the hunger of memory

histories of small peoples // requests welcome

[aegean-okra]

Crimean Tatars in exile in Uzbekistan and Siberia, 1950s

(Crimean Tatar art museum, Simferopol)

[tvaryny12]

Following the establishment of the Soviet Union, Moscow acknowledged the Crimean Tatars as the indigenous population of the Crimean ASSR within the framework of political “Korenizatsiya” policies. 

In the 1920s, the Crimean Tatar culture was allowed to flourish with Crimean Tatar-language magazines and newspapers being distributed, and museums, libraries, and theatres being supported.

The Crimean Tatar language, along with Russian, was the official language of the region. It was used by over 140 Crimean political councils.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Crimean Tatars composed 25-30% of the Crimean population. However, in the 1930s, the Soviets became less friendly to the Crimean Tatars, as it did to other minorities in the Soviet Union. This marked the start of the Soviet repression of Crimean Tatars.

[tvaryny12]

How the Crimean Tatars lived in Crimea before the deportation

[sumertabletleri]

[everythingcentralasia]

Uyghurs

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The Primate of our Diocese His Eminence Archbishop Avak Asadourian paid a pastoral visit to the Armenian churches and communities in Northern Iraq. His tour included visits to the city of Duhok, the village of Avzrook, the village of Havresk, the city of Zakho and the city of Ankawa in Erbil [in March 2011].

[tomarza-blog]

A Crimean Tatar prays at a mosque in Ukraine, Vadim Ghirda. 

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Crimean Tatar Deportation Memorial, Mount Sinai, New York | 1, 2. 

“...the first Crimean Tatar national monument honoring the Crimean Tatar martyrs who perished before, during and after the Sürgün was erected in Washington Memorial Park on Long Island, New York, in 1986. Every year on May 18, Crimean Tatars gather to commemorate the tragic deportation of their compatriots” (International Committee for Crimea). 

[hatirlamak-blog]

Bağçasaray, Crimea in the 1920s and 1930s | 1, 2, 3.

The former capital of the Crimean Khanate, Bağçasaray (Bakhchysarai, Бахчисарáй) remained an important center of Crimean Tatar cultural life even after it lost its official political status upon Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 1783. It suffered enormous losses during the 1921-1922 “Povolzhye” Russian famine. According to The Crimean Tatars (Alan W. Fisher), “estimates of a mortality rate as high as 50 percent (in Bahçesaray) [were] recorded for that winter.” Twenty years later, on May 18, 1944, Crimean Tatars from across Crimea were brought to Bağçasaray prior to their deportation to Central Asia, during which as many as 50% of Crimean Tatar deportees perished. Pre-Russian Crimean monuments and cultural sites remain: the Bahçesaray Palace, Chufut-Kale (the center of Crimean Karaite Jewish culture), and Orta Cuma Mosque are among those Bağçasaray monuments which survived the ethnic cleansing and demographic reconfiguration of Crimea.

[hatirlamak-blog]

Old photos of Crimean Tatars in traditional clothing | 1, 2, 3, 4. 

[hatirlamak-blog]

Hemshinli of Rize | Charles Roffey 

In the latter half of the eighth century, and for a hundred years before that (and a hundred years after), Armenia was an emirate--a satellite state of the Islamic caliphates: first the Rashidun, then the Umayyad, and finally the Abbasid. Armenia was conquered and brought under Arab rule in 645 C.E.--this meant, among other things, that its Christian inhabitants (the vast majority of the Armenian population at that time) paid jizya, a special tax levied on kafirs, or non-Muslims. 

Jizya--or, perhaps, Arab domination itself--did not sit well with the Amatunis, a noble Armenian family from Vaspurakan, who abandoned their homeland for the Black Sea region when it became clear that the Arabs did not plan on decamping any time soon. There, they established the Principality of Hamamshen, an autonomous nation that remained independent until the arrival of the Ottomans in the fourteenth century. 

