00:04 Kelly
From the Imperiia project at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, I'm Kelly O'Neill. This is the MapMaker.
00:20 Valerie
Approximately 430 years ago, the famous question "What's in a name?" was raised by Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet. Well, in the case of Crimea, it turns out a name can contain quite a bit. In this episode, we'll delve into the changing place names or toponyms of Crimea, discussing the ways in which these toponyms can inform our understanding of population movements, Imperial Soviet (and now Russian) expansion into this contested Peninsula. Putin's 2014 claim that Crimea is rightfully Russia's "Крым наш", to justify the annexation of Crimea and the ongoing war in Ukraine make these questions especially timely and all the more worth answering. Is Crimea historically Russian? What can changing place names tell us about the ways in which empires and states incorporate subjugated territories?
01:11 Kelly
If you tuned into the first three episodes of this podcast, you already know something about Crimea, a peninsula that juts out into the northern part of the Black Sea. Even if you haven't been listening to us, you've probably heard of this place. Right? The international community recognizes it as Ukrainian territory, but the Russian Federation annexed it illegally in March of 2014. And it has been uh cropping up in the news ever since as one of the contested sites in Russia's war against Ukraine. Today, we're talking about one of the things that really makes Crimea unique. Its place names. Its toponyms. I was born in a place called Beverly, a town that got its name in 1668. And really couldn't be farther away from Crimea. Here to help me in this discussion is my partner in Toponymical crime. Valerie Brown, Valerie is a first year graduate student here at Harvard. She's working on a master's degree in Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies. Hi, Valerie!
02:15 Valerie
Hi, Kelly! Speaking of toponyms, I was born in a place called Martinsburg, which was named after the Loyalist Thomas Martin in 1772.
02:26 Kelly
Ah, so your place name goes back to the reign of Catherine the Great, one of my very favorite moments in all of history. I love it. I love it. Okay, so Valerie, it was kind of your idea to talk about toponyms. Why?
02:39 Valerie
Yeah, so as Kelly can attest, I was not super familiar with GIS, geographic information systems, or anything really related to cartography. When I began this project, however, I did have a degree in languages and literatures under my belt, and thought that entering this map through that lens, through looking at the way place names change over time would be a really fruitful means of looking at the structures of power in the region, as well as the ways in which populations shift.
03:18 Kelly
I love it. So you had a map in front of you, and where other people might have focused on the boundary lines or the, you know, depiction of water resources or any number of other things, your eye was drawn to the place names, and that is your entry point into the map.
03:38 Valerie
Yes.
03:39 Kelly
So okay, tell us about this map. What is this map that I admit I kind of dropped in your lap, and you've had to deal with it for much of the last academic year. Tell us about this map?
03:49 Valerie
Absolutely. So the first time I was exposed to this map in person, Kelly, unrolled this entire carpet of a map. Uh and I was immediately struck by the fact that this map not only shows the topography of the region, it's a military topographical map that was created by General Mayor Mukhin in 1817. So it not only showed the mountains and the rivers as Kelly mentioned, it was also chock full of these Crimean Tatar, mostly, toponyms.
04:31 Kelly
Yeah, so if you happen to have listened to previous episodes of the Mapmaker podcast, you will already know something about this map. We talked a lot before about an English language map that was published in the 1850s right around the time of the Crimean War. It was published by an Englishman who stole a Russian map from a friend's library and copied it: he was basically a map thief. And the map that he stole was the one you've been working on, right. So you're working on the original version of this this military topographical map of Crimea?
05:11 Valerie
Yes, I am.
05:15 Kelly
So um Crimean place names, I think it might be useful to give everyone a sense of what these sounds like.
05:22 Valerie
All right. So read from the map?
05:26 Kelly
Yeah. From, from this map. From 1817. Give us a sense of what Crimea sounded like.
05:29 Valerie
All right. So there's Садыр [Sadır; Sadyr].[1]
05:34 Kelly
And let's see. Курулу-Кенегес [Quruvlı Kenegez; Kurulu-Keneges].
