Having a homeland: Recalling the deportation, exile, and repatriation of Crimean Tatars to their historic homeland.

Abstract

Why are Crimean Tatars born in diaspora, who have perhaps only visited their historic homeland, willing to give up everything, including their lives, to repatriate? Tatars say it is their sense of homeland. But homeland as a referent lies beyond the memories of most returnees. Based on ethnographic research between 1995 and 1998, this dissertation explores the significance of recollection for the transmission of ideas and sentiments, and how in a reciprocal process ideas and sentiments ramify through and are affected by processes of land reclamation and nation building in the former Soviet Union. Specifically, I examine Crimean Tatars' concept of homeland as it developed in the Soviet Union beginning in 1941 with the German occupation of the Crimea, extending through exile by Stalin to the Urals and Central Asia in 1944, and the attenuated process of repatriation that continues into the present. Crimean Tatar memory and sentiments are condensed in the concept of <italic>vatan </italic>, or homeland, which provides a focal point for exploring the production of historical knowledge in everyday life, the transmission of memory within a social milieu, and the genesis of patriotism. The ethnography, which is multi-sited, combines oral testimony from informants in Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan, with archival research. The dissertation contributes one of the first detailed ethnographic descriptions of Tatars' experience of deportation. Investigation of Crimean Tatar artwork expands the exploration of oral and written sources to non-textual interpretations of the past, and shows how the social imaginary is a means for the transmission of collected memories, some artists painting what they imagine their parents remember, others intervening in the past by means of counter-historical artistic interpretations. Taken together, these media document Tatars' multiple ways of knowing and documenting their previously forbidden past. While an approach to history as negotiated and memory as constructed has become well-established, few studies provide a description of how memories and interpretations actually come to be shared. The ways in which children edit their parents' recollections, dissidents reeducate their interrogators, and interlocutors borrow and correct each other's fines index this social, intersubjective aspect of memory as a cultural practice.