Autumn in Crimea
By Israel Shamir
I love this country in the off-season. The tiresome
tourists are all gone. The North is already covered in
snow, but here in Crimea, autumn still lingers in all
its late beauty. The forests are full of colour; not
just green, but all hues from mellow yellow to a violent
violet. Vineyards display more shades of red and purple
and yellow than Microsoft could ever imagine. Playful
rivulets run down the steep slopes, from the flat and
barren highlands to the deep and placid sea, spawning
pretty waterfalls on their way. The roads that cross
these hills at such impossible angles are now empty, and
the Crimean palaces I visit share the unique history of
this land with me alone.

The most bewitching is the Garden Palace of the Crimean
Khans; slim, delicate and slender with well-proportioned
rooms, many verandas, lush gardens, the Falcon tower for
Khan’s falconers, and two delightful fountains remindful
of Alhambra in Grenada. The Golden fountain murmurs so
gently, so quietly that one has to strain to catch its
soothing babble. The Tear Fountain drops its large tears
from one cup to another, silently weeping for days of
past glory. The palace lent its name to the small town,
once a capital of the Khanate, to be forever known as
“Garden Palace”, or Bakhchi-Sarai in the Turkic
language of Crimean Tatars, the aborigines of this
land.
I sit in the divan with my friend and master of the
palace, the Khan, as we call him jokingly, for
the palace is a museum and he is its director. Server
Abu Bekir actually retired last year after twenty long
years of managing this national treasure, but he does
not stray far. He is himself a priceless fountain of
stories about the land and its history, and I always
leave a wiser man. On this visit we reminisced on the
days past, on the hopeful story of his people, and of my
strange involvement in that.
When the fury of the Palestinian Uprising at the end of
the Eighties and its bloody suppression drove me
out of Palestine, I came to Crimea to seek consolation.
Crimea is a kind of sister to Palestine, for they both
share the same landscape and character, the same
Byzantine and Turkish heritage and the same refreshing
sea breeze. Crimea may be slightly cooler and greener
than Palestine, its mountains may be higher and steeper,
and its wilderness less arid, but the feeling is
familiar. After enjoying the vineyards with their sweet
Muscat grapes, the free-flowing springs and olive
orchards covered by black olives bursting with purple
juices, I discovered that these two sisters share the
same sad history of deportation and expulsion. The
Palestinians lost their homeland in 1948; the natives of
Crimea had lost theirs some four years earlier. Their
villages were taken away by foreigners, renamed and
rebuilt in a rather charmless East European way, forever
burying the Oriental touch.
The stories of the rape of Crimea struck a powerful
chord in me. In the late Sixties, I arrived in
Palestine, just another young settler from Russia
blissfully unaware of what had happened twenty years
earlier. I discovered it one story at a time, roaming
the land on the back of my donkey named Linda. I noticed
that the land was strewn with lonely ruins, with rounded
niches and blocked-up wells under fig trees. I
innocently asked the locals and learned that these were
venerable historic villages mentioned in the Bible and
described in the chronicles of the Crusades. The
foundations were overturned and their inhabitants
expelled in 1948, as the Jewish state was established.
Later I met some of the refugees in their squalid camps,
and over the years I have seen them in their new lives;
never again were they allowed to return to their
shattered ancestral lands.
Two Arab words, Nakba – the expulsion of 1948,
and Awda – the expellees’ dream of homecoming –
became keys that unlocked many mysteries for me. When I
translated Ulysses and Odyssey, the long
journey of Ulysses to Ithaca became an Awda, and
when I celebrated Easter, it combined the Nakba
of Crucifixion with the Awda of Resurrection.
This meme immediately resonated with my youthful
Zionism, but it soon exposed it for what it was – an
illusion. My triumphant return to the Holy Land turned
out to be little more than a visit to a beautiful, but
foreign land. I did not regain my homeland for it was
just a dream, and the Palestinians lost their homes. My
dreams had destroyed their reality. The refugees now
dreamed of a real home in which they had really had
grown up, and of the real spring waters they once had
sipped beneath real olive trees. If I couldn’t really go
home, I at least wanted to see these refugees return to
their homes. An uprooted victim of Zionist dreams, I now
dreamed of helping others to return their own, real
roots.
