All that's left is the name

Her real name is Gulnara Fevzievna Musanif. But the passport says something else - Gulnara Asanovna Kalaiji.

She is 85 years old, she is a Crimean Tatar. She recently donated copies of several family photographs and documents to the collection of the Sakharov Center Museum, and along with them, the story of her life.

Here her father and mother were photographed on vacation in Chair Park in Miskhor. 1933. The father is twenty-nine years old, the mother is twenty-seven. They have just under four years of life left together.

On a short June night in 1937, 9-year-old Gulnara slept through her father’s arrest. When she went to bed, her father was there, but in the morning when she woke up, she was no longer there. And she will never see him again. Fevzi Musanif, People's Commissar of Agriculture of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, will be shot in 1938. His name is on those very “Stalinist lists” that the leader himself endorsed. When he, along with other defendants in the “case of Samedinov” - the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, accused of creating an "anti-Soviet pan-Turkist espionage and sabotage-terrorist organization, which aimed to overthrow the Soviet regime, seize Crimea from the USSR, and establish a fascist state under the protectorate of foreign states", was tried The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, Fevzi Musanif, found the strength to declare his innocence and that he had slandered Samedinov under torture, being “in a state of insanity.”

...What pan-Turkic organization? The Musanif family even spoke only Russian among themselves...

When Fevzi Musanif was arrested, his wife Edie was expecting their second child. She, a midwife by training, worked in a pharmacy and knew nothing about her husband’s affairs - this is how she answered the investigator, who again and again called her in for questioning. But the pressure on her became more and more intense, and finally Edie realized that she was doomed. Then she made a terrible decision - she had an abortion. Getting ready for the next interrogation, she took her daughter Gulnara by the hand and took her to her younger sister. Edie Musanif did not return from interrogation. It was December 1937. And in August 1938, she was sentenced to eight years in the camps as “a member of the family of a traitor to the motherland” and sent to distant Kazakhstan, to Karlag.

Eddie tried in vain to hide her daughter. The day after the arrest, the mothers came for Gulnara. The daughter of an enemy of the people should have been sent to an orphanage. Two NKVD officers tried in vain to restrain the girl, who, having fallen to the floor, desperately fought back, screamed and bit. “Don't touch the child! - my aunt begged. “What should I do to keep her?” - “Apply for adoption urgently!” And the very next day new documents were issued at the Simferopol city registry office in Gulnara. From now on, her aunt Urie Kalaiji was listed as her mother, and there was a dash in the “father” column. The surname Musanif was changed to Kalaiji, and the patronymic Fevzievna was changed to Asanovna - after the grandfather’s name. All that remains from Gulnara’s former life is her name.

Then there was war, occupation, liberation and deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar people in May 1944. Three years later, in a village near Samarkand, where Kalaiji’s family lived as special settlers, Gulnara met her mother. Edie Musanif, having served her time in a camp and in exile, came to her family as soon as she gained freedom of movement. And then, in order not to be separated again, she again signed up as a special settler - this time voluntarily.

Here they were photographed together - mother and daughter, so similar to each other. One is innocently convicted for being the wife of her husband - also innocently convicted (Fevzi Musanif will be rehabilitated in 1958 “for lack of corpus delicti”). Another lost her parents at the age of nine and was innocently repressed at the age of 16 simply because she was born a Crimean Tatar.

They failed to return to Crimea.

Today Gulnara Asanovna Kalaiji lives in Moscow. A smiling, intelligent woman keeps in her memory all the horror, all the injustice of the twentieth century.