Paul Goble
Staunton,
December 14 – Natalya Kryzhko, a member of the Russian-organized and imposed “parliament”
in occupied Crimea, who is upset by Crimea Tatar efforts to restore historic
place names, has threatened to “load them on barges and drown them in the Black
Sea,” thus repeating one of the most barbaric actions carried out by Stalin’s
henchmen in 1944.
Crimean
Tatar outlets have called attention to this latest horrific example of Russian
state continuity (avdet.org/ru/2016/12/13/chlen-partii-edinaya-rossiya-predozhila-utopit-krymskotatarskih-deputatov-v-chernom-more/ and qha.com.ua/ru/obschestvo/krimskii-deputat-predlojila-topit-v-more-inakomislyaschih/168858/).
On
July 19, 1944, after the Soviet NKVD had deported most of the Crimean Tatars,
its officers discovered that villages on Crimea’s Arab Spit had somehow escaped
that fate. The residents were then
locked up, put on a boat, taken out into the Azov Sea, and killed by
machine-gun fire before being drowned.
Obviously,
the Soviet authorities did not celebrate this “heroic” action, and when emigres
reported it in the mid-1950s, even many anti-communist experts in the West were
convinced that this couldn’t be true. But at the very end of Soviet times,
Moscow ethnographers published a chronology that acknowledged it was true.
Since
that time, Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian historians like Gulnara Abdulayeva have
documented this event more fully, even taking the testimony of one former NKVD
major who told them that the Soviet secret police had acted in this way because
“we didn’t have a lot of time.”
Crimean
Tatars have commemorated this event (qha.com.ua/en/society/memory-of-people-killed-in-1944-venerated-at-arabat-spit-photo/99026/ and qha.com.ua/en/society/the-crimean-tatars-of-arabat-spit-were-drowned-in-azov-sea-will-be-commemorated/704/),
and it is discussed in Lily Hyde’s remarkable novel, Dream Land (in English,
2008; in Ukrainian, 2014) (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2014/05/window-on-eurasia-defining-novel-about.html).
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