Cahiers du monde russe Russie - Empire russe - Union soviétique et États indépendants 41/1 | 2000 Varia Hijra and forced migration from nineteenth- century Russia to the Ottoman Empire A critical analysis of the Great Tatar emigration of 1860-1861 Brian Glyn Williams Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/39 DOI: 10.4000/monderusse.39 ISSN: 1777-5388 Publisher Éditions de l’EHESS Printed version Date of publication: 1 January 2000 Number of pages: 79-108 ISBN: 2-7132-1353-3 ISSN: 1252-6576 Electronic reference Brian Glyn Williams, « Hijra and forced migration from nineteenth-century Russia to the Ottoman Empire », Cahiers du monde russe [Online], 41/1 | 2000, Online since 15 January 2007, Connection on 20 April 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/39 ; DOI : 10.4000/monderusse.39 © École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. BRIAN GLYN WILLIAMS HIJRA AND FORCED MIGRATION FROM NINETEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIA TO THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE A critical analysis of the Great Crimean Tatar emigration of 1860-1861 THE LARGEST EXAMPLES OF FORCED MIGRATIONS in Europe since the World War II era have involved the expulsion of Muslim ethnic groups from their homelands by Orthodox Slavs. Hundreds of thousands of Bulgarian Turks were expelled from Bulgaria by Todor Zhivkov’s communist regime during the late 1980s; hundreds of thousands of Bosniacs were cleansed from their lands by Republika Srbska forces in the mid-1990s; and, most recently, close to half a million Kosovar Muslims have been forced from their lands by Yugoslav forces in Kosovo in Spring of 1999. This process can be seen as a continuation of the “Great Retreat” of Muslim ethnies from the Balkans, Pontic rim and Caucasus related to the nineteenth-century collapse of Ottoman Muslim power in this region. The first “dominoe” to fall in this historic process of retreat by former Ottoman Muslim populations was a small Turco- Muslim ethnic group known as the Crimean Tatars. An analysis of the Crimean Tatar mass migrations from the Russian Empire to the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century can shed some light on the process that has seen millions of Muslims uprooted and forced to migrate to the Muslim core of the Otttoman Empire, Anatolia. To understand the migration of the Crimean Tatars one must go back to the period of the Crimean War. In the aftermath of the Crimean War of 1853-1856 approximately 200,000 Crimean Tatars from a total population of roughly 300,000 living in the Russian Empire’s Tauride Province (the Crimean peninsula and neighboring steppe lands) abandoned their ancestral lands and migrated to the Ottoman Empire in a process known as hijra (religious migration). The strange mass movement of two Cahiers du Monde russe, 41/1, Janvier-mars 2000, pp. 79-108. 80 BRIAN GLYN WILLIAMS thirds of this Muslim people from their ancestral lands to the ak toprak (“white soil”, i.e. sacred land) of the Ottoman caliph-sultan is one of the least understood migrations related to Russian colonial rule in the Muslim borderlands. While this migration can be seen in part as a sub-plot to the Great Retreat of Muslim ethnies such as the Circassians, Ubykhs, Abkhazians, Chechens, Nogais, Bosniacs, Pomaks, Balkan Turks, Laz and other Muslim groups related to the nineteenth-century collapse of Muslim rule in the Balkans, the Pontic rim and the Caucasus, this movement had its own peculiar dynamics. As will be demonstrated, this little understood migration was partially the result of colonial policies specific to the Tauride province and internal mechanisms working within nineteenth- century Crimean Muslim society. In addition, events surrounding the Crimean War, which was fought across the lands of Crimea long settled by Tatar peasants, acted as a catalyst for this mass emigration. In order to understand the background to this migration, which took place between 1859 and 1862, one must in fact look back to the Crimean Tatars’ position during the Crimean War. There are considerable differences of opinion between many nineteenth-century tsarist officials and Soviet propagandists on one side and the Crimean Tatars and their sympathizers (many of whom were Russian) on the other side concerning the Crimean Tatars’ role during the Crimean War. General Menshikov (the commander of the Crimean front during the Crimean War) and several Soviet historians have generally depicted the Crimean Tatars as traitors to the Russian rodina (homeland) during this conflict. The Crimean Tatars’ communal betrayal of Russia during this war is presented in many post-1944 sources as a rehearsal for this nation’s later “mass betrayal” of the Soviet Union during World War II. P. N. Nadinskii’s work Essays on the history of the Crimea (Ocherki po istorii Kryma), published just seven years after the deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar nation in 1944, is considered