Black Sea Read online

  During the Second World War, the Nazi racial bureaucracy in Berlin decreed (vainly, as it turned out) that the Karaim should not be included in the 'final solution of the Jewish question', on the grounds that they were not biologically and genetically Jewish but descendants of Khazar converts to Judaism. This was complete nonsense. But the main Jewish communities of the Black Sea, themselves listed for slaughter, seem to have supported the myth in order to save their brethren if they could not save themselves.

  Just below the rim of the Mangup summit, there is a spring of chill, delicious water. Then the trees part and you emerge into a tableland of flat, short turf scented with thyme. Ruins stand about, some with towers and arches, others little more than the stone wall-footings which are all that remains of basilicas and gatehouses and synagogues and watch-towers. The world, sea and land, lies spread out below. People came and settled on Mangup when they were afraid or wanted to be alone with God, or both.

  That day there was a camp on the flat summit: a line of pup-tents flying the Russian tricolour, an old army cooker on wheels, a blackened bucket full of stewing tea, clouds of blue woodsmoke. An archaeological expedition from the University of the Urals at Sverdlovsk (now again Ekaterinburg) had been digging on the summit for several weeks. Up here, above the world, they knew nothing. The students gathered round gravely, while we drank their tea through thick Russian sugar-cubes. Only light music dribbled from their radio, a long giggle of embarrassment to fill the silence of Russia which grew more enormous as the hours passed.

  All human populations are in some sense immigrants. All hostility between different cultures in one place has an aspect of the classic immigrant grudge against the next boatload approaching the shore. To defend one's home and fields and ancestral graves against invasion seems a right. But to claim unique possession — to compound the fact of settlement with the aspect of a landscape into an abstract of eternal and immutable ownership - is a joke.

  Crimea, whose beauty provokes almost sexual yearnings of possession in all its visitors, has demonstrated this joke in every century of its history. It has no natives, no aboriginals. Before the Scythians, before the Cimmerians who preceded them or the Bronze Age populations who raised the first burial-mounds, there were human beings who had come from somewhere else. Crimea has always been a destination, the cliffs at the end of the sea or the shore where the wagons must end their journey. Voyaging communities settled in Crimea (the Scythians lived here for nearly a thousand years) but in the end they dispersed or moved on. All that has been constant in Crimean history has been a certain structure which the peninsula has imposed upon its visitors: the zones of mind, body and spirit have often been effaced but until now have always re-emerged. Only in recent times has the Crimean truth - that it belongs to everybody and to nobody — been violated. Two of these violations, which would be merely absurd if they did not imply so much blood and suffering in the past and very probably in the future, are the declarations of two autocrats. In 1783, Catherine II ('The Great') proclaimed that the Crimean peninsula was henceforth and for all time to become Russian. And in 1954 Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian seeking to divert the attention of his own people from their miseries, announced that he was transferring Crimea from Russia to become for all time Ukrainian.

  Mangup is about all these Crimean ironies. Most of the ruins on the Mangup summit belong to a forgotten, improbable principality of the Middle Ages. The fortress of Theodoro-Mangup contained an independent Greek principality, ruled by the Princes of Gothia. But what did 'Greek' mean up here, or 'Gothic'?

  The Goths came to the Black Sea and to Crimea from an unusual direction, from the north-west rather than from the east. A proto-Germanic confederation of peoples from southern Scandinavia, they had occupied Crimea in the third century AD, in the course of their conquest of most of the Black Sea's northern shore. A hundred years later, the Black Sea Goths were defeated by the Huns. Many headed westward, on the next leg of a migration which in the time of their great-grandchildren would deposit them in Italy as the army of their king, Theodoric the Great. But some remained in the Crimean mountains. Christianised and then incorporated into the Byzantine Empire, they were still there in the sixth century when the emperor Justinian I fortified Mangup as part of a line of strong-points intended to shield the coastal cities against an attack out of the steppes.

  When the Khazars conquered Crimea in the eighth century, the remnants of the Christian Goths retreated up into the mountain zone of the spirit. John, Prince-Bishop of Gothia, sallied down from Mangup to lead an unsuccessful rising against the Khazars, but the Byzantine emperors betrayed him. They preferred to come to terms with the Judaised Khazars, recognising them as powerful allies who could form a buffer-zone between the Empire and wilder nomad nations approaching the Black Sea from the steppe; two Byzantine emperors - Justinian II and Constantine V - married Khazar princesses. Gothia went back to its hill and left history for nearly seven hundred years.

