Borderland (27 page)

Nothing was publicly announced about the deportations until June 1946, when a Supreme Soviet decree, published in
Izvestiya,
announced the abolition of the Crimean and Chechen–Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics:

A minority of Tatars had indeed collaborated. Erich von Manstein, commander of the German Eleventh Army, headquartered in Crimea until late in 1942, was able to recruit some 20,000 Tatars into anti-partisan battalions and ‘village defence units’, designed to protect homes from marauding Russian and Ukrainian irregulars. But more than twice as many Tatars fought alongside the Russians in the Red Army, only to be deported on discharge along with everybody else. (These included several bemused Tatar Heroes of the Soviet Union.) As for the Chechens and Ingush, their lands had never even been occupied by the Germans, so they had had little opportunity to collaborate whether they wanted to or not. The real reason for the deportations seems to have been the NKVD’s desire to justify its existence, since it had not done any front-line fighting (letters from Beria to Stalin show him vigorously supporting the scheme
²⁴
), combined with Stalin’s customary paranoia about the non-Russian nationalities. As Khrushchev observed in his earth-shattering ‘Secret Speech’ to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, ‘the Ukrainians avoided meeting this fate only because there were too many of them . . . Otherwise, he would have deported them also.’ (A statement greeted with laughter and animation in the hall’.
²⁵
) Though Khrushchev condemned the deportations as ‘monstrous’, officially rehabilitating five of the deportee nationalities, he made no mention at all of the Tatars, Volga Germans or Meskhetians, who had to wait for the dying days of perestroika before being allowed home to their native lands.

Saide Chubukshiyeva is one of the oldest returnees. Before the war she lived with her husband and two children at 23 Rosa Luxembourg Street in Bakhchisarai. She had a job in a printing shop, under a friendly Russian boss, and her husband worked as secretary to the city council. At five o’clock in the morning of 18 May 1944, she says, the family were woken by a knock at the door. ‘Two militiamen were standing there. They shouted – you have ten minutes! The children were small then – you can imagine what one could collect in those ten minutes.’ By the end of the day all the Tatars in the town had been taken to the station and loaded into railway-cars. There were 133 people in Saide’s wagon, ‘all women and children – I can’t imagine now how they managed to squash us all in’. The next morning the train set off for the east. Though Saide was occasionally let out to get food and water, there was never enough for everybody, and the older women and the children started dying – ‘we just had to throw the bodies out of the window’. At the stations, she says, ‘people called us traitors, betrayers – they threw stones.’ Twenty-eight days later the convoy arrived at Perm in the Urals. ‘We were all ordered to the forest to work as lumberjacks. The salary was in kind – they gave us 400 grams of bread a day. My youngest sister was nineteen then. She had to load those six-metre logs into wagons – can you imagine? If you didn’t complete your quota for the day you weren’t allowed out of the forest. There were these slogans painted on the trees – “If you don’t finish your work, don’t leave the forest.”’

Forty-seven years later Saide made her way back to Crimea with a daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren. Not, of course, to the old house on Rosa Luxembourg Street, but to a one-room trailer in a new Tatar shanty-town on the windswept hills above Bakhchisarai. Though the cold bites straight through the trailer’s paper-thin walls, they have done their best to make it cosy. There are rag rugs on the floor, and a picture of a cocker spaniel hangs above the wood stove in the corner. Six people live here at the moment, says Saide, but last winter there were eleven. The rest of the settlement still looks like a refugee camp. Half-built houses cobbled together out of bricks and breeze-blocks alternate with tiny shacks made of sheets of polythene tacked to wooden frames. Hens and goats scratch about in the coarse dry grass, which stretches away in treeless billows to the horizon. The returnees have rigged themselves up an electricity supply, pirated from the mains, but there are no drains or standpipes. Drinking-water comes in a lorry twice a week.

When the Tatars arrived three years ago the hillside was completely deserted. ‘We waited and waited for official permission to start building,’ says Saide, ‘but nothing happened, so we divided it into plots ourselves. They came and told us to stop, but we weren’t going to move. It’s so stupid – in
Glory to Labour
I saw an article saying “the Tatars have occupied a fertile peach-orchard”. Can you see any orchard here?’ Relations with local government have improved a bit since, but ordinary Russians still resent the returnees. ‘Quite recently I went to get my pension. Three or four other Tatar women were there too. And the girl behind the counter said – hey, you’ve brought the whole tribe, and you won’t go away until you’ve taken everything! That’s mostly the Russians who’ve arrived recently – the ones who were here before the war know the Tatars; their reaction is completely different.’

