In light of today’s heated debates on the role of literature in political projects, Rory Finnin’s groundbreaking book The Blood of Others: Stalin’s Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity provides a forceful answer. Yes, literature can be weaponized by states to create the desired narrative or “co-opt readers in the legitimation of imperial conquest,” yet it can also be a source to generate solidarities and spur empathy with the Other.
To demonstrate the power of literature to forge solidarities, Finnin embarks on an ambitious project to write a cultural history of Crimea in the Black Sea region that too long has been sidelined to the peripheral position in several area specializations. Bringing Crimea to the fore, the author also centers the discussion on the indigenous Crimean Tatars, whose minority status in Crimea has rarely put them at the center of scholarly research. In his account, he addresses Crimea’s complex history by analyzing literary exchanges between the Crimean Tatar, Turkish, Russian, and Ukrainian writers. Bridging together the distinct Slavic Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, bringing together literary texts in four languages—poetry, novels, and short stories of both canonical and noncanonical work produced over the last two hundred years, Finnin not only provides a convincing argument regarding the role of literature in forging solidarities but also presents a remarkably captivating work.
Chronologically, the study revolves around the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944, yet the book starts with Catherine’s colonization of Crimea in 1783 and ends with present days. Such a temporal framework is predicated on author’s conceptualization of Crimea as a settler colony that ties the events of the deportation to the earlier colonialism of the Russian Empire. It is worth noting that settler colonial lenses are not typically applied to Crimea and such conceptualization is viewed as a welcoming shift by the younger generation of scholars.
Structurally, the book is divided into three parts: “Possession,” “Dispossession,” and “Repossession.” This allows the author to both persuasively advocate his conceptualization of Crimea as a settler colony and provide a neat chronological frame that is easy to follow. The bond between the indigenous people and the land is a significant dimension of Crimea’s colonial history, and it forms the basis for the poetics of solidarity.
The part I “Possession” traces sociopolitical events in the peninsula following the Russian empire’s conquest of Crimea in 1783. Against the backdrop of dramatic events of 18th–20th centuries, the author analyzes literary exchanges between the Russian, Ukrainian, Crimean Tatar, and Turkish authors. Here the major paradox of Russia’s imperial politics presents itself: the negation of the “intimate bond between the Crimean place and Tatar personality” through its affirmation. This “dialectic of imperial possession” was reproduced in the Russian literature, most famously in works of Aleksandr Pushkin, Lev Tolstoy, and Anton Chekhov. The Turkish literature was not immune to the same disease, as is evident from the Ottoman intellectuals’ attempts to safeguard Ottoman unity through rhetorical construction of Crimean Tatars as “Ottoman Turks.” The identity crisis that resulted from this is addressed in the discussion of the 19th- and 20th-century Crimean Tatar authors, from Ismail Gaspirali to the Young Tatars. Finally, the Ukrainian writers, Lesia Ukraїnka and Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, are representatives of the poetics of solidarity for their ability to see the Crimean Tatar colonial situation as their own.
In part II “Dispossession,” Finnin continues to examine Ukrainian writers’ expressed solidarity with the Crimean Tatars through the Soviet period, beginning with the productive “cross-korenizatsiia” stage, and through the horrors of purges and deportation. The tragedy of the deportation and resettlement of Russians and Ukrainians as well as what the author calls “ethnic and discursive cleansing” of Crimea reverberated in the Ukrainian and Russian dissident “samizdat” and “samvydav” literature. Boris Chichibanin’s poem “Krymskiie progulki” that became iconic among the exiled Crimean Tatars invited the readers to foster the feeling of guilt as the basis for solidarity.
Finally, in part III “Repossession,” Finnin celebrates the success of the literature in advancing the Crimean Tatars’ eventual return to homeland following the Soviet Union’s collapse. And although literature failed to promote guilt-processing in their readers and postcolonial reading of post-Soviet Crimea is rare, the solidarity is there, especially after Russia’s annexation in 2014. The Crimean Tatar–Ukrainian solidarity expands the boundaries of Ukrainian civic nationalism and reconfigures the role of the Crimean Tatars in Ukraine.
The book rightfully deserves to be celebrated for author’s efforts to bring together literary exchanges in four languages, for pioneering the deep intertextual analysis of the Crimean Tatar literature, for illuminating previously obscured intercultural relations, and above all, for giving justice to centuries of Crimea’s colonial condition. At the same time, some categories of analysis require further interrogation. For example, although Finnin rightfully criticizes scholars for theorizing Crimea’s post-Soviet situation in terms of “interethnic conflict,” his “decolonial” framework also does not necessarily capture the peninsula’s reality. The decoloniality of the Crimean Tatars’ struggle went hand in hand with the latent Russian “neocolonialism” of Crimea’s economic, social, military, political, and cultural life. It is this tension between decolonial efforts and neocolonial aspirations that need further examination. Furthermore, the very categories “possession/dispossession/repossession” suggest that the same imperial logic in relation to land and territory pertains to both the colonizer and the colonized. Although Crimean Tatars indeed would like to reclaim their land as evident from the ubiquitous samovozvraty, their relation to land is qualitatively different from the settler’s logic of extraction. “Repossession” means different things for different people, and this distinction should be acknowledged.
To conclude, in the spirit of Rory Finnin, the book should be read by everyone who is not indifferent to the plight of others—academics and nonacademics alike. It is especially recommended to undergraduate and graduate courses that deal with Russia’s colonial legacies. With the hope for Crimea’s deoccupation in sight, the bonds of solidarity are ever more important.
