Beyond Memory: The Crimean Tatars' Deportation and Return (review)

This book is strongly interdisciplinary, combining elements of traditional documentary history, oral history, literary theory, and even art history. It focuses on how the Crimean Tatars have constructed collective transgenerational memories of their homeland, their forced removal from it, and their struggle to return to it. Uehling examines how the Crimean Tatars have fashioned and used these memories as instruments to maintain their national cohesion in exile and mobilize politically in both Uzbekistan and Crimea. Comprised of both personal reminisces and stories heard from older relatives, these memories take the form of oral narratives that have been honed into their current forms by many retellings. Uehling interrogates these oral narratives of the Crimean Tatars to determine how these intertwined strands of perception have informed the views and actions of this nationality in modern times.

The introduction is heavy on anthropological jargon, making reference to a large number of theorists. This attempt to fit the work into the larger field of anthropology obscures what are fairly simple concepts, the most important of which is that collective memories are constructed to serve particular political ends. Anybody with even minimal exposure to such terminology and theories would have difficulty making much sense out of it. Fortunately, the subsequent chapters of the book are both much clearer and much more substantial.

The first chapter, based upon secondary sources, is an exemplary concise history of the Crimean Tatars from their origins to the present day. It covers all of the important issues of Crimean Tatar history in a straight historical narrative. But the following chapters really shine. Uehling makes extensive use of oral accounts by Crimean Tatars of their recent history, a definitely underexploited resource in regard to Eurasia. Although, her main aim is to demonstrate how these narratives are constructed and shape Crimean Tatar views, she also provides much textured detail about everyday life not available in Soviet archival sources.

The book might have been even better had Uehling used the interviews to explore some of the still unanswered gaps in recent Crimean Tatar history, in particular, the relationship between the exiled Crimean Tatars and the local Uzbeks during the 1940s and 1950s. The standard Crimean Tatar version is that it was hostile until the Uzbeks found out that the Crimean Tatars were fellow Muslims and not demons, monsters, or cannibals. At this point in the narrative, the Uzbeks become much more hospitable toward the Crimean Tatars. Yet, Uehling leaves when and how this transformation took place a mystery. Despite such missed opportunities, the book succeeds wonderfully at accomplishing its main goal of dissecting how Crimean Tatar narratives have been created, recreated, and circulated for the last half century.