The man responsible for holding the line between Tatars and Russians is Mustafa Cemiloglu, head of the Milla Mejlis, the organisation Crimean Tatars think of as their national parliament, and one of the grand old men of the Soviet human-rights movement. After an hour’s driving about the Simferopol suburbs, we found the Mejlis’s headquarters in a cottage on one of the straggling streets where town starts turning into countryside. In the courtyard a group of weatherbeaten men in felt boots and padded jackets stood round a burned-out Mercedes. They were a generation younger than Saide – born in exile in Uzbekistan, they had no memory of pre-war Crimea. One had spent his life in a silk factory in Samarkand; another had worked on a collective farm, only survivor of seven brothers and sisters. The car, they said, had burned out the previous night, when somebody threw a petrol bomb over the wall.

In a back room decorated with a star-and-crescent flag and a portrait of Celebi Cihan, head of the stillborn Tatar government of 1917, Cemiloglu gravely gave me my interview. Though only in his early fifties he looked twenty years older, with draggly silver beard and an old lag’s nervous nicotine-yellow fingers. The first time I was arrested,’ he said, ‘was in 1966, when they wanted to send me to the army. I told them I couldn’t serve in the Soviet army because I couldn’t serve the Motherland – I had no Motherland. There was nothing for me to protect. That’s how I got my first year and a half’s sentence.’ The brave, lonely life of the dedicated ‘uncorrectable’ followed – seven more arrests and a total of fifteen years in prison, two in Vladivostock, three on the arctic Magadan peninsula in a camp for violent criminals. When he was released for the last time in 1986 it was thanks to the support of better-known non-Tatar dissidents. His mentors were Andrey Sakharov, who put him on the list of political prisoners whose freedom he made a condition of his return from Gorky to Moscow, and General Petro Hryhorenko, a Ukrainian army officer who, magnificently and improbably, adopted the Tatar movement for his own in middle age, suffering five years’ torture in psychiatric clinics as a result. Cemiloglu lived with him between prison sentences. ‘He was,’ he says, ‘my second father.’

In 1989 Gorbachev finally allowed the Tatars to start returning home. Now they faced a new problem: how to make themselves felt in a Crimea where they were vastly outnumbered by defensive and disoriented Russians. Around 260,000 Tatars have returned so far, giving them just under 10 per cent of Crimea’s population. It is an awkward number – large enough not to be ignored, but too small to give them much electoral clout, especially since they are thinly dispersed throughout the peninsula. For a while, it looked as though things would turn violent: in October 1992 the Crimean government bulldozed a Tatar settlement on the coast, arresting and beating up several protesters in the process. (‘You might consider it a violation of human rights,’ a Crimean official told me, ‘but we call it making order.’) The Tatars responded by storming the Simferopol parliament, breaking every window in the building. The following winter two prominent Tatar moderates, a businessman and a parliamentary deputy, were assassinated – whether for political or financial reasons is unclear, since neither man’s murderer has ever been brought to trial.

Since then, although officialdom still puts bureaucratic obstacles in the way of Tatars getting land and jobs, and filches Western resettlement aid, things have quietened down. In the autumn of 1993 Cemiloglu succeeded in negotiating a quota of fourteen Tatar seats in the ninety-six-member Crimean parliament – not as many as he wanted, but generous none the less – while simultaneously reining in violence-prone factions in the Mejlis. What he fears most now is pro-Russian separatism. ‘It’s not that we love Ukraine any better than Russia,’ he says. ‘We simply realise that we need a stable situation here in Crimea. Changing boundaries means war.’ He has accordingly come out strongly on Kiev’s side in its periodic bust-ups with Crimea’s Russian nationalists, a tactic which should have earned favours for the future.

But however cunningly Cemiloglu parlays Tatar influence, their basic grievance is not going to go away. Like stateless nations everywhere, the Tatars regard themselves as a conquered people unjustly sidelined in a country morally their own. ‘But how can you have a Tatar Crimea,’ I ask, ‘when 70 per cent of Crimeans are Russians?’ Tapping his yellow fingers on the desk with the star-and-crescent flag, Cemiloglu has heard this question all too many times before. ‘Of course we don’t represent a majority of the Crimean population. But it isn’t our fault. The fact that we were annihilated doesn’t lessen our rights to our native land.’

