In a recent address to the nation, Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to tie his foreign and defense policies to one of the turning points in Russian history: the conversion to Christianity of Vladimir the Great, the prince of Kievan Rus, in Chersonesos, in present day Crimean peninsula, in the late 10th century. Claiming that Crimea is sacred to Russia in the same way the Temple Mount is to Jews and Muslims, Putin enshrined the peninsula as being inseparable from the larger history of Russia as a state and of Russians as a people. In so doing, Putin sought to create the basis for justification of recent Russian actions, as well as those yet to come.
This marks a departure from the standard Russian interpretation of history. For decades, history books and popular culture have viewed Crimea largely through the lens of its history as the state of the Crimean Tatars. The Tatars ruled present-day Crimea and Southeastern Ukraine in the late middle ages and warred with Russian principalities - and later the Muscovite Kingdom - for several centuries. The Crimean Khan accepted Muscovite Russian subjects and collected their taxes. At times the sovereign burned Moscow to the ground in a show of strength and as punishment for Russian defiance. Crimea allied with the growing Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. Russia was finally able to crush the Crimean Khanate under the rule of Peter the Great, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. In other words, Putin's Temple Mount statement notwithstanding, Crimea has always been seen as a place of war and conquest. Putin now wants to place Crimea in a continuum of Russian theological origins. His Temple Mount statement folds the region's history neatly into the story of Russian Orthodox Christianity. This re-imagining comes at the expense of the peninsula's present-day and once-original inhabitants - the Crimean Tatars.
A tragic turn for the Tatars
Tatars were accorded varying degrees of tolerance during the rule of the Czars, from Peter down through Nicholas II. Tatar history took a tragic turn, however, under Soviet Rule, starting in the 1920s, when the new Soviet government sought to crush any dissent and destroy any semblance of national identity among the numerous peoples folded into the newly established Soviet Union. Since there could only be one ideology under Communist rule - that of secular egalitarianism and belief in the Communist Party - no other national or ethnic identity was allowed to develop and flourish.
The Tatars' greatest tragedy began in 1944, when Joseph Stalin ordered their forced exile - out of Crimea and into the cold emptiness of Kazakh steppes and Russian labor camps. Nearly 200,000 people were uprooted from lands they had occupied for nearly five centuries. Many died en route and in the place of their unwelcome sojourn. Their deportation was triggered by Stalin's perception that these Tatars welcomed German armies and German rule in the first half of World War II. Such treatment was the fate of many ethnic nationalities that the victorious Soviet regime saw as pro-German - or as not pro-Soviet enough - and millions more were sent away to a promise of destitution and death.
The Crimean Tatars suffered in the most acute sense. Their entire population had seemingly been slated for extermination. Those who survived were left more or less alone once Stalinist paranoia subsided across the country. Starting with the political changes that marked Gorbachev's "perestroika," some Crimean Tatars began returning to their ancestral home. Their communities settled across the peninsula, and before Russian military actions this year, Crimea's numbers included nearly 300,000 Tatars.
The repatriation was not always smooth: Returning Tatars often found that ethnic Ukrainians and Russians had lived for decades on what the returnees viewed as their property. Conflicts over land and settlement rights occasionally flared up. Presently, Crimean Tatars fear that Russia's annexation of the peninsula will bring back the history of repression.
Moscow in fact has already taken significant steps to limit Crimean Tatars' political independence, barring Tatar leaders from returning to Crimea from Kiev; randomly arresting young men Moscow characterizes as extremist Muslims; and raiding mosques and schools. Locals fear such shows of force are meant to instill fear into a now twice-conquered people. Although the Ukrainian government did not explicitly limit celebrations of Crimean Tatar identity, the situation now may change drastically, since so much of Crimean Tatar history involves a direct competition with Russia for statehood and independence, punctuated by large-scale warfare and the destruction of entire regions. Can Russia allow people under its control to celebrate a history that seems to undermine Moscow's own narrative of ethnic-Russian military and religious victories?
This brings us to the question of how Russian popular culture will now portray Crimea and its people following Putin's recent statement - and in light of the bloody history between Crimean Tatars and ethnic Russians. Websites in Russia are replete with stories of Tatar abuses of the Russian population in 1943, when Ukraine and Crimea were under German control. Narratives that unfold like this:
"According to a special note from Chief of Soviet Secret Police Lavrenty Beria to Joseph Stalin, the local (Crimean) population complained that it suffered greater repression at the hands of Crimean Tatars than from (pro-German) Romanian occupation forces... Local Russian-speaking population appealed to occupying German forces for protection against Tatars ...and received it..."
For 25 years, Crimean Tatars lived outside of Moscow's direct reach and beyond its attempts to shift the memory of history to a narrative more favorable to Russia. Now, a population with much to fear from Russia is under Putin's direct control. Will suspicion continue to dominate the Russian government's perception of its new subjects? Current events on the ground suggest so, with potentially negative consequences for Crimean Tatars' history and ethnic identity.
