̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Crimea

Stolen World War Two letters help author uncover the hidden lives of army wives

sjr81 — Fri, 09 Sep 2016 09:38:42 +0000

Army Wives by Midge Gillies, Academic Director for Creative Writing at the Institute of Continuing Education (ICE), uses first-hand accounts, diaries and letters to piece together some of the extraordinary stories of servicemen’s wives through history – from Crimea to the war in Afghanistan.

Exploring all aspects of army life across the centuries; from the impact of life-changing injuries to séances, public memorials and death in foreign fields, Army Wives seeks to understand the singular experience of what it means for women to be part of the ‘army family’.

But it is perhaps the wartime letters of Diana Carnegie to her husband James which provide the most personal, colourful and touching accounts of a life wedded to both the soldier she loved, and the uncertain life of a military wife.

“I wanted a distinctive voice that took me beyond the familiar stories of bombing, blackouts and barrage balloons of the Second World War,” said Gillies. “Then I read a piece in ̽��ֱ��Telegraph about a cache of letters being sold at auction which provided an uncensored account of the war that wasn’t available in Pathe newsreels: Diana talked about couples having sex outside Buckingham Palace on VE Day and ‘getting tiddly’ on the way to hear a speech by Ernest Bevin.”

However, Gillies’ joy at outbidding her rivals at auction for the letters was short-lived when the auction house phoned her to reveal that although the letters were sold in good faith, they had in fact been stolen as part of a house burglary more than a decade earlier, and that she should expect a call from Kent Constabulary.

Sophie Carnegie, one of Diana’s two surviving daughters, only learnt about the letters’ reappearance a day after the auction, thanks to a chance phone conversation with someone who mentioned the Telegraph piece in passing. Sophie and her twin sister Charlotte both realised the letters must have come from a chest stolen when their parents’ house was burgled after Diana Carnegie’s death in 1998.

“Fortunately, the family were delighted I wanted to write about their parents and would help me as much as they could,” added Gillies. It didn’t take long to see that this was rich material. Diana wrote about the Home Guard and her fears of invasion right up until the terror of the V1 bombs and, finally, the agony of waiting for her husband to be demobbed at the war’s end. Her voice was witty, sassy and vivid – I liked her immediately.”

As well as Carnegie’s letters, Gillies visited and spoke with around 30 current and former army wives, as well as visiting archives across the UK in a sometimes difficult search for the voices of the women who were both left behind – or made the arduous journey to the front lines with their husbands.

Although it seems incredible today, the wives of British soldiers fighting in the Crimea were among the last of many to witness battle at close quarters; travelling with their husbands or sometimes stowing away on board Royal Navy ships in an effort not to be parted. Army wives, especially those married to lower-ranking men, often suffered terrible hardships and lived in squalor alongside their husbands, spending years in distant parts of the Empire, or accompanying their husbands from one seat of unrest to the other.

When a regiment was ordered abroad, a certain number of places were allocated for the wives of ordinary soldiers. In 1800, six women per 100 were allowed to go with their husbands. When soldiers began to travel further afield this rose to 12 per 100 men in India, China and New South Wales, and by the 1870s it was one in eight soldiers.

̽��ֱ��wives drew lots to determine who would accompany their husbands in a tense and very public ritual that was usually left to the very last minute to avoid the risk of desertion if a man found his wife was to be left behind.

“This most cruel of lucky dips took place either in a room into which the wives filed in order of their husbands’ rank, or sometimes, at the very dock where the soldiers’ ship was waiting,” added Gillies. “This led to harrowing scenes in which distraught wives waited to find out their fate; the wrong scrap of paper or the wrong-coloured pebble meant they may not see their husband for several years – if ever again.”

In her book, Gillies recounts the experience of 24-year-old Nell Butler who followed husband Michael, a private in the 95th Derbyshire, to Crimea aboard troop ships and 20-mile-a-day marches. Watching from a ship as a major battle commenced, Nell pleaded to be allowed ashore to search for Michael after fearing he must have been injured in the fierce fighting.

