Beyond Memory: The Crimean Tatars' Deportation and Return (Anthropology, History, and the Critical Imagination Series)

Palgrave, 2004. — 294 p. Orthographic Note. Acknowledgments. List of Illustrations. Introduction. The Lay of the Historic Land. The Faces of Public Memory. Exile: Recalling the 1944 Deportation. Family Practices: The Social Circulation of Memory and Sentiments. The Crimean Tatar National Movement: Memories of Power and the Power of Memory. How Death Came to be Beautiful. Houses and Homelands: The Reterritorialization of Crimean Tatars. Sequel. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

This book offers the first in-depth, ethnographic exploration of the Crimean Tatars' experience of deportation from Ukraine at the end of World War II, examining how memories and sentiments were created and came to shape the dramatic repatriation to historic lands, which involved squatting and self-immolation.

Foreign Affairs

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.

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.

In the final days of World War II, Stalin ordered the deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar population, nearly 200,000 people. Beyond Memory offers the first ethnographic exploration of this event, as well as the 50 year movement for repatriation. Many of the Crimean Tatars have returned in a process that involves squatting on vacant land and self-immolation. Uehling asks how they became willing to die for their national collectivity. She provides a fine-grained analysis of how "memories," sentiments, and dreams of a homeland never seen came to be shared. Uehling suggests the second-generation has a surprisingly instrumental role to play. The way children correct and intervene in parental narratives, dissidents challenge interrogators, and speakers borrow and trade lines index this social aspect of memory.