'If My Roar for the Oppressed Were Heard by the Whole Planet': Displacement, Mass Action, and Solidarity in Late Soviet Crimean Tatar Literature

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Decolonization and Geopolitics I: Geopolitical and Class Agendas among Post-Stalin-Era Multinational Soviet Writers and National Intelligentsias

Abstract

My paper examines the Crimean Tatar movement for the return to Crimea and the restoration of civil rights, which emerged soon after Stalin’s death, gained momentum during the Thaw (which ultimately failed to meet its hopes), and, after reemerging with renewed vigor in Perestroika, outlived the Soviet state to continue its political activism first in Ukrainian Crimea and then under Russian annexation. This movement — unprecedented in the late Soviet context for its mass scale, effective self-organization, and militancy — offers an important case of close cooperation between the creative intelligentsia and the broader masses. I focus on the movement’s extensive (and largely outlawed) literary production — both fiction and non-fiction, from pioneering samizdat to poetry and prose — that not only promoted its cause to a broader audience but also fostered new forms of political action. Specifically, I examine how the economic and political conditions of deportee status and exclusion from the official “friendship of peoples” and from their land compelled Crimean Tatar writers to explore alternative forms of solidarity and political organization. Seeking support from a wide range of groups — Soviet human rights activists, pan-Turkists, Muslim intellectuals, displaced population in the Soviet Union (including peasants and other deportees) and worldwide — the movement sought to reframe its political and cultural agenda beyond ethnonationalism and official regional and nation-states borders.

Author

• Marsel Khamitov, U of Wisconsin-Madison