Once ashore, Nell trudged her way to Balaklava where she searched hospital ships and was mistaken for a nurse; being called into action to hold a soldier’s hand as his leg was amputated without anesthetic. Despite fainting, she earned herself a nursing role, tearing up her petticoats as makeshift bandages to treat the most appalling battlefield injuries.

Eventually, she found the badly-injured Michael and accompanied him to a hospital 300 miles away where she is thought to have served under Florence Nightingale in the hellish conditions that because synonymous with the conflict and the reforms of battlefield medicine and surgery.

Not that conditions for soldiers and their wives were markedly better at home. Army Wives reveals how overcrowding, poor hygiene, and a lack of basic cleaning facilities meant that diseases such as typhoid and tuberculosis were often rife, and their toll catastrophic.

In 1864 there was an outbreak of scarlet fever among army children at Aldershot and between 1865-1874, 120 children living in huts on Woolwich Common died of the same disease or diphtheria, at a much higher rate than in the civilian population.

Disease was by no means confined to home barracks. Husbands returning from service abroad often brought unwanted gifts back to their wives. ̽��ֱ��steady supply of prostitutes to army camps led to one estimate, in the middle of the 19th century, that around one quarter of the British Army had VD.

Rates for infection remained high in India, rising to 438 admissions per 1,000 men in 1890-93, double the rate for the British Army at home, and almost six times the German Army. This was partly why more wives were allowed to follow their husbands to the subcontinent.

In the 20th century, two world wars produced new generations of army wives and widows who lived through separation, injury and the deaths of husbands by forging friendships that lasted into peacetime. More recently, the Cold War and the war on terror has produced a new breed of more independent women who have supported their loved ones through an evolving landscape of combat operations.

“While the roles, expectations and the day-to-day lives of army wives may have altered over time, there were constant recurring themes as I wrote the book,” added Gillies. “Accommodation has always been a bone of contention and the state of army housing remains a real cause for concern today.

“Likewise, although communication is a lot easier than the days of letters and telegrams, our era of instant communication brings with it its own problems when husbands in difficult and demanding situations are available on a daily basis via Facebook or Skype to hear that Jonny isn’t doing his homework or that the washing machine is on the blink when there is nothing they can do about it from such a distance.”

̽��ֱ��strain is evident in divorce rates for soldiers and their wives. ̽��ֱ��figure remains much higher than that for couples in civilian life. So many army wives put their career second to become, effectively, a single mum for the time their husbands are deployed. Likewise, they often face the strain of uprooting their lives, and the children’s lives, time and again for new postings in the UK and overseas.

“ ̽��ֱ��lot of an army wife is waiting, being there to support and almost being gagged in a sense,” said Gillies. “A lot of the wives I spoke to seemed inhibited about speaking to me either because they feared getting their husbands into trouble, or because of their fears about the war on terror after the death of Fusilier Lee Rigby.

“But on the plus side, the friendship networks they develop are fantastic and for those who throw themselves into the life, the experience can be a great one. There was a real sense of service among many of the wives I spoke to – even if their lives can sometimes be very lonely and unpredictable.”

Gillies was also struck by the importance that couples still place on letters. Lyrics for the song, Wherever you are, which was written as a result of Gareth Malone’s TV programme, ̽��ֱ��Choir: Military Wives (2011) and which reached Number One, was based on letters and poems. For army families the letter is still king – even if it is delivered electronically before being printed out as an “e-bluey”. While the rest of us have abandoned letters in favour of texts and other forms of electronic communication the Army should provide rich pickings for future historians.

A stolen chest of letters – penned by an army wife to her husband on the battlefields of the Second World War – has helped a Cambridge academic and biographer trace the history of the women behind the men in uniform.

Diana talked about couples having sex outside Buckingham Palace on VE Day and ‘getting tiddly’.

