Crimea (part 3): The Nazis, Stalin and the bitter end

Professor Donald Rayfield picks up Crimea’s story in spring 1942, when Germany turns south for the Black Sea and oil. Some Tartars can't imagine anyone worse than Stalin. Some can't imagine anyone worse than Hitler. Tragically, they are both right though in different ways.

Donald explains the realities of the German occupation, from the early “orderly” phase to the arrival of SS units whose mission is extermination of the Jews. Astonishingly some Jews are spared as the ever 'scientific' Nazis rule they are not Jews at all. 

Then comes one of the great crimes of world history. Stalin decides to deport the entire Crimean Tatar nation to Central Asia. Donald tells the story of the cattle trains, the scale of death and the uncertain welcome for survivors in Uzbekistan. Crimea itself is stripped of Tatar presence through renamed towns and seized homes. 

We bring things up to date with the 1990s return and the brief cultural revival under Ukraine . But the post-2014 Russian annexation brings renewed repression. As Donald says 'History can always get worse'. 

It is a fascinating episode.

Transcript

Welcome And The Historical Setup

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hello and welcome to Subject to Change with me, Russell Hawk. This is part three of a three-part series I'm doing with Professor Donald Rayfield about the history of Crimea. And in the first episode, we talked about the Crimean War and about how prisoners were treated, uh, the surprisingly humane way they were treated, in fact. And in the second, we we went back further into the history of Crimea, which is you know the talking about the Golden Horde, uh the slave trade, the Ottomans, and and ultimately the Russian conquest. And today we're coming a bit closer to the present, and we're gonna start with the German occupation in the Second World War. Uh anyway, welcome back, Donald, to the podcast. Glad to be here. Can you just set the scene and and say when the Germans arrived and and what was at stake there? The Germans paid their attention to the Crimea not at the beginning of the war, when they f hoped they would get to Moscow

Why Germany Targets Crimea

SPEAKER_00 1:05

before winter, but after they failed to capture Moscow or even get beyond the suburbs, they decided they needed the oil fields in the south and accessed the Black Sea through the Crimea. And they came through the Ukraine, which pretty well collapsed. The Soviet armies just either surrendered en masse. German's biggest problem was dealing with the number of prisoners that they had to put on death marches westwards. And they entered the Crimea basically in spring nineteen forty two, and once they got to the Crimea they didn't get a lot of resistance. Sebastopol was rather like British Singapore. It was expecting to be attacked from sea, and it didn't expect to be attacked from land, from the north. The Russian officers all fled in time, and the um ordinary sailors and soldiers of Sebastopol had to be taken prisoner, so that wasn't particularly desperate. And then the Russians uh oh sorry, the Germans, aided by the Romanians, who were were interested in in taking over the southern bit of Russia and the Ukraine, concentrated on the Crimea and they found that they didn't have too difficult a job. Most Tartars felt that Hitler could not possibly be worse than Stalin. Each side had this illusion thing that Stalin couldn't be worse than Hitler and Hitler couldn't be worse than Stalin, and both were worse than each other in different ways. Um Tartars had just experienced not only collectivization in which anyone who had more than one horse or employed any labour was probably to be sent to Siberia and never come back, and then they'd had the Great Terror, in which males between thirty and fifty, who were educated, were immediately accused of being traitors and spies, and the country was devastated in that way, and the hatred for Stalin, what he'd done to their country, his campaigns against religion, against land holding, against traditional practices, made him a figure of horror. So the when the Germans arrived, very often they were told, You're welcome here as long as you don't ever let the Russians come back. As things developed, things got more complex, because the initial German army, which was reasonably well trained and recognizably human, was followed by the SS special troops, and by even worse commanders, and their job was not to fight, but to exterminate, and one of the first things they did was seek out all the Crimean Jews who hadn't succeeded in flee fleeing. Many Russian Jews had had and Ukrainian Jews had managed to get out and go go east away from the Germans. They knew what was coming, but it was difficult to get out of the Crimea, as there was only one isthmus and and no ready transport. And uh the Germans rounded up all the Jews and took them to cemeteries and and uh shot them. This was profoundly horrifying to the Tatars. One of the features of the Crimean Tatars was that they didn't discriminate against Jews. They regarded Jews as part of their community. They spoke the same language or very similar language, they dressed the same way, they mingled with Muslims, there was no problem. They were not uh they were appointed to various posts. So this was this was horrific. There was one peculiarity, however, that Crimean Jews were divided into two sorts, one conventional Jews, called the Krimchaks, who had rabbis and had the Talmud and so on, and the other were the Karaim, which means readers, who were Jews who only observed the first five books of the Old Testament, and otherwise did not differ very much. But one of the peculiarities of the Nazis was they had among them some quite distinguished Orientalists, who pointed out that the Karaim were not really Jews, proper Jews, that they only pretended to be Jews, and that Jews who had rabbis didn't recognize them as Jews. This worked in two places. It worked in the Crimea. The Karaim were left alone by the Germans to their amazement, and it worked in Lithuania, in the little town of Trakay near Vilnius, where everyone, every Jew was exterminated, but it could be found Lithuanians enthusiastically collaborated, but the Karaim were left. It didn't work in the Ukraine, where the message didn't get through. In the terrible massacre of Babiyar, the Karaim was shot just as systematically as were the rabbinical Jews. But the murder of the Jews was the first horror which turned many Tatars against. And so you find the Crimean Tatars basically wanted to continue life as it had been before the Russians interfered with it. But the memory of what the German commanders had done to the Jews stuck. And you then find that Tatars divide into two groups.

