Beyond Memory: The Crimean Tatars' Deportation and Return

by G. Uehling

Overview

In the early morning hours of May 18, 1944 the Russian army, under orders from Stalin, deported the entire Crimean Tatar population from their historical homeland. Given only fifteen minutes to gather their belongings, they were herded into cattle cars bound for Soviet Central Asia. Although the official Soviet record was cleansed of this affair and the name of their ethnic group was erased from all records and official documents, Crimean Tatars did not assimilate with other groups or disappear. This is an ethnographic study of the negotiation of social memory and the role this had in the growth of a national repatriation movement among the Crimean Tatars. It examines the recollections of the Crimean Tatars, the techniques by which they are produced and transmitted and the formation of a remarkably uniform social memory in light of their dispersion throughout Central Asia. Through the lens of social memory, the book covers not only the deportation and life in the diaspora but the process by which the children and grandchildren of the deportees 'returned' and anchored themselves in the Crimean Penininsula, a place they had never visited.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781403962652
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	12/16/2004
Series:	Anthropology, History and the Critical Imagination
Edition description:	2004
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.03(d)

About the Author

GREATA LYNN UEHLING is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, Philadelphia, USA.

Table of Contents

Dedication and Acknowledgments Orthographic Note Introduction The Lay of the Historic Land The Faces of Public Memory: Competing Representations of the World War II German Occupation of Crimea Exile: Recalling the 1944 Deportation Family Practices: The Social Transmission of Memory and Sentiments Among Crimean Tatars Family Practices: The Social Transmission of Memory Among Stalin's Deportees The Crimean Tartar National Movement: Forging an Emotional Comportment on the Terrain of Ideological Resistance How Death Came To Be Beautiful 'Capturing' Land: Appropriation, Reclamations, and the Reterritorialization of Crimean Tatars Houses and Homelands: Crimean Tatar Memory in Sight, Sense, and Experience Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

Uehling is less interested in the story of Stalin's savage deportation of 190,000 Crimean Tatars over a few days in the spring of 1944 than in the meaning the story has for those who survived it and for those born of them. Why, she asks, has the "feeling of homeland" — the emotional attachment that transcends experience, for it applies to those born in exile — been so powerful, and where does it come from? These are particularly apt questions because the actual homecoming of slightly more than half of the Crimean Tatars who were in Central Asia has been harsh, impoverishing, and demeaning. As an anthropologist who spent much of six years gathering evidence and fathoming the encounters she had, she wants to understand the sources, nature, and effects of communal memory. For the non-anthropologist, she is a rich source of insight into the Crimean Tatar community and why it looms so large in Russian history and the contemporary Russian mind despite its diminished numbers today.

Foreign Affairs