When I left Palestine in the late Eighties, this dream
was still as remote as it was in the Sixties. But when I
crossed into Crimea, I suddenly discovered an actual
Awda in full bloom. In 1989, the expelled Tatars
began their trek homewards. In Ulysses, Stephen
Dedalus says: “We can’t change the country, let us
change the subject.” Joyce was wrong: it is much easier
to change a country than to change one’s subject. My
subject remains fixed somewhere between Nakba and
Awda.
The Nakba of the Crimean Tatars began in 1944,
when the Red Army drove the Germans out of the lush and
beautiful peninsula. After establishing control, the
Russians began to load the natives onto trains and
deport them to Central Asia. They accused the Tatars of
collaborating with the Nazi enemy, though among them
there were many brave and distinguished soldiers who had
fought on the Russian side against the Nazis. The
Soviets dealt with them as arbitrarily as did the
Americans with their own native tribes: some two hundred
thousand people, 15 or 20 per cent of the total Crimean
population, were declared ‘hostile traitors’ and shipped
away.
Years passed by in exile; the Tatars managed well, their
children received good education, they built houses in
their new country. In the 1960s, this label of
‘hostility and treason’ was removed and the Crimean
Tatars were suddenly free to go wherever they want - as
long as it was not to Crimea. Crimea was by then known
as the Russian Riviera; the villages and homes of the
deported Tatars had become resorts and dachas for the
privileged. “The Tatars have taken root in their new
place”, declared the government.
The Tatars did not agree. “Do they think we are
saplings, that they can transplant us wherever they
please?” They did not forget their home country, and
they began their long struggle to return. Throughout the
1960’s they demonstrated, they organized successful
“sit-ins” at various offices of the government and even
in front of the president of the Soviet Union; their
campaign was second only to the better-publicised and
funded Russian-Jewish Let-My-People-Go campaign, but
chronologically, it was the first one. The Tatars
inspired the Jews; at least they inspired me, a young
dissident, and they led me to my Zionism. Dissident Jews
were active in many causes, just as they were active in
the Civil Rights Struggle in the American South. A
Russian Jewish poet Ilia Gabay became a key supporter of
the Tatar movement; he was sentenced to three years in
jail, duly released, and then he committed suicide,
despairing and heart-broken; a tragic and poignant
figure of a man who was ready to feel others’ pain until
it became too much to bear.
The Tatars were doing things unheard-of in those days of
Soviet preeminence, things like demonstrating at Red
Square and picketing the Kremlin. While picketing
Moscow, the Tatars did not neglect the “facts on the
ground”, the fait accompli. They continuously
infiltrated Crimea, slowly, against formidable odds,
against all regulations and prohibitions. The
authorities forbade the Tatars to visit Crimea. Tatars
could not buy rail or air passage to the peninsula.
Tatars could not obtain registration of residence in
Crimea - and without such a registration one could not
find work.
They still seeped into Crimea, as inexorably as water
passing through brick, as unstoppable as salmon swimming
upstream. When caught and deported, they gathered at the
border and found other ways in. The Tatars carefully
built up forward bases in preparation for their return,
shifting their families from the far-away cities of
Bukhara and Samarkand.
In the late Eighties, the Soviet Union began to
disintegrate. The central authorities weakened, the old
regulations lost their sting, and the Tatars began to
come to Crimea en masse. That was the time I first met
the Khan, Dr Server Abu Bekir, and heard from him
the stories of the Tatar’s struggle. Over the years I
have met many Tatars: they are a likeable people,
usually educated, hard working, good-looking, of open
and friendly character. They are a people accustomed to
making friends and fitting in. The returnees weren’t
looking for trouble with the Russian majority
population; in most cases they established friendly
relations with their new neighbours.
Surprisingly, the locals accepted them rather well, too.
At first they were patently nervous about the invasion
of the ‘Nazi collaborators’, but it did not take long
for them to recognize good neighbours. The Tatars are
not weak; they learned to stick together under difficult
circumstances, but neither were they looking for a
fight: they purchased or rebuilt their homes afresh,
integrated into the contemporary Crimean mosaic, and
became part of the community. They did not shrink from
work; they opened many cafes, good food for a reasonable
price, and this was something Soviet Crimea had not yet
experienced.
