Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity

2023 Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies

2023 Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies

2023 University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies

2023 American Association for Ukrainian Studies Best Book Prize

2023 Raphael Lemkin Book Award Finalist 

"One of the Best Books of 2022" (The Hill Times)

"Highly recommended... this captivating, informative, compelling work elucidates the many nuances of the current situation in Ukraine for the benefit of those who would like to comprehend the incomprehensible." (Choice)

In the spring of 1944, Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars, a small Sunni Muslim nation, from their ancestral homeland on the Black Sea peninsula. The gravity of this event, which ultimately claimed the lives of tens of thousands of victims, was shrouded in secrecy after World War Two.

What broke the silence in Soviet Russia, Soviet Ukraine, and the Republic of Turkey were works of literature. These texts of poetry and prose – some passed hand-to-hand underground, others published to controversy – shocked the conscience of readers and sought to move them to action.

Blood of Others presents these works as vivid evidence of literature’s power to lift our moral horizons. In bringing these remarkable texts to light and contextualizing them among Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian representations of Crimea from 1783, Rory Finnin provides an innovative cultural history of the Black Sea region, now engulfed in war. He reveals how a "poetics of solidarity" promoted empathy and support for an oppressed people through complex provocations of guilt rather than shame.

Forging new roads between Slavic studies and Middle Eastern studies, Blood of Others is a compelling and timely exploration of the ideas and identities coursing between Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine – three countries determining the fate of a volatile and geopolitically pivotal part of our world.