Sevastopol Falls From The Land

SPEAKER_00 6:20

I think nobody's done been able to do a really objective study of this. One group decides that however awful the Russians are and were, they didn't do anything like this. And they went into the mountains, and as guerrillas they attacked and murdered Germans. The Germans, of course, responded by killing fifty men for every German killed, and that of course made anti-German feeling even stronger. But other Tatars decided they would collaborate with the with the Germans, and the Germans had two groups for young men, which was difficult not to join. One was called the Schuma. Schuma were a defensive court, they were local policemen and officials collaborating with German army, and the other would be uh called Frivis, they were voluntary uh workers who would go to Germany to work on farms. Germany, of course, was desperately short of labor because so many men had been involved in so many armies invading so much of Europe and Africa, and these Tartars went to Germany, and it was an extraordinary phenomenon because they weren't paid very much. East workers were paid only a pittance, whereas workers from France and the Netherlands were paid quite well. But the German farmers were so appreciative of their Tartar slaves, they started treating them like family. There was a peculiar phenomenon many years later, twenty years later, after Stalin's death, interists started to invite tourists to come to the Soviet Union, and there'd be Germans coming, West Germans coming, and they would go to Uzbekistan, where the Tatars would eventually be exiled, and to the amazement of the interist guides, there'd be Tatars appearing and suddenly speaking in German to German tourists whom they'd known as their farmers, and Germs, some of the Germans had learnt some Tatar. Interest guides actually horrified by this continued loyalty of the slave to the master, but there was a considerable appreciation. Now the other factor in the occupation of the Crimea was that Hitler decided he needed to do something for a friend, a friend who was a Gowleiter called Frauenfeld. And Frauenfeld was not only a friend of Hitler, but amazingly he was quite a nice man. Um and seemed hyperpastable like being Göring's brother, who was also a nice man. And Frauenfeld made f friends with the Tatars, and he allowed them to run their own schools. He gave all back the land that had been confiscated by the collective farms back to their original owners, and the Germans paid for everything. They lent they lent them tractors, they they paid for horses if they borrowed them, they even lent them German horses if they weren't using them. They didn't make many heavy demands. You were supposed to register every animal you bred every time your chickens hatched more chicks, you were supposed to tell the Germans this extra meat was available. But generally speaking, apart from the bureaucracy, the the the Tatars were treated extremely well. Their colleges were opened, their schools were opened. They even had a free press, and if you look at the newspapers that were issued under the German occupation, they don't seem to have been censored, because they they speculated what would happen when the war was over, would um would Crimea now be an independent country or would it be part of Germany? So there are discussions that didn't go on in any other country occupied by the Germans. Frauen felt felt he wrote his memoirs, and I and because they are his memoirs, one doesn't fully trust them, but he does say he felt he could walk one end of the Crimea to the other without a gun or a protector or a bodyguard. He felt totally safe, and certainly nobody had seemed to have attempted to kill him. So that occupation was for a while compared to the occupation in, say, Ukraine or um

