{"id":186298,"date":"2014-03-07T19:14:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-08T00:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/03\/07\/this-is-more-than-a-russian-ukrainian-thing\/"},"modified":"2014-03-07T19:14:00","modified_gmt":"2014-03-08T00:14:00","slug":"this-is-more-than-a-russian-ukrainian-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/03\/07\/this-is-more-than-a-russian-ukrainian-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"This is More than a Russian-Ukrainian Thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the New Yorker<\/i>, Natalia Antelava notes that Crimean Tatars are completely without any ally or patron<\/a>:<\/p>\n

At first, Rustem Kadyrov could barely make out the mark outside his house, in the Crimean town of Bakhchysarai, but it filled him with terror. It was an X, cut deep into the gray metal of the gate, and its significance cut even deeper, evoking a memory Kadyrov shares with all Crimean Tatars. Kadyrov, who is thirty-one, grew up hearing stories about marks on doors. In May of 1944, Stalin ordered his police to tag the houses of Crimean Tatars, the native Muslim residents of the peninsula. Within a matter of days, all of them\u2014almost two hundred thousand people\u2014were evicted from their homes, loaded onto trains, and sent to Central Asia, on the pretext that the community had collaborated with the Nazi occupation of Crimea.<\/span>

<\/span>Kadyrov\u2019s grandmother, Sedeka Memetova, who was eight at the time, was among those deported. \u201cThe soldiers gave us five minutes to pack up,\u201d she told me, when I visited the family on Thursday. \u201cWe left everything behind.\u201d Memetova still has vivid memories of her journey into exile: the stench of the overcrowded train carriage, the wailing of a pregnant woman who sat next to her, and the solemn faces of the men who had to lower the bodies of their children off of the moving train\u2014the only way, she said, to dispose of the dead. Four of her siblings were among the thousands of Crimean Tatars who never even made it to their final destination, Uzbekistan.<\/span>

<\/span>Starting in the nineteen-sixties, the Soviet Union began to allow survivors of the deportation to return. Memetova and her family came back to Crimea almost three decades ago, in 1987. This weekend, at around 3 P.M. on Saturday, Memetova\u2019s forty-four-year-old daughter, Ava, looked out the window and saw four young men, strangers to the neighborhood, walking down the street, armed with batons. The men were also carrying pieces of paper, Ava told me\u2014which she believes were lists of homes belonging to Crimean Tatars. Seventy years after Memetova\u2019s deportation, her house had been marked once again. \u201cJust as we thought we finally had a future,\u201d she said. \u201cHow could anyone do this in the twenty-first century?\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On one side of the conflict are the Russians, (Yes, I know that Stalin was a Georgian) who engaged in Genocide in 1944, and on the other side is the neo-Nazi influenced government in Kiev.<\/p>\n

It’s kind of like what happened to the Roma following the fall of the Warsaw pact.<\/p>\n

The new Europe has some frightening echos to the interwar years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the New Yorker, Natalia Antelava notes that Crimean Tatars are completely without any ally or patron: At first, Rustem Kadyrov could barely make out the mark outside his house, in the Crimean town of Bakhchysarai, but it filled him with terror. It was an X, cut deep into the gray metal of the gate, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1040,1115,1011,1098],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-former-soviet-union","category-genocide","category-history","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186298"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}