Crimean People’s Republic
크림 인민공화국
The state proclaimed in the Crimean Peninsula by the Crimean Tatar Qurultay in December 1917, also called the Crimean Democratic Republic, which lasted until January 1918. It declared the equality of all the peninsula’s peoples and was governed by a five-member Directory headed by Noman Çelebicihan, but fell in January 1918 to the Bolsheviks backed by the Black Sea Fleet.
In depth
According to the English-language source Russians made up 42 per cent of Crimea’s population and Ukrainians 11 per cent, yet the Crimean Tatars were for a while the dominant political and cultural force on the peninsula. Founded on the Qurultay’s initiative, the republic laid down the equality of all ethnicities in Crimea, and the Directory and the Central Council of Ukraine recognised each other. The programme published in the government papers Millet and Voice of the Tatars called it the government’s sacred duty to protect not only the native people but all the peninsula’s inhabitants from usurpation and anarchy. Before the Qurultay opened, Çelebicihan likened the Tatars, Russians, Armenians, Jews and Germans of Crimea to flowers, each with its own beauty and scent, and called for a bouquet of them that would make Crimea “a true civilised Switzerland”. The government relied on the troops of the Crimean Revolutionary Staff formed by the Muslim Executive Committee in November 1917: besides the Crimean Tatar dragoon regiment there were a Ukrainian regiment, a Greek battalion, a Jewish detachment and Armenian and Polish companies, and French aviators served too. Maciej Sulkiewicz’s Muslim corps, however, never arrived from the Romanian front. Pyotr Wrangel, then in Crimea, recalled that Cafer Seydahmet offered him command of the troops and that he refused, finding its politics coloured by “typical Kerenskyism”.
On 16 December 1917 the Bolsheviks seized Sevastopol, headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet, and dissolved the city council. On 19 December the Crimean government formed a United Crimean Headquarters with two Crimean Tatar cavalry regiments, one infantry regiment and some Ukrainian and Russian units. On 3 January 1918 supporters of the Directory occupied the former governor’s residence, the People’s House, but left the next day amid criticism, and Çelebicihan resigned in protest. On 24 January (New Style) the government’s troops advanced on Sevastopol and were beaten on 25–26 January, and on the 27th forces backed by the Sevastopol Red Guards and Black Sea Fleet sailors drove the Tatar units out of Simferopol. Seydahmet left Crimea, while Çelebicihan was arrested, held in Sevastopol prison and killed without trial on 23 February, his body thrown into the sea. By the end of January the Bolsheviks held all of Crimea and dissolved the Qurultay and the Council of National Representatives, and the Red Terror engulfed the peninsula. The Ukrainian government blockaded Crimea and stopped Muslim units heading there, drawing a protest from the All-Russian Muslim military council. Some officials who escaped the terror sought asylum in Kyiv and asked the Ukrainian army and the Central Powers for military help. The Bolsheviks set up the Taurida Soviet Socialist Republic in early 1918, but the peninsula was soon overrun by the forces of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and Germany.