05:39 Valerie
Джага-Шейх-Эли [Cağa Şeyh Eli; Dzhaga-Sheikh-Eli]
05:41 Kelly
Джума-Кисек [Dzhuma-Kisek]
05:44 Valerie
Тереклы-Китай; [Terekli Qıtay; Terekly-Kitay]
05:48 Kelly
Ашага-Мамут-Султан [Ashaga Mahmud Sultan]. And that might be one of my favorites actually.
05:52 Valerie
Your pronunciation is so much better than mine, Kelly.
05:56 Kelly
No, no. It's not true.
06:00 Valerie
Kelly's actually studied uh Turkish right? Or Tatar.
06:04 Kelly
Turkish? Yes. As every good Russianist must at some point in their life.
06:08 Valerie
I'll get there someday.
06:10 Kelly
So how many toponyms are on this map approximately?
06:13 Valerie
Around 1800.
06:16 Kelly
Okay. So we are dealing with about 1800 names of places that existed in the 19th century, in the early 19th century. Villages and towns. These are names of settled places rather than names of rivers and mountains and things that we're primarily talking about. Right?
06:32 Valerie
Yes. Settled places or recently abandoned settled places.
06:35 Kelly
Aha! Okay. So um recently abandoned settled places, maybe you can tell me what it is - give me a sense of what one learns about Crimea, simply by looking at the place names instead of looking at where the rivers are, and where the boundary lines are? What are what are some of the things you take away from this?
06:57 Valerie
Absolutely. So of course, if I was only looking at the Mukhin map for information about these toponyms, I wouldn't garner that much information. However, through, you know, triangulating with uh sources, actually, in Crimea, uh I was able to find out so much about the ways in which these villages were emptied. The Crimean side loves to use the word “liquidated” uh and these um sort of historical resources that were in this Wikipedia database, uh were really helpful in me, sort of getting a sense of uh what all happened, why, why these places on the map that are indicated by Mukhin, as empty, or as пуст or пустые, like how that occurred.
08:00 Kelly
Can you describe the task I gave you when I handed you this map?
08:03 Valerie
Yes, absolutely. So I was essentially looking at these historic places, and trying to find out if they still existed.
08:16 Kelly
And how does one go about doing that? So you're basically taking a map that was produced, you know, almost 200 years ago, and extracting the list of place names, and you're trying to match it up with what we know about Crimea in the modern world? How does one go through that matching process?
08:33 Valerie
So, you know, oftentimes, professors when you're researching something will tell you that Wikipedia is not the best source. However, in this case, it proved to be a treasure trove of information about Crimea, and about the history of the toponyms that I was looking at. So this Wikipedia site was able to give me a wealth of information about the ways in which the populations of in these settlements, you know, emptied out over time, or were repopulated and the ways that the names changed.
09:16 Kelly
So when you're thinking about the history of the places that you encountered on this map from 1817, are there other moments in time um that you would flag as really important for understanding their path from the early 18th century to this moment in 2024?
09:35 Valerie
Oh, absolutely. I would say that moment happened in 1944. When I was looking at these Wikipedia sources, I was struck by the fact that many of the Crimean Tatar place names that I had seen in the Mukhin map had been completely transformed into sort of like Russified Soviet names. I think a turning point for Crimean toponyms happened in 1944 with the deportation of the Crimean Tatars also called in Crimean Tatar the Surgun. Essentially what happened was in the wake of the German invasion of Crimea, Stalin labeled many of the Crimean Tatars as collaborators with the Germans and used this to justify deporting most of the Crimean Tatar population. So around 230,000 Crimean Tatars were deported in the span of two days, the 18th through the 20th of May in 1944, which was actually almost exactly 80 years ago.
10:56 Kelly
It's a really remarkable episode of ethnic cleansing, right and incredibly efficient, incredibly thorough. So Stalin sweeps in removes the Crimean Tatars from the peninsula, and he could have stopped right there. But he didn't right? There was another step that he felt was necessary.