Mass Shootings And The Karaim Exception

SPEAKER_00 10:10

parts of Russia, it was relatively humane. Um the German occupation had never been objectively written about. It was uneven. In areas like Belarus, it was brutal to an unimaginable degree, in killing a fifth of the population. But in areas like north and northwest Pskov, for instance, uh it was uh it was completely tolerable. Sorry, where Pskov is near, between Leningrad and Estonia. Okay. A region called Pskov, a city nearest Estonian border, and that was run by German bureaucrats who weren't Nazis. They're just doing a job as a Germ German bureaucrat does. And uh people were allowed to teach, doctors were allowed to practice, peasants were allowed to grow their food and sell it. And the Soviets had a big problem at the end of the war in curing nostalgia for the German occupation in that area. The same thing can be said of the Baltics in Latvia, for instance, which had a large Russian minority. The Russian minority was very appreciative of the of the German occupation because the Germans insisted that Russian be allowed to be taught in schools, that Russian opera should be performed in Riga, and so on. Russian emigres should be allowed a full full role. So uh German brutality was was widespread, but it but not universal. There were areas where it ruled, and there were a number of people in the German uh foreign office under Rubentrop, Count Schulenburg, who were very pro, pro-Tatar, pro-Muslim. There was another factor, too, that mistreating the Tatars would have annoyed the Turks. And one of Germans Germany's main policies was to keep Turkey sweet, not let Turkey join the Allies. Turkey was wise enough not to join the Germans, but uh the they did keep an eye on how Muslims were being treated, and so treatment of Muslims by by the German occupiers was somewhat gentler than their treatment of Slavs, whom they regarded as untimentioned subhuman. The other fact was Hitler knew very well that uh the Tatars had a Gothic element. You couldn't be more Aryan and Germanic than a Goth. And so he proposed uh renaming the capital Simferopol as the port would be called uh Yelte would be called Friedrichshafen, and Crimea would be called Gotland. Actually Napoleon I, when he first invaded Russia, thought of doing something similar, regarding Crimea as a sort of Proto-European country. So the the Tartars, compared with others, had a fairly easy time until, of course, the Russians started to fight back, and the Germans got desperate and they began to suspect Tartar guerrillas of helping the Russians. Of course, once the Tartars knew that the Russians were coming back, they reassessed their attitudes, and being pro-German was not much point unless you thought you could leave with the Germans and find a new life in Germany. And the more intelligent Tatars realized that if Germany was being driven out of Russia, it would probably be driven out of Poland, and even driven out of German Germany, they would be destroyed. So they became more pro-Russian, and Tatar guerrillas started to attack Germans, and when the Russians sent in parachutists, they decided to report to the Germans where these parachutists were. So that gave them a bad war and meant Sorry, I didn't just understand that last bit. When when who sent in paratroopers? The Russians. Before they invaded the reinvaded the Crimea at the beginning of 1944, they sent in uh parachutists in advance before they tried to invade by sea and land. But then I think you said they reported these paratroopers to the Tatars, when they found uh paratroopers landing in the forests, they reported the the the landings to the Germans. I thought you said that they were sort of switching sides over to the uh to the Russians, I'm supposed to be. Yeah, they are so because by reporting the Russians to the Germans, it meant the Russians could be exterminated by the Germans. They betrayed the Russians, in fact. But I thought by this stage they were sort of swinging over to be more on the Russian side. They are. The thing is, you couldn't you couldn't ignore the Russian landing. On the other hand, you couldn't support it, but you could you could report it to the Germans. Then that suggests that they're still on the German side. Well, they're on their own side, because they they know that if the Germans find out that they knew about the Russians' landing and hadn't said anything, they would be gone. For the Germans were now becoming the enemy. You had to be careful of them. It is complicated because both were enemies. There's a question of which enemy was going to determine their future. And they realized at the beginning of 1944 that Russia was going to determine their future. Some Crimean Tatars actually served in German uniform. They'd been prisoners of war in Germany, and the Germans formed what they called the Turkestan battalions. And they promised these Turkestan battalions that they would free all the Muslims in the Soviet Union and allowed them to establish a great big Turkic state, Crimea, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, all that, in exchange for wearing German uniform and fighting. And some of them got as far as Stalingrad when they realized this was not going to happen. Belame. And the Germans also realized that they were not reliable because any Soviet citizen caught wearing German uniform would not be treated as a prisoner of war. They'd be executed on the spot. So the Germans decided they would have to use these Tatars and others as policemen to keep control of occupied territory. So a lot of Crimean Tatars in German uniform were employed in Poland, and then later they were sent to France. And it's interesting, in France, they were sent a lot of them went to the town of Albi in southwest France. And in Aldi they started collaborating with the French resistance of the Maquis. And their speciality was betraying German officers to the Maquis. Huh. So it was complicated being a Tatar. What was the safest person to collaborate with? Who was the safest person to betray? And did they have a terrible reputation or a good reputation, you know, when they were behind the lines in Eastern Europe? Because it sounds like they No. In

