Drawing on author's extensive field research amongst the Crimean Tatars in Uzbekistan and Crimea in the late 1990s, Beyond Memory offers the "first ethnographic account" (p. 246) of the Crimean Tatars' deportation and return. To this end, several ethnographic topics and theoretical arguments are being developed in this book. On the level of ethnography, the books explores oral history of deportation of the Crimean Tatars by the Soviet government in 1944, their political activism in both Soviet and post-Soviet times, and subsequent return to their homeland. To put the stories in the context, the author provides some historical overview on the development of a Crimean Tatar people and their complex relationship with first Russian and then Soviet authorities. An Islamic and Turkic speaking people who lived in Crimea long before its colonization by the Russian Empire, the Crimean Tatars were rather well incorporated in both the Russian Empire and later in the early Soviet Union. Despite the group's efforts to maintain their status quo within the two states, geopolitical agendas of competing political camps in the first and the second world wars significantly affected this equilibrium. In the Second World War, the Crimean Tatars' alleged collaboration with the German occupants led to their haphazard and ill-planned overnight deportation by the Soviet government. As a result, almost half of a people perished in a very short period of time. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, the Crimean Tatars, the author asserts, used their memories of both (a) the collective trauma at the hands of the Soviet government and (b) their loyalty to Soviet communist ideology in order to sustain their sense of themselves in the exile, advocate for their right to return, and be recognized as Crimea's indigenous people. The competing visions on the role of Crimean Tatars in the Soviet war effort are discussed by Uehling in the chapter "The Faces of Public Memory." Following this, Uehling presents oral testimonies of her consultants' experiences of deportation and exile.
In the second half of her book, Uehling goes beyond personal stories and looks at Crimean Tatars national movement through revisiting her interviews with its key political figures. The emphasis is placed on the formation of activists' political consciousness in their dealings with the Soviet authorities and on how these are remembered today. She then moves on to discuss current practices of 'reterritorialization' within which the returnees are exercising their agency to obtain and retain housing in Crimea. The discussion on squatting, battling the bureaucratic and highly resistant offices of house registry, and self-immolation provides further ethnographic detail.
Presenting the reader with the complex nature of the Crimean Tatars' deportation, national movement and return is not the only goal of the book though. Rather, as the author points out in her introduction, the book is an account of the Crimean Tatars' ways of making their history and by extension making themselves; "as such, it is about the intersections of memory and sentiment, power and agency in the production of knowledge about the past" (p. 7). Evoking Raymond Williams' "structure of feeling" which cannot be taken outside of potent duality of "thinking as felt" and "feeling as thought" (1977), Uehling rightfully proceeds to assert that sentiment and memory converge on many planes, both discursive and social, producing political behavior and therefore all have to be taken into account when its explanation is sought. She sees her study as adding "to others by considering how patriotic sentiments are constituted within the dialogical effects of everyday conversation" (p.16). Another important theme which runs through this study is the relationship between a people and a place. In the case of Crimean Tatars this relationship is not limited to familiar diasporic longings for homeland widely acknowledged by the scholars of diaspora studies as contemporary productive practices of ethnic diasporas. Discarding, not necessarily rightfully, these attachments as "dysfunctional manifestation of ethnonationalism" (p. 16), Uehling claims that Crimean Tatars longing for homeland and eventual return is "a fully modern response to changing relations to place," rather than manifestation of nationalist aspirations.
Greta Uehling ensures us that "as a result of this book, we have clearer idea of the real reasons for the Crimean Tatars' deportation" (p. 245) and return. While overall, one can agree with this, the question remains to what degree the author is successful in her efforts to provide thorough and sustained presentation of both ethnographic detail and theoretical claims laid out in the introduction. One difficulty this monograph presents the reader with is its somewhat un-sustained theoretical argumentation. On one end, the reader is properly introduced, however briefly, to a variety of scholarly literature on the workings of memory, sentiment, ethnicity and place, exile and displacement, as it is done in the introduction. Yet, it is not always clear in what ways listed contributions informed the author's own theoretical position, and in some cases some important scholarly debates on matters of interest to the author are omitted. Thus, an important message effectively conveyed in this publication is the driving power of the myth of homeland which continues to inform the Crimean Tatars' massive homecoming. Scholars of diaspora studies pioneered the study of the constructive power that longing for a homeland holds for groups in exile, and their findings should have been incorporated into the book's discussion. Rich and informative ethnographic evidence, carefully collected by the author from her informants speaks for itself here. Yet, the attempts to provide many answers to many questions within the limits of one book seem to dilute the initial intention. In theorizing the workings of collective memory in a Crimean Tatar case, Uehling takes up many matters, ranging from stories and storytelling, experiences of exile and return, the myth of homeland and its role in a people's yearning to return, family narrative practices and memory continuity within the kin, political movement and identity projects of today's Crimean Tatars. Though at times the author presents these questions quite effectively, in the end they are not necessarily tied up together in a coherent argument.
The author's writing style does not do justice to her rich topic either, for it is marred by many unclear or under-developed passages. In many instances, referencing is reminiscent of mental notes yet to be elaborated and incorporated into the text. Often references are misleading, as in case of a reference to Bakhtin on p. 152 listed right after Uehling's commentary on her informant's style: "The way in which she [Seytmuratova ö N.S] opposes rather than agreeing with this 'citizen' contributes to kinds of meanings she is able to construct (Bakhtin 1981)." In another, one is led to assume that many Crimean Tatars' patriotic sentiments were directly inspired by an American anthropologist Michael Taussig's writing on state fetishism (p. 136), or in yet another case, one is prompted to believe that Taussig himself wrote on Crimean Tatars (p. 155).
In addition, numerous misspelled personal and geographic names, inconsistent transliterations, cases of incorrect translation, various typos, footnotes not matching the references in the text, and the absence in the bibliography of many cited publications further undermine the scholarship behind this publication. Thus, Sovnarkom is not some "Soviet Committee of Nationalities" (p. 36), but a Soviet government itself in its early form -- the "Council of People's Commissars." Rukh is not an abbreviation; it should not be rendered as RUKH, and it is not some Western Ukrainian political organization as claimed (p. 76), but the national political movement of Ukraine of the late 1980s and beyond. Propiska is not just a "registration" (p. 172) but an important soviet mechanism of population movement control known as a residence permit (as referred elsewhere). Karbovanets', a Ukrainian name for the Soviet currency mutates into korbonntsev (p. 211). Within only two sentences 'Ian Palach' transforms into 'Jan Palach' (p. 184), and the Ian/Jan oscillation goes on while his case is discussed. Prince Potemkin (p. 203) becomes Potomkin (p. 264, f.7). An informant, listed as Ukrainian in the text becomes Russian in the footnotes (p. 52). A newspaper in the text becomes two in the footnotes (p.68, f. 22). The text may be discussing a publication, yet the corresponding footnote cites an informant (p. 68, f. 25). The text provides a reference to the book and the bibliography contains none, or it is listed under a different year (too many examples to cite here). Even the author's 2004 publication title is not without a typo, "evalvation" is used instead of "evaluation." One also stumbles over numerous other discrepancies between the text and the accompanying footnotes. The above examples do not exhaust the list; they are distracting and impede reading.
Still, a forgiving reader may find enough intriguing information in this book about the Crimean Tatars' history in the second half of the 20th century, provided one is willing to oversee the book's shortcomings. This certainly concerns the extended and thorough presentation of Crimean Tatars' oral testimonies especially on deportation and political resistance to the Soviet authorities.