Black Sea Page 5

  The fact is that most of the Nazi collaborators in Crimea during the Second World War were non-Tatars. Perhaps 50,000 Tatars had fought on all fronts in the Soviet armed forces. It was true that some 20,000 had joined von Manstein's village-defence units. Most of them intended only to protect their homes against raids by Russian and Ukrainian partisans, which often resembled racial pogroms rather than military operations. But nearly twice as many Tatars from the Volga region served with the Germans in similar volunteer units, and they suffered no collective punishment.

  In Crimea, the punishment began instantly. Some partisan units had already been shooting Tatars who applied to join them. Within days of the Soviet reconquest in April 1944, whole villages had been executed and dead Tatars swung from the Simferopol lamp-posts. But these were mere preludes to Stalin's more measured retaliation.

  In the expanses of the Soviet Union, Stalin had space for many different ways of dealing with social groups who displeased him. He could, of course, simply have them murdered, and when it seemed necessary, he did so. But - like a Roman emperor or a European colonial viceroy dealing with recalcitrant tribes on the fringes of the empire-he also had the power forcibly to move a whole people into exile, to banish them a thousand miles from their homes.

  The Crimean Tatars were the first ethnic minority to suffer total deportation. A few weeks after Soviet power had been reestablished in Crimea, the entire remaining Crimean Tatar population was expelled to Central Asia. Driven into railway cattle-wagons for journeys which sometimes lasted as long as a month, the Tatars were ejected into a wilderness without food, tools or shelter, to survive if they could.

  This deportation was not announced for two years. Then a statement was issued in Moscow, quoting Article 58, paragraph 1 (a) of the Russian Criminal Code concerning 'treason to the Fatherland', which informed the public that the Crimean Tatars, with the Chechens and Ingush of the northern Caucasus, had been 'resettled in other regions of the USSR where they were given land together with the appropriate government assistance for their economic establishment'.

  Eleven years later, in 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev had specifically named and denounced the Tatar deportation in his speech attacking Stalin's legacy at the Twentieth Party Congress, the first timid petitions arrived in Moscow from Tashkent. The Tatars asked for the right to return home. There followed thirty years of appeals, demonstrations and deputations; of official lies and meaningless 'rehabilitations'; of struggle by the Tatars themselves and by their supporters in the Soviet democratic opposition like the magnificent Colonel Grigorenko, a war veteran and steadfast opponent of the Communist regime who devoted his life and eventually sacrificed his freedom and his health to the cause of denouncing the injustice done to the Crimean Tatars. All who took up that cause, Tatar, Russian or Ukrainian, knew what the price of their struggle would be: menaces, beatings, mass arrests, sentences served in labour camps or — this was the fate of Grigorenko - years spent in brutal psychiatric hospitals under false diagnoses of insanity.

  But now, at last, the Tatars are returning home. They call it home, although fifty years constitutes more than a human generation and all but a minority of those who return were born in Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan. They call it home, but the small white-plastered cottages smothered in vine arbours which belonged to them or to their parents or grandparents are now occupied by Russian or Ukrainian immigrants who, for the most part, hate them. They are attacked by their neighbours, and there have been murders. They are treated as alien squatters by the corrupt Crimean regional government which currently rules at Simferopol. But on stony valley-bottoms which nobody wants, on the barren waste lots outside the Crimean cities, men and woman are building houses out of home-made clay bricks, reeds and corrugated iron. They measure up and parcel out the barren land between families, and conjure water out of the rocks. There is a haze of green seedlings where once there was only dusty grey turf, and a din of hammering. This is their Israel, their promised land, and they will not be parted from it again.

  The morning after Mangup, we set off for the airport at Simferopol and the flight to Moscow. This time, even the Genoese were sombre and silent on the coach. But then a bearded Russian scholar next to me — an Orthodox tsarist conservative, as he had earlier described himself - suddenly blurted out in his deep voice, 'Things could not go on as they were! There was utter anarchy; bandits and mafiosi were devouring the land. Somebody had to act.'

