Khans of Crimea

When Norman Davies published Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe in 2011 he remembered Alt Clud and Aragon, but forgot the Crimean Khanate. Perhaps he considered the Crimean Khanate a mere vassal of the Ottoman Empire. That would be a mistake: the Khanate had its own laws; its khans were all from the Giray family, descended from Chinggis Khan; and between the 15th and 18th centuries it often acted independently of the Ottomans, in both diplomacy and war. The Crimean peninsula, approached by land through a narrow isthmus, with a rocky coast, has been a refuge for imperilled nations since the first millennium: defeated Huns, Ostrogoths, Khazars, Jews, Armenians, Greek and Italian traders, dominated by the Qipchaq Turks, created, in a land barely larger than Wales, the world’s most diverse and viable ethnic mix. With rich human and natural resources, perfectly positioned for trade between Europe and Asia, the Crimean Khanate shaped central and eastern Europe for 300 years. Now it is gone and the Crimean Tatars are a minority in their own land.

The last lawful Act determining the Crimean Khanate’s status was the 1774 Russo-Ottoman Küçuk-Kaynarcı Treaty, Article Three of which stated:

All the Tatar peoples shall, without any exception, be acknowledged by the two Empires as free nations, and entirely independent of every foreign Power, governed by their own Sovereign, of the race of Genghis Khan.

Catherine the Great’s correspondence reveals, however, that this treaty was a cynical ploy to turn the Crimean Khanate from an Ottoman protectorate into a Russian province. The ground had been laid a century before: Juraj Križanić, a Croat priest, who had entered Russia as a Polish diplomat and spent 15 years in exile in Siberia, recommended an extermination programme:

Tatars customarily live by robbery, they do not recognise international agreements or any humanity in their relations, there is no advantage or honour in negotiating with such people … We ourselves must seek them out in their own land, ravage their settlements, seize their wives and children so that they can no longer multiply.

The Crimean Khanate has been controversial ever since the Crimean Tatars became a powerful force in 14th-century Poland-Lithuania. As Chinggis Khan’s last heirs the Islamic world – Turks and Iranians – respected them; French and German travellers and diplomats in the 17th and 18th centuries thought them equal to civilised European nations. But Slavic nations (with the exception of the Cossack clans), Hungarians and Austrians, who suffered Tatar depredations, denounced them as savage, treacherous parasites.

Heirs of Chinggis

There were reasons to respect the Tatars. From the Khanate’s founding under Hacı Giray in 1441 to the rule of Şahın Khan, Catherine the Great’s puppet in the 1770s, the Crimean Tatars lived under a constitutional monarchy based on Chinggis Khan’s. A clan bey council chose and advised a khan. To avoid the fratricidal frenzy that plagued the Ottomans at every accession, the third Tatar khan, Mengli, appointed a qalğa (heir and viceroy); in the 16th century, ‘an heir and a spare’, a nureddin (‘Light of the Faith’) was added. This system lasted for 330 years. Their court records likewise show a legal system that resolved civil disputes and criminal cases with efficiency and fairness.

Like Andalusia at its best, the Khanate showed religious tolerance: Shia, Sunni and Sufi Muslims lived communally with Jews and Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Roman Catholic Christians. The Tatars lived peaceably with other ethnic groups – Ostrogoths, Genoese and Venetians, Armenians and Greeks – as well as former prisoners of war preferring (or compelled) to stay in the Crimea.

Despite the Russian army’s demolition of libraries in the 18th century, and the Tsar’s civil service’s destruction of Tatar books and manuscripts – even those in private hands – in 1833, we know that the Crimean Khanate was a cultural centre for Islamic study, producing manuscripts in Chaghatai and Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and Farsi.

