Borderland (26 page)

Baron de Tott, Louis XV’s envoy to ‘the Kam of the Tartars’, accompanied one such expedition into the Zaporozhian lands in January 1769. Armed with bows and scimitars, the Tatar horsemen rode short-stirruped, like modern jockeys, and took two or three horses into battle each, leaping from one to another mid-gallop when under pursuit. The rich wore embroidered caftans trimmed with fox or sable, the poor sheepskin coats with the wool turned outside, so that they looked like ‘white bears mounted on horses’.
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Marching under the green banner of the Prophet, they burned every village they came to, turning the snow grey and blocking out the sun. Mid-campaign, de Tott wrote, the cloud of cinders from 150 burning Cossack settlements stretched a ‘full twenty leagues into Poland’.
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A single Tatar horseman might capture ‘five or six slaves of different ages, sixty sheep and twenty oxen’,
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carrying the infants in saddlebags and herding the rest along in front of him for months at a time. In this, at least, the Tatars compared favourably with the accompanying Turkish Sipharis, who ‘after dragging these wretched people about with them for some time, tired of the trouble, and cut them in pieces to get rid of them.’
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But Tatar life was not all slave-raids. Having dreaded his posting, de Tott found that the khan’s ‘pretended barbarous court’ had a certain rough-hewn Oriental charm. Visitors were received at sunset, after evening prayers, and entertained with clowns and musicians until midnight – a pleasure somewhat marred by the fact that nobody was allowed to sit in the royal presence. Hawking and coursing – 500 horsemen at a time – were favourite pursuits, and de Tott scored a diplomatic triumph with a fireworks display for Khan Makfoud Giray’s birthday. ‘Accustomed as he had been,’ the envoy wrote complacently, ‘to nothing but smoaky gerbs [
sic
], bad crackers and small rockets, badly filled and ill directed, the success of my exhibition was complete.’
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For his grand finale he administered Makfoud and his nobles with electric shocks; for the next few days ‘Nothing was talked of but electricity, and the number of the curious continually increased’.
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Makfoud’s successor Kirim Giray, a clever, affable man with a weakness for practical jokes involving severed heads, became a close personal friend. Under de Tott’s influence he developed an enthusiasm for French cuisine (especially its wine-based sauces), and requested that
Tartuffe
be translated into Turkish for performance by the court buffoons. On campaign, the two spent long evenings talking politics inside a giant crimson-lined tent, Kirim delivering his opinions ‘on the abuses and advantages of liberty, on the principles of honour, or the laws and maxims of government, in a manner which would have done honour to Montesquieu himself’.
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By de Tott’s day, the khanate was nearing its end. The Ottoman empire was in decline, and Crimea with it. Fewer successful Turkish-backed wars meant fewer infidel prisoners, and the slave-trade withered. At the same time, Russia was starting to look Crimea’s way, tempted by the Black Sea ports and by the empty ‘wild field’ south of the Zaporozhian Sich. The eighteenth century saw a series of military expeditions against the khanate, and in 1772 the Tatars were forced to exchange Ottoman for Russian protection. Two years later, having thrown the Turks out of Kaffa, Catherine II signed a second treaty with the Porte itself, under which Crimea was not to be interfered with by either side. ‘Independence’ lasted less than a decade, and in 1783 Russia annexed the peninsula outright. Catherine instructed that notices be prominently posted ‘to announce to the Crimeans Our receiving them as Our subjects’.
¹⁰
The Girays decamped to Constantinople, where they became courtiers to the sultan: the Crimean khanate – ‘one of the most important states in eastern Europe’ according to one modern historian
¹¹
– was no more.

In their determination to cast the Tatars as little better than nomadic tribesmen, and Crimea itself as virtually unsettled land before their own arrival, the Russians tore down almost all reminders of the Tatar past – hundreds of mosques, palaces, medressas, caravanserais and hammams. One of the few buildings to have survived more or less intact is the khans’ palace at Bakhchisarai, spared only because Pushkin versified about it and because Catherine II stopped there on her way to Sevastopol. (Its star attraction used to be a specially installed royal bathtub.)

Though its contents and most of the interior decoration have long gone, Bakhchisarai still carries a whiff of sybaritic glamour, of the Krim Tartary of fairy-tales. The buildings are homely, ramshackle, with stumpy minarets, fretworked eaves and open verandahs, quite lacking the aesthetic rigour of Samarkand or the spooky claustrophobia of Topkapi. When the Rev. Milner came here in the mid nineteenth century the rooms were painted with ‘flowers, fruit, birds, beasts, stars, scrolls, villages and landscapes’ – all vanished now, but proof, as he pointed out, that the Girays ‘were free-thinking Mohammedans; for the Koran expressly forbids the representation of living objects’.
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The empty fountains in the overgrown garden are carved with rose-bushes, goldfish and baskets of pears; the turban-topped tombstones in the royal cemetery with Arabic verses, sunflowers and scimitars. Nothing grows there now but dusty steppe grass, but Milner saw nut-trees and lilacs. From inside an octagonal mausoleum – it once had a gilded cupola – comes the sound of hammering. ‘No we’re not doing repairs,’ a workman tells me when I poke my head in, ‘this is a carpentry shop.’ Over the whole seductive complex, at the top of a flight of granite steps, looms a large grey Russian tank. Officially it is a war memorial; unofficially, a reminder of just who is – or was until recently – in charge in Crimea.

