborhoods was not a spontaneous event but rather
a well organized action as were the subsequent land
seizures in the Crimea by returning Crimean Tatars.
This chapter provides a chronology
of the subsequent clashes between the Crimean Tatar
‘returnees’ (many of whom had never seen
the Crimea) and Russian-Crimean authorities in the early
1990s, attempts by the Russian dominated authorities
of the Crimea to destroy Crimean Tatar settlements (known
as samozakhvats-self-seized settlements), the struggle
to gain representation in the Russian-dominated Crimean
parliament and difficulties (such as de-urbanization)
related to the process of resettlement in the Crimea.
This chapter is based on field research in the Crimea
and provides a description of life in the settlements,
the importance of Central Asia in the collective memory
of the Crimean Tatar repatriates, the sense of disillusionment
many returnees feel in a homeland most had never seen
prior to the Soviet collapse, and problems related to
keeping Crimean Tatar identity alive among that segment
of the Crimean Tatar population (50%) still in exile.
The narrative ends with an analysis of events on the
ground in the Crimea as of spring 2000 and discusses
such topics as the homogenizing effects of the exile
on creating a sense of unity among the Crimean Tatar
sub-ethnies (the Tats and Nogais), efforts by Crimean
Tatar leaders to have the Crimean Tatars defined in
the Ukraine and international forums as an indigenous
group, the role of Turkey (and the Tatar diaspora there)
in the Crimea and the future prospects of the Crimean
Tatar diaspora still residing in Central Asia and Russia
(predominantly the Krasnodar region and Moscow).
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