Its diplomatic missions to Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Prussia and Russia – with correspondence composed in Chaghatai Turkish, Italian and Latin, often polished by a khan’s consort or daughter – show that the Khanate was a sovereign state dealing with its neighbours on equal terms. Its policy was to support a weaker potential enemy over a stronger one. The Khanate sometimes defied the Ottomans: in 1583, Khan Mehmed II refused to invade Iran and instead attacked a Turkish commander-in-chief, although this cost him his life. As the only surviving Chinggisid state, the Crimeans claimed seniority over the Ottomans. They accepted substantial annual tribute in gold, silver or bolts of cloth, both from their conquests and their allies, as a tax owed to the Golden Horde of Chinggis Khan.

The Crimean Tatars were also a trading and agricultural power, supplying the Black Sea with grain, meat, wine and salt. They farmed with irrigation and built cities and ports to European standards. Yet those who saw the Khanate as a nest of bandits had their reasons.

Tatar horsemen and armies harassed their northern neighbours, often unprovoked, looting, burning, killing and enslaving men, women and children, whom the horsemen would drag by leather leads to the Crimean slave markets. In the 17th century Crimean Tatars enslaved some two million people, equal to the number of Africans enslaved by the Portuguese. The Tatars depopulated Poland to such an extent that Polish bishops permitted remarriage if a spouse, still alive, was in Tatar captivity. The Crimean Tatars also had brutal military discipline: cowardly or incompetent men were executed, often with cruel ingenuity. Political rivals were mercilessly eliminated. Little wonder that a Polish scholar, Szymon Starowolski, in 1618 advised his king in his A Call to Arms or Advice to Exterminate the Perekop Tatars to:

Free ourselves first of all from those pagan Tatars who have learnt without restraint to pinion the wings of the Polish eagle and wade through Christian blood, driving numberless throngs of our brothers into slavery.

Missed opportunity

At the end of the 16th century Khan Mengli I (renowned as a state-builder, warrior and poet) enjoyed the same prestige as other great monarchs of Europe: Suleiman the Magnificent, Ivan IV, Elizabeth I, Henri IV, Philip II. In the 17th century, some Crimean khans lacked their forebears’ intelligence, courage or momentum. As Russia expanded into the empty steppe using artillery, the Crimean Khanate could only make a cordon sanitaire by burning the grass and any settlements. A new force, the Cossacks, intervened. While the Don Cossacks were pro-Russian, many western Zaporozhian Cossacks, rebelling against the Poles, joined forces with the Crimean khan Devlet II Giray in resisting the northern powers. The cooperation was often fruitful, but turned both Crimean Tatars and Cossacks into targets. Their opportunity came in 1711 when Peter the Great and his army were trapped at the River Prut by a force of Turks, Crimeans, Cossacks and Swedes. But the trap broke: Peter’s consort Ekaterina bribed the vizier Baltacı with the Russian army’s horses, jewels and, it is said, her body. Russia evaded destruction and returned as a deadlier threat. Vizier Baltacı was beheaded, but the khan himself was overthrown and the Khanate became a target of aggression.

In the 1730s the Tatars neglected the moat and ramparts at Perekop, the settlement that blocked access to the Crimean peninsula. From 1731 to 1735 Russian troops, with no plans, not even maps, dragged heavy artillery across the depopulated steppe and into the peninsula. The khans’ archives and libraries, mosques, churches, synagogues, palaces, baths and cemeteries were burnt and smashed. Russian troops slaughtered half the population. Though the Russians in turn lost tens of thousands of soldiers to plague and fevers, these expeditions disabused the Tatars of their illusion of impunity.

Two decades later, under the last great khan, Qırım Giray, palaces, towns, gardens and aqueducts were restored. Simferopol had piped water, sewage (not restored by Russia until the 1950s) and a theatre. Molière’s Tartufe was due to be performed. The port of Közleve (today’s Yevpatoria) was compared to Rotterdam by Dutch travellers, who considered the capital Bahçesaray to be Europe’s cleanest and greenest city. When Frederick of Prussia hired, for a fabulous sum, 60,000 Tatars to fight Russia in the Seven Years War, past military glories, too, seemed resurrected. Then Tsar Peter III made peace with Prussia and the Tatars were left empty handed. In 1769 Qırım was poisoned by a doctor in the pay of a Moldavian prince.