Guerrillas Or Collaboration Under Occupation

SPEAKER_00 16:10

Eastern Europe they had a terrible reputation with the Germans because they weren't reliable, and they got on with the Polish home army. The Poles at first were suspicious of them because they were wearing German uniform and because they were Soviet citizens. There are two reasons to be suspicious of them. But when they realized that the Tartars hated the Germans and the Russians with equal force, just like the Poles did, they got on famously. But then the Russians they they do come roaring back and the Germans are driven out. Yes. So so how are the how are the Tartars, how are the Crimeans treated then? Very, very badly indeed. Stalin decided that all the Muslim nations that had been welcoming the Germans were to be severely punished. He made an exemption for the for the Georgians. Huh. Because quite a few Germans complained when they got to the Caucasus and started across the passes, that the real problem was that not the Georgians, not because they were fighting back, because they were surrendering in such numbers that it it hindered the progress of the German army. Gosh. But uh Stalin sort of closed uh had a turned a blind eye to that. And when he met German uh Georgians who'd served in the German army, they they very often were allowed to wander the streets freely and not uh not bothered. But once uh the the Crimean Tarts were captured by the by the by the Russians, a decision was made to deport the entire nation to Central Asia. Oh God. Uh some of them went to the forests at the Urals, men, women, children, everything, and including Tartars who'd fought in the Red Army, had never betrayed the Red Army. As as soon as they they uh this happened, they were summoned, their medals were stripped off, and they too were sent to Uzbekistan. And it was done under the most frightful conditions. They were rounded up by trucks, armed soldiers. They were told that they would get receipts for all their cattle and all their goods, and these receipts would be honored when they got to Uzbekistan. They were told that they'd be going in trains with doctors, food, water, and so on. In fact, they were in dirtal c dirty cattle trains. There was no water, no food, nobody looking after them. The only way that some people survived was if you had a small child, it could get through a ventilation hatch when the train stopped and it stopped frequently. It took sometimes three weeks to get to Uzbekistan by train, and they could go fill a can with water and come back into the carriage and give people water. Some quarter of a million people were were were deported in this way. Probably half died in the deportation process. And when they got to Uzbekistan, the local population told these are all traitors, they're horned devils, don't speak to them, don't feed them, and they had to dig holes in the ground and and uh live in live in these what the Russians call Zemlyanke, holes in the ground covered with reeds and grass. And it took some years before the local Uzbeks realized they were perfectly human. Uh they didn't even think they believed they were Muslims because they they they wore Western clothes, and they didn't wear eastern clothes. It took some time for the the survivors to establish themselves, and they had sheer hell. There were a few Tatars that the NKVD, the secret police, missed. There were some fishermen and spit uh of land, there were a few shepherds in the mountain, so they sent out shooting parties and shot everyone they could. Fishermen they put into barges, and they put the barges out to sea and then they scuttled and they put holes in the boats and they watched them sink and watched over with machine guns in case anyone tried to swim to shore. Oh God. So total extermination. And then they later produced a book, Languages of the USSR, in five volumes. Volume three, Turkic languages. Tata, Crimean Tatar, is no longer spoken. I mean this is something it feels like something that you know the the Nazis would have been completely pr proud of the way. Yes, I mean it's hard to to see the difference. There isn't any difference. With a few survivors, whereas the Nazis, of course, with the gas chambers was almost zero survival, particularly in the Baltics, where I think seven Jews survived in Estonia. Dear God. And the lucky Estonian Jews were the ones that Stalin had deported in 1941 to Siberia. They didn't think they were lucky, but they were. So this this was a real uh real disaster. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, desolate areas, were, if you could survive long enough, were not such a bad place because the local Uzbeks and Kazakhs, who didn't really like the work ethic of the Russians, they appreciated the people that had been deported there. The first people deported were the Koreans. Excuse me? Koreans from Vladivostok. There was a big Korean community between Vladivostok and North Korea. Huh. And as anyone living on a border in the Soviet Union was regarded as suspect because they might collaborate with their colleagues across the border. Koreans were deported as an initial experiment in 3738. They were taken by train to Kazakhstan. But they were allowed to take things with them. They were allowed to take they were very clever, they took rice seeds with them and vegetable seeds.