  I stared at him in astonishment.

  Avoiding my eyes, he muttered, 'Well, what about de Gaulle? The Fourth Republic had fallen into anarchy, hadn't it? And when the integrity, the very life of France was threatened over Algeria, then he took over. Well, then ...

  'Are you trying to tell me that Gennadi Yanayev is de Gaulle -and that Lithuania or Georgia is somehow like "Algérie Française"?'

  I got only a reproachful look.

  At the airport in Simferopol, there was Krimskaya Pravda to read, no more than a folded poster of the junta's proclamations. All demonstrations were banned, the newspaper told us, and there were curfews in Moscow and Leningrad. The paper carried no news, no commentary, but printed a grotesque 'Appeal' by Yanayev and his fellow putschists in the language of some Latin-American pronunciamientoy stinking of aggressive paranoia towards the whole outside world, dripping with references to the 'Motherland'.

  In Moscow, dim and green under summer rain, columns of armour were waiting in the side-roads off the long avenue from Vnukovo airport. Tanks from the Taman Division stood beneath the dripping trees around Moscow University with their field kitchens and command trucks. This was not a new sight to me: the Soviet tanks had rested like that beneath the trees of the parks in Prague, late in another August twenty-three years before. Now they had invaded and crushed one more country - their own.

  Watching them, I felt a sudden suffocation, a violent swelling of the heart. Was it vindictive joy, or reverence for the hammer-blow of justice with which history very occasionally strikes home? Later, I understood that it had been neither, but rather the breaking-through of a compassion for those soldiers - in their buff combat tunics, their black-and-white striped undershirts — which I had never been able to acknowledge in all the years when they served as the jailers of half Europe. I had been released at that instant from a fallacy, from the ingrained lie which invites us all to identify an army, a thousand or a million anxious and obedient young men and their machines, with the private feelings of a whole nation.

  Alfred de Vigny wrote: 'The army is both blind and dumb; where it is set down, there it smites. It has no will of its own, and acts as if wound up. It is like a huge, insensate thing that is set in motion and kills, but it is a thing that can suffer too... ' All that has happened since the putsch of 1991 - the use of a reluctant army in 1993 to bombard Boris Yeltsin's opponents in the building of the Russian parliament, the misery of Russian troops during the Chechen war of 1994—5 as they massacred and threatened to mutiny and then massacred again - illustrates that blindness, but also that capacity to suffer.

  The bus stopped outside the Oktyabrskaya Hotel, I dragged my case through the puddles, past the guard-house at the hotel gate and up the broad, shallow marble steps leading into the foyer. A loud American voice echoed from one corner, where the hotel staff stood pressed together in a herd. Looking over their shoulders, I saw a television set tuned to CNN: on the screen were barricades, women with armbands carrying loaves and duplicators into the Russian parliament, an orator standing on a tank. Running out into the street again, I waved down a passing car and asked the driver to take me to the parliament building. He stared at me in horror. I showed him some dollar bills. He hesitated a little more, then nodded gloomily. I jumped in.

  The final victory of the Revolution took place on Saturday, 27 March 1920. On that day, British, French and American warships covered the evacuation of the White armies commanded by General Denikin from the Black Sea port of Novorossisk. There was more fighting to come: Baron Wrangel held out in Crimea
with another WTiite Army and managed a last counter-offensive before he was defeated, but Novorossisk was the real end of the Civil War and of the Allied intervention.

  Novorossisk, on the north-east coast of the Black Sea, looks today much as it did in 1920, then as now the port for the oilfields of the northern Caucasus. It stands at the head of a small gulf of deep blue water, still dominated by the chimneys of the old Portland Cement factory spewing smoke across the bay. The hillside above the city is scarred into immense pale rectangles where limestone has been stripped to make cement. In the black-and-white snapshots my father took in 1920,1 can still recognise those rectangles - smaller then - above a harbour full of masts and smoke.

