Elvira Kemal is a researcher of Crimean Tatar history who lives in Germany. We are publishing her article for the Turkish publication Yenidevir.

A little over a hundred years ago, the Russian Empire collapsed, and the country was engulfed in a civil war. Crimea — the homeland of the Crimean Tatars — was not a party to this conflict, but rather its victim. Over the course of three years, power on the peninsula changed hands several times: the Bolsheviks, Ukrainian and German troops, the White Army, and then the Reds again. None of the sides fought for the Crimean Tatars or treated them as a people; each merely exploited their land, crops, and lives for its own struggle.

The history of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War in Crimea is often reduced to the fate of such an outstanding figure as Noman Chelebidzhihan and his martyrdom. However, no less important is the fate of the entire Crimean Tatar people, who once again found themselves caught between two fires during this period. Neither the Reds nor the Whites became their allies, and their quest for national self-determination was crushed by the confrontation between several forces.

The population reacted rather cautiously to the first revolutionary events in Crimea. In the summer of 1917, the Bolsheviks had virtually no support on the peninsula. However, by the end of the year, the political situation had changed significantly: the influence of left-wing forces began to grow rapidly, especially in the major cities, which set the stage for the subsequent struggle for power in Crimea.

In the fall of 1917, three authorities operated simultaneously on the peninsula, none of which recognized the authority of the others: the national government of the Crimean Tatars — the Qurultai; a coalition of anti-Bolshevik municipal and local government bodies; and the Bolshevik Soviet in Sevastopol. Crimea entered the civil war already divided even before it began.

By the end of 1917, the first clashes had begun in Crimea. The Black Sea Fleet, which had not participated in military operations since the summer of 1917, had been completely sidelined. In addition, during the summer, criminal elements and deserting soldiers flooded into the Crimea, engaging in looting in Crimean villages.

The October Revolution was met with hostility on the peninsula, so Sovietization could only be achieved by force of arms. The Bolsheviks, Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, and anarchists relied on armed struggle. Revolutionary-minded sailors from the Black Sea Fleet, soldiers who had deserted the front, and criminal elements — for whom the revolutionary chaos provided a favorable environment — played a significant role in their units. Violence became the primary means of achieving political goals.

In January 1918, a wave of Red Terror swept through Crimea. One of the most famous victims was Noman Chelebidzhihan, a political leader of the Crimean Tatar people, who was arrested without trial and killed. His body was thrown into the Black Sea, making his death one of the most tragic symbols in the history of the Crimean Tatar people in the 20th century.

‍In the spring of 1918, Crimea was briefly occupied by Bolbochan’s Ukrainian troops, who had driven out the Bolsheviks — but the Germans, under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, forced them to withdraw and established their own administration. In the fall of that same year, they were replaced by Denikin’s volunteer army. In April 1919, power passed back to the Reds (the Crimean SSR) for several months, but by the summer of that same year, Denikin had regained control of the peninsula. In the spring of 1920, following a catastrophic retreat and evacuation from Novorossiysk, Baron Pyotr Wrangel took over command from Denikin — and held Crimea until November 1920, when the Red Army finally occupied the peninsula for good. 

Neither the Bolsheviks, nor the Whites, nor the Germans had any real intention of helping Crimea — they were all interested in it as a resource (the fleet, ports, grain) and as the last patch of land that could be held onto when everything else had already been lost. Hence, the logic behind the changes in power: they did not originate within the peninsula itself, but more often came from outside, and each time descended upon Crimea as a whole precisely from the direction of the isthmus.

For the Crimean Tatars, this is a true tragedy: they had their own national movement, their own Qurultai, their own government — in other words, they were trying to become a political entity at that moment, not just a territory. But the scale of the forces deciding Crimea’s fate (the German army, Denikin’s front, the Red Cavalry) was orders of magnitude greater than what they actually had at their disposal (a few thousand cavalrymen). Hence, the tragedy of Chelebidzhihan — it lies not in the fact that he lost a specific battle, but in the fact that the effort toward national self-determination clashed with forces for whom Crimea was merely a footnote in a larger war.

