Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Blood of Others: Stalin’s Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity, by Rory Finnan. 2022. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Buffalo

Russian Settler Colonialism: Russian Expansionism and the Deportation and “Uprooting” of Native Peoples

This book is about the Crimean Tatars. There are many similarities between the experiences of the Crimean Tatar deportees of 1944 and that of the Soviet-conquered Kresy Poles in 1939-1946, and these similarities are the focus of my review.

In early 1944, the Red Army regained possession of Crimea. The Communist government arbitrarily accused the Crimean Tatars of collaborating with the Nazi German invaders, and, based on this pretext, deported these Tatars to Kazakhstan. In actuality, only 10% at most of Crimean Tatars had collaborated with the Nazis. (p. 15). Russian imperialism was the real motive for the deportations (“a Russian riviera”: p. 4), just as it had been the real motive for the deportation of the Kresy Poles (geographic expansion of the Soviet Union). For decades, the Crimean Tatar deportees sought justice and, after the fall of the Soviet Union, many of them finally got to move back to Crimea. The Kresy Poles never got justice.

DEPORTATION AND DEATH: THE SAME OLD RUSSIAN PLAYBOOK

The Russian-caused deportations are sometimes trivialized and disrespected as “just a little train ride”. This is like saying that the Holocaust was “just a little trip to the showers”.

The 1939-1941 Polish deportees report being crammed into overcrowded trains on a prolonged journey, with nonexistent sanitation, minimal protection from the elements, and repressive terror from the NKVD. This was also the fate of the Crimean Tatar deportees. Finnin reports, “Train cars marked for ’40 people or 8 horses’ were packed with roughly 150 men, women, and children. The doors to the cars did not open for eighteen days. There were no toilets. There was no drinking water: deportees survived on rain run-off collected through gaps and holes in the cars.” p. 9, 16).

The death rate for the Crimean Tatar deportees, in the first few years of their ordeal, was in the 30%-50% range. (p. 16, 250). This is comparable to the death rate of the 1939-1941 Polish deportees.

RUSSIAN SETTLER COLONIALISM: THE OBLITERATION OF THE LOCALS’ NATIONAL MEMORY

The deportations were just the beginning. Finnin comments, “Traces of the Crimean Tatars were wiped off the map and torn from encyclopedias, their dwellings and property redistributed to the Slavic settlers recruited by the Soviet state to replace them.” (p. 16; For details, see p. 94). In other words, the Crimea was de-Tatarized (just as the Kresy was de-Polonized).

The author adds that, “Traces of their [Crimean Tatar] past presence on maps and signs were thrown into what Robert Conquest, after Orwell, calls ‘the memory hole’. Before the deportation there were, by one count, 1,775 towns and villages in the Crimea bearing a Crimean Tatar toponym. After the deportations only a small number remained.” (p. 92).

In like manner, the Kresy Poles were obliterated from public memory. The remaining Poles were expelled, the Kresy itself was de-Polonized, and almost all traces of the Polish-ness of the Kresy were wiped out. As an example, the Soviet authorities renamed Stanislawow as Ivano-Frankovsk in 1962, fully 18 years after the expulsion of the Kresy Poles. To reinforce the amnesia, the Soviet-imposed Communist puppet government in Poland forbade any kind of mention of the Kresy Poles. The “memory hole” was complete.

RUSSIAN SETTLER COLONIALISM: UNMASKING RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM

Some Soviet Ukrainian dissidents called out the underlying cause of the deportations, “‘Monuments are built to Ivan the Terrible, Peter I, Catherine II, but no one will say that they seethed with hatred for Ukrainians, Tatars, Belarusians, Poles, Georgians, and others.'” (p. 144). That’s putting it mildly.

CRIMEAN TATARS–LIKE THE KRESY POLES–WERE SUBJECT TO RUSSIAN SETTLER COLONIALISM

Finnen comments, “Settler colonialism occurs when an empire displaces and replaces a conquered native population.” (p. 20). He elaborates, “What Crimea experienced after 1944 was a paradigmatic project of settler colonialism. Stalin ethnically cleansed an entire indigenous population from the peninsula–roughly 20 percent of the population at the time–and presided over an erasure of their material and symbolic traces and a rewriting of their history. He then replaced this population with tens of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians who were transplanted from outside the peninsula: a program of ethnic cloning.” (p. 200. Emphasis in original).

As with the Crimean Tatars, the property of the deported and later expelled Kresy Poles was confiscated by the Soviet Russian authorities, and given to Ukrainians and Belarusians, whom the authorities treated as branches of the Russian people.

RUSSIAN SETTLER COLONIALISM: INDIGENOUS PEOPLES ARE NOT SEEDLINGS!

Decades later, the Soviet authorities reasoned that the Crimean Tatars had no right to complain about the injustice done to them because they were now “rooted” (ukorenilis) in Kazakhstan, to which their ancestors had been deported. One commentator laughed, “What are the Crimean Tatars–seedlings?” (p. 122). Touche!

Finnin adds, “The deportation sacralized the territorial nationalism of the Crimean Tatars…” (p. 19). And why not? The Tatars are one of the indigenous peoples of the Crimean Peninsula, and this Peninsula is the native land of the Crimean Tatars, on which they had lived for many centuries. (p. 14). It is their native land. (p. 259). The fact that they were a minority on the Crimean Peninsula (p. 14), as compared to the Ukrainians, does not change this fact.

Exactly the same is true of the Kresy Poles (including my ancestors). These Poles are one of the indigenous people of the Kresy. It is their native land. They had lived on the Kresy for many centuries, if not millennia. The fact that they were a minority compared with the local Ukrainians does not change this fact.

The horrible experiences of the Kresy Poles: the deportations, OUN-UPA genocide, and the Soviet postwar expulsions–have all sacralized the territorial nationalism of the Kresy Poles. As they should.

The Kresy Poles are not seedlings that can legitimately be uprooted from their native Kresy and transplanted to the former German territories (the Recovered Territories) any more than the Crimean Tatars are seedlings that can legitimately be uprooted from their native Crimea and be transplanted to Kazakhstan!

Therefore, the Recovered Territories must be understood as punitive damages from Germany, and not as some kind of “compensation” or “even exchange” for the Soviet-confiscated Kresy, whose confiscation should never have happened in the first place–any more than the confiscation of Crimea from the Tatars should have ever taken place.

Down with Russian settler colonialism!