Blood of Others: An Urgent New Cultural History of Crimea
Date and time:
Friday 25 November, 2022
18:30 - 20:00
Location:
Europe House
32 Smith Square
London
SW1P 3EU
Join Rory Finnin in conversation with James Meek to discover an urgent new cultural history of Crimea and the Black Sea region.
Among many territories occupied by the Russian Federation, Rory Finnin writes, “Crimea juts into the map of the Black Sea like a trigger. We forget its significance at our peril.”
In his new book, Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity (University of Toronto Press, May 2022), Finnin offers a cultural history of Crimea and the Black Sea region by confronting the phenomenon of Russian and Soviet settler colonialism, which he calls “a defining historical and political phenomenon too often swept under the academic rug and ignored in political discourse.”
The event at the centre of the book is Stalin’s 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars, which sought to “efface and replace” Crimea’s indigenous peoples. Finnin traces the long aftermath of the deportation in Ukrainian, Russian, Crimean Tatar, and Turkish cultures and tells an inspirational story of artists and activists who fought back against the Kremlin -- and won.
In the process, Finnin places Lesia Ukraïnka in conversation with Hasan Çergeyev, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky with Üsein Şâmil Toktargazy, Serhiy Zhadan with Seyare Kökçe, and much more. The common thread connecting their works is a struggle against Russian imperial power for the right to be at home. He also brings to the fore literature and art written after Russia's breakneck annexation of Crimea in 2014, with special attention paid to Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar works that enrich the idea of Ukraine as a "homeland of homelands."
"A brilliant book by the UK’s most important scholar of Ukraine." Anne Applebaum, Staff Writer, The Atlantic, Senior Fellow, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History and Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine.
Blood of Others “is a book about the tragedy of the past that inspires optimism about the future, and an essential read for anyone interested in the literature, history, and politics of the Black Sea region." Serhii Plokhy, Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History, Harvard University and author of The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present.
The event is co-organised by the European Parliament Liaison Office in the United Kingdom and the Ukrainian Institute London.
Speaker
Rory Finnin
Rory Finnin is University Associate Professor of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Cambridge. He launched Cambridge Ukrainian Studies in 2008. He is former Head of the Department of Slavonic Studies (2014-18) and former Chair of the Cambridge Committee for Russian and East European Studies (CamCREES) (2011-18). Rory Finnin is a trustee of the Ukrainian Institute London.
Moderator
James Meek
James Meek is a novelist and journalist. He grew up in Scotland, lived in Ukraine and Russia in the 1990s, and now lives in London. He has published two books of short stories, two collections of essays and six novels, the most recent of which is To Calais, In Ordinary Time. He is a contributing editor to the London Review of Books.
