Join Donald Rayfield in conversation with Ekaterina Schulmann about his book, ‘A Seditious and Sinister Tribe’: The Crimean Tatars and Their Khanate – shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2025. In the first English-language history of the Crimean Tatars in over a century, Rayfield presents a groundbreaking work of scholarship on the complex but overlooked story of the Crimean Tatars, as well as essential context on current geopolitical conflicts and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Crimean Tatars built a powerful and enlightened Khanate in Crimea in the 1440s. They promoted a society