Midge Gillies

Carnegie Estate

Diana Carnegie with her husband James and her children Charlotte, Sue and Sophie

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̽��ֱ��Crimean Tatar Sürgün: Past and Present

fpjl2 — Tue, 20 May 2014 11:11:19 +0000

On 18 May 1944 a young Crimean Tatar poet named Idris Asanin began a torturous journey to Central Asia at the gunpoint of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. Along with hundreds of thousands of other Crimean Tatars, a Turkic-speaking Sunni Muslim people indigenous to Crimea, Asanin’s family endured an ordeal of mass death and brutal dispossession that claimed the lives of at least thirty percent of the entire population, mainly women, children and the elderly. Thirty percent – that is thirty times the percentage of the British population killed in the Second World War.

̽��ֱ��deportation is known as Sürgün ( ̽��ֱ��Exile) in the Crimean Tatar language. Asanin’s mother and father did not survive it. In Soviet Uzbekistan, where he was forced into a ‘special settlement camp’, the young poet channelled his grief into verse. ‘Menim antım’ (My Pledge, 1944), one of the first literary works in the Crimean Tatar language to confront the deportation, is a defiant scream into darkness. Its stanzas – which would be later cited by Soviet authorities in a trial that sentenced Asanin to twenty-five years in prison – are a catalogue of abuse and alienation: Crimean Tatar funerals are mocked by onlookers, their sacred prayers are interrupted, their dead are forgotten. His lyrical persona cries out and asks, ‘How can I bear it all without succumbing to rage?’

This week, as we mark seventy years since the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, Asanin’s question resounds with a tragic new relevance. After struggling for generations to return to and resettle on the Black Sea peninsula, the Crimean Tatars are now under new threat from ‘local authorities’ under the nominal jurisdiction of the Russian Federation, which illegally occupied and annexed Crimea from Ukraine in March. Many have fled to mainland Ukraine since the annexation, becoming the largest community of IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) in the country. And only days ago, the Crimean Tatars were even forbidden by decree to gather in public and commemorate the deportation and its victims.

On 18 May 2014, they had to break the law to mourn and honour their dead.

̽��ֱ��Crimean Tatars defied the prohibition without – somehow – succumbing to rage. Disavowing religious and political extremism, they have engaged for decades in a committed practice of non-violent resistance against state injustice and oppression. In the late 1980s they prevailed over the Soviet system and won the right to return to Crimea. (In the post-Soviet period, this return from exile was financed by the Ukrainian state. In 1999 alone, for instance, Kyiv allocated twenty million hryven – approximately five million US dollars – to fund Crimean Tatar resettlement programs and attendant infrastructure projects.) Today’s prohibitions and provocations are nothing the Crimean Tatars cannot overcome.

But the resilient dignity of the Crimean Tatar people should not exempt us from outrage. In Britain our public understanding of the present war between Russia and Ukraine – and make no mistake, it is a war – has been clouded by a relentless Kremlin propaganda campaign and by Western media ignorance of a complex ‘theatre’ of conflict. A casual observer seeking to make sense of the diplomatic recriminations, ubiquitous balaclavas, and proxy violence at this point may be tempted to throw her hands up in exasperation and confusion. To navigate between rhetoric and reality and understand what is generally happening along the eastern border of the EU, simply look to the case of the Crimean Tatars since the Russian annexation.

̽��ֱ��reality is that Crimean Tatar civil society and identity are under cruel assault, while the rhetoric from the Kremlin would have us believe otherwise. Only days ago, on Friday 16 May, Vladimir Putin sat down with selected Crimean Tatars in Sochi to mark the anniversary of the ‘inhuman’ (beschelovechnaia) deportation, announcing that the new ‘local authorities [in Crimea] are ready to work’ with them. At that very moment, these ‘local authorities’ in Crimea did exactly the opposite. Sergei Aksenov, the new ‘head’ of the Crimean government known as ‘Goblin’ in the criminal underworld, outlawed all public demonstrations in the entire territory of Crimea until 6 June. ̽��ֱ��purported reason was fear of potential ‘provocations’ from ‘extremists’ tied to the violence in ‘Ukraine’s south-east’. Keep in mind that the interim Ukrainian government in Kyiv – which has actual cause to fear mass gatherings at the moment – has issued no such kind of blanket prohibition on public assembly. In fact, over the weekend of 17-18 May, the Ukrainian capital and other Ukrainian cities were host to a series of solemn public events commemorating the seventy years since the Crimean Tatar Sürgün.

