On the night of 18th May 1944, Joseph Stalin’s NKVD officers began to force thousands of Crimean Tatars – a Sunni Muslim national minority – from their homes at gunpoint, and herded them into cattle-cars bound for Central Asia and the Ural Mountains.
Witnesses recalled that those deemed unfit to travel, or who refused to go, were shot. Thousands died on the journey and thousands more perished from hunger, exposure and disease in ‘special settlement camps’.
Stalin justified this ethnic cleansing by condemning the Crimean Tatars as traitors and hugely exaggerating the numbers who had collaborated with Nazi occupiers. Traces of the Crimean Tatars were purged from maps and books, while their houses and property were handed over to Slavic settlers recruited by the Soviet state to replace them.
And then the atrocity was shrouded in silence, for decades. Most knew nothing of it and if they did hear about it, the terrible truth had to be confined to whispers.
Breaking the silence
Finnin’s book sheds light on the underground poems and other texts written in Crimean Tatar, Russian, Turkish and Ukrainian, which broke the silence and gradually helped force change.
“We often talk about the ‘moral power of literature’, but we don't often see how it works,” says Finnin. “But this book shows in detail how literature educated people about a largely unknown Stalinist crime, triggered emotional responses and inspired many of them to do brave things to support an oppressed people thousands of miles away.”
One of the book’s central figures is the poet Boris Chichibabin, a Red Army veteran and a Gulag survivor who grew up in eastern Ukraine, spoke Russian, identified himself as part of Russian culture, but loved Ukraine and Crimea.
In the late 1950s, after leaving the Gulag, Chichibabin visited Crimea but found it stripped of the Crimean Tatars who had once lived there. Shocked, he wrote Krymskie progulki (Crimean strolls), a poem that would be circulated throughout the Soviet Union, even reaching the displaced Crimean Tatars themselves.
Finnin says: “Crimean Tatars recited Chichibabin’s poem at their organisational meetings and wept because it instilled a sense that others could see what had happened to them. That recognition was so important to their movement. And their movement was the most organised in Soviet history. What the Crimean Tatars did, Russian and Ukrainian dissidents did later.”
Chichibabin’s poem confronts a common thread in all of the literature responding to the atrocity: the need to process guilt. Stalin and the NKVD were directly responsible for the crime of the 1944 deportation, but Chichibabin and other writers cast themselves and all of Soviet society as indirectly responsible.
“But that responsibility cut two ways,” says Finnin. “For these writers, it meant that Soviet citizens also had a responsibility to stand up for the rights of the Tatars. And that responsibility could be empowering.”
Finnin demonstrates that the emotions stirred up by poets like Chichibabin helped unleash powerful forces of change. In 1989, the Soviet Union finally allowed the Tatars to return to Crimea, and the Kremlin denounced their deportation as a “barbaric” act by Stalin.
“It was a remarkable achievement that art and literature were a part of,” says Finnin.
“Slowly but surely, through works of culture, ordinary people heard about what happened to the Crimean Tatars and endeavoured to do something about it.”
