Case Study:

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 E. Memories

The term Sürgün is used to refer to the deportation. It means “expulsion”, as well as “exil” in Turkish. By extension, Sürgün refers to violent expulsion and the prolonged exile. It has to be noticed that this term is mainly used by members of the Crimean Tatar Diaspora.

The deportation is the central event in the narratives that constitute individual memories and Crimean Tatars’ collective memory. It can be considered as the cement of the Crimean Tatar identity. The concept of “chosen trauma” (Volkan, 1997: 48) has been widely used in the studies to characterize the importance of this event and the diffusion of the memories still focused on it (Williams, 2001; Uelhing, 2004; Campana, 2003).

The censorship concerning the deportation, as well as the non-rehabilitation, has deeply marked the Crimean Tatars’ memories and their externalization. In most cases, the narratives broadcast from the 1960s to the 1980s were included in the appeals and the petitions that representatives of the dissident Crimean Tatar national movement wrote. They served a strategy of victimization and of consciousness-raising.

In general, the main social frameworks of memory are mixed up with the living memories of deportation, which are mainly passed on within the family circle. Memories of deportation thus can be assimilated to transgenerational memories. The survivors’ recollections constitute a cultural framework that the second and third generations of Crimean Tatars adopted as their own and took with them to Crimea (Uelhing, 2004: 9). A poem by Lilia Bujurova speaks of the desire of knowledge typical of the generations of Crimean Tatars who did not have a direct experience of the deportation or, because they were too young, have only partial memories. It is about a Crimean Tatar descendant who asks his father to talk about “the house where he was born”, an allegory used to describe Crimea. In a meaningful excerpt, he asks him:

Tell me once more who survived!
I want to know everything about that,
To be able to tell your grandson —
Your sorrow, that screams in me and in my son
In every living moment!

The recollections are not simply reproduced and passed on, but circulate through families’ circles. Thus, the style that parents adopted in their accounts is, implicitly or explicitly, rejected by the youngest ones who, as they appropriated their parents’ recollections, gave them a stronger emotional significance (Uelhing: 17 and 116). This trend can be partly explained by the nationalist contexts in which many Tatars evolved between the 1960s and the 1990s and after the USSR split. The centrality of the Crimean Tatars’ return and the restoration of their political rights lost in 1944 are constructed as arguments based on a past seen through the nationalist prism.

The political mobilization promoted by the movement activists largely contributed to establish the sharing of traumatic recollections within formalized frameworks, whose diffusion led to a certain homogenization of the speeches and narratives. The historical narrative elaborated by the activists of the movement had a strong impact on memories. Terms as genocide or destruction are found in numerous narratives, which are a singular demonstration of the pain suffered by the group. Indeed, the Tatar historical account considers the deportation as the last stage of a genocide planned since the annexation of Crimea in 1783. The deportation is regarded as a break. The National Mourning Day, May 18, also represents the birth of a new solidarity that appeared in the places of exile and that was duplicated in a context of scattering and negation. The deportation is placed at the center of the timeline produced by the Crimean Tatar historical narrative which includes all the events perceived as “tragedies”: the annexation of the peninsula by the Tsarist Empire in 1783, the emigration of almost two million Tatars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the actions of expropriation and russianization… Therefore, the historical account is one of the most efficient homogenizing frameworks of the Tatar memories (Campana, 2003).

Beyond the individual traumas exist traumas considered as collective peppered narratives. Many testimonies insist on the behavior presented as a humiliation and attacks against the Tatar identity: the physical and symbolic violence perpetrated against old people and women; the confinement of men and women in the same trucks mixed together; soldiers’ disrespect for religious symbols; their refusal to bury people who died during the transfer… The narratives also underline the destruction caused by the detatarization of Crimea, although those events, which took place after the forced expulsion, cannot be remembered by the deportees and their descendants. In parallel, they give an idealized view of life in Crimea before the forced displacement. The deportation gave birth to a new sense of identity and to new perceptions, which are the origin of the development of an idealized connection with a territory set up as a Homeland (Campana, 2006).

Crimean Tatars’ memories are in direct competition not only with the Soviet official narrative, but also with the memories of the Russian-speaking inhabitants of Crimea. Indeed, those inhabitants remember the Crimean Tatars’ collaboration with the occupying German army (Uelhing, 2004: 49-61). Conversely, the Crimean Tatars recall their active involvement in the ranks of the Red Army and in the Soviet partisan movement (Williams, 2001: 414). The Crimean Tatar soldiers who were decorated during the Second World War or killed in the line of duty are celebrated as personification of Crimean Tatars’ patriotism. Beyond that subjectivity of the memories, some aspects of Crimean Tatar history are ignored. Thus, the acts of collaboration of hundreds of Crimean Tatars are avoided, as well as the formation of self-defense units and their role during the German occupation. This period is greatly emotionally invested and gives still rise nowadays to competing interpretations.

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