̽��ֱ��real reason for Aksenov’s decree was fear of the content, form and number of the commemorative events being organized by the Crimean Tatar community in Simferopol, Bakhchisarai and beyond. These demonstrations were a powerful refutation of the neo-Soviet pageantry resurgent in Crimea and the Russian Federation. They recalled the atrocities of Stalinism and restored many of the names, faces and stories of its victims. ̽��ֱ��demonstrations also sounded a note of Ukrainian national pride and gave lie to the ‘Potemkin referendum’ that hastily preceded the March annexation. There is a saying: naibilshymy ukraintsiamy v Krymu ie krymski tatary. ‘ ̽��ֱ��greatest Ukrainians in Crimea are the Crimean Tatars.’ ̽��ֱ��vast majority of Crimean Tatars, who comprise more than 12% of the population, recognise Crimea as a part of independent, sovereign Ukraine. They identify overwhelmingly with the Ukrainian national project. And on Sunday, 18 May they made ubiquitous the national flag, the kök bayraq, which evokes the Ukrainian yellow and blue.

On this day in Bakhchisarai, the ancient capital of the Crimean Tatar khanate, two Russian military helicopters flew directly over the crowds of Crimean Tatars who defied the protest ban. Among the assembled, many of whom were schoolchildren, there was an initial moment of quiet terror as the first aircraft passed overhead. ̽��ֱ��sound was deafening. Those speaking via microphones to the crowds could not be heard. But then the crowds shouted in unison at the skies: ‘Qırım Vatan Millet!’ ‘Crimea, Motherland, Nation!’

Undaunted in the face of such intimidation, they also chanted ‘Mustafa! Mustafa!’ They were calling for the man who has prominently represented them for many decades, the seventy year-old Mustafa Dzhemiliev (Mustafa Cemiloğlu, aka Mustafa Abdülcemil Qırımoğlu). He was in Kyiv on this solemn day, and not by choice. Dzhemiliev is presently not allowed to set foot in Crimea. ̽��ֱ��Kremlin’s ‘authorities’ are in effect subjecting him to a new exile.

Although physically diminutive, Dzhemiliev is a giant. As a child, he survived the deportation; as a young man, he survived the Gulag, enduring a 303-day hunger strike in the mid-1970s that garnered headlines around the world. In 1989 he made an emotional return to the ancestral homeland that he fought his entire life to see.

To separate this man from his home today is an extreme injustice, yet it is Dzhemiliev and his compatriots who must fend off accusations of ‘extremism’. On 3 May, when Dzhemiliev attempted to cross at Armiansk from mainland Ukraine into Crimea, many hundreds of Crimean Tatars pushed past Russian troops to meet him. ̽��ֱ��new Prosecutor-General of Crimea characterized this abortive encounter at the border as an ‘extremist action’ and threatened to dissolve the Crimean Tatar parliament, the Mejlis, in recompense. ̽��ֱ��Kremlin’s ‘local authorities’ then made a more targeted threat against Dzhemiliev as well: last week his residence was among a number of Crimean Tatar houses searched by the Russian Security Service (FSB) for evidence of ‘terrorism’. ̽��ֱ��incident led to the hospitalization of his wife, Safinar Dzhemilieva.

In war, wrote Carl von Clausewitz, ‘all action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight.’ Information is elusive and unreliable, suspended between recessive daylight and an encroaching darkness of ignorance, confusion and deception. In Crimea, this darkness has lifted; in Donbas, it has grown. What we now see is that the Kremlin’s presumed gains on the Black Sea peninsula have already meant very real losses for the long-suffering indigenous people of the Black Sea peninsula. Seventy years after Sürgün, the question returns: how to bear it all?

In this article, originally published on the CRASSH website, Dr Rory Finnin - ̽��ֱ�� Lecturer and Director of the Cambridge Ukrainian Studies programme - addresses the banning by Russia of the public commemoration of the deportation of the Tatars in illegally annexed Crimea.