Nineteenth-century tiavel-writers all waxed furious at the cultural havoc Russia wreaked on its newly conquered territories. One of the most splenetic was Cambridge’s indefatigable Clarke, visiting in 1800:

At least a third of the buildings in Bakhchisarai, he wrote, had already been demolished. Aqueducts and fountains were being stripped of their lead, and cemeteries of their tombstones, despite the fact that the country afforded ‘most excellent limestone, capable of being removed from the quarries with almost as little trouble as the destruction of the grave-stones occasions to the Russians’.
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Kaffa’s ancient Greek remains were being broken up to build barracks, and at Chersonesus marble was up for sale by cubic measure. Clarke wanted to buy a bas-relief – on offer, ‘together with a ton weight besides of other stones, for a single rouble’ – but purchase was prohibited ‘because we were strangers; and, worse than all, we were Englishmen’.
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‘If it be now asked what the Russians have done in Crimea,’ he concluded furiously,

Clarke exaggerated. In reality, the Tatars were no harder hit by tsarist rule than the other newly conquered nations of the expanding empire, and in some ways, they were better off. Though Russians staffed the local bureaucracy, police force and courts, the government did not interfere in religious matters or with the clergy-run schools. The old khanate lands were distributed among royal favourites – Catherine II alone gave away a tenth of the whole peninsula – but Tatars, unlike Ukrainians, were never subjected to serfdom, paying the same taxes to their new Russian landlords as they had to the old Tatar nobility.

The Tatars’ response was to vote with their feet, emigrating
en masse
to Turkey. Out of a population of half a million on annexation in 1783, over 100,000 had already left by the early years of the nineteenth century. More major exoduses followed each of the four Russo-Turkish wars, especially the Crimean War of 1854–5, during which Tatars were pushed out of their farms on the fertile southern coast into the dry steppe interior. By mid-century, the Tatars made up only just over half the population, and as Crimea filled with Slav settlers with the opening of the railways, they fell into the minority. By 1897 they were down to a third of the population, by 1921, to a quarter.
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The few Tatar noble families who did not emigrate were coopted, like the Ukrainians before them, into the Russian nobility, becoming to all intents and purposes Russians. (One such was Rasputin’s murderer Felix Yusopov.) Outside the mosques, Tatar culture atrophied and died, only reviving again at the end of the century, with the first stirrings of the modern national movement under a new middle-class intelligentsia.

Through the chaos of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the Tatars’ national aspirations ran a doomed and familiar course. On Nicholas II’s abdication in March 1917 the leaders of the various Tatar parties raced home from exile in Constantinople and Switzerland and began agitating for self-rule under the slogan ‘Crimea for the Crimeans’.
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In December the radical wing of the Tatar movement, the Milli Firka or National Party, held a national assembly – dubbed a ‘kurultai’ after the old khanate gathering – in Bakhchisarai, electing the Young Turk-affiliated Noman Celebi Cihan as head of a new Crimean Tatar government. But while the Tatars established their headquarters in Simferopol, the Bolsheviks took control among the Russian sailors of Sevastopol. In January the Bolsheviks marched on the capital, easily defeating the Tatar cavalry they met on the way. The kurultai disbanded and its members fled to the mountains or to Turkey. Celebi Cihan, who had stayed behind hoping to come to a
modus vivendi
with the new regime, was killed and his body thrown into the sea. Wholesale slaughter of Tatar and Russian civilians followed: taking over under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in May 1918, the German army uncovered fresh mass graves. The Germans left again in December, and for the next year and a half the peninsula was in chaos, changing hands four times before finally falling permanently to the Bolsheviks in October 1920. A new wave of terror followed, as Lenin’s Cheka set about rooting Tatar partisans out of the hills, and slaughtering the Tatar and Russian intelligentsia. Sixty thousand Crimeans were killed in less than six months,
¹⁹
and another 100,000 died of starvation. An
émigré
newspaper described conditions in Yevpatoriya:

The ‘taking root’ policy of the 1920s, aimed at reconciling non-Russians to Bolshevik rule, saw a brief cessation of hostilities. Tatar schools, libraries, museums and theatres opened; Simferopol got a new university and returned to its old name of Akmecet. Permission was given for the publication of Tatar-language books, and Tatars – including many old Milli Firka members – got senior posts in local government. But the period of grace did not last long. In 1928 the Tatar Bolshevik Veli Ibrahim, leader of
korenizatsiya
in Crimea, was executed, signalling a new round of purges. Collectivisation meant the deportation of 30–40,000 Tatar ‘kulaks’
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and thousands more deaths through starvation. The Tatar alphabet was first Latinised then Cyrillicised – not just a cosmetic change, since it cut off the younger generation from Arabic-script pre-revolutionary Tatar literature. Mosques were closed, and Muslim clerics exiled to Turkey or Central Asia.

Up to the Second World War, the Tatars’ experience of communism was nothing unusual. Executions, deportations, famine – these were the common lot of all Soviet subjects, including the hapless Russians themselves. But in 1944 the Tatars became one of a select group of nationalities for whom Stalin had reserved a special fate: wholesale deportation – not just of collectivisation-resistant peasants and the urban middle classes, but of the entire population.

The deportees came from eight different nationalities – about 1.6 million people in total.
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. They were the Crimean Tatars; the Chechens, Ingush, Meskhetians, Karachai and Balkars, all Muslim nations from the Caucasus; the Volga Germans and the Buddhist Kalmyks, from the Caspian steppe. The Volga Germans were deported in the summer of 1941, as the Wehrmacht advanced, the rest from 1943 to ’44, as it retreated again. In what was by now a familiar pattern, the victims were arrested, piled into wired-up cattle-trucks and shipped, food- and water-less, to ‘special settlements’ in Central Asia and Siberia. In the Tatars’ case, the round-up was completed in three days. Recently released NKVD statistics say that 5 per cent of Tatars died in transit, and another 19 per cent in the first five years in the settlements.
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According to the Tatars themselves, 46 per cent of deportees died during the journey or within a year of arrival.