  The Admiralty Pilot for 1920 describes Novorossisk harbour as 'protected by two moles; the eastern one extends in a southwesterly direction from the shore and is about half a mile long; the western extends from the town in an opposite direction for a little over half a mile, leaving an entrance nearly two cables wide between them.' Freighters under British and French escort had steamed through this gap to unload artillery and tanks and uniforms for the White armies - much of it to be stolen and sold by racketeers or, in the case of the tanks, to stay rusting on the quayside. And it was to these moles and to the piers and jetties within the harbour that Denikin's broken Army of the South - Don Cossacks and Russian volunteers and a refugee mass of women and children - took flight when their last front on the lower Don collapsed before the Bolshevik offensive.

  General Piotr Nikolayevich Krasnov, a Cossack Ataman (chieftain) in the White armies, was among the defeated commanders who fled into western exile. He went to Berlin and then to Paris where, to the astonishment of this tough old soldier's friends, he became a prolific novelist. A four-volume novel, From Two-Headed Eagle to Red Flag, was published and translated into several languages within three years of his flight, and that was only his first literary achievement. But Krasnov, who had all the Cossack talent for forgetting nothing, forgiving nothing and learning nothing, came to a bad end.

  In Claudio Magris's book Inferences from a Sabre, a much more talented writer plays through the pathetic coda to Krasnov's life. In 1938, when he was sixty-nine years old, German agents persuaded Krasnov to move back to Berlin, where the SS flattered and manipulated him, satisfied by reports that his hatred of Soviet Communism was matched only by his contempt for the Judaeo-democratic West. After June 1941, as the Wehrmacht broke out across the steppes of southern Russia and Ukraine, the old man happily agreed to command Cossacks once more against the Bolshevik enemy. But when the tide of war turned and the Germans began to fall back, Krasnov and his men retreated across Europe with a nomadic retinue of men, women and animals to finish up as a legion of the defeated, encamped in the mountains behind Magris's city of Trieste. In April 1945, the Cossacks moved into Austria and surrendered to the British. They supposed that they would be treated as normal prisoners of war, or at least as displaced refugees, and evacuated to some new place of exile.

  But this was not Novorossisk. The British Army, after a few weeks of deceitful assurances, seized them and drove them - men, women and children — to the zonal border where Soviet security troops were waiting for them. Among those delivered up were a few — mostly officers — who had been rescued from Bolshevik vengeance by the British at Novorossisk just twenty-five years before.

  Many of the Cossacks were shot, at once or within the first year. Most were herded into trains and disappeared into labour camps in the Arctic or the Far East. Piotr Krasnov, tried and condemned as a traitor to the Motherland, was denied the soldier's final tribute of a firing-squad. He was hanged in Moscow on 26 August 1946.

  In From Two-Headed Eagle to Red Flag, Krasnov had described the retreat to Novorossisk.

  The nearer the Polegaeffs [two fictional characters) approached Novorossisk, the greater was the number of dead horses they saw. The bodies of soldiers, volunteers, refugees, women and children, partly stripped of their clothes, were also lying about. One came across mounds of hastily dug graves without crosses or inscriptions; broken carts, smashed cases full of clothes, rags and household goods were lying scattered about... a vast, wealthy region suddenly rushed towards the sea in search of salvation, dragging all the riches assembled during many centuries, hoping to save them and to settle with their help in a new place ... The blue sea, the fairy-story of Russia's children, the enchanted lands which must surely lie behind the sapphire sea, forced many hundred thousands to move towards the shore.

  As they crossed the last ridge, the Whites saw Novorossisk ahead of them: the sea, the smoke rising from the funnels of the passenger ships and freighters alongside the piers and the moles, the British battleships at anchor in the outer roadstead. Hundreds and hundreds of abandoned Cossack horses stood about the broad streets running down to the harbour: 'although forsaken by their masters, they continued to stand in rows of six'. At the edge of the sea, the trampling, screaming panic to reach the ships had already begun.