Destroy and swallow

The 1774 Ottoman-Russian treaty of Küçük-Kaynarcı, purporting to liberate Crimea, in fact ruined it. Its hinterland was ceded to the Ottomans and the Russians, with a Russian resident and a young puppet khan Şahın Giray (who despised the Tatars and longed to be a Russian officer; he rode about in an English carriage and had his army trained with Russian brutality). The technique of wrecking a country by destabilisation before swallowing it up was a technique Russia had previously used in destroying the sovereignty of Poland. Crimea and Georgia followed. The destitution of the Khanate culminated with the deportation of Christian Greeks and Armenians to the uninhabited frozen steppes from Azov to the Kuban. (Mariupol, now rubble, was established by citizens of Mariampol deported from the Crimea.) The Khanate was so shattered that in 1784 Catherine declared it bankrupt and a province of Russia. Khan Şahın Giray was exiled to Rhodes, where the Ottoman Sultan had him strangled for treason.

Forced emigration began to clear land on which Catherine’s nobility and military could build palaces and be rid of hostile Muslims. The Ottomans offered asylum; exiled Crimean Tatars outnumbered those who remained. The Crimean Tatar language is close to Ottoman Turkish, so assimilation was easy. Crimean Tatars lost both identity and homeland.

Cultural genocide occurred in 1833, when the Russian Minister of the Interior, helped by a puppet mufti, confiscated every manuscript in public or private hands in the former Khanate. The mufti received a gold medal from Tsar Nicolas I ‘for diligence in removing from the Tatars manuscripts harmful to them and to the common peace, not accordant with the law nor with the rules of prudence’.

Other peoples have had their self-image shaped by tragedy: Jews by the shoah, Palestinians by the naqba, Armenians by the medz yeghem of 1915, the Crimean Tatars by the sürsün, ‘banishment’. After an annexation as deplored by European observers as that of 2014, the Frenchman Gilbert Romme remarked in 1786: ‘The Crimea looks like the Garden of Eden after the expulsion’. Every generation of Crimean Tatars since 1780 has been dispossessed, slaughtered or driven out.

Genocide and deliverance

In 1812, for fear of Napoleon (who thought of renaming the Crimea ‘Napoléonide’), and again in 1855 after the Crimean War, tens of thousands of Tatars, branded as enemy agents, were deported to Ottoman territory. Russians built more villas and imported Bulgarians, Pontic and Ottoman Greeks and Germans to replace Tatar labour.

Physical genocide began in 1860, as Tsar Alexander II Russified the north and east Black Sea coast: the entire Ubykh nation, most Circassians and half the Abkhaz were deported in leaky hulks, perhaps 200,000 dying of typhus, dysentery or drowning. The Crimean Tatars suffered too, despite a renaissance inspired in the 1890s by the charismatic polymath and pan-Turk Ismail Gaspralı. A National Party (Milli Firka) and Gaspralı’s newspaper The Interpreter rallied the population before the First World War shattered hope: Tatars, unlike other Russian Muslims, were conscripted, as Russia’s generals feared they would be a fifth column if left in the Crimea. Tatar songs, recorded in Austrian PoW camps, capture soldiers’ distress and longing: ‘They shall not see paradise / Who conscript us as soldiers.’ Ironically, the Crimean Tatar conscripts in the Ottoman armies sang the same songs at Gallipoli as their compatriots on Russia’s side in the Carpathians.

The Bolshevik revolution brought the Crimean Tatars illusory deliverance. From 26 November to 13 December 1917 a qurultay (constituent assembly) in the old capital of Bahçesaray devised a Tatar republic to include Russians, Ukrainians and Jews. Delegates envisaged a modernised Khanate: they created the world’s first parliamentary Muslim People’s Republic, with equal rights for women, minorities and all religions.

To defend their republic against the Bolsheviks’ Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol, the Crimean Tatars formed a small army. Bolshevik sailors began a Red Terror with mass shootings in 1918. The next three years saw German and Ukrainian intervention, White Russian rule, French intervention, ‘Green’ and Red Terror, with intervals in which the Milli Firka revived. Tatar leaders perished: the poet Noman Çelebicihan’s body was thrown into the sea by Bolshevik sailors on 23 February. His poem, ‘I have sworn to bind my people’s wounds’, became the Crimean Tatar national anthem.