̽��ֱ��vast majority of Crimean Tatars, who comprise more than 12% of the population, recognise Crimea as a part of independent, sovereign Ukraine. They identify overwhelmingly with the Ukrainian national project

Rory Finnin

Jordi Bernabeu Farrús

A woman walks along a railway crossing near Ukrainian tanks on freight cars before their departure from Crimea -- now annexed by Russia -- to other regions of Ukraine in the settlement of Gvardeiskoye near the Crimean city of Simferopol

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A divided Ukraine: Europe’s most dangerous idea

fpjl2 — Fri, 28 Mar 2014 12:49:23 +0000

Pick up any news clipping about Ukraine from the past twenty years, and you are likely to find a cursory description of the country along these lines: ‘Ukraine, roughly the size of France, divided between a pro-EU west and a pro-Russian east’.

A journalist once admitted to me that his editors routinely appended such a refrain even to articles and reports attesting to a different, more complex reality – to a highly diverse but ultimately coherent country. Ukraine was too poorly known in the West beyond nuclear accidents and feuding politicians, he explained. In media discourse it needed a 'brand', an easy shorthand, a consistent diagnosis to account for a host of geopolitical maladies.

A consensus emerged: bipolar disorder.

Ukraine became known as the perennial ‘house divided against itself’, riven along a deep west/east, pro-EU/pro-Russia fault line. Months ago, this reductive cliché used to irritate me. Now it keeps me up at night. As Russian troops amass along Ukraine’s eastern border, it may be the most dangerous idea circulating in Europe today.

Ukraine is not existentially divided. Its body politic is scarred and fractured, but it is whole. Labelling its eastern regions ‘pro-Russian’ – ontologically disposed to a neighbouring state and culture – is not only inaccurate as an historical matter but perilous as an analytical one. We need to appreciate the gravity of this likely scenario: if the Russian Federation invades the east of Ukraine, most residents of such eastern cities as Kharkiv and Donetsk will not open their arms or shrug their shoulders. There will not be a repeat of the Crimean affair, which saw little violence thanks to a Ukrainian military determined not to legitimate Russian provocation with compensatory force.

If Russia invades beyond Crimea, Ukrainians will defend themselves. And Europe will be witness to a war between its largest countries, with dire economic and human costs for us all.

Each day brings new details of a Russian theft of Ukrainian strategic assets – nearly all of Ukraine’s Black Sea Fleet has been sunk or stolen outright – and of a massive Russian military build-up along Ukraine’s eastern border. How massive? ‘Very, very sizeable’, in the words of NATO Supreme Allied Commander Philip Breedlove. ‘Tens of thousands’, say members of the US Armed Services Committee. Andrii Parubii, Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, recently quantified it in this way: 100,000 Russian troops and more than 370 artillery systems, 270 tanks and 140 combat aircraft.

Meanwhile, across the border, Ukrainians in eastern cities like Kharkiv are organizing masterclasses in triage and first aid, and crowd-sourcing the translation of books about the tactics of light infantry. Others in a vocal minority, by contrast, are beckoning the Russian armed forces in public with enthusiastic shouts of ‘Rossiia!’. Many of these demonstrators are actually touring Russian provocateurs. Kharkiv journalists have devised a canny way to determine their provenance: they simply ask them what time it is. Western Russia is two hours ahead of Ukraine. As it turns out, watches and smartphones tend to run very fast at these demonstrations.

