Historian Gulnara Abdulayeva wrote a column for Ukrainska Pravda on the 81st anniversary of the deportation. It was about the Simferopol “house of specialists” on the corner of Zhukovsky and Samokish streets. 

She compared it to Kharkiv's “Slovo” House, which is called a symbol of the Ukrainian Executed Renaissance.

Gulnara Abdulayeva told how, on the eve of the great genocide, the empire was establishing control over the intellectual elite of the Crimeans and destroying it. 

However, in addition to the house on Zhukovskoho Street, the Crimean Tatar Executed Renaissance has another symbol: the Aqmescit (Simferopol) building at 3a Gorky Street. My peers remember it because of the Alcatraz nightclub that was located there in the 90s. During one night, on April 17, 1938, almost all Crimean Tatar scientists, writers, and composers were killed in the basement of this building. And it was this symbol of repression that stuck in the minds of the people in the last years before the occupation of Crimea.

The house at 20 Zhukovskoho Street is not mentioned that often, and there is an explanation for this. It is not only the place where actress Nuriye Cetere and composer Yaya Sherfetdinov, writer Umer Ipçi, and musician Asan Refatov lived at the same time. 

It is also an unpleasant page of national history, which is not usually spoken about aloud in the Crimean Tatar community. Because then we would have to call it a house of myths and shame.

In 2012, on the centenary of the writer Şamil Alâdin, a memorial plaque was installed on the house, and it was then that the first scandal arose, thanks to which ATR journalists discovered the unpleasant truth about the house's residents. Gulnara Abdulayeva recalled the names of many writers, composers, and artists who lived there. However, this is not just a story about Crimean Tatar angels and NKVD demons. Thanks to the living witnesses of the 1930s repressions, we know that without the help of the angels, the demons would hardly have survived.

I will not write a lot about Yusuf Bolat. The genius of Crimean Tatar poetry of the 20th century, Eşref Şemi-Zade, said it briefly and succinctly: “Yusuf Bolat's hands are covered in blood up to his elbows.” But his nephew, the writer Şamil Alâdin, is still called the great Crimean Tatar novelist. An assessment of Alâdin's work should be left to specialists (and, by the way, cautious conclusions about his secondary and calcified language have already begun to appear, in particular, from the recognized linguist Mustafa Ametov). I go back to 2012, when the son of Umer Ipçi, who was repressed in 1938, Yakup Ipçi, staged a protest against the installation of a plaque with the name of Şamil Alâdin on it. Then the journalist Afize Yusuf-qizi learned about the history of Alâdin and his uncle Yusuf Bolat's move into the apartment at 20 Zhukovskoho Street, where Umer Ipçi's family lived. In 1938, he was sentenced to 12 years in the camps, and the writer's wife, Fatima, and two daughters stayed in the apartment. She was seven months pregnant with her third child - a son, Yakup. Şamil Alâdin came every night and pressured the woman to get out of the apartment as soon as possible, because “it is not the place for the wife and children of an enemy of the people to occupy the living space of Soviet writers.” To confirm his words, Yakup Ipçi took our film crew to his older sister, Leila-hanim. In 1938, she was 8 years old, and she remembered well Şamil Alâdin, who terrorized the family and eventually took Fatima and her children to her father in Baqçasaray in his car. From there, they moved to a shack in a village in northern Crimea, where they faced war and deportation.

Şamil Alâdin's grandson was so angry with the first truthful material about his grandfather that he organized several years of online bullying against me personally. After all, I was the chief news editor of ATR at the time and aired the story.

However, this is not the whole story of shame. Eşref Şemi-Zade's eldest son, Professor Aydin Şemi-Zadeh, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, was upset by the leak of the story and the scandal, and our correspondence about it has been preserved. In it, he unequivocally confirmed the story of the expulsion of the Ipçi family from their home and added several details that were well remembered by his mother, Sayde Bodaninska, the daughter of Ali Bodaninsky and the niece of Usein Bodaninsky, who was also shot on April 17, 1938.

I leave the screenshot as it is. It contains an interesting detail: a fight for an apartment between an uncle and a nephew, the playwright Yusuf Bolat and the writer Şamil Alâdin.

As follows from Gulnara Abdulayeva's article and the testimony of the late Aydin-bey, the sparring for the apartment ended in a draw, and both moved in, and later they were also moved in with a third neighbor, Suleiman Maksut.

And this is just one of the mise-en-scenes of the tragedies of that time.

The “great” Ilâs Bakhşış is a separate, undisclosed story about the composer's amazing resilience and Teflon-like strength. He escaped repression and camps in the 1930s, became a favorite of the Nazis, and during the German-Romanian occupation, together with artists from the Radio Committee and the Crimean Tatar theater, was taken to Romania. When the Soviets demanded the artists back, the government of the Romanian king, which quickly changed its shoes and began to cooperate with the Stalinists, handed them over to Moscow. Some were shot while crossing the Romanian-Soviet border. The rest were not only deported, but, like Sabriye Erecepova, sent to hard labor, from which she returned almost disabled with cirrhosis of the liver. Only Bakhşış received nothing for his work in Romania. Later, in 1957, the Soviet authorities instructed him to create a new Crimean Tatar ensemble, Haytarma, in Uzbekistan. And after perestroika, Bakhşış became a favorite of the local Crimean authorities, and he was also entrusted with the revival of the theater in Crimea.

In addition, there are still a lot of rumors about his authorship of the amazingly successful musical play Arzy-qız. Let there be Crimean Tatar or non-Crimean Tatar researchers who will study all the scores of the play and other works by the two composers - Asan Refatov, who was shot on April 17, 1938, and Ilyas Bakhşış, the eternal favorite of all the authorities - and tell us whether there is theft or not. What is the role of one in the death of the other? Like Yusuf Bolat? Up to his elbows in blood? Like Alâdin? Halfway down the neck? Or clean, like Remzie Bakkal and Sabriye Erecepova, and then we should stop gossiping.

Finally, we should no longer be shy about the outstanding singer Fevzi Bilyalov, who in the 1960s fired Sabriye Erecepova, Selime Çelebieva, and other artists known before the deportation from the Haytarma ensemble. It was only in 2022, after the outbreak of a full-scale war, that we recorded a song with lyrics by Sabriye-apte and music by Kabul Seitveliyev. It is about a terrible crow that envies everyone and eats carrion. The song is dedicated to Fevzi Bilyalov. We know this because the coryphaei of our scene, Gulizar Bekirova and Rustem Memetov, dared to speak about it out loud. It is enough to talk about the cooperation with the KGB in kitchens and smoking rooms. The mythologization of Crimean Tatar history with the desire to avoid the complex topics of betrayal, denunciation, envy, and intrigue turns us into flat, meaningless and meaningless characters in Indian films for people with mental disabilities.

After all, Ablâziz Veliyev and Uriye Edemova are still alive, and there are researchers like Zera Bekirova or even Shemieh Zadeh's student, Ayder Emirov. All of them have to tell not only tearful and sterile stories about ideal Crimean Tatars, but also start writing an honest story that may initially frighten us all. Because in real life, demons are always real, and angels are often fictional, and we must finally at least start destroying the myths about the holy martyrs, where each first one is a veteran of the national movement, a passionate patriot, and, as in the joke about the slides in the village club, all his life he has been engaged in only one kind of love... for the Motherland.