Frauenfeld And A Strangely Mild Regime

SPEAKER_00 21:40

And Kazakhstan, and it was because I had a big problem with meeting cotton quotas. They were supposed to produce all the cotton of the Soviet Union and rice. And the Koreans came, they said, Oh, we know how to produce that. And they dug canals and they sowed and they farmed. And very soon Koreans were really popular in Kazakhstan. They brought Saved the country from repression from the Russians, and uh Korean became a second language of Kazakhstan. Yeah, they were very tough. And that was an example to other nations. The Chechens also went to Uzbekistan, and the Chechens learned how to be crooks. Chechens were highly honourable people, but they learnt that if you wanted to survive, you had to be wheeling and dealing. They learnt to deal in second hand parts in war trophies. And after the Second World War, Russia was for the first time flooded with American goods. Jeeps, cans of ham, boots, everything. The Second World War was one with Russian blood and American goods. Everywhere in Russia you see the signs of these trophy things, which introduced a market economy to Russia, a criminal market economy, a black market economy. But under Stalin it hadn't existed because you couldn't do anything with money. But once you had American goods, uh you could exchange them for American money too. And there were all sorts of leakages. But the and the Crimean Tatars eventually became quite successful because they were good craftsmen. Right. And they were very good musicians. They set up clubs and music nights and restaurants, too. They were much better cooks than the Uzbeks. So by the the those that survived by the 1960s weren't badly off. You say those that survived weren't badly off. Had had they been allowed to return to the Crimea? That was the difference. They were uh branded as a traitor nation. The Koreans hadn't been classified as a traitor nation. The other Caucasian Muslims who'd been deported were allowed back because there was nobody to farm the land. Right. But with the Crimean Tatars gone, the land was snatched up by uh Russian officers for holiday homes or even to live. And the towns were all renamed. So all the Tatar names disappear from the map. And a newspaper in Simferopol was given the task of finding new names. And they only had two books in the office. One is a fruit growing manual, and the other was a military manual. So you found towns called apricot, guava, cherry, and tank, and panther, and so on. And so all these towns lost their names and were given these new Russian names, and the land was a portion. So they didn't naturally they didn't want them back. And there were a few Tartars who surreptitiously made their name back, but they were soon spotted and arrested by the secret police and deported back. They were officially rehabilitated in 1967. Is that under Khrushchev? Yes, under Khrushchev. No, it was under Brezhnev. Khrushchev was deported in 64. It was officially recognised they shouldn't have been deported. Right. But of course most of them had not betrayed the Soviets, some had, but not all. But it was not to be broadcast. It was to be kept as secretly. There's no point being rehabilitated, of course, if nobody knows about it. So you can't get re-employed. So it wasn't really until 1990 that they were able to come back. But but by that stage, you know, a generation has passed, at least. A whole generation. But they kept their language. They kept their songs, they kept the their culture going, the what the survivors. And by and large, come the nineties or or come Brezhnev's time, did they did they return or did they? In 1990, they started returning. You needed money to return. By then Crimea was under Ukraine. And there were certain advantages that people say it was a very stupid thing of Khrushchev to give Crimea to Ukraine, but actually it was very sensible, because Crimea was totally wrecked by the war, totally wrecked by the deportation. All the aqueducts had fallen into disrepair, with the Tatars no longer there to maintain them. And the only way to redo it was to get a canal from the river Dniepr to supply eastern Crimea, which is very dry, with water. And Crimea has the railways come right up to it, it has roads, and it has waterways. And also Tartars got on with Ukrainians much better than they got on with Russians. In Tartar history, you often find that the Cossacks, who were Ukrainians basically, and Tartars were allied. They did fight each other, of course. They fought mainly over Jews because Ukrainians wanted to slaughter Jews and Tartars didn't. God. The Ukrainians were terrible. The great national hero, Bogdanitsky, uh, drowned a quarter of a million Jews. Oh my god. He was um horrific. When is that? That was in sixteen seventy, saying. Dear God, the