Both the Reds and the Whites supplied their armies in the same way — by confiscating grain, livestock, horses, and wagons from the local population. The Crimean Tatar villages on the southern coast and in the foothills, where gardening and small-scale farming yielded a harvest barely sufficient for a family, found themselves caught between armed detachments that seized food supplies — sometimes on the orders of the Soviet authorities, sometimes on the orders of the White command. The receipts issued in exchange for the confiscated goods were worthless under either regime. Livestock was slaughtered on the spot if it could not be driven away in time. As they retreated, soldiers poisoned or filled in wells — often not out of revenge against a specific village, but because the war had written off those who happened to be in the path of the retreating army.

Added to this was the naval blockade: the Crimean Peninsula is connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus, and any power controlling Perekop could turn it into a trap. A striking example of this occurred in the fall of 1920, when Wrangel’s troops were retreating toward the ports for evacuation, while the Red Army was advancing from the north: the peninsula’s roads were simultaneously clogged with retreating units, refugees, and abandoned livestock. There was almost no one left to harvest that year’s crop.

After endless interventions and looting, any crop failure could have triggered a catastrophe even in the fertile Crimea. And that year of crop failure arrived: 1921 turned out to be a dry year, and the wheat and barley failed to sprout. But this did not prevent the Soviet authorities from carrying out a policy of forced grain expropriation; during the winter of 1921 alone, they seized about two million poods of grain and nearly as much in fodder crops from Crimean peasants, and requisitioned 80,000 head of livestock and 400,000 poods of hay and straw for the army. 

The effects of the famine began to be felt unevenly: the Roma and the poor neighborhoods were the first to bear the brunt, and the Crimean Tatars of the southern coast were the next group to suffer. Historically, the region had grown grapes and tobacco rather than grain — the gardens and plantations along the southern coast generated income that southerners used to buy bread grown in the north of the peninsula. But by fall, the northerners had nothing left to trade. By August 1921, everyone was feeling the effects of the famine. And this did not prevent the authorities from simultaneously conducting a campaign in Crimea to collect aid for the starving people of the Volga region (!).

Moscow did not recognize Crimea as a region suffering from famine until February 1922, even though approximately 1,500 people died of starvation in November and December 1921 alone.

Eyewitness accounts report that the villages in the Bakhchisaray and Qarasubazar districts have been deserted. People abandoned their homes or sold them for a pittance and left in search of food. Corpses were found along the roads, most often those of children and the elderly. Numerous cases of looting, murder, cannibalism, fraud, and banditry were reported.

At the same time, international aid arrived very late — primarily because the Soviet leadership had long concealed the scale of the disaster and was reluctant to cooperate with foreign and charitable organizations. In 1922, a Crimean Tatar delegation led by Asan Sabri Aivazov and Mamut Nedim reached Ankara, where they were received personally by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Turkey responded: donation collection points were opened locally under the auspices of the provincial governorships, and several thousand Crimean Tatar children were transported through the Transcaucasus to the Turkish coast — to Samsun and Trabzon — where they were taken into the care of the local Red Crescent. 

At that time, Turkey was still fighting its own war of independence — but it responded nonetheless; the Crimean Tatar diaspora living there also played a role, having maintained ties with their abandoned homeland since the 18th and 19th centuries. 

While food from various countries was making its way to remote mountain and steppe villages, approximately 110,000 people died of starvation in Crimea within a short period of time, of whom about 76,000 were Crimean Tatars (according to an estimate by Veli Ibraimov, chairman of the Central Election Commission of the Crimean ASSR).

This was not the first — nor would it be the last — time in its history that Crimea found itself a place where a change in power was considered more important than the fate of those who remained to live on the land after the troops had left. The famine of 1921–1922 was not a natural disaster in the strict sense — it was the price the people paid because their land was needed by several armies at once. This price is not always mentioned in textbooks. But it remains in the memories of families who, to this day, have no grave to visit.