The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #7574   Message #2605500
Posted By: Jack Campin
06-Apr-09 - 06:31 AM
Thread Name: Origins/lyrics: Hey Zhankoye
Subject: RE: Hey Zhankoye
Surely it's more likely that the village's name would include the word for "village" in a language spoken by a large proportion of the population.

I have a map I got off the web a few years ago showing the Tatar placenames of the Crimea transliterated into modern Turkish spelling (no idea now where I got it; I was trying to get an idea of Crimean geography as it was around 1500 AD). There are dozens of "-köy"s all over it, as you'd expect in any area settled by people speaking a Turkic language. There is a large "Canköy" on a major crossroads in the north; the same place is"Dzhankoy" in my 1962 Bartholomew atlas. It's the most important crossroads in the entire Crimea, for linking to the Ukraine - the sort of place you'd want to get control of in advance if you were planning a mass deportation programme.

So my guess is that Stalin quietly disposed of the local Tatar population somehow and replaced them with Jewish settlers from cities like Kiev and Odessa (the song seems to imply that the settlers were of urban origin), anticipating that they'd help out or at least not interfere when it was time for the deportation trains to roll through. In the event things didn't pan out quite as either Hitler or Stalin expected - there is a bit about the Nazi occupation of the Crimea in Neal Ascherson's book "Black Sea". The Nazi in charge of the campaign had done his racial homework and concluded that the Karaite Jews of the Crimea were completely unrelated to those of Eastern Europe and no threat to the purity of the Aryan race, so there was no need to do anything about them. He eventually got orders from above to annihilate them anyway, but it took a while. Stalin ended up accusing the Tatars of collaboration with the Nazis as a pretext for the deportation, but it looks like the most he could truthfully have accused them of was prudently keeping their heads down - there were no local Nazi-collaborator military units like those in the Baltic or the Balkans.