At the time, I wrote a piece about the Awda of
the Tatar people for the Israeli Haaretz
newspaper; my article concluded with a hope to someday
witness the homecoming of the Palestinian refugees. The
newspaper published the article, but cut off the last
sentence. I translated my article into Russian and gave
it to the Moscow’s Literaturnaya Gazeta, a very
important central weekly of the time. They ran the
article, and they included the final sentence. The
Haaretz chief editor received some complaints from
Moscow Jews, and this prominent liberal sacked me on the
spot. That was the end of my writing for the Israeli
Hebrew media, but it’s not the end of the story.
1990 was a turbulent year; nobody knew what was going on
and what was going to happen next. The wily Tatars
presented my piece published in the Moscow central
newspaper to the local Crimean officials as proof
sterling that Moscow had signed off on their return. In
Soviet days, such a publication would mean exactly that;
in 1990 it meant very little in Moscow, but in far-away
Crimea it still passed for the real thing. The Tatars
were allocated little parcels of land all over Crimea on
the basis of the same article that had me sacked, so
though it was painful for me, it was well worth it.
Twenty years passed before I visited Crimea again.
Crimea is now a part of an independent Ukraine, and is a
by-product of the kind of Balkanization that follows
Neoliberal economic crisis: a kind of preview of an
independent Scotland, or Catalonia. Many Ukrainians, as
well as Russians, regret this separation and would
prefer a restoration of the Union, if given a choice.
Kiev’s hold over Crimea is precarious; if forced to
choose, the bulk of the Crimean population would choose
to join Russia.

To offset the Russian influence, the Ukrainian
authorities cater to the Tatar minority, and the Tatars
have thrown their support to Ukraine. The Tatar numbers
are still too small to be an autonomous minority, and so
they will support an independent Ukraine for as long as
they are well treated. Ukrainian independence has been
good to the Tatar returnees, and now they indeed have
taken root in their ancestral country.
They have problems like everybody else; twenty years of
Ukrainian capitalism has left a mixed record: not an
unmitigated disaster, as some say, but not much of a
blessing, either. The countryside is just as beautiful
as it ever was. Some Soviet eyesores have been removed,
and some post-Soviet eyesores have been added. Yalta and
Gurzuf, two of the most delightful spots on the southern
coast, have become over-commercialised and
over-developed. An amusement park has been built on a
historical promenade once trod by Chekhov. Prices are
high and nothing is free; they charge you to visit the
beach, they charge you to take a walk in the mountains.
It’s a typical Neoliberal Success Story, with the
typical catch: the Ukraine has a very high level of
unemployment, and so does Crimea. Young people have no
chance for a real job other than catering for tourists.
Tatars and Russians alike tell me that their education
is wasted under the prevailing economic conditions. One
needs to be well connected to land a job, even after
graduating with a university degree. The returning
Tatars are not yet well connected, do not carry degrees
from local universities, and are saddled with the
additional problem of having to find housing. While the
local authorities prefer to sell public land to wealthy
investors and to Moscow’s newly rich, the persistent
Tatars simply squat on land until they can afford the
bribe necessary to legalise their possession. I visited
the charming house a Tatar built near the perennial
spring of Jur-Jur, in the village of Ulu Uzen
(officially, it is called “Generalskoye”). Theirs is the
only restaurant and the only place to stay in the
vicinity, for the Tatars are more entrepreneurial than
the local population. They are friendly and willingly
share stories of their deportation and return.
The Tatars have restored a local colour to Crimea; in
fact, they are fashionable. The best (and most
expensive) restaurant along the South Coast serves Tatar
cuisine in a restored palace, and it is owned by a
Moscow couple. Tatar painters and Tatar architects are
sought out to add the Tatar touch. They have rebuilt
their ancient mosques, like the Baybars Jami in
Old Krym; this mosque was built in the 13th century by
the Sultan Baybars, a native of Crimea who stopped the
Mongol invasion near Ain Jalut in Palestine.
Islam is making great inroads among the Tatars: they
were never especially religious, but now they are being
influenced by the Saudis and Turks. This religious
influence has turned many young men away from the
alcohol and drug abuse that plagued them in the 1990’s.
In any case, I never saw a woman in chador, and bearded
men are quite rare.
The Tatars make up only 15% of the Crimean population,
and yet are found at every level of economic life: they
drive taxis, teach, practice medicine and grow
vegetables. In short, these people have successfully
integrated with the local population of Crimea with a
minimum of fuss. Someday the deportation will be
remembered as little more than a bad dream.