Over time, after prolonged separation from the Armenians of Armenia proper, the Armenians of Hamamshen became the Hemshin, a distinct ethnic group that later adopted Islam and forgot entirely its Armenian origins. The Hemshin peoples--the Hemshinli of Hemşin, the Hopa Hemshinli of Artvin, and the Christian Homshentsik of the Russian Caucasus--are considered by modern Armenians a lost Armenian people. Among the Hemshin themselves, no such consensus exists--the Hopa Hemshinli and the Homshentsik have been surprised to discover that Armenian outsiders understand their Homshetsma, in fact a dialect of western Armenian. In her documentary The Hamshen Community at the Crossroads of Past and Present, Lucine Sahakyan examines the unwillingness of the Hemshin to acknowledge their Armenian heritage.

The Hemshinli of Hemşin, Rize, are perhaps the most acculturated of the Hemshin peoples. They are Sunni Muslims, and unlike the Hopa Hemshinli and the Homshentsik, they do not speak Homshetsma but Turkish, exclusively. In these photographs, Hemshinli women pick and harvest tea. It is their staple crop (it replaced maize as the most profitable agricultural product in the 1990s), and, according to Erhan Ersoy, author of Social and economic structures of the Hemshin people in Çamlıhemşin, an essay included in The Hemshin: History, society, and identity in the Highlands of Northeast Turkey, edited by Hovann H. Simonian, "to a large extent, it is the women who are responsible for [tea cultivation] and animal husbandry."

Cultivation of tea in Çamlıhemşin began at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. Of the twenty-four villages in the region, nineteen are engaged in the cultivation of tea... The main unit of production in the cultivation of tea is the family; small-scale cultivation is typical for the Rize region...

Although the great majority of the labour required for tea cultivation is carried out by women (80 percent...), a major part of the income generated is retained by men (around 60 per cent). The heads of households tend to say that the income from tea is so small as to be insignificant, adding that it is typically used to buy small things for the house or is split up among the women of the house, who usually use it to buy gold.

Ersoy explains that "the patriarchal family system is dominant in the region, and so the eldest male is the head of the household. The eldest woman in the household also enjoys high status. The term koçira among the Hemshinli is used to a describe a woman who performs a managerial function within the home rather than carrying out household duties. Elderly women," he continues, "do not lose this status when their sons become adults, though as a general rule it is considered important that women obey the male head of the household. For women this is an inescapable rule, and for this reason it is women who do most of the heavy work like carrying loads."

One Hemshinli woman said, "Only mothers bear all the burdens. Mothers who make their husbands bear a burden are considered dishonourable among the people. This tradition is still in force in the Hemshin region. The woman bears the burden of the whole family."

The identity of the Hemshin peoples remains complicated, but that is not their primary concern. Compared to neighboring Laz villages, Hemshin villages are built at higher altitudes and are less suitable to tea cultivation; in 90% of households, at least one family member was forced to seek work outside of the village, most likely in the big city, in order to support their traditionally large families; women remain subject to the will of men while working harder than men do--these, and not the issue of Armenian heritage, remain the most pressing problems of the Hemshin peoples. 

[hatirlamak-blog]

Volga Germans in the United States | 1, 2, 3, 4 

The early settlers in Nebraska and Kansas endured hardships, privations, and years of austerity. One settler wrote in 1880 that their wheat crops had failed in three consecutive years. Most had to endure the discomfort of dugouts, sod huts, crude shanties, and tents. There were those who would have returned to Russia, but it was too far and they lacked even enough money to leave the state... The family from the Volga, generally speaking, was handicapped financially, and unless it arrived during the early years, or later only where homesteads were still available, it had to find its livelihood in the labor market.

But those were early days. Upon their arrival Volga Germans were singled out for their Russian background--by some accounts "even Reich Germans [Germans from Germany proper] mistakenly applied 'Rooshians' to the equally German immigrants from the Volga, the Black Sea region, and Volhynia--intending an insult as ugly as any applied to any immigrant." 