1944 Calculations And Fighting For Survival

SPEAKER_00 26:40

Jewish people have been it's just horrible. Yes, they uh yes, they're worse than the Tatars, because they've been discriminating against so many more countries and uh with so much effort. But I must say Muslims treated them much better than Christians. Yeah. Yes. Um they got on wells. Yes, it's it's strange that. That's why I'm all if anyone asked me for a solution to the uh to the problems of the Lebanon and Israel and Palestine, I say restore the Ottoman Empire, because when they ran it there was no very little trouble at all. Anyway, come back to the subject. The um Crimean Tatars gradually got back. They many of them had made enough money to bribe the Ukrainian officials to let them build their houses or to buy back from Russians and Ukrainians the houses they'd stolen. They often you often found Russians and Ukrainians living in your house and refusing to give it, you'd have to buy it back. And so they did re-establish themselves in the 1990s very, very quickly, and there was an enormous um revival. Uh I was amazed when I started work on it, uh, the amount of books, uh, articles, uh, old manuscripts they put online, academic activities, schools, university, uh there was a Crimean uh television station running in Crimean Tata. They had a few Russian friends from the Crimea. They had, first of all, General Grigirenka, who is a war hero, who'd been born in the Crimea. He was a Ukrainian, but he was a war hero. And in when he heard about the Crimean deportation to Uzbekistan, he joined the dissidents, the Helsinki Committee, and he started protesting. And because he was a war hero, they couldn't arrest him straight away, bad publicity. So they put him in a psychiatric unit for a while. Gosh. And he still wouldn't shut up. And he kept on protesting, and so they sent his son to America. They thought that might shut him up, and he still wouldn't shut up, so they sent him to America. Uh but he was quite effective in bringing it to international attention. Otherwise, the attention was very, very small. In the West, there was uh the case of Lord Aldington, who was supervising the return of prisoners of war in Germany who were Soviet citizens to the Soviet Union, and he insisted on sending them back even in when the Soviets were shooting them on arrival. Yeah. And um Crimean Tatars also suffered, Cossacks suffered badly. I gather the Americans were were not so bad there. No, in Italy, uh clever Tatars and clever Germans crossed through Austria, went to Italy, and surrendered there. There was General Alexander who found that this was happening and he gave them the tip off, and he opened the gates of the camp and said, It'd be a good idea if you just went to the International International Red Cross and get you to South America. Declare yourself stateless. I think that's one of the great scandals of British history that is that is that is that is maybe not better known, but I don't think you can do a podcast on it because uh you'll have uh Lord Altington's uh suing you. Oh, really? They sued uh Count Nikolai Tolstoy, who wrote a book about it. Goodness. It cost him a million and a half. The things that you have to wait for the last people to die off before you can you could tell the truth. Yeah. So the the Tartars had this extraordinary flourishing in the 1990s, I would say. And the Ukrainians became as the Ukrainians realized that the Russians were now their enemies, not their brothers, they became fonder of the Tatars. Before that, they they i and the crime was under Ukraine and the whole of Ukraine is extremely corrupt. Yeah. Really corrupt. I used to know about corruption because I used to drive a lot in Russia and Ukraine. And the where you meet corruption is the traffic police. Sure. And the traffic police would explain, you had I used to get out and chat with them because they were nice, if you talk treated them as if they were human beings, and they used to explain I paid five thousand dollars to have this place at the crossroads, or I can rob motorists, and or I never touch priests, you know, things like that. Um and um you realize that uh the the chain of bribery. The the the traffic police had to give the inspector, the inspector had to give the minister, the minister had to contribute to the oligarch in charge of that particular department. Utterly corrupt. I'm not sure it's that Zelensky's managed to clean it up, but I'm pretty sure he hasn't. But um, it was clean enough for them to value the Tatars and to let them flourish. And they had a couple of Tatar, not exactly oligarchs, but rich Tatars who've subsidized Lenur Islamov, who had a publishing house, and another Russian uh academic called Vazgren did a four-volume history of the Crimean Tatars, which I'd got a copy of. It's now unobtainable since the Russians took over.