11:12 Valerie
Yes, absolutely. So, in 1944, an order from the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet appeared on the desks of local officials in Crimea. And it essentially commanded that they rename all of the sort of foreign place names in Crimea to their proper Russian or Soviet names.
11:45 Kelly
So these foreign place names that existed, were place names that were derived from mainly Turkic languages, right?
11:54 Valerie
Yes.
11:55 Kelly
And kind of a hodgepodge of others right? There there were a couple of Slavic place names. There were some derived from Greek and Mongolian. But let's, we can just generalize and generalize a bit and call them mainly Turkic. What were these place names? How did Crimean Tatars name places? What kinds of names did they use for their settlements? What were the building blocks?
12:17 Valerie
Absolutely. So a lot of the place names in Crimea are extremely tied to the natural world.
12:27 Kelly
Yeah, the natural world. You're absolutely right. It played a really important role in the construction of place names of toponyms in Crimea. So there would be references to specific rivers and wells and springs, because, in large part because water resources were so important, right? There's a large chunk of Crimean Tatar place names that are associated with personal names, the names of members of influential clans of Crimea. There are ethnonyms that are embedded in Crimean Tatar place names. There are lots of I think several villages in Crimea named Oyrat, which was an, an ethnic group from Mongolia, right. And so there are ethnonyms, there are personal names. One of my favorite categories are as a kind of building block are the more general attributes, there are a lot of words to describe color, and orientation and the size of something that are built into Crimean place names. So you'll find, you know, the “black mound” or the “beautiful pasture” or things like that. So you get this really, really rich word stock that was used to describe settlements throughout the peninsula. And as you said, there were roughly 1500 of these place names that had persisted from, you know, throughout the Russian imperial period right, Russia was annexed, Russia annexed Crimea in 1783. The place names had remained largely intact until Stalin came along and, and changed everything. So what kinds of names did Soviet authorities come up with to replace the Crimean Tatar names?
14:14 Valerie
Yeah, so as I was sort of confronted with the data in the digital modern map of Crimea I was really struck by how simplistic and sort of primitive a lot of the toponyms that were chosen by the Soviet officials were.
14:33 Kelly
What do you mean by that?
14:35 Valerie
Uh, so places like Чеголтай-Татарский [Tatar Çağaltay; Chegoltay-Tatarsky] were named “Faraway.” Places like Mamçıq [Мамшик; Mamchik] were named “Place of the Ants.”
14:45 Kelly
Oh say it in Russian. Say it in Russian.
14:50 Valerie
Муравьево [Murav’yevo]. [laughter] Places like Tak-Buzar were named Овощное [Ovoshnoye], which means vegetable. Places like Biy Suv Küyçe [Бий-Су-Ковче; Bii-Su-Kovche], renamed Яркое [Yarkoye], which means bright. And, you know, as a Russian speaker, I was like, what is this? It just seems like all of these names are really superficial. And also just related to extractable materials. So referencing sort of agricultural things, or maybe the the type of soil in the region, but it didn't feel as though these these names had deep roots.
15:29 Kelly
Right? So you get something if in Crimean Tatar, you might have a place name that's called, you know, the Yellow Salt Lake. And one of these new kind of “Sovietized” place names might be Place of the Lake. Both place names have a water body in them, but somehow they mean something really different. They feel different on the tongue, they feel different to us in terms of their, their cultural resonance, right? Озерное [Ozernoye] is one of the place names that crops up in this new list of Soviet place names I had, I couldn't resist doing a search to find out how many villages there are called Озерное [Ozernoye] in Russia. There are roughly 60 throughout Russia, and there are 73 places called Озерное [Ozernoye] if you include Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine. So you're absolutely right. They're kind of taking these general place names and imposing them on the Crimean landscape. So the question I have is why?
16:29 Valerie
So a lot of this has to do with the pressure to rename this place as quickly as possible to homogenize it and incorporate it into the Russian territory. Pretty much overnight if we're talking in bureaucratic terms
16:47 Kelly
And when you say Russian territory, do you mean Russian? Not Soviet?
16:52 Valerie
Yes. So in 1945, the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was actually incorporated into the Russian Federative Socialist Republic.