In his book The Volga Germans: In Russia and the Americas, from 1763 to the Present, Fred C. Koch, an American entrepreneur, writes that the prejudice held against Germans from Russia soon disappeared. "Wherever immigrants from the Volga and other areas of Russia settled in North America they have usually become assimilated and acculturized [sic] smoothly and naturally," he writes. "The second, third, and fourth generations have dispersed themselves over most of the continent, indistinguishable from other white Americans and Canadians" (221). 

This may well be true--certainly, Volga Germans appear no different than the average American of European descent--but Koch betrays his own racism (and perhaps poor research) when he frames Volga Germans in opposition to other, unassimilated immigrant communities in the United States. "They have demanded no special treatment, no precedence over other members of our national societies, or no preferential consideration because at one time they were a socially denigrated and economically underprivileged minority," he writes. "They are not hyphenated Americans and don't want to be because they prefer to be Americans all the way" (221). Koch is also the man who argued that the welfare system was created in order to get "a vicious race war started," aligning poignantly with his belief that Volga Germans "demanded no special treatment." Perhaps the Volga Germans, former citizens of the Soviet Union, a people of Western European descent who were, conveniently, victimized by Joseph Stalin, were the prime example of an argument he pulled out of thin air: "The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America."  

In any case, Koch--a man whose lived experience was certainly not that of an American Volga German--dramatically exaggerated the desire of Volga Germans to assimilate. In his book Russian-German Settlements in the United States, Richard Sallet writes that "the life-giving artery of every non-English speaking group in the United States is the constant stream of new immigrants, which brings fresh blood to the old settlements. When the influx is heavy, then this particular group flourishes; if it is weak, the ethnic group declines; if immigration ceases altogether, then submergence into the American way of life is but a matter of time." This was the case of the Volga Tatars, he argues. "Every nationality of the white race in the United States is subject to this unalterable law even though the Germans are surely not the ones who acclimatize themselves quickly. The Russian-Germans are even more resistant in this respect than the Germans who immigrated from the Reich, for they were accustomed to living as colonists in foreign surroundings [in Russia], and thus they held tenaciously to their native tongue and tradition. But even at that, they cannot swim against the tide of assimilation in America."

It is crucial, in any history of a people, to examine its contemporary community. While Koch and Sallet agree that, ultimately, Russian Germans did assimilate into Western society, it is important to note that, although they are no longer a distinct ethnic group, Americans of Volga German descent still cling to their identity. Websites and archives have sprung up all across the Internet, "dedicated to the discovery, collection, preservation, and dissemination of information related to the history, cultural heritage, and geneaology of Germanic Settlers in the Russian Empire"--to quote the mission statement of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia.

There is a grain of truth to the statement that "[Volga Germans] have long since ceased being an ethnic minority." They are no longer persecuted and, generally speaking, no longer distinct from their fellow white Westerners. But when Koch writes that this is "entirely through their own efforts... They are not hyphenated Americans and don't want to be because they prefer to be Americans all the way," he was absolutely, categorically wrong. 

[hatirlamak-blog]

Moscow Sabantuy | Galya Morell 

Sabantuy, the "ploughman's festivity," is a springtime holiday celebrated by Tatars. This ancient cultural event had been suppressed for generations as being "reactionary," "religious," or "separatist"... But the peoples' rising of 1989/91 brought it to life again. By the festivity, a people expressed its cultural survival. It showed that a new--and old--nation was striving for self-determination, Tatarstan. 

At the same time, the festivity displayed ties between different peoples, while nations in other parts of the earlier Soviet Union clashed in bloody conflicts. In Sabantuy, not only Tatars were showing their costumes, flags, dances, and musical performances, but also other peoples and minorities living in the region, such as Bashkirs and Finns... 

The Tatar springtime festivity includes--besides korash wrestling--running competitions and horse races, performances of strength (as weight lifting), jumping and several types of games. Many of the competitions have a humorous character, provoking laughter and enjoyment... These performances do not only put on stage the success, but also the failure, the stumbling, the comic and the ridiculous...