Perhaps now Israeli readers will understand that al
Awda does not have to be a disaster, but can be a
new opportunity. Perhaps now Israeli readers will be
able to stomach the line I wrote twenty years ago: “inshallah
the Palestinian refugees will also find their way back
to their villages.”
The Ukrainian generosity in dealing with their refugee
issue shames Israel’s miserliness; their deportees are
now home, while Israelis still do not consider the
Nakba a crime, and even the most enlightened
Israelis reject the Awda.
Why They Were Deported
Recently, this peaceful picture has become troubled:
some young people attacked a Tatar squat near
Simferopol, a Tatar child was mistreated; tensions
mounted. This sudden worsening of inter-communal
relations began in May 2012, when the Tatar
representative in the Ukrainian parliament
proposed a Restitution Bill describing the
ethnic-based deportation ‘a crime’, granting the
deportees some compensation and returning historical
names to their villages. The parliament (Rada)
received the proposal with keen sympathy, and speakers
of various fractions were ready to approve it after some
minor alterations.
Speaker Petro Simonenko took the floor and turned the
tide against the bill. He spoke of Tatar treachery, of
their support for Hitler. He said that the deportation
was not a crime but a rescue, without which thousands of
Tatars would have been shot for treason or lynched by
patriots. His speech derailed the proposal and the bill
was rejected.
Simonenko was speaking on behalf of the Communist party,
and the Communists do not want another crime being
placed onto their doorstep. Furthermore, if you want to
claim victimhood, be prepared for complaints from the
people you have victimized. When you start digging up
history, everyone’s skeletons come out.
But what really happened?
Alan W. Fisher, in his capital study of the Crimean
Tatars, writes that the reasons for deportation are far
from clear. The Tatars did not collaborate with the
German invader more than any other people under
occupation, including Russians and Ukrainians. They had
nothing similar to a Bandera, the Ukrainian pro-Nazi
leader, or a Vlasov, the Russian pro-Nazi general. They
did not fare better than other ethnic groups under
German rule: over 60 Tatar villages were burned by the
Nazis, sometimes together with their inhabitants. The
Nazis had plans in place to exterminate or deport the
Tatars when the war was over; the only reason they did
not begin immediately is because they did not want to
create problems for their potential ally, Turkey, home
of a large Tatar community.
Moreover, one month after the deportation of the Crimean
Tatars, all the other native minorities of Crimea were
also deported: the Greeks, the Bulgars, the Armenians,
and Italians (yes, they had even a few hundred
Italians). Only the native Jews, Karaites and Krymchaks
were allowed to remain in Crimea alongside the Russian
and Ukrainian majority. Why only these minorities,
Fisher could not answer.
I found the answer myself, in Moscow, where certain
documents of the period were made public. These
documents point to the infamous case of the Jewish
Antifascist Committee (JAC). The JAC was created in 1942
in order to bridge the gap between US Jewry and Soviet
leadership; to mobilise the American Jews to help Soviet
Russia and the Soviet Jews in their struggle against
Hitler’s Germany. Many of their contributions were
valuable, and their work was appreciated by Stalin –
until they crossed a red line.
In 1943, two prominent Russian Jewish JAC leaders,
theatre director Samuel Michoels and poet Itzik Fefer
toured the US. They spoke Yiddish, were clearly
non-Communist, and behaved like perfect examples of “the
people’s diplomacy”, as described by historian Eugene
Lobkov. They were exceedingly well received by both
Jewish and non-Jewish Americans. It was a very
successful wartime propaganda campaign, and the JAC
leaders came home convinced of their own importance, of
the great role America will play in the post-war USSR,
and of the pre-eminent position of the Jews in all this.
They decided to become the nucleus of a Jewish Lobby
within the USSR, closely connected with and representing
the interests of American Jews.
On the 15th of February 1944, three JAC
leaders (Michoels, Fefer and Epstein) wrote a letter to
Josef Stalin and to Vyacheslav Molotov. In this letter
they demanded that the USSR surrender the Crimea to the
Jews. They declared that the peninsula should be
elevated to a status of a separate Jewish Soviet
Republic of the USSR, on a par with Russia, Ukraine, and
Georgia. As a Jewish State, it would be entitled to
leave the USSR if it wishes in the future. This was
their alternative to the Jewish State proposed (at the
time) in Palestine.