17:08 Kelly
It's a mouthful.
17:11 Valerie
Yes, it is quite a mouthful. I'm always scared, I'm going to mess up the acronym. But yes.
17:15 Kelly
So this is strange. So the Autonomous Crimean Republic, you know, territory gets subsumed into the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, and does it stay there?
17:30 Valerie
No, it does not. Because in 1954, Khrushchev and the really, I listened to a podcast about this recently. Khrushchev gets a bad rap for by the Russians who were opposed to Crimea being Ukrainian, which, by the way, it still is. The decision to Crimea to Ukraine was not unilateral on the part of Khrushchev. It was, there was consensus across the board that it would be best for Crimea to go to Ukraine, especially considering the fact that Ukraine is uh a very important supply of fresh water for the peninsula.
18:16 Kelly
Absolutely. Right. So this transfer happens in 1954. And in 19- was it -57 The Soviet authorities begin building the North Crimean canal, right, which connects the Dnieper river to Crimea and provides 85% of Crimea is freshwater supply. So there are these direct kind of physical connections between the Ukrainian territory and Crimea itself. So when Crimea gets transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, does it get a new batch of place names?
18:53 Valerie
Unfortunately, no. Because I think the main goal of the renaming that occurred after the deportation of the Crimean Tatars was to assert that Crimea was no longer a place that was owned by the indigenous community, the Crimea, Crimean Tatars, Ukraine was sort of claimed for Slavic peoples and the Ukrainian settlers that would be brought there to farm the land, to be on the collective farms in Crimea, and also the Russian settlers that would be imported in by Stalin. And so this, this claim that Crimea was historically Slavic, or historically Russian, was really forcefully asserted by the changing of the of the place names, and there are honestly, places in Crimea that were renamed to Slavyanskaya, which means Slavic, so it's a little on the nose the way that they were trying to claim it as being as completely just belonging to Slavic peoples who were imported in after the native populations were deported.
20:17 Kelly
So from what you've described, there are a lot of elements of this Crimean kind of toponymical experience that are very unique. But would you say that there are other places to look either in the post-Soviet world or elsewhere in the world where you see similar processes at work? Or is this really just a very unique thing that we're looking at?
20:41 Valerie
I would say, Crimea is unique in that it's the the toponym changes that it's kind of experienced very volatile. And I think Crimea is like one of the few places that has had like, over like four rounds of complete renaming, or at least like a large batch of toponyms being renamed. This happened during the era of Imperial Russia during Catherine's reign, and also occurred in the Soviet Union. So there wasn't just a renaming that occurred after 1944, there were three waves of renaming after the Crimean Tatars were deported 1944, 1945, and the bulk of the toponyms that I've worked with thus far, were renamed in 1948, actually, after Stalin visited the peninsula personally.
21:40 Kelly
Hmmmm....So he maybe knew something of the history of Catherine the Great's personal journey to Crimea in 1787, was following in her illustrious footsteps.
21:49 Valerie
Perhaps, Stalin had great admiration for autocrats.
21:53 Kelly
I suppose he did.
21:56 Valerie
And as we say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
22:01 Kelly
So it is. Okay, so we've been talking about Crimea in very general terms, and we have said the names of a couple of places, but I wonder if you could take us in kind of up close and personal to a particular village or two where you think that there's a, you know, an interesting story to be told.
22:22 Valerie
So one toponym that had a particularly interesting trajectory is Küçük Alqalı [Kuchuk-Alkaly]. So this place began as a Crimean Tatar village that mostly emptied out in the wake of the Crimean War, so in the 1860s. In 1924, it became a Jewish communal settlement by the name of Mishmar. But only a decade later, local populations started protesting the presence of a Jewish commune. So this place was liquidated by the Soviet authorities and the land was promptly turned into a very Soviet collective farm called “Lenin's testaments,” which is almost biblical sounding.
23:16 Kelly
And that is the name that the place still has?
23:19 Valerie
Yes! The place is still called “Lenin's testaments” and there are many other Soviet toponyms that continue to exist in Crimea.