Other dances have a more formalized and folkloristic character. This is reminiscent of the Soviet period when state ensembles demonstrated "living folk culture" by measured choreographies, theatrical pathos and reconstructed costumes. Again other performances are more sportive in character, such as the parachute jump. 

The Tatar Sabantuy festivity, as it reappeared after 1990, is, thus, compiled from many elements and different sources, often in a contradictory way. Features from modern sport and from traditional folk practice clashed and mingled--competition, dance and folkloric arrangement--national demonstration and popular joke. (x)

[hatirlamak-blog]

The remaining (Lutheran) Volga Germans of Frank, Russia | Flickr

The colony of Frank was officially founded in 1767. At first the colony did not have a name, only a number, and was called Frank by the colonists... Frank was located on the east bank of the Medveditsa River, on the western edge of the Saratov Province of the Lower Volga area. It is primarily an agricultural area, with some oil and gas resources in the area. 

The village of Frank was populated by German immigrants at the invitation of Catherine-the-Great of Russia. It is believed that many of the original settlers were from the Hessen area of Germany, in the 1760's.

The official statistics state that 525 people of the Lutheran faith were settled here in 1767. Most of them had left their homelands the previous spring and had spend over a year in getting there. Many traveled by ship from Germany to Oranienbaum (near St. Petersburg) and then by wagons or boats to the steppes of the Volga.

According to tradition, the colonists found little or no preparation had been made for them. and like the settlers in the other Volga colonies, they had to dig into the banks of the river to make crude shelters for themselves. However, after a number of years, the village of Frank became a very prosperous agriculture community... The church was the focal point of the colony. From the bell tower, the sexton announced the deaths in the community by means of the church bell, designating by the first peals, whether the deceased by a man, woman, or child, and then tolling out the age. The bells were further used in cases of fire, and blizzards in order to direct wanderers to the village.

In the early years, educational interest was not high. The principal aim of the whole system was to perpetuate the German language and the traditional and religious customs and practices. In subsequent year the educational cause was promoted and higher educational standards realized.

Frank families were large. Like all pioneers, a part of their service was to multiply and replenish the steppes. Despite suffering, sacrifice, and struggle, the population grew.

When in the early seventies of the 19th century the Czar put an end to all privileges and was determined to make of these Germans full-fledged Russians, they sought a land of liberty, and America was the magnet. Emigration began almost at once, some going to South America, a few to Canada, but by far the largest number came to the United States.

After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, many of the Volga Germans that had not immigrated to the United States--about 400,000--were deported eastward, feared by Stalin to be potential collaborators and enemies of the state. They were resettled primarily in Kazakhstan and drafted into the Soviet Labor Army. Approximately one third of these did not survive. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, they were not allowed to resettle in their old homes in the Volga region. Today, roughly 200,000 ethnic Germans live in Kazakhstan, approximately 1.4% of the overall population. 600,000 more now live in Russia.

[hatirlamak-blog]

Emine Ziyatdinova's recent photographs from Crimea sketch the pain that is not far from the tenuous peace. There are images of Russian soldiers and pro-Ukrainian protesters. And just last Sunday, in her family's home, she photographed her mother crying as she stashed some documents into a bag. 

"She is getting ready to leave if they have to," Ms. Ziyatdinova said. "My mom is really panicked and upset. She cries every day, and she thinks we are going to be deported."

This is not paranoia, but fear rooted in memory. In the 1940s, her grandparents--Crimean Tatars--were forcibly removed and sent to Uzbekistan, where Ms. Ziyatdinova, her brother and their parents were born. The family returned to Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union, rebuilding bit by bit in Serebryanka, a village in northern Crimea. But the upheaval in Ukraine, Russian intervention in Crimea, and a coming referendum on whether the region can secede and join Russia have made her and many others nervous. Most recently, Crimea's regional Parliament passed a resolution in support of independence should the majority of voters approve. 

An Uncertain Quiet for Crimean Tatars, David Gonzalez.