Blood of Others: Stalin’s Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity by RoryFinnin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. 352 pp. $80.00. ISBN 978‐1‐4875‐0781‐7

Rory Finnin’s book is not a history of the internal deportation, on May 18–20, 1944, of the Crimean Tatars from their homeland to Uzbekistan and the Urals, where they were restricted to special settlements. Rather, it is a history of the literature written about the event, particularly poetry. As such it is one step removed from the historical events since it deals primarily with its literary depiction rather than the historical narrative itself. It is a comparative literary study aimed primarily at examining the use of poetry, written by people of other nationalities, as an instrument of solidarity with the dispossessed Crimean Tatars in their long struggle to return to their homeland. These include Russians, Ukrainians, and Turks. The book is divided into three parts. The first is devoted to literature establishing the strong ties of the Crimean Tatar people to the Crimean peninsula. Ties that rely not so much on the length of their history in the territory as the fact that they underwent their ethnogenesis on the land and have no other possible homeland. But the Crimean Tatar claims to their homeland had already come under severe stress after 1783, with Catherine II’s annexation of the territory ruled by the Crimean Khanate. Here the poem “Bakchisaraiskii fontan” by Pushkin is the central literary text examined, but it is not the only one, and the literature of the nineteenth century dealing with Crimea clearly establishes the fundamental connection between the Crimean Tatar people and their native land. The second part focuses on the main theme of the book, the use of literature by people other than Crimean Tatars to express solidarity with them in their long struggle to undo the consequences of the May 1944 deportation. Here the most important poem is “Krymskie progulki” by Boris Chichibabin, a former Russian political prisoner. His poem expressing solidarity with the Crimean Tatars in their heroic efforts to return home from Uzbekistan spread throughout the Soviet Union at the same time that activists petitioned and protested for the restoration of their rights. Despite their small population, the Crimean Tatars were one of the most active national groups in the Soviet era in seeking redress for the crimes against them during the Stalin era. Chichibabin was an ethnic Russian in Ukraine, and like other Russian dissidents he sought to cajole the Russian nation to take moral responsibility for the Soviet crimes against the Crimean Tatars and make proper amends. Finnin contrasts this type of solidarity with that expressed by Ukrainian writers on the one hand and Turkish ones on the other. The Ukrainians examined include Borys Antonenko-Davydovych and Ivan Sokulsky. After Khrushchev transferred Crimea from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR there was an increasing alliance between ethnic Ukrainian dissidents and Crimean Tatars. The creation of a multiethnic alliance of dissidents with territorial ties to the Ukrainian SSR greatly worried the Soviet leadership. In addition to Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars, this alliance also included Jews. And although they were political dissidents rather than poets or literary figures, the cooperation of Ukrainians like Petro Griogorenko with Mustafa Dzhemilev, the foremost Crimean Tatar activist of the post-Stalin era, and Ilya Gabai, who was Jewish, in support of the Crimean Tatars epitomized this alliance. Outside of the USSR a large population descended from the Crimean Tatars lived in the Turkish Republic. A number of writers in Turkey wrote on themes related to the Crimean Tatars. Here the solidarity was ethnic. Crimean Tatars share many similarities not only with people descended from their ancestors, but also with the Anatolian Turks, including a similar language, the same religion, and strong historical ties between the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire. The largest population of people sympathetic to the plight of the Crimean Tatars was in Turkey, and literature was a key means of expressing this solidarity. The final part of the book deals with literature since the mass return of around half the Crimean Tatar population to their homeland during 1987–94. Here the emphasis is on the contribution and development of the Crimean Tatar minority to post-independence Ukrainian politics. Continuing the pattern of dissident cooperation that marked the Soviet era, the Crimean Tatars took on an important role in shaping Ukrainian civic identity. The book lacks a proper conclusion, and the last two pages are obviously a late development dealing with events after 2014 when the Russian Federation invaded and annexed Crimea. Nonetheless, the book is a good summary of the literature expressing the support of Russians, Ukrainians, and Turks for the Crimean Tatars’ quest to return to their homeland. It does an excellent job of putting this literature into its proper historical context.

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