Stalin’s Deportation Of An Entire Nation

SPEAKER_00 31:25

And he was expelled from his professorship and from the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences for writing a pro-Tartar book. And this is in 2020. Gosh. So it it's always been a dangerous thing. So if I understand it right, at some stage Khrushchev decides the right thing to do is to transfer the Crimea to the Ukraine. Yes. And he did N fifty-four. That was, I think, a very sensible thing to do for economic reasons, purely economic reasons. But in a sense, it's a Soviet republic at that stage. So Yes, it's i i the Ukraine is a Soviet republic, yes. But it still has a degree of autonomy in terms of financing and construction and building railways, building canals and so on. So maybe this is my slight ignorance. Well slight ignorance. My great ignorance is that I also read the Soviet Union as being sort of this homogeneous mass, but but but it but it's really not. These republics do have some degree of There was some devolution. It's a bit like Wales and and Scotland. There was a certain amount of uh devolution. Aaron Powell And then when when the Soviet Union breaks up then uh then obviously they can go their separate paths, yes. Well, well well, but yeah, but but the Crimea is part of Ukraine, so so it becomes independent along with along with Ukraine. Aaron Powell So you so even within the U even within Ukraine, Crimea is seen as sort of a subject. Yes, it has its own ministers. Mind you, there is run by Ukrainians and Russians, and the Tartars only get a little bit, per se. So I don't know what the population of the Crimea would be around about the time we're talking about, and what percentage of that would then be recognized as Tartar? Um the the percentage would be uh by then uh at most ten percent. Right. Of something like three million, yes, ten percent at most. And th they they did increase, but they had a higher birth rate as as Muslims over Ukrainians, but um they were never going to be the majority population again. And and when when did they stop being the majority population? Was that when the uh when Row and Stalin Ross B. It was really about a third of the way through the nineteenth century when the Russian landowners and Russian serfs and German immigrants uh started to predominate, and enough Tatars had left the country. They kept on being accused of being traitors or after the Crimean War, quite a few left because the Russians started accusing them of being pro-Turk and pro-allies. Yeah, so you're a traitor for for living in your own country. Yes, you are. Yeah. Quite outrageous. And okay, so do you want to sort of just I mean I'm always nervous about talking too much about the present because I because I think uh the I mean we may know more in the present, but but we don't have sort of this uh benefit of hindsight, if you like. But you sort of want to bring the history up to the present, as it were. The the present is subject to revision, that's true. Yes. Uh in the light of newly discovered facts. But um I would say it's safe to say that the the Tatars were on an upswing between 1990 and about 2004, when um they began to suspect that Russia might be taking over, taking over the Ukraine by appointing Russia-friendly presidents like Yanukovych. And their upswing meant that they established businesses, they were in the tourist trade. Tatars were all famous for as hoteliers and restaurant owners. They had a good education center in Simferopolis, but they were excluded from things like factories and um international trade and so on. That was kept by the oligarchs in in the Ukraine. They were never going to be um great leaders, and they couldn't take a major part in the Ukrainian parliament. They had their own parliament called the Medzlis, which was half recognized as a legislative body, but it didn't have much power, rather like again the Welsh Senate. But uh it was above all culturally that they they were surviving, and they were they were doing all sorts of things which now interrupted like a big dictionary of the Crimean Tatar language. The disappointing thing for them and for the rest of the world is that their brother Turks did very little to help, even though lots of Turkish politicians are of Crimean Tatar descent. The Turks have always been very, very nervous about being on bad terms with