  Below this 'Lost World' on its plateau, the world continued to change, but Gothia kept on worshipping in its huge basilica and ignoring the turmoils at the foot of its cliffs until — in 1475 — the Ottoman Turks arrived. Mopping up the fringes of the Byzantine Empire, after their capture of Constantinople in 1453, the Turks and their Crimean Tatar allies stormed the Principality of Theodoros on its mountain and brought Gothia to an end.

  The Basilica of Constantine and Helen, dating from the ninth century, stood desolate for a time. In 1579, a Polish nobleman scrambled up to look at it. Marcin Broniewski ('Broniovius') had been sent by King Stefan Batory on a diplomatic mission to Mehmet Giray, khan of the Crimean Tatars, and he wrote an elegant Latin account - Tartariae Descriptio - which was translated into English a century later by Samuel Purchas. Marcopia [Mangup] ... hath had two Castles, Greeke Temples and Houses sumptuous, with many cleere Rils running out of the stone: but eighteene yeers after that the Turkes had taken it (as the Greeke Christians affirm) it was destroyed by a sudden and horrible fire.'

  Broniewski found still standing 'the Greeke Church of Saint Constantine, and another meane one of Saint George. One Greeke Priest and some Jews and Turkes dwell there; Oblivion and Ruine hath devoured the rest; nor are there men or Stories of the quondam inhabitants, which I with great care and diligence everywhere sought in vaine.' Yet Broniewski had been able to question the Orthodox priest, who told him that 'a little before the Turkes besieged it, two Greeke Dukes of the Imperiall bloud of Constantinople or Trapezond [Trebizond], there resided, which were after carried alive into Constantinople, and by Selim the Turkishe Emperour slaine. In the Greeke Churches on the walls are painted Imperiall Images and Habits …'

  Nothing remains of the basilica but foundations, and the archaeologists from the University of the Urals could only dream of what those 'Imperiall Images' might have shown them. The zone of the spirit is almost empty now. The only inhabitants of Mangup are a colony of Russian hippies, out where the plateau juts to the north-east in a terrifying bowsprit of bare stone overhanging a thousand feet of air. The hippies live in old guard-houses cut into the rock, rolled in blankets on the stone floors, breathing a fog of dope and smoke from fires of green sticks. They growl, snore, fart and sometimes rouse themselves to fits of bellowing. The young girls from the university expedition had learned not to visit this end of the plateau on their own, but groups of students sometimes came and left cans of tea or stale loaves near the cliff-edge. Retreating a few yards, they would wait and watch until the hippies, like bears, dragged themselves out of their tomb and flung themselves on the food.

  Gothic, with Greek and probably Hebrew, was one of the languages which continued to be spoken in Crimea as it emerged into the modern period. It was also a written language. Bishop Ulfilas had translated parts of the Bible into western Visigothic in the fourth century, but the tongue survived in Crimea long after the western dialect had died out. In 1562 the Austrian diplomat Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq (more famous as the man who sent the first tulip bulbs f
rom Turkey to Europe) collected a list of eighty-six words and phrases in Gothic which he had gathered from Crimeans he had met in Constantinople, and the last Gothic-speakers seem to have died out in the seventeenth century.

  Lakes of ink have been uselessly spilled over Mangup and its 'Problem of the Crimean Goths', which was in truth no problem but an obstinate, perverse attempt to hammer modern definitions of ethnicity onto an ancient society in which they were irrelevant. Excavations began on the Mangup hill-top in the nineteenth century. The antiquaries Uvarov, Brun and Lepicr laid out theories. German scholars, excited by the Germanic ethnicity of the Goths, longed to find in Crimea evidence of an ancient Teutonic state which raised stone cities and dominated its neighbours. But the evidence was meagre. The fantasy of an ur-German Crimea, of a Teutonic urban civilisation picking up the torch of culture as decadent Rome let it fall, was thrown away by later scientists.

  Then, however, it was retrieved by the Nazi mind - that drain-filter of broken, discredited and putrescent ideas - and recycled into a new version of pseudo-history and political legitimation. Crimea must be reconquered and the Gothic realm restored. Cleared of Tatars, Jews and Russians, except for a temporary labour force of field slaves, the peninsula would be the destination for trainloads of German settlers. Sevastopol was to become Theodorichafen. Simferopol became Gotenberg. Crimea itself was to be known as Gotland.