This Russian military escalation and these coordinated public demonstrations in support of Russian intervention may not alarm the casual observer in Britain, who has been told a story about the ‘pro-Russian’ complexion of Ukraine’s east for far too long. But we should be alarmed. Let me explain by stating what should be obvious: Ukraine’s east is ‘pro-Ukrainian’. Its Ukrainian identity is idiosyncratic and contested, but it is dominant. Moreover, it has been historically influential. Kharkiv, in fact, is a central birthplace of the modern Ukrainian national idea.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Kharkiv ̽��ֱ�� was a seminal bastion of Ukrainian Romantic thought, a site of vigorous heritage-gathering and artistic creation. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ��’s professors – Amvrosii Metlynsky, Petro Hulak-Artemovsky – as well as its students – Mykola Kostomarov, Levko Borovykovsky – strove to elevate the Ukrainian vernacular to the status of a literary language, publishing original poetry and historical research in such Kharkiv journals as ̽��ֱ��Ukrainian Herald, ̽��ֱ��Ukrainian Digest, ̽��ֱ��Ukrainian Journal and ̽��ֱ��Ukrainian Almanac. By 1876, when the tsar explicitly banned the Ukrainian language from the public life of the Russian Empire, such periodicals ceased to exist in Kharkiv. But they nonetheless laid the ground for an explosion of Ukrainian cultural production in the twentieth century, when Kharkiv was the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and in the twenty-first century, when Kharkiv became accustomed to celebrating the accolades of its native son Serhii Zhadan, one of Ukraine’s most popular writers.

And what about Donetsk, widely known in the West as a ‘pro-Russian’ city populated by miners, oligarchs and football stars? Founded in 1879 by Welsh industrialist John Hughes, Donetsk is an unofficial capital of the Ukrainian national rukh oporu, the dissident ‘defence movement’ that championed the rights of Ukrainians and many other groups in the Soviet era. Ivan Dziuba, who graduated from the Donetsk Pedagogical Institute, wrote the classic underground exposé of Soviet nationalities policy, Internationalism or Russification?; Mykola Rudenko, who penned touching poetic reflections about his Donetsk childhood, led the Ukrainian Helsinki Group; Vasyl Stus, who also attended the Donetsk Pedagogical Institute, was a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group and the greatest Ukrainian poet of the twentieth century; and Oleksa Tykhy, who worked in Donetsk as a biology teacher, courageously confronted Soviet officialdom over the suppression of Ukrainian national culture. All of these prominent figures were imprisoned for ‘pro-Ukrainian’ activities; both Stus and Tykhy died in the gulag as late as the mid-1980s.

And today? Over the past decade, poll after poll of respondents in Ukraine’s eastern oblasts reveal – to entertain the reductive label one final time – a majority ‘pro-Ukrainian’ sentiment. In a 2005 Razumkov Centre study, for instance, 67% of citizens from Ukraine’s east answered positively in response to the question ‘Do you consider yourself a patriot of Ukraine?’, while 22% answered negatively and 11% found it difficult to answer at all. Likewise, in a 2006 Razumkov Centre study, 62% of respondents in the east said ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Would you choose Ukraine as your fatherland if you had the choice?’, while 20% said ‘No’ and 18% ‘Hard to say’. Keep in mind that in Ukraine per capita GDP was $2,303 in 2006; in Russia it was $6,947. Even despite economic disparity with its powerful neighbour, most residents in Ukraine’s east have made a point of embracing the Ukrainian state as their home.

It is high time we listened to them. With another Russian invasion of Ukraine’s sovereign territory on the horizon, we cannot afford to retreat to stale, intellectually lazy and above all dangerous clichés about Ukraine’s ‘pro-EU’ and ‘pro-Russian’ halves. Ukraine is a large, diverse country that has managed its many differences admirably since winning independence in 1991. Today the Kremlin is trying to fetishize, manipulate and exaggerate these differences through brute force, intimidation, provocation, and propagandistic deception – simply because the Ukrainian people ousted a corrupt, criminal president and fought to determine their own destiny. War is imminent, and the Kremlin is counting on our ignorance and on our tacit questioning of Ukraine’s sovereignty over its eastern territory. We need to respond not only by supporting the new Ukrainian government with ambitious financial assistance but by making Ukrainians, at last, the subjects of their own story.

Originally published with the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

In this article, originally published on the CRASSH website, Dr Rory Finnin - ̽��ֱ�� Lecturer and Director of the Cambridge Ukrainian Studies programme - addresses the notion of a 'divided' Ukraine and the current military escalation by Russia.

We cannot afford to retreat to stale, intellectually lazy and above all dangerous clichés about Ukraine’s ‘pro-EU’ and ‘pro-Russian’ halves

Rory Finnin

Sasha Maksymenko

Pray for Ukraine

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