a classic of historical revisionism and generally paints a negative picture of the Crimean Tatars. In this work Nadinskii writes “The massive migration of the Tatars to Turkey also appeared as a direct response to the war. The main cause of this emigration was the Tatars’ fear of just retribution for their traitorous behavior during the war.”1 It was, according to this popular viewpoint, the Crimean Tatars’ “fanatical” attachment to their co-religionists, the Turks, that led this people into collusion with the Ottomans and their allies during the Crimean War. At the conclusion of the war, according to anti-Tatar accounts, the Crimea’s Muslim population, in a religious frenzy, abandoned the Russian Empire in a mass migration to join their Muslim allies in the Ottoman Empire. On the other hand, the Crimean Tatars and their sympathizers stress this people’s loyalty during the Crimean War and claim that they were actually the passive victims of Russian attacks during the conflict. A nineteenth-century Russian writer living in the Crimea, Evgenii Markov, claims that the Russian populace of the Crimea (as opposed to the officials in far off St. Petersburg) felt that 1. P. N. Nadinskii, Ocherki po istorii Kryma (Simferopol´: Krymizdat, 1951): 140. HIJRA AND FORCED MIGRATION 81 the Crimean Tatars had actually been loyal during the war. According to this source “With one voice they say that, without the Tatars, we would have fallen; all means of transport were exclusively in their hands.”2 A second Russian source, G. I. Levitskii claims that “All this slander and censure” against the Crimean Tatars was an obvious pretext by those not familiar with the Crimea or its Tatar inhabitants to rid this territory of its Muslim population.3 General Totleben, the defender of Sevastopol during the Allied French, British, Ottoman and Sardinian invasion of the Crimea (1854-1856), mentions that relations between the Russian peasants and Muslim Tatars of the Crimea during the war were friendly and writes: “Between the Russians and Tatars there is no noticeable mutual hatred and our simple people now are extraordinarily regretful about the departure of the latter.”4 From London, the exiled Russian writer Alexander Herzen wrote: “The general opinion of all those who know the Crimea is unanimously in favor of the Tatars. This people is quiet and submissive and does not have any sort of prejudice against the Russian government, in spite of all the oppression, it has never thought about going over to its co-religionists and for long has not been fanatic.”5 An examination of the Crimean Tatars’ status during the Crimean War (and earlier Russo-Turkish wars) favors the latter viewpoint and, in many ways, explains the unprecedented mass migrations of Crimean Tatars to the Ottoman Empire during the mid-nineteenth century. Most contemporary accounts indicate that the Crimean Tatars were victimized during the Crimean War and this experience destabilized this community and left it prone to calls for migration from community religious leaders. TThhee sstt aatt uuss ooff tt hhee CCrrii mmeeaann TTaatt aarrss dduurrii nngg tt hhee eeaarrll yy RRuussssoo--TTuurrkkii sshh wwaarrss It is generally agreed that the roots of the mass nineteenth-century migration of the Crimean Tatars to the Ottoman Empire lay in this minority’s treatment during the Crimean War of 1853-1856. While there were many factors operating in the nineteenth-century Russian province of the Tauride that would have impelled the Crimean Tatar community of this era to abandon its homeland for the Ottoman Empire (in particular mass land confiscations by Russian landowners known as pomeshchiki), the pressure to emigrate was dramatically increased in time of war. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian authorities were all too aware of the Crimean Muslims’ continuing identification with the Ottomans during the Russo- 2. Evgenii Markov, Ocherki Kryma (Simferopol’: Tavria, 1995): 122. 3. G. I. Levitskii, “Pereselenie tatar iz Kryma v Turtsiiu,” Vestnik Evropy, 5 (1882): 125. 4. E. I. Totleben, “O vyselenii tatar iz Kryma v 1860 godu,” Russkaia starina (June 1893): 534. 5. A. Herzen, “Gonenie na krymskikh tatar,” Kolokol, 117 (Dec. 22, 1861): 973. 82 BRIAN GLYN WILLIAMS Turkish wars of 1787-1792, 1806-1812, 1828-1829, 1853-1856 and 1877-1878 and considered this Islamic community to be a potential fifth column in time of war. There were of course grounds for distrusting the Crimean Tatars’ historic, cultural, ethnic and religious links with the Ottoman Empire. On many levels the Crimea’s Muslim community certainly did consider itself to belong to a religiously-defined “imagined community” (the umma, the ecumenical community of Muslims) that included the Ottoman Muslims. Russian military strategists in particular feared the presence of this unreliable Muslim community in the Crimean peninsula which was seen as a vital fortress guarding Russia’s southern flank against the Ottomans.