Lobkov describes the letter as “business-like, no
thanks, no compliments, almost rude; it is a letter to a
manager who is about to be dismissed. The Jewish
problems can be solved only by creation of the Jewish
Soviet Republic in Crimea. The US Jews will bankroll the
operation, they wrote.”
What made these JAC leaders think that they could
dictate to Stalin? In 1944, it was thought that the USSR
might accept American leadership and money as did the
other European states, for Russia was in a poor shape,
worn and exhausted by the war. The Marshall Plan was in
the offing, a plan offering reconstruction and
prosperity, and all beneficiary nations need do was
simply agree to US guidance – and this plan was offered
to the USSR as well. Apparently, the JAC leaders were
convinced that Stalin would accept Marshall Plan money
and American guidance, including proposals by US Jewry
such as the creation of a Jewish Crimean Republic.
Furthermore, they had found an ally in Molotov, whose
wife, Mme Paulina Jemchujina, had strong Jewish
sentiments (she described herself to Golda Meir as “a
Yiddische Tochter” -- a Jewish maiden). Another ally was
Lavrentiy Beria, the powerful State Security boss. Some
say (and others deny) that Beria was of Jewish origin,
but he definitely had pro-Jewish and pro-American
leanings. Beria was friendly with many prominent Jews as
the curator of the Soviet Nuclear Programme; he
personally dismissed the Doctors’ Plot Case and released
the arrested Jewish medics in March of 1953, after
Stalin’s death. Beria publicly floated a proposal to
free East Germany and transfer it to the Western control
in exchange for economic help. He knew the JAC plans and
proposals, and he was just the kind of man who would
gladly accept the Marshall Plan and lead the USSR into
American patronage.
Intelligence officer Pavel Sudoplatov wrote that both
Beria and Molotov closely followed and supported the
activities of the JAC; they saw the draft of the letter
to Stalin, they knew and approved of the plan to create
the Jewish Crimean Republic.
The allegations of Tatar collaboration with the Nazis
were built up from the reports of one man: Leo Mekhlis,
nicknamed “The Inquisitor”, the chief editor of
Pravda and an ex-Zionist. Beria used Mekhlis’
reports to persuade Stalin to deport the Tatars. It is
probable that both Mekhlis and Beria were guided by JAC
demands; Beria discussed a Jewish Crimea with Averell
Harriman, the US Ambassador in Moscow, as late as in
1947, according to Sudoplatov.
As for the Marshall Plan, Stalin was of two minds. At
first, he leaned towards accepting it, until Donald
Maclean, the First Secretary of the British Embassy in
Washington (and a Soviet spy) reported to Moscow in June
1947 that the real purpose was to ensure the American
economic dominance in Europe. He revealed that all funds
were to be carefully controlled by US industry and
banks. This was also the view of Professor Varga, an
important economist who had Stalin’s ear. After a long
period of hesitation and discussion, Stalin decided to
reject the plan. As we now know, Marshall Plan
conditions included removing all Communists from the
governments of beneficiary countries, accepting the US
dollar as the universal currency, and opening markets to
American goods. The beneficiaries indeed gained much in
the short term, but in the long run they were saddled
with US dominance.
Stalin’s rejection made the JAC plans irrelevant. While
the Jewish Crimean Republic never came to existence, the
Tatars and other Crimean minorities had already been
deported. This story makes clear that the tragic
deportation had little, if anything, to do with alleged
collaboration: this historical event was caused by the
efforts of a Jewish and American Lobby within the Soviet
leadership. Perhaps this will cool off Comrade Simonenko,
and maybe he and his friends will stop instigating
anti-Tatar feelings in Crimea.
Perhaps we should all cool off. We have seen how Stalin
was very nearly hoodwinked by his trusted aides. How
easily do we allow ourselves to be led by false reports
and double-dealing? Let’s stick to the facts. We have
seen how al Awda can work. Is Palestine so
different from Crimea? Are the Tatars so different than
the Palestinians? Is the Israeli public so different
from their Ukrainian counterpart? Good will is all that
is needed to reintegrate the refugees, to unite society
– and to unite family. That is why Homer ended his epos
with homecoming and restoring the wanderer to his wife
and son.
Language edited by Paul Bennett
Israel Shamir wrote that in Crimea, he can be reached at
adam@israelshamir.net