23:30 Kelly
So as we've been talking about this, it almost feels like the Crimean Tatars had a crucial role to play in naming places in the distant distant past. They then were kind of forced away from their homeland from their territory and the way we've been describing it anyway, they've been kind of sitting on the periphery of the story watching these settlements get renamed and reclaimed by various versions of Russian and Soviet authorities. Um is there, do they play any role now? What is the relationship of the Crimean Tatar population to Crimea, and maybe, maybe to its place names?
24:15 Valerie
Absolutely. I think that there have been many movements among Crimean Tatars to sort of reclaim these toponyms and to reclaim Crimea as theirs because for so many years, it was Russified. Large portions of the Crimean Tatar population only really returned in the 1990s. And so that movement has kind of it's still in its early stages, but I think it's absolutely been accelerated by the war. And I think that mainland Ukraine is also very interested in allowing the local population, the indigenous population of Crimea, to really take ownership of their territory and to resurrect those Crimean toponyms.
25:11 Kelly
So when we look at this map that was published in 1817 by Russian military topographers, what do we actually see?
25:23 Valerie
We see Stalin, we see Imperial conquest, and I mean, most of all, for me, I see the current war in Ukraine.
25:35 Kelly
Okay, so you have a background in literature and linguistics, and you spent a lot of time over the last 10 months studying this map. But why should anyone else care about Crimean place names?
25:48 Valerie
Um, because it gives you amazing insights into the way that not only imperial powers, but also Soviet powers legitimated their control over this, these territories. And not only that, but made historical claims about their lasting presence in the region.
26:06 Kelly
Is there… what's an example of that? Can you, can you prove that? Sounds great, but is it true?
26:13 Valerie
Absolutely. So I think example A is what we see, coming from Putin today. When Crimea was annexed in 2014 a big slogan of that campaign was Крым наш – “Crimea is Ours.” And a lot of the propaganda coming from that campaign, essentially centered around the fact that Crimea was historically Russian. The thing is, when looking at this Mukhin map, you see how tenuous and shaky those claims are, because I had a very rough time of it, triangulating some of these toponyms. So looking them up in Wikipedia was actually a trial. Kelly can attest to the fact that at the beginning of my research assistantship, I kept saying, Kelly, I can't find any of these toponyms in Wikipedia. And then we had a conversation about how the Russian ear was not very familiar with the sounds of Turkic languages. And so a lot of the toponyms that I encountered in the Mukhin map, were misspelled or had inversions, so I kind of had to take that into account, an example of some of those misspellings are um so Маркур [Markur] turned into Маркуль [Markul’]. In the Mukhin map, um, Алдермен [Aldermen] turned into Алмердан [Almerdan], Якшибай [Yahşı Bay; Yakshibay] turned into Якшиныки [Yakshinyki], so you can imagine my confusion, and the difficulties that I encountered.
27:59 Kelly
So I think in my normal life, as a historian, I'm pretty resistant to the idea that we need to understand the documents of the past through contemporary gaze, I think it makes me feel uncomfortable on a certain level. But I think that this conversation has really drawn attention to the fact that no single document exists in a single moment in time, right? I mean, all of what all the insight that you've brought to this map really shows that when we think about Crimean space and the way that Crimea has been named, and claimed and reinvented, it's a story with a lot of history, the chronology is really entangled. It folds in on itself and there is an undeniable link to the present, right? And it just can't be shaken off. So I think one of the things that I take away from this conversation is kind of a, you know, call to not necessarily action but engagement with that relationship between past and present, and maybe I need to get over my own insecurities about talking about the present when I'm studying the past. So I'm pretty grateful to you for that.
29:15 Valerie
Absolutely Kelly, it was a pleasure to chat with you.
29:18 Kelly
Let’s do it again sometime.
29:19 Valerie
Absolutely I would love that!
29:20 Kelly
Thanks Valerie
29:22 Valerie
Thanks Kelly
[1] When place names are quoted from the Mukhin map they are given first in the Russian spelling, with Crimean Tatar and English versions in brackets.