However, this was not a holiday. The port of Sevastopol remained in the enemy’s hands. As each mile of hinterland fell to the Red Army, more refugee detachments of the Wehrmacht and its Romanian allies arrived in the port city. At the beginning of May, the commander of the German Seventeenth Army in Sevastopol, Generaloberst Edwin Jaenicke, expressed doubts that his troops were in a condition to withstand the predicted Soviet blow. He was replaced by a more loyal Nazi, Karl Allmedinger. Hitler had ordered that there was to be no question of surrendering the port. It had held out for 250 days at the beginning of the war and now it was commanded to sustain a second siege. The city’s readiness for this would be tested at once. On 5 May, two days after Jaenicke’s removal, the Soviets attacked.
The first onslaught came from the north. On 7 May, a second wave advanced towards the famous Sapun ridge, whose name evokes the foaming sweat of horses galloping to reach the higher ground.107 Less than a hundred years before, when British and French forces had faced Todleben’s Russians in the Crimean War, the valley all around had echoed to the sound of cannon fire, the smoke and dust of battle breaking for a second now and then to show a glint of gold braid or a flash of steel. This time the landscape trembled to the shudder of Katyushas and the drone of planes. After the mortars came the men. Some were professionals and some mere boys, some communists and some, the blighted, shtrafniki. But for the most part, they were nothing like the ill-equipped, half-trained conscripts of 1941. The troops of 1944 knew their business, and for this campaign they were well supplied. Soviet industry had filled their ammunition belts, American lend-lease provided them with transport and tinned food. Among the corpses, when the scavengers came by, there would be pickings of watches, knives, pens and Gillette razor blades. Even their boots, these days, were often better than the German ones.108
The port of Sevastopol held less than a week. A more realistic leadership might have evacuated the remaining German troops well in advance of the collapse, but Hitler still refused to cede his prize. Now the frightened, injured and leaderless men who remained in the city panicked before the Soviet advance. Some managed to cram into the few ships that were putting out towards the west, while others surrendered with their backs to the ruined harbour. The rest fled down the coast towards the ancient settlement of Kherson. Its cliff-top ruins would become a killing field. The Soviets trapped the survivors on the limestone rocks and blasted them with every kind of fire. Those who were not cut down in the grey dust drowned when they leapt into the sea. Werth, who arrived within days of the last battle, described the place as ‘gruesome’. ‘All the area in front of the Earth Wall and beyond was ploughed up by thousands of shells,’ he wrote, ‘and scorched by the fire of Katyusha mortars… The ground was littered with hundreds of German rifles, bayonets, and other arms and ammunition.’ It was also ‘scattered with thousands of pieces of paper – photographs, snapshots, passports, maps, private letters – and even a volume of Nietzsche carried to the end by some Nazi superman’.109 Estimates vary, but it is likely that at least 25,000 people perished or were captured in this one defeat.110
The liberation of the Crimea was complete by 13 May, but there was one group of Soviet citizens who would not celebrate for long. The Tatars, a people who could claim the Scythians, Goths and Greeks among their ancestors, had lived and farmed in the Crimea for at least 600 years.111 Russian settlement, which dated from the eighteenth century, had never brought them luck. Their loyalties, like their language, their architecture and their easygoing Muslim faith, were more inclined towards the Turks of the Black Sea’s opposite shore. Like peasants everywhere, the farmers among them also hated the collectives, and in 1941, some of them saw the invasion as a chance to throw off the unwanted yoke of Soviet rule. Though many thousands of ethnic Tatars fought in the Red Army, a number of those who remained behind welcomed the Germans as liberators, or at least as an alternative to Stalinist dictatorship. Meanwhile, a small number of the Tatar soldiers held as prisoners of war in German camps had taken the only route to survival, as they saw it, and joined the anti-Soviet Tatar legion.112 Just one week after the rout at Kherson, the entire Tatar population of the Crimea would pay the price.
That night, 18 May 1944, thousands of Tatar families were woken in the small hours before sunrise by a knock on the door. When they answered, they found that their visitors were armed. While the Red Army had been clearing the last fascists from the Crimea, tens of thousands of NKVD soldiers had been brought into the rural settlements and coastal villages where Tatars lived. Now these police were giving orders to pack quickly, to collect the children and to be ready outside, on the road, in fifteen minutes. Many Tatars had seen the Nazis doing much the same in 1941, when local Jews were rounded up, each carrying a precious cardboard case of clothes and food. ‘We all thought we were going to die,’ survivors of this other night recall. The irony was that this time the men with the guns were Soviet fellow citizens.
Just under 200,000 people, or 47,000 families, most of them headed by women or older men, were herded to the stations and locked into cattle trucks that night.113 The process was efficient, quick. Indeed, the NKVD troops already had experience. The wagons that were used to take the Tatars east had just returned from other human transport missions – most recently, the deportation of the mountain peoples of Chechnya, Ingushetiya and the autonomous republic of Kabardino-Balkariya.114 The process, organized by NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria, amounted to a smooth routine. The trucks, as witnesses observed, were still smeared with the faeces and dried blood of the last consignments of deportees.115 There would be stops along the way – if the passengers were lucky – to bundle out the bodies of those who died from heat, thirst or the typhus that soon raged within the crowded cars. About 8,000 deportees are thought to have perished in the air-less, stinking wagons. The rest would have to build new lives from nothing when they arrived in central Asia. They would find little welcome there. Their new hosts, fellow Muslims as well as fellow Soviets, would accept, for a while, the tale that all Tatars, as a people, were traitors.
Some of the deportees were genuine collaborators; some had indeed helped to support the new Nazi regime.116 But many had been dedicated to the Soviet cause. Among the latter were numbers of partisans, including the political officers Ahmetov and Isaev, both of whom, as members of the 5th partisan brigade, had been helping the Red Army as recently as April 1944. At least four Heroes of the Soviet Union, all of them decorated for their part in the Soviet landings at Kerch in November 1943, were also in the trucks.117 So were the wives, parents and children of soldiers who were still serving at the front, to say nothing of the families of combatants who had died. While Russian soldiers, including Fedor Kuznetsov, looked forward to new lives in the Crimea, delighted to have found, through army life, a place where they could thrive after the war, the Tatars in the same army would soon find that they had no home.
‘There were thirty-four different nationalities in the forest,’ a partisan who spent her war in the Crimea remembered. ‘Most of them were Russians, of course, but there were Ukrainians, Belorussians, Crimean Tatars, Greeks, Armenians, Georgians, Slovaks, Czechs and Spanish veterans of the civil war. We made absolutely no distinction between them all.’ The citizenship that she assigned to herself, and that she still honours, was ‘Soviet’. It was the label that made greatest sense in the political universe in which she lived, the name that conjured dreams of brotherhood, equality and proletarian justice for all. It also matched the government’s official line, the propaganda of the Sovinformburo. But by the war’s end, 1,600,000 Soviet members of minority ethnic groups had been singled out, tarred with a racist brush and deported – in the Soviet Union’s name – from the lands in which their ancestors had lived. Within a few years – just after the peace – about a third were dead.