  Hitler himself was, in private, reserved about those departments of the Third Reich devoted to the manufacture of history. He left these enthusiasms mostly to Rosenberg and to Himmler, whose craze for archaeology once induced Hitler to ask: 'Why do you insist on demonstrating to the world that we Germans have no past?' But Crimea stirred him. In April 1941, two months before Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, it was agreed that Crimea should be separated from Russia and ceded to a puppet Ukrainian state. In July, when the German armies were already penetrating deep into Soviet territory, Hitler himself chaired a meeting on Crimean policy at which the 'Gotland' project was in principle accepted. As for the Crimean Tatars, they were judged to be racially worthless - like the Jews - but their deportation would be delayed in order not to offend neutral Turkey, their protector through so much of their history. The real attraction of the 'Gotland' scheme for Hitler, however, lay far from the Black Sea: it offered a possible way out of his South Tyrol dilemma.

  In the mountain valleys of the upper Adige, a German-speaking population had been torn out of the wreckage of the defeated Hapsburg Empire in 1918 and presented to Italy by the victorious Entente. This act was the delivery of a bribe promised some years before in order to enlist Italy into the war against the Central Powers. A few years later, this South Tyrol population posed a delicate diplomatic problem for the new Nazi regime in Germany. The Nazi programme for German minorities abroad was either to annex their territories (as in the case of the Sudetenland) or to transport them Heim ins Reich — to resettle them within the expanded Reich frontiers. But Mussolini was Hitler's ally. An exception had to be made over the South Tyrolese. Some tiny pockets of palaeo-Germanic population in other north Italian glens (like the Cimbri, supposedly descended from the horde that Marius slaughtered and dispersed in the Po Valley in 101 BC) were moved to Germany by mutual German-Italian agreement. But the Italian frontier stayed where it was, on the watershed of the Alps at the Brenner Pass, and the South Tyrolese stayed in Italy.

  This compromise left Hitler restless. Now he proposed a new solution. The Germans of South Tyrol should resettle Gotland. WTiy not? Here, too, were forested mountains, fertile valleys, water in abundance. And here already were vineyards, planted by Catherine's foreign settlers or by Russian landowners. Perhaps the quality did not match the red wine from Bozen or Meran (Bolzano and Merano) which had made the Tyrolean peasants rich, but German Fleiss and skill would change all that.

  In the end, no Germans — Tyrolean or others — were settled in Crimea. But the Gotland project had terrible consequences. Once, it had been the alliance between Crimean Tatars and Ottoman Turks which had destroyed Gothia. Now the Gotland scheme, in its failure, brought down final catastrophe upon the Crimean Tatars.

  Field-Marshal von Rundstedt's Army Group South broke into Crimea in September 1941. By November the whole peninsula was in German hands, apart from Sevastopol, which held out until July the following year. At first the Crimean Tatars were inclined to welcome the German conquest - or rather the expulsion of Soviet Russian power - as a liberation. And they had good reasons to feel as they did.

  By 1854, after only half a century of Russian colonisation, the Tatars - both reduced in their own numbers and increasingly swamped by Russian and other European settlers - made up no more than 60 per cent of the Crimean population. By 1905, they were a minority in the land which they considered to be their own. A Tatar 'National Awakening' led by intellectuals was launched in the late nineteenth century, and the Tatars greeted the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 as the overthrow of a repressive colonial empire rather than as a class struggle. They were to be disillusioned. The 1905 Revolution brought forward a hopeful Tatar clamour for independence or autonomy, but the triumph of Bolshevism, between 1917 and the end of the Civil War in 1910, began two generations of atrocity and disaster for Crimea.

  After the first massacres of Tatar nationalists carried out by the Bolshevik security police (Cheka) in 1920, there followed the famine of 1920—2 — even worse in Crimea than in southern Russia and Ukraine. Almost half the population of Bakhchiserai, the Tatar capital, starved to death, and by 1923 a mere quarter of the Crimean population was Tatar. Stalin's purges began with the kulaks (the richer peasantry) but soon developed into the liquidation of the whole pre-Revolutionary Tatar intelligentsia and the suppression of the Tatar culture. The historian Alan Fisher, in his book The Crimean Tatars, calculates that 150,000 Tatars, half the Tatar population in 1917, had been killed, deported or forced into exile outside the Soviet Union by 1933. A renewed slaughter of educated Tatars, including the Moslem clergy, took place during the Great Purges of 1937-8.