Exile In Uzbekistan And Cultural Survival

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either the Germans or the Soviets. And when people were arrested in in the Crimea, the Turks very, very rarely intervened with the Russians. There's a peculiar relationship going back to Lenin and Atatürk, that the Lenin allowed uh and the Soviets allowed, Stalin allowed Trotsky to go into exile in Turkey. Huh. And in Turkey nobody was assassinated by the Soviet secret police ever. Gosh. You can't think of a single country in the world where the Soviets didn't assassinate someone, but there was a sort of agreement, and the Turks didn't touch their communist poet Nazim Hikmet. There was a sort of don't touch agreement between them. And yet when uh prominent Crimean Tatars were disappeared by the Russians, only occasionally did the Turks make some sort of mild protest. So Putin now, he's he's taken over. I can't remember when the first invasion was when they took it. The Green Men was tw when the suddenly these Russian Russians always had bases, uh had a base at Sevastopol, the Sevastopol. So they um they always had troops of a sort, armed uniform people. But these were green men with no markings on the uniform who took over in in in in in 2014. And the Ukrainian army didn't fire a shot. Right. They just um accepted the takeover. And now we've got the latest war. So what is I mean, presumably in some to some degree the Tatars, because there's there's so few of them are in some level not not hugely relevant, but but is there a sort of a is there a specifically Tartar view of of events at the moment? Yes, very much so. Many Tartars fled to the Ukraine. In fact, uh the Mejlis, their parliament, is now sort of fused with the Ukrainian parliament. And the leaders, um, Mustava Jemilolo, who is who is the child in the deportation, is now in his 80s. Um he's an important figure. The Refat Chubarov was another survivor of the deportation. He's in the Ukrainian army, a very senior figure in the Ukrainian army. So the Tatars are thoroughly uh with the Ukrainians and uh uh anti-Russian. The Russians have been disappearing, Tatars, shooting them. They're found dead in forests. Anyone who speaks Tatar or speaks up for Tatar or prays in the mosque is is suspect. Putin got rid of the Mufti, arrested him, and appointed a tame Mufti, a high priest of the Muslims. There was a Tatar who'd been in exile in France called um Altin, Gulliver Altin, who came back to Crimea in 1990s and established a museum, an enormous museum called La Richesse, of all Tatar products and monuments and carvings, statues and so on. And uh when the Russians took over this time, he vanished. And I've been trying to find out what happened to him. The last I heard was a Facebook posting in his name which he supported the Russians. But he hasn't been seen since. And nobody knows, even the Tartar leaders don't know if he's alive or dead. So there's been a total suppression. The the universe has been closed, the television station held on for a bit, it had an hour a week in Tata called the hour of the Mufti, which nobody listened to because it was this pro-Putin Mufti, and now it's stopped. So Tatar is virtually dead as a public language. If you're heard speaking it in the street, you can get arrested as a terrorist. And um most Tatars think that the if they have a future, it is the twenty thousand Crimean Tatars living in Romania south of Constanza. There are quite a few Tatar villages, a few in Bulgaria. The problem with the Tatars in Turkey is they start to start their children speak Turkish. Um

Return Then 2014 Annexation And Repression

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it's like moving a Scottish child to England, they start to speak English. Well, of course, you you assimilate, of course you do. And it's only a few thousand living in more remote villages that manage to maintain it. It's an astonishing story, and and I have to say, I mean, I'm surprised in a way it's not better known, but but it's such a complicated story and and and such a miserable story in some of the years. It's had several sad endings from which there's been a re uh a recovery. Uh but I don't think it's going to be a a series two or a series five. I can't see the population basis are so small. Yeah. And they're now a nation w without a homeland. Okay. Well, um well, probably we should end it there. I mean, I can't think of a better place to end it, but uh it's just such a shame to to end it on such uh on such a dismal note, but but that's perhaps just the reality. One of the Tatar poets in in Romania wrote that uh the entire world is a cemetery for Tatars. Yeah. Okay. Um, Professor Donald Rayfield, thank you very much indeed. That was absolutely great. Well, thank you. Sad story, but there it is. With history, you know there's always worse to come.