Tartars’ memories of Kremlin genocide revived by Russian moves
The three Crimean men knocking back vodkas and toasting ‘‘victory’’ in a bar wanted to thank the revolutionaries in Kiev for providing ‘‘a wake-up call for our society’’.
Asked whether they had guns to support any future Russian invasion, Sergei, 40, who said that he worked in construction, popped out of the room. When he returned he slapped a loaded AK47 down on the table.
‘‘Ukraine is a mistake of a country,’’ he roared. ‘‘We are the USSR!’’
Nikolai, 44, the group’s leader, described himself first as a ‘‘businessman’’ and then later, with a smirk, as a ‘‘bandit’’. He had a shaved head and wore a fur-trimmed leather jacket over a tracksuit and had a shaved head and black leather fingerless gloves that he did not remove.
‘‘It’s a really happy time,’’ he said. ‘‘A lot of people have been waiting for this for decades. Now we have started the fightback.’’
They had come from Sevastopol, the most Russian city in Ukraine and home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet, to visit business associates in the small town of In fear of the future: Crimean Tartars fear a return to the bad times of Stalin when the entire population was deported to Siberia and central Asia. Half died from hunger, cold and disease. Bakhchisarai, an hour’s drive into Crimea’s rocky interior.
It is the historic home of the Crimean Tartars, a Muslim community that opposes annexation by Russia and nurses raw memories of a 20th-century ‘‘genocide’’ by the Kremlin. Nikolai said that the Tartars would be welcome in the new Crimea ‘‘so long as they follow all the rules’’.
He does not expect them to, though. ‘‘We think there are radical Islamic groups here. That means there will be violence,’’ he said.
For hundreds of years the Tartars were the dominant group in Crimea. They carved out a profitable trading kingdom on a stretch of the Silk Route and continued to thrive despite repeated raids by Ukrainian Cossacks and annexation by the Ottoman Turks. After Catherine the Great swallowed the Crimean Khanate in 1783, mass emigration to Turkey began, so that the population had shrunk to a tenth of its original size by the beginning of the 20th century.
Worse lay ahead. In 1944 Joseph Stalin decreed that the Tartars had collaborated with the Nazis, against the Soviet Union and deported them to Siberia and central Asia. Around half died from hunger, cold and disease.
They began to return to their ancestral lands only in 1989 and remain marginalised in Crimea, where they make up 12 per cent of the population. They practise a moderate form of Islam, and say that they have largely resisted any incursions by radical preachers.
Today, parts of Bakhchisarai’s dusty old town feel more Middle Eastern or North African than Ukrainian. The former Khan’s Palace, where the first blossom is starting to appear in the rambling gardens, is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Ukraine. On the surface, ethnic conflict here seems a remote prospect, but the speed of Crimea’s sudden lurch towards Russia has revived old fears.
About 10,000 Tartars protested against it in front of the Crimean Parliament on Thursday in a standoff with Russian nationalists that turned violent. At least one elderly man died.
Sergei Aksyonov, the new pro-Russian Prime Minister of Crimea, has emphasised that his administration posed no threat to the Tartars. However, leaders of the Mejlis, the Crimean Tartars’ representative body, have denounced the new government as illegal because it was voted in ‘‘practically at gunpoint’’ last week, and said that Tartars were forming ‘‘self-defence’’ groups.
They are not yet evident in Bakhchisarai, but after evening prayers in one of the old town’s mosques, Server, 57, a fridge repair man, confirmed that ‘‘hotblooded young men’’ were ready to defend their land.
‘‘We are sitting on a barrel full of gunpowder,’’ he said. ‘‘At the moment we live peacefully side by side – it is only Russia that plants this seed.’’
Rustam, 57, agreed. ‘‘We feel great alarm, but we are not surprised because we all lived in Russia. It is the old Soviet mentality,’’ he said.