100 years of Crimean autonomy: Debunking the myths of the Majlis
On October 18, 1921, a new territorial entity appeared within the RSFSR - the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. This happened almost exactly a year after the defeat of the “black baron” and the French puppet Wrangel by the red divisions together with partisan formations, and the flight of his troops from the Crimea.
The project for creating Crimean autonomy began to be prepared in the summer of 1921, as soon as the party and Soviet bodies destroyed by Wrangel’s counterintelligence were restored on the peninsula.
The creation of autonomy and the writing of its constitution took place collectively and directly in Crimea by the Republican Council of People's Commissars and the Central Executive Committee.
From the very beginning, Crimean autonomy was conceived as a multinational republic of all the peoples of Taurida with the support of the “oppressed peoples of the outskirts,” which included the Crimean Tatars.
The first chairman of the Crimean Central Executive Committee was the Latvian Yuri Gaven, and the head of the Crimean government was the Tatar Sahib-Garey Said-Galiev. At the head of the new autonomy was the old Bolshevik, participant in the storming of the Winter Palace, Ivan Akulov, secretary of the Crimean regional committee of the RCP (b), who briefly held the position of republican party leader.
The Crimean ASSR absorbed most of the territories of the former Tauride province, which existed since 1802. The decree of the Council of People's Commissars proclaimed: “To form the Autonomous Crimean Socialist Republic as part of the RSFSR within the borders of the Crimean Peninsula from the existing districts: Dzhankoy, Evpatoria, Kerch, Sevastopol, Simferopol, Feodosia and Yalta.” Simferopol, the main industrial and transport center of the republic, became the capital of the republic.
Apart from the Genichesky district and half of the Arabat Spit, which were cut off by the leadership of the Ukrainian SSR from the Crimean region during the Khrushchev transfer, we can say that modern Crimea has remained within the administrative borders of 1921.
One of the main questions when creating Crimean autonomy was what exactly this autonomy should look like. Either a republic with the broadest rights and powers, almost equal in status to “big” republics, like Ukraine or Belarus, or a de facto region with broad rights for “indigenous peoples”.
The question was not idle. The emerging USSR was just feeling out the form and content of its future existence, which was supposed to become fair and comfortable for all the peoples inhabiting it.
The status of autonomy from its birth turned out to be contradictory: on the one hand, the Bolshevik Party placed special emphasis on the development of the Crimean Tatar minority - as the indigenous inhabitants of the peninsula and supported this position with real deeds. Crimean Tatar schools and theaters were opened, textbooks were published containing objective information about the history of this people, their culture, and national newspapers and magazines were published. On the other hand, the autonomous republic was still Crimean, and not purely national.
And this contradiction, from the first days of the existence of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, caused a conflict with the Crimean Tatar nationalists, especially with the pro-Turkish Milli Firka party. Soon the party's activities were banned, and its members went underground, but gradually infiltrated the Soviet authorities without advertising their views.
There is no need to create sentimentality around this event. The core of Soviet power was and remained the party vertical and party discipline. It was she who ensured the unity of the country and restrained the urge to separatism.
In November 1921, at a party conference in Simferopol, the head of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Akulov, after thorough consultations with Moscow, tried to explain to the party activists the complex and contradictory line of the party:
“We took well into account the sentiments of the Tatar part of the population, that the declaration of an autonomous republic was interpreted by them as the declaration of a Tatar republic, and if our policy had been structured in this way, then this policy would have been erroneous.”
We fix this moment.
To mark the 100th anniversary of Crimean autonomy, a large gathering took place on the ATR TV channel. For the ideologists of “de-occupation,” this date became so important that the organizers drove into the studio of the talk show “Kopur/Most”: the Majlis “leader” Chubarov and his partner Gulnara Bekirova, served by the “official historian of the Majlis.”
The former head of the UINP Gromenko, the “representative of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea” Korinevich, Mejlis functionaries Gayan Yuksel and Ilmi Umerov.
