“Crimean Strolls” (1959), a poem by Russophone Kharkiv poet Boris Chichibabin about Iosif Stalin's brutal 1944 deportation of Tatars from their native Crimea, did much to inspire Ukrainians’ solidarity with the displaced. In Uzbekistan, the poem galvanized the deported Crimean Tatars, as they organized the largest dissident movement in Soviet history. The poem, which defiantly recasts Crimea from a Soviet Riviera to a land soaked with the “blood of Others,” made Chichibabin a hero to Mustafa Dzemilev, the leader of the Tatar repatriation movement in Central Asia. And since then, it has been a staple on Ukrainian social media sites following Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea.
This is one of dozens of such transnational networks of socially and politically impactful art that are traced in Rory Finnin's extraordinary new book Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity. The book's big value is that the author empirically establishes this impact though deep research in diverse sources and archives from Moscow to Kharkiv to Ankara. Avoiding a sentimental reduction of literature to wholesome moral nourishment, Finnin nonetheless lays out a moving argument about literature's power to invite prosocial concern for the welfare of strangers, and to build solidarities across linguistic, cultural, and ethnic divides that have led to demonstrable political effects.
Finnin shows in illuminating detail how Russian, Ukrainian, and Turkish writers—and let us pause here to admire the linguistic range that made this original comparison possible—forged ties around their response to the Soviet-era ethnic cleansing of Crimea's Tatars and to the settler colonialism aiming to cement their displacement. Wise to abandon the dichotomy of the canonical and non-canonical, Finnin is as probing on modern Turkey's historical pulp fiction as on Aleksandr Pushkin's “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai”—a cultural touchstone of “talismanic power” (55) for the transnational literature on Crimea. Finnin moves effortlessly between a lyric and a dissident pamphlet, between Taras Shevchenko and a Eurovision song by Jamala, while engaging postcolonial theory, trauma studies, memory studies, and history. This is interdisciplinary humanities at its best, speaking to social scientist and humanist alike. One hopes that this book's fruitful dialogue between Slavic and Middle Eastern studies will find other interlocutors.
The book is composed of eight chapters arranged in three parts. Part One, “Possession” (Ch. 1–2), explores the cultural discourse that paved the way to Stalin's atrocity. It establishes the study's principal conceptual thread and political index: the way authors negotiate the relations between the Crimean place and the Crimean Tatar people (the latter somewhat awkwardly termed “the Tatar personality”). Educators eager to decolonize their Russian literature curriculum may take note of the arresting juxtaposition (59–61) of Anton Chekhov's “The Lady with the Little Dog” (1899) and Lesia Ukraïnka's “At the Sea” (1901). Other authors in this part include Pushkin, Namık Kemal, Üsein Toktargazy, and Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky.
The poetics of solidarity, with its artful arousals of empathy and of positive forms of guilt (ones that prompt reparative actions), is elaborated in Part Two, “Dispossession,” the book's “center of gravity” (20). Chapters 3–6 analyze the joint projects of ethnic and discursive cleansing as well as the backlash against them. Of note here is Finnin's notion of “cross-korenizatsiia,” or the project of promoting the entanglement of the Soviet Union's “national” cultures and their mutual support (78–79) and his emphasis on settler colonialism in Crimea as the extension of ethnic cleansing (94, 200). Among the authors discussed in Part Two, we find the Russophone Chichibabin, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, and Viktor Nekipelov (all prominent in samizdat circuits); Ukrainophone Ostap Vyshnia, Ivan Sokulsky, and Roman Ivanchuk; and Turkish writers Sükrü Elçin and Cengiz Dağci, who championed the displaced Crimean Tatars as “paradigmatic Turkic victim[s] of the twentieth century” (170).
The Tatars’ return to Crimea emerges in Part Three, “Repossession” (Ch. 7–8), as a form of decolonization that, paradoxically, failed to erase “patterns of colonial dominance” (201). Finnin details the continued colonial effacement of the Crimean Tatars in the fiction of the Russophone Vasily Aksenov, the Bohemian collective The Crimean Club, and Gennady Katsov and Igor Sid's anthology NashKrym (Our Crimea; ostensibly a challenge to the chauvinistic meme KrymNash [Crimea is Ours]). This effacement is juxtaposed to recuperative cinematic projects such as Oles Sanin's Mamai (2003), Akhtem Setiablaiev's blockbuster Khaitarma (2013), Nariman Aliev's arthouse Evge (2019), and the translation-cum-transposition of Serhiy Zhadan's poetry by Crimean Tatar-language poet Seyare Kökçe, analyzed with particular subtlety by Finnin (232–36).
Against the ongoing trauma of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and occupation of Crimea, Blood of Others is a most timely read, as intellectually stimulating and archivally rich as it is ethically fortifying. A brilliant account of cross-cultural solidarities fostered by literature, this valuable book powerfully reminds us to whom Crimea truly “belongs.” And that those true “owners” have a preference for the “liberty and freedom” (227) of Ukraine.
