pseudo-Russian style favoured by Alexander III, the Yalta cathedral was erected in memory of his murdered father. Chekhov was at that time so unwell that he had not been down to the centre of town for weeks, but he could hear the deep bass bells from his house, and they made him feel very homesick for Russia.37
II Chekhov and the Tatars
A week after arriving in Yalta in 1898, Chekhov was taken to see a small red-roofed house that was for a sale in a Tatar village called Kuchuk-koy. The property was situated about twenty miles along the coast towards Balaklava, on a steep incline not far from the sea. It came with a small tobacco plantation, a vineyard, some wonderful old trees (including pomegranate, fig, olive, walnut) and a splendid sea view from the upstairs balcony. Dreaming of long days in which he would go and sit on the rocks and fish – he told his brother Ivan to bring hooks and a fishing line when he came to stay – in December he bought it, having already bought a plot of land to build a house on in Yalta itself. It seemed as wild as Africa.38
It was not surprising that Chekhov felt he was living in a foreign country when he was in the Crimea. He was. There was a mosque below the house he built, which was situated in a Tatar village, his first gardener was a Tatar called Mustafa, and both the men who came to dig up the old vines on his newly acquired plot wore red fezzes on their heads.39 Even the English Gothic-style dacha he stayed in before his house was built was given a Tatar name – 'Omyur', meaning life.40 Chekhov may have been slightly disparaging about the Tatars when he took in his first superficial view of Yalta as a young man back in 1888, but since then he had been to Sakhalin, had observed at close hand how contemptuously the indigenous population was treated there by the Russian colonists, and was now acutely conscious of a similar dynamic at work in the Crimea, where Tatars were often referred to as Turks, due to the similarity of the language they spoke.
Chekhov found these attitudes abhorrent, and he went out of his way to disassociate himself from the imperialist attitudes of most of his fellow countrymen. As his friend Bunin noted: 'There were many Turks and Caucasians working on the Black Sea coast. Knowing the hostility mingled with contempt which we have for other nationalities in Russia, he would never miss the opportunity of expressing his admiration at how honest and hardworking they were.'41 After coming down to the harbour to meet his mother and sister and their old servant off the steamer St Nikolai in October 1899, Chekhov was horrified to see the assistant captain strike Mustafa in the face when he went to their cabin to pick up their luggage. The officer was appalled to see a Tatar mingling with the first-class passengers; Chekhov was appalled by the blatant racism.42 The scandalous incident was even reported in the local Yalta newspaper.43 As usual, it is the small details (revealed posthumously in memoirs) that give away feelings Chekhov largely kept to himself. During his visit to Yalta in 1894, he had become exasperated with a local journalist who had published a small book on 'Yalta and its Environs'. When Chekhov had encouraged him to write more, the journalist wondered what more there was to say about a place that was just one big station in the summer and a dead provincial town in the winter. Chekhov had suggested he write about the way of life of the Tatars, since he was so lucky to be in the Crimea all year round; he reckoned there must be an interesting legend to tell in each mountain village. It was a topic which had obviously never occurred to the
journalist before, and he objected feebly that he did not know the language, to which Chekhov immediately retorted that their mutual acquaintance did, and could probably help, and that knowledge of the language was perhaps not a necessity anyway.44
When Chekhov moved to Yalta four years later, he was full of appreciation for its wonderful sanitation system, but at the same time he was acutely aware that it had been installed for the benefit of its Russian inhabitants, while the overwhelmingly Tatar villages beyond the town remained 'completely Asiatic'.45 Beyond the exotic-sounding local place names, most Russians at that time did not stop to think about the fate of the Crimean Tatars, who had been emigrating to Turkey in large numbers ever since their land had been taken away from them to become part of the Russian Empire at the end of the eighteenth century. But Chekhov clearly did: all three of the properties he bought in the Crimea were in Tatar villages. He would have been horrified to have been alive in Stalinist Russia when the 200,000 remaining Tatars were taken away and callously deported to Central Asia. In November 1888 he had written to Suvorin: 'A propos Feodosia and the Tatars. The Tatars were swindled out of their land, yet no one spares a thought for their welfare. They need schools. You ought to write an article calling for the money the Ministry pours into that Dorpat University of Sausages for useless German students, to be spent instead on schools for Tatars, who can be valuable to Russia. I would write it myself, but I haven't the skill.'46
Over the centuries, the Crimean peninsula had been home to Cimmerians, Scythians, Tauri, Polovtsians, Khazars, Armenians and Byzantine Greeks (Yalta is derived from the Greek 'yalos', meaning shore), to name just some of the peoples who had passed through the territory, but it was the Tatars who could lay the strongest claim to its 10,000 or so hotly contested square miles. They were a distinct ethnic group, descended partly from the dominant group in the Mongol army which overran Europe in the thirteenth century under the leadership of Genghis Khan's grandson, and partly from the mixture of sedentary peoples who already inhabited the Crimea.47 The most westerly settlement in the vast Mongol Empire was established by the Tatars in the Crimea at Bakhchiserai (meaning 'palace in a garden'), and in the fifteenth century it became the capital of one of several independent khanates formed when the newly Islamicized empire began to collapse. The Crimean Khanate, which was the only one to survive, soon became
uncomfortably sandwiched between two emerging empires: the newly powerful Russians to the north, and the Turks to the south. With such close religious and linguistic ties, it was inevitable that an allegiance was formed with the Ottomans, who essentially ruled the Tatars for the next three centuries. This situation drastically changed when – to telescope many complex events – the Crimea (from the Tatar name Arym or Grim)4S became a protectorate of the Russian Empire in 1772, and was finally absorbed into it in 1783 under Catherine the Great. Russia had finally acquired the access to the Mediterranean it had coveted for so long, along with the fertile lands of southern Ukraine and Russia along the Black and Azov Seas.
Once the Crimea belonged to Russia, it was subject to her laws. Only the nobility could own land, and the Tatars did not belong to the noble class. Therefore, went the argument, the land was not theirs to own. The Russian colonizers thus felt no compunction about seizing the territories, thereby restricting Tatar access to wells and the precious commodity of water, which led eventually to their complete impoverishment. To judge from the account of a British traveller who came to these parts in the 1830s and 1840s, the Russians performed a passable imitation – in reverse – of the Tatar invasion of the Russian lands in the twelfth century. 'Even now, although so many years have elapsed since Russia has established her rule in the Crimea,' he wrote, 'we hear these poor people enumerate the barbarities that were perpetrated upon their country by Potemkin and his host of rapacious agents, with as much vivacity and freshness of colouring as if these horrors had only occurred yesterday.'49
As the Tatars' traditional pastoral way of life collapsed, Catherine's aggressive Russification policies soon compelled them to start emigrating in large numbers, mostly to Turkey. By 1790, 80,000 had already fled, with a further 200,000 leaving after the Crimean War in I860.50 The last wave of emigration took place in 1902-1903, Chekhov's last years in the Crimea, when hundreds of Tatars left for Turkey daily.51 From an initial population of about six million, their numbers had declined to less than a million by the beginning of the twentieth century.52 This is the other side of Crimean life which Chekhov did not want to ignore. When the Russian colonization of the Crimea is viewed in this context, the decision in the 1860s to design much of the opulent new Romanov palace in Livadia in the 'style of a
Tatar cottage'53 seems ;it best tasteless. However, this particular aesthetic had been subjected to 'ethnic cleansing' long before Roosevelt was billeted there for the 1945 Yalta Conference: the palace was remodelled more than once by its imperial inhabitants.
Although the vast majority of the overall population in the Yalta area was Tatar when Chekhov moved south,