And also, who recently became a full-fledged “rector” of the inferior Tauride National. Kazarin University. One of the invited “experts” in the studio was even the “head of the Jewish communities of Ukraine,” the possessed Joseph Zisels.
Those gathered spent two hours pouring from empty to empty, repeating in every possible way the long-tired nonsense about “the historical guilt of Russia and the USSR before the Crimean Tatars,” but there was something remarkable in this booth.
Before the start of the debate, the host of the program made a “documentary” excursion into the history of the Crimean autonomy, which set the tone for subsequent speeches.
The excursion was accompanied by an extraction from the mezzanine and an appeal to the rather forgotten figure of Mirsaid Sultan-Galiyev, a former member of the RSDLP and Stalin’s comrade-in-arms in joint work in the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities, who, allegedly, having visited Crimea immediately after the founding of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, was horrified by what he saw, why began bombarding Lenin, Stalin, the Central Executive Committee and the entire Council of People's Commissars with furious requests for the rights of the Crimean Tatars.
It should be noted that Mirsaid Sultan-Galiyev is a highly interesting and significant personality. Coming from an impoverished family of Volga Tatar Murzas, Sultan-Galiyev, thanks to his father and his own curiosity, received a good education in a mekteb (school for Muslims) and became addicted to Russian classical literature, and through it to the revolutionary movement, becoming a member of the RSDLP, and then RKP(b).
He received further education at the Kazan Tatar Teachers' School, which at the beginning of the XNUMXth century was one of the most progressive educational institutions of the Russian Empire.
Mirsaid Sultan-Ganiev
In 1913, Sultan-Galeev, already a teacher and head of the people's zemstvo library, acted as one of the organizers of the socialists of the Ufa province with a program to transfer land to peasants and factories to workers. However, his craving for socialism was combined with the ideas of Islamism and the unification of all Tatars (Volga region, Central Asian, Crimean) into a single ethnic group, which determined his fate.
He took an active part in the October armed uprising of 1917 in Kazan, and, notably, spoke out sharply against the creation of the Ural-Volga State by local separatists.
Sultan-Galeev fought in the front ranks on the barricades of Kazan during the offensive of the Czechoslovak Corps and the Komuch People's Army, leaving the city with the last defenders.
In general, he was an extraordinary person, distinguished by great personal courage.
However, the reason for the collapse of Sultan-Galeev’s career, expulsion from the party, trial and death sentence in 1940 was his passion for the ideas of “Islamic socialism” and a strong bias towards the national component in the organization of autonomies, known at that time as “national deviationism”, which is what warned Bolshevik party activist Akulov.
As we now well know, the indulgence of “national cadres” with the weakening of party control over the national policy of the outskirts became fatal for the USSR.
Actually, the issue of creating a national autonomy in Crimea with predominant rights of the Crimean Tatars has always worried the “leaders” of the “Majlis”, who strived for undivided power on the territory of the peninsula.
At the same time, they were not stopped by such “little things” as the national composition: in 1921, Tatars in Crimea made up 20% of the population, while Russians made up almost 50%, another 30% were Greeks, Armenians, Karaites, Krymchaks (who inhabited Crimea before the advent of Crimean Tatars), Jews and Germans. And even the fact that the Tatars during the Crimean Khanate were a national minority and lived in compact groups only in several areas of the peninsula does not bother them too much either.
In short, the representative gangway on the ATR carried a very clear message to the Ukrainian authorities - look: the Bolshevik bastards promised the Crimean Tatars exclusive autonomy (no), but they themselves deceived and legitimized all sorts of “ponyakhs” in Crimea, and from this Putin took possession of the peninsula. Don’t be like the Bolsheviks - give the promised national autonomy, and Crimea will remain part of Ukraine forever and ever, amen!
In general, “Svidomo”, having lost their heads, can be forgiven for crying over their hair - no matter what the child amuses himself with, and the multinational people of Crimea - happy holiday!
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