The Crimean Tatars

THE CRIMEAN TATARS BRIAN GLYN WILLIAMS The Crimean Tatars From Soviet Genocide to Putin’s Conquest 3 3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America Published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd. Copyright © Oxford University Press 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. ISBN 978–0–19–049470–4 A copy of this book’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress. 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Edwards Brothers, USA For Eren “Pasha” Altindag, Yetkin Altindag, Feruzan and Kemal Altindag and Ryan and Justin Williams CONTENTS Acknowledgements ix Prologue xi 1.âThe Pearl in the Tsar’s Crown 1 2.âDispossession: The Loss of the Crimean Homeland 9 3. Dar al Harb: The Nineteenth-Century Crimean Tatar Migrations to the Ottoman Empire 19 4. Va t a n : The Construction of the Crimean Fatherland 33 5.âSoviet Homeland: The Nationalization of the Crimean Tatar Identity in the USSR 57 6. Surgun: The Crimean Tatar Exile in Central Asia 89 7.âReturn: The Crimean Tatar Migrations from Central Asia to the Crimean Peninsula 117 Notes 161 Bibliography 177 About the Author 199 Index 201 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost I would like to thank the numerous Crimean Tatars who invited me into their simple stone homes in the settlements of the Crimea and greeted me with their people’s legendary hospitality, despite their often tragic circumstances. In particular, I would like to thank Nuri Shevkiev and his won- derful wife Lilia and his children Emir and Elmaz for letting me live with them in their samostroi (self-built) home in the settlement of Marino near Simferopol. I still fondly recall the evenings gathered with the Shevkievs and Tatars from the surrounding houses eating homemade cigborek and drinking tea while collecting stories of the deportation, exile and return. I would also like to thank Mustafa Dzhemilev for taking the time to grant me interviews during my stay. It was a real honor to get to know the “Crimean Tatar Mandela” who sacrificed so much to lead his people from exile to their homeland. I would also like to thank Lilia Bujurova, Izzet Khairov, Alie Aki- mov, Fevzi Yakubov, Abdullah Balich, Reshat Dzhemilev and Server Karimov for the time they took to grant me interviews. In addition, I would like to thank my parents, Donna and Gareth, for encouraging me to travel the world as a young man and to respect other cul- tures. I would not be who I am today without their inspiration and guidance over these many years. I am also grateful to my wife Feyza Altindag for her support and patience with my obsession with the Crimean Tatars’ history. I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to my advisors at the University of Wis- consin who taught me Central Asian history, Uli Schamiloglu and Kemal Karpat. I would also like to say thanks to my colleagues at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, Mark Santow and Len Travers, who provided me with the invaluable support I needed to produce this work. And as always I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my indispensable secretary, Sue Foley. ix PROLOGUE On the distant edge of Europe, where East meets West, Islam meets Christian- ity, and the world of the steppe nomad meets that of settled man lies the Crimean Peninsula. Since even before the classical era, when intrepid sailors from Greece arrived on its shores and interacted with the mysterious horse- riding peoples of the vast European plains who migrated to the Crimea’s interior, this borderland has been an outpost of the nomads from the east. It has also been a preserve of nations, an ethnic time capsule and palimpsest of lost Eurasian races. Located on the Black Sea shore of the Ukraine (whose name translates to “the Frontier” of the steppe in Russian), the Crimea has seen more than its share of conquering and migrating races. These races have, like waves coursing across the open steppes from the north and east, lapped up on its plains and cast their ethnic residue on the Crimea’s genetic makeup. It was here that the ancient Greek traders encountered the Scythian nomads, whose skill as horse-mounted archers gave birth to the legend of the half-horse, half-man Centaurs. After the Scythians came the nomadic Sarma- tians, the Goths and Attila’s Huns, followed by the Turkic Kipchaks (or Polovtsians, the “Men of the Plains” as they were known in Russian). But no nomadic race left as great an impact on the Crimea as the world-conquering Mongols. Storming across the Eurasian steppe from their home in distant Mongolia, the Mongols of Batu Khan (grandson of Genghis Khan) shattered the divided Russian principalities in the forests to the north and absorbed the vast hordes of Kipchak Turks of the south Ukrainian plains into their armies in the 1240s. The amalgam of pagan Mongols and Turkic Kipchaks then gradually converted to Islam and became known as “Tatars”. It was these horse-riding Turko-Mongol-Muslim Tatars that were to call the Crimea home until the present day. As the transcontinental Mongol world xi PROLOGUE empire fractured and collapsed in the mid to late 1300s, the Tatars of the Crimea and surrounding steppes continued to dominate much of Eastern Europe. While the Mongols were ultimately expelled from China and the Middle East in the mid fourteenth century, in the southern Ukraine the Tatars were an anachronism that continued their horse riding ways for centuries. Not even the liberation of Russia to the north from the Tatar Golden Horde in 1480 ended the power of the Crimean Tatars. By this time Khans (Geng- hisid rulers) of the Tatar Giray dynasty had established an independent Khan- ate in the Crimea and surrounding lands. The Tatar Khans of the Crimea, ruling from the fabled town of Bahcesaray (“Garden Palace”) in the southern Crimean mountains, saw the rising power of Russia and made a far-sighted alliance with another up-and-coming power, the Muslim Ottoman Empire. This alliance helped the Crimean Tatars maintain their independence even as Ivan the Terrible’s Russia inexorably expanded eastward across the vast forests of Siberia and down to the Caspian Sea, conquering the other Tatar remnants of the Mongol Golden Horde. Long after the Tatars of the Volga River region and plains north of the Caspian Sea had been absorbed into sixteenth-century Russia, the Crimean Tatars maintained their independence. As the memory of the Medieval Mongols faded in other parts of the world, the Crimean Tatars continued to roam freely on the plains on the edge of a modernizing Europe. Riding on their rugged steppe steeds with their fur rimmed, spiked helmets on chambuls (raids for cattle and slaves), the Tatars of the Crimea continued their ancient ways and kept the Russians off the open plains of southern Ukraine for centuries. The Tatars of the Crimea were able to burn Moscow as late as 1571. Every year the Tatars would sally forth from their bastion in the Kirim (“the Fortress”, the Turko-Mongol name which gives us the English word Crimea) to carry out vast slave raids into Poland, Russia and the Ukraine. Not even the modernizing Tsar Peter the Great could conquer the horse-riding Crimean heirs of Genghis Khan. In fact, the Crimean Tatars played a major role in the Turkish defeat of Tsar Peter’s inva- sion of Ottoman Eastern Europe in 1711. The incomparable Tatar horsemen also assisted the Ottoman sultans of Istanbul in their endless wars with the Christian West. The arrival of the Otto- man army in Eastern Europe was usually preceded by waves of mysterious Tatar horsemen, whom the Germans fearfully called “sackmen” and the Otto- man Turks admiringly called akinjis (literally “those who flow” over others’ lands). The only sign Christian villagers had that the fast riding Tatars were coming was the urgent ringing of the Turkenglocken (Turk Bells) warning xii PROLOGUE them of their impending arrival. While the main Ottoman army had to build bridges to cross rivers, the Tatar cavalry swam them. The hardy Tatars did not need cumbersome wagon trains to carry their provisions, they lived off the land and on bits of raw meat warmed beneath their saddle (hence the term “steak tartar” today). Covering vast distances at speeds that could not be believed, the Tatar outriders and skirmishers overwhelmed Austrian Habsburg positions and swarmed beyond Vienna, looting, enslaving Christians, and destroying small concentrations of troops. The arrival of the Tatar Khan for an Ottoman campaign was an occasion of much rejoicing for the Turks who considered his horsemen to be invincible.1 But the Tatars’ days as outriders for the Ottoman sultans gradually came to an end, largely due to events bigger than themselves.

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