Potemkin called Crimea ‘the wart on Russia’s nose’, and it still itches. Were a civil war to break out in Ukraine, it would most likely begin in Crimea. So far, things have been quieter than expected. Kiev has handled the peninsula coolly, giving it substantial autonomy and resisting pressure from Ukrainian nationalists to impose direct presidential rule. Kiev’s timing has been canny too: when the pro-Russian firebrand Yuriy Meshkov was elected Crimean president in January 1994, Ukraine’s President Kuchma waited until Meshkov had squandered his popularity by failing to deliver on economic promises before giving him the boot. The Crimean presidency has now been abolished, and at the time of writing Kiev and Simferopol are still half-heartedly bickering over the fine print of a new Crimean constitution.

But like so much in Ukraine, Crimea’s future hangs largely on what happens in Moscow. The Yeltsin government has been restrained on the issue, repeatedly declaring Crimean kerfuffles ‘Ukraine’s internal affair’ and agreeing, as part of the 1994 deal on Ukraine’s surrender of its nuclear weapons, to mutual respect of national borders. When Meshkov visited Moscow the month after his election, Yeltsin and the Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin both refused to meet him, leaving the disconsolate Crimean president boasting unconvincingly about contacts with anonymous ‘big pine-cones’ in the ‘capital’. And though Ukraine and Russia spent five years squabbling over the fate of the Black Sea Fleet, rotting at anchor in Sevastopol, the protraction of negotiations probably had more to do with both governments’ reluctance to give ammunition to their nationalists than with the fleet’s actual strategic importance, which is negligible. The Chechen war has worked in Ukraine’s favour, since as well as spoiling Russia’s taste for imperialist adventure, it has given Ukraine the moral high ground. Having bombed its own would-be secessionists to pieces in the Caucasus, Moscow can hardly object to Kiev using a few sharp elbows in Crimea.

There is no guarantee that Russia will be sensible for ever. Many politicians would like to take a more aggressive line on Crimea, among them two of Yeltsin’s likeliest successors, Aleksandr Lebed, the gravel-voiced ex-head of the Russian army in Moldova, and Yuriy Luzhkov, the populist mayor of Moscow. Both talk about the ‘historic Russian-ness’ of Sevastopol; Luzhkov has declared it ‘the eleventh district of Moscow’. All this is music to the ears of the Russian parliament, which has twice condemned Khrushchev’s transfer of Crimea to Ukraine, and in 1993 passed a resolution declaring Sevastopol to be Russian territory. Were a President Lebed or a President Luzhkov to successfully re-ignite the secessionist movement in Crimea, it could even spark a chain reaction in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine.

Kiev’s best pre-emptive bet is to get to work on the Crimean economy. With local government dominated by conservative ex-communists, in terms of economic reform the peninsula is one of the most backward places in Ukraine. In Simferopol milk queues outnumber pavement kiosks, and until the summer of 1996 there was a moratorium on all privatisation. Nothing will stop Crimea’s Russians being Russian, but if Kiev can start creating jobs and improving living standards, the lure of nationalist demagogues will be weaker.

Back in Sevastopol, in a café down by the waterfront, I asked a group of young men lounging round a card-table if they felt like Ukrainians. They looked at me as if I were mad. ‘Of course not!’ exploded one. They put new stamps in our passports without asking us – they did it by force! I don’t speak Ukrainian at all – but they didn’t care if you were Russian, Jewish or whatever!’ It was all Gorbachev’s fault: That man was a real bastard. He let the country collapse. No one managed it in seventy years but he managed it in one with his perestroika!’ Like his friends, he was out of work – yesterday he had been offered a job as a security guard, but with a salary of less than five dollars a month it wasn’t worth taking. The girl behind the counter chipped in: There’s no sense in any of it – we should have stayed together! Suddenly me and my sister live in different countries! You’ve got your hard currency, you can go anywhere in the world with it – but with our coupons we can’t even go to Moscow!’ Grimacing, she slapped at a wad of scuzzy notes: ‘It’s paper, not money – what
is
this stuff? I don’t know!’ Her friends, she said, were all leaving – not just for Russia, but for anywhere abroad. She hadn’t voted in the elections ‘on principle’ – because I don’t believe in these borders. It’s like a play – they know in advance who’ll win, who’ll lose.’