Ukraine discovered the Crimean Tatars three years ago - after the Crimea was annexed. Since then, it was this people who became the main figure of news from the peninsula. Ukraine watched how the Crimean Tatars fed locked military units, how they went to rallies with Ukrainian flags, how the Kremlin prohibited the Mejlis and broke into searches at home for activists, writes Pavel Kazarin for the League. no. - Of all political affairs in the Crimea, Crimean Tatars account for half - although their share in the population of the peninsula does not exceed one-sixth.
The last three years, Ukraine negotiates about itself, but the occupation of the peninsula has taken the Crimean Tatars out of the brackets. They were alone with Russia - and Moscow has been conducting an operation to "force for loyalty" for a thousand days.. But in that and a feature that between the empire and the Crimean Tatars mutual understanding is possible only on conditions of surrender. The only question is, whose.
The current war is not only between the two countries. It goes between values: on one side pro-Soviet ethics, and on the other - post-Soviet.
The Crimean Tatars supported both Maidan precisely because these protests pulled a Ukrainian train from that post-Soviet depot in which he found himself. But at the very moment when the train moved from its place - Russia came and unhooked the Crimean car from the train. The people, who supported the ethics and logic of Kiev, now have to live in a state that is moving in all pairs to the past. The very thing in which seventy-three years ago these people no longer had a place.
In addition, the history of the Crimean Tatars destroys the main spiritual bond of modern Russia - the myth of the "Great Patriotic War". Because in modern Russia the history of that war became a real religion - with its pantheon of apostles and great martyrs. Any reflections on the theme of the Second World War in Russia are unacceptable: the only possible interpretation of those events should fit into the formula "the struggle of absolute Good with absolute Evil".
And the deportation of the Crimean Tatars destroys this patriotic equation. Because if you consider it a crime and a tragedy, it turns out that for the Crimea the liberation from the Nazis did not become a triumph of the Good. That Good, having defeated Evil, committed the atrocity itself. And any adherent of this civil religion is faced with a choice: either to admit that it was not quite good - or to say that it did not quite an evil deed.
That is why any pro-Soviet person immediately declares that the deportation of the Crimean Tatars was a logical punishment for collaborationism. That repentance should not be in front of the Crimean Tatars, but from the Crimean Tatars. Moreover, in the Soviet tradition, all peoples - from Belarus to the Kazakhs - were declared victorious nations, among which were traitors. And only the Crimean Tatars are denied this: they are declared a traitorous people, among whom were separate heroes. And this is the situation in which a compromise is impossible.
Russia is the state of victorious statism. The country of the victorious vertical: the state here is the only subject, and anyone who tries to challenge this subjectivity is an enemy. The non-system opposition is dispersed, the sprouts of free thinking are uprooted, and any actions can only be with the sanction of the authorities. When in April in St. Petersburg the metro was blown up - the Kremlin gathered an official mourning rally, not daring to give even a grief to itself.
And the Crimean Tatars have a long experience of fighting for their rights. It began in Central Asia, where their national movement was born, struggling to return to the Crimea. Then this experience was useful in the Crimea, when Kiev preferred to flirt with the pro-Soviet electorate, giving the peninsula to the "regionalals" and the Communists. The Crimean Tatars had their kurultai (unofficial ethnic parliament) and the Mejlis (unofficial ethnic government), who, without legal status, were the players with whom the others had to reckon.
The last three years, Moscow is engaged in precisely the fact that it is trying to deprive the Crimean Tatars of their subjectivity. The ban on the Mejlis, expulsion of political leaders, searches in settlements of Crimean Tatars' compact settlement is still the same attempt to force the indigenous people of the peninsula to step in the foot and sing in chorus. Because any extra-system player for Moscow is a threat that one should not negotiate but destroy.
And if you look at the map of Crimea released before the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, the names of the settlements will give an unambiguous answer to the question, who has more historical rights. And the whole tragedy of the Crimean Tatars is precisely because they were alone with Russia.
They can not leave the Crimea - unlike Ukrainians and Russians, they have no homeland outside the peninsula and the very idea of ??voluntary deportation after fifty years of life in exile seems unacceptable to them.
They can not negotiate from a position of strength - they are only 15% of the population of the peninsula and they are compelled to resist the attempts of the Kremlin to assimilate and dissolve itself.
They turned out to be a situation when the reality around them lives across all that they believe in.
Do not forget about it.
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