Vozgrin, V. E. Istoriia krymskikh tatar (review)

Abstract

SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 556 together of the larger historical narrative with the Kremlin specifics that will make this book attractive. One way or the other, for an intelligent, wellresearched , engagingly-written and often surprising history of a key cultural icon of Russia and of the country itself, Red Fortress is heartily recommended. Department of History Theodore R. Weeks Southern Illinois University, Carbondale Vozgrin, V. E. Istoriia krymskikh tatar. Four volumes. Tezis, Simferopol, 2013. 870 + 938 + 879 + 619 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. UkrH 600.00. In the Crimean crisis of 1855 there was no shortage of scholarly and popular works giving an insight into the history of the Crimea and of the Crimean Tatars. For the 2014 crisis there is just this one magisterial survey which, because of its sympathetic treatment of the Crimean Khanate and the Tatar population, has brought so much antagonism upon its author that it cannot be bought in the Russian Federation (the author is still a Professor of Modern History in St Petersburg, but accusations of Russophobia resulted in him losing his position in the Russian Academy of Sciences). The sole source of copies at the time of writing appears to be the Simferopol shop of ATR, the Tatar television service (www.atra.ua). Modern archaeological excavations have given little new information on the history of the Crimea in antiquity and the classical period. More recently, the Ottoman archives have revealed (see Alexander Bennigsen et al, Le Khanat de Crimée, Mouton, 1976) the degree to which the Crimean khans were independent of the Golden Horde and the Sublime Porte (recently published Turkish presidential archives are now revealing more). This gives the lie to the Russian view underlying V. D. Smirnov’s Krymskoe khanstvo of 1886 that the Khanate was essentially an instrument of pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic hostility to Russia. Vozgrin takes the more plausible view that the Crimean Khanate and Muscovite Russia should be seen as competing successor states to the Golden Horde, that the Khanate’s ravages on the steppes and raids on Moscow were politically rational acts to protect its borders, and that the Khanate would willingly ally itself to any of the steppe powers, including the Don Cossacks and Muscovy, to maintain a balance in its own interests (for instance, the Khan would not necessarily obey the Ottomans’ call to attack Poland). What emerges from the immense amount of detail — anthropological, economic, as well as political — marshalled by Vozgrin is the degree to which the Khanate was a religiously tolerant state, comparable with El Andaluz, allowing several varieties of Judaism and Christianity to flourish. The khans, REVIEWS 557 although in principle subject to the approval of the Sultan, were effectively answerable to the beys of the leading Genghisid clans, and their autocracy limited to foreign policy, diplomacy and justice. By the mid eighteenth century, despite appalling destruction by Russian forces in 1736, Bakhchisarai and the port of Gözlev (Eupatoria) were cities foreign travellers compared favourably to Rotterdam, and Tatars had high levels of literacy both male and female. The miracle is that the Tatars survived at all: they were treated far worse than most of the other nations absorbed into the Russian empire by force or fraud at the end of the eighteenth century. The systematic razing of cities, cemeteries, orchards and forests was matched only by the deportations, which took on almost genocidal proportions and were regularly repeated: 1786, 1812, 1860, 1880 and, of course, May 1944, when the entire peninsula was purged of Tatars. Vozgrin (a native of Simferopol, but an ethnic Russian) does not skirt around the brutality of Russian occupation: the Tatars were victims of a peculiar libel, perhaps stemming from their burning of Moscow in 1571: Catherine the Great called them a ‘nest of predators and robbers’, just as Stalin branded them ‘a traitor nation’, although there were probably fewer collaborationists in the Crimea than in Pskov, Kiev or Kharkov. True, the Nazis had been persuaded that the Ostrogoths (who did in actual fact establish a kingdom in the Crimea and whose language was spoken there a thousand years after it had died out elsewhere) were the ancestors of the...