After 1922 the Bolsheviks patronised minorities: the Crimean Tatars received a Latin alphabet and their intellectuals professorial chairs. But Stalin (who forced a Cyrillic alphabet on the Tatars) crushed this ‘bourgeois-nationalist’ flowering. The Great Terror of 1937-38 targeted 300 for shooting and 1,200 for the Gulag. The target was fulfilled tenfold. Prominent Crimean Tatars were shot, usually as Turkish spies, including the turcologist Bekir Çobanzade, a superb poet who described himself as ‘Iron hands, oaken head, soul on fire’.

In the Second World War surprisingly few Crimean Tatars collaborated with the Germans: peasants, teachers, doctors and mullahs lived unharassed. German occupation from 1942 to 1944 was a false dawn, when German orientalists persuaded the Nazis that Tatars were descended from Goths. Tatar men not in the Red Army faced forced labour in Germany or enrolment as Schuma (‘defence teams’) supporting the Germans. Just 2,000 enrolled; others joined Russian partisans in the mountains. The German yoke was light: the Russian-language newspaper Voice of Crimea, encouraged by a Turkish mission to Adolf Hitler requesting the reinstatement of the Crimean Khanate, speculated that, if Germany lost the war, the Allies might concede Crimean independence. Hitler toyed with renaming the Crimea ‘Gothenland’.

Stalin’s sürsün of May 1944 outdid all previous efforts: 40,000 Tatars serving the Red Army joined their families in an exile that killed half the population. All 240,000 Crimean Tatars were deported to Uzbekistan or the Arctic, half dying within months from cold, hunger, exhaustion and disease. In 1945 a Simferopol newspaper was ordered to devise Russian names for the abandoned Tatar villages: the newspaper office had only two books, a fruit-growing manual and a military history. Crimea now has villages called ‘Quince’, ‘Apricot’, ‘Tanks’, ‘Guards’.

In February 1954 Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea, wrecked by German occupation, Stalin’s counter-attacks and deportations, to Ukraine. The following decade the Ukrainians built a canal to take water from the River Dnieper to replace aqueducts built by Tatar khans and wrecked by the Russians.

Disappeared

Today’s Crimean politicians are Mustafa Jemilev, the retired head of the mejlis (the Tatar parliament), and Refat Chubarov, the new head.  Having survived the 1944 deportation as an infant, Jemilev spent 45 years in exile, 15 of them incarcerated in Soviet prisons for his activism. In 1991 he revived the Tatar assembly, the qurultay, and entered parliament in Kyiv. In 2014 he spoke with Vladimir Putin, the UN and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in an attempt to stop the persecution of the Tatar community. He appealed to Turkey, with its four million descendants of Crimean Tatar refugees, but Turkey is as dependent as Europe on Russia for its gas. The Tatar mejlis is branded ‘a terrorist organisation’, its sympathisers jailed or murdered; Tatar television has stopped; 30,000 Tatar-language pupils are taught only in Russian. Since 2014 some 600,000 ethnic Russians have settled in Crimea, living in houses abandoned by Tatar refugees in Ukraine.

The history and culture of the Crimea could be written about until 2014, when Valeri Vozgrin, a St Petersburg professor of history born in Simferopol, published a 3,000-page study, The Crimean Tatars. He was denounced for ‘Russophobia’: no bookshop in Russia stocks the work and the publisher Lenur Isliamov, a Tatar media giant, is now hiding in Ukraine. In September a group of Kazan Tatar journalists visited Simferopol to investigate Crimean Tatar journalism: they found that once-prestigious journals and newspapers, such as Yildiz and Qirim, had ceased to exist, much like the state that they once reported on.

Donald Rayfield is Emeritus Professor of Russian at Queen Mary, University of London. His history of the Crimean Khanate will be published in 2023.