  It was therefore scarcely surprising that in 1941 the Tatars looked back with something like nostalgia at their previous German occupation in 1918, at the end of the First World War. Compared with the Bolshevik and Soviet regime which followed, it had been a period of relative liberty. In that year, the nationalist politician Cafer Seidahmet and the Lithuanian-Tatar General Sulkiewicz had organised a Moslem corps to support the German armies in Crimea. Tatar nationalists remembered this German policy of offering a possibility of Crimean independence in return for support against Russia, and they assumed that this bargain might be revived again in 1941. They were wrong. The chaos of Nazi administration - the Darwinian competition of rival institutions, which could be kept within bounds inside the Reich but which flourished uncontrollably in the occupied territories - soon broke up any coherent Crimean policy of the kind that Hitler had contemplated.

  Three different power centres were eventually operating three divergent policies in Crimea. The first policy was that of the army. Von Manstein, General Rundstedt's successor in the military command, exploited Tatar resentment of Soviet rule by raising anti-partisan battalions and Tatar village home-guard units, who took over some of the burden of resisting guerrilla groups left behind by the retreating Red Army. But von Manstein was at the same time careful not to suggest that the creation of these militias had any political implications. As a soldier, he had no wish to provoke the majority, non-Tatar population by appearing to favour the Tatars as a community.

  A far more pro-Tatar line was taken by the German civil administration. The General Commissar, Frauenfeld, fell in love with the notion of restoring the Crimean Tatars as a Kulturvolk. He reopened Tatar schools, for the first time for many years, and spent money on fostering Tatar language and customs. A Tatar theatre was opened, Tatar newspapers were brought back to life and there was a scheme for a separate Tatar university. No doubt Frauenfeld's policy included some 'divide and rule' calculations, but it was essenti
ally a genuine, old-fashioned German intellectual enthusiasm for folk-culture as the foundation of Herder's definition of 'historic nations'. Frauenfeld set up 'Moslem Committees' (some of them including survivors from the pre-1917 nationalist parties), and an ineffectual Tatar mission was established in Berlin, but his approach had little real political content and was well within the bounds of an enlightened colonialism. The Frauenfeld line was, all the same, entirely alien to the spirit of the Gotland project, which had proposed that the Tatars should be reduced to the status of slaves for the Aryan settlers before their final fate - death or expulsion - was decided.

  A third policy began to emerge after the arrival, in the wake of the fighting troops, of the SS command structure headed by Otto Ohlendorf. Racial and political extermination squads under SS command had been attached to the rear areas of each Army Group, and in Crimea it was Einsatzgruppe D which set about the methodical slaughter of undesirable elements by firing-squad. The savageries of the SS drove more and more Tatars to join the partisans, or, where the Soviet guerrillas would not accept them, to form resistance groups of their own. By the time that the Red Army re-entered Crimea in April 1944, Ohlendorf had murdered some 130,000 people, including the entire gypsy population of Crimea, the remaining Jews and - disregarding those ethnological points so nicely made in Berlin - most of the Karaim. Tens of thousands of Tatars were among Ohlendorf s victims.

  The Gotland fantasy stifled in confusion and blood before it was born. All that came from it was Stalin's vengeance on the Crimean Tatars, unfairly accused of mass collaboration with the Nazis. That accusation of treachery to Russia had a long ancestry. Stalin was only contributing to more than a century of Russian propaganda which, in spite of evidence to the contrary, insisted that the Tatars were a form of Turk whose first loyalty was always to the Ottoman Empire and to Islam. During the Crimean War of 1854-6, when British and French troops had fought against Russia in the peninsula, there was no significant Tatar defection to Russia's enemies. But Alexander II, who became tsar while the war was still in progress, was informed that the Tatars had shown themselves to be a menace to Russia's security, and after the war they were encouraged to emigrate. In all the subsequent Russo-Turkish conflicts, large numbers of Tatars served in the Russian armies, fighting against their fellow-Moslems, but their display of loyalty made no impression on the prevailing Russian paranoia about them. Each Russo-Turkish war was followed by another Tatar reaction of despair, another wave of emigration.