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 loca1 place aames, most Russians at that time did not stop to think about the fate of the Crimeah Tatars, who had been emigrating to Turkey in large numbers ever since then: 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 remaning 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
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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 wr. ;e 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 oetween two emerging empires: the newly powerful Russians to the north, and the Turks to the south. With such close religious and lingi listic 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 Grimjt8 became a protectorate of the Russian Empire in 1772, and was finally absorbed into it 'n 1783 under Catherine the Great. Russia had finally acquired the access to the Mediterranean it had coveted for so long, along with the fert le 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 estabi.shed 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 Russificarion 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 I8 60.50 The last wave of emigration took place in 1902-1903, Chekhov's last years in the C:.mea, 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
itar cottage'53 seems at 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 n the Yalta area was Tatar when Chekhov moved south, with Russians a small minority, the ratio was reversed m the town of Yalta tself. The ten per cent of the Tatar population in the Crimea who lived in towns resided in separate
quarters and came into little contact with the Russian 'nhabitants. The rest
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Had retreated into the mountains or deep into the steppe. An even smaller ethnic minority m the Crimea were the Turkic-speaking Karaim Jews, who numbered no more than 13,000 in the whole of Tsarist Russia. One of them became Chekhov's trusted friend. Isaak Sinani, who was someone he got to know when he first went to Yalta in 1889, was renowned as a bibliophile and an expert on the Crimea's ethnic groups. It is telling chat Chekhov should specifically refer со h;m as 'the Karaim Sinani' when writing from Siberia to let his sister know she should pick up the telegram he had sent her at the bookshop where his friend worked.54 By the time Chekhov moved to Yalta, Sinani had acquired his own bookshop.55