The Past and Its Presence: A Study of Multidirectional Memory in Akhtem Seitablaiev’s 87 Children (2017)

This article examines Akhtem Seitablaiev’s 2017 film, 87 Children, which depicts Stalin’s 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars through the prism of another genocide – the Nazis’ 1941–1943 murder of Crimean Jews. It uses Michael Rothberg’s theory of multidirectional memory to illustrate how the history of the Holocaust, Stalin’s deportation of the Crimean Tatars, and the personal story of the film’s protagonists conflate in Seitablaiev’s work in an attempt both to foreground silenced pasts and to comment on the pernicious instrumentalization of history in Putin’s Crimea. Seitablaiev makes an important contribution to the deconstruction of competition and hierarchies within traumatic histories of the peninsula, offering new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice – all of which are found in the specificities, overlaps, and echoes of different historical experiences that continue to shape current events in post-annexation Crimea.