  Denikin's orderly evacuation plans were overwhelmed. In his terse, unforgiving book of memoirs, he observes only that 'Many were the human tragedies enacted in the town during those terrible days. Many bestial instincts were brought to light at this moment of supreme danger, when the voice of conscience was stifled and man became the enemy of his fellow-man.'

  Only a few hundred yards of water separated the Novorossisk piers from a world as remote as a distant planet: the cheerful, monastic, scrubbed routines of the Royal Navy. Incredulous, the young officers watched the shore through field-glasses. Among them was my father, a midshipman aboard the warship Emperor of India.

  The Navy List for 1920 describes her as a battleship of 25,000 tons, with a primary armament of ten 13.5-inch guns and a secondary armament of twelve 6-inch guns. Commanded by Captain Joseph Henley, she also carried Rear-Admiral Michael Culme-Seymour, second in command of the Mediterranean Fleet, who was in charge of the evacuation. Denikin, who had few good words for anyone else who witnessed his defeat, called Culme-Seymour a 'fine and kindly man' who 'nobly kept his word'. The Admiral, who was under instructions to use his squadron only to protect the civilian transports, had finally consented to embark troops and refugees on his warships as well. He was taking a risk which, as it turned out, nearly ended in disaster.

  Emperor of India had steamed up from Constantinople to Sevastopol in the first days of March, and had been off Novorossisk for nearly three weeks when the advance guard of the retreating White Army appeared over the pass leading to the Kuban and began to pour down to the harbour. On 20 March the ship's log records: 'Hands make and mend. Embarked as passenger Denikin and party consisting of one Russian gentleman, two ladies and one child.'

  On Friday 26 March, the panic ashore reached its final intensity as Red Army units began to close in on Novorossisk from the hills and along the shore from Gelendzhik to the south.

  11.15: sounded action.

  12.00: fired 4 rounds three-quarter charge at village of

  borisovka.

  3.30: fired 8 rounds X Turret at same target.

  [A snapshot my father took from the bridge shows the gush of black cordite smoke from the gun-muzzles, the after-funnel blurred by the concussion.]

  Saturday 27 March was the last day:

  2.40: embarked about 500 refugees. 3.30: embarked 538 refugees.

  5.24: weighed anchor (shifted berth). Embarked General Holman [head of the British Military Mission].

  9-2o: General Denikin left ship. Approximately 850 Russian troops left on board.

  10.45: Bolsheviks opened fire on ships in harbour at extreme range.

  10.51: weighed, left harbour for Theodosia.

  My father saw how near Admiral Culme-Seymour's gesture of generosity came to tragedy. His photographs show the decks of Emperor of India as a swarming encampment of ragged, fur-hatted soldiers so tightly packed together that they could not sit down; a few sailors are fighting their way through the mob with tin canisters of bully beef. He used to tell me of the cr
ew's horror when they discovered that the torn greatcoats all round them were heaving with lice and that some of the soldiers were sick with typhus. He told me how the Cossack officers, ominous figures in their black, wasp-waisted tunics with bandoliers and sabres, stood under the bridge and stared wordlessly over the rail at the shore of Russia. It was at this point that a horse-drawn battery of Bolshevik field guns galloped over the low ridge just to the north of the city, took up position and opened fire.

  Only one of the guns worked. With this, Trotsky's men engaged a battle squadron of the Mediterranean Fleet equipped with many hundred times their fire-power. Their aim, luckily, was bad, for the refugee mass on deck meant that the big warships were unable to reply. Aboard Emperor of India, the main armament - the 13.5-inch guns — jutted out only a few feet above the heads of the crowd, and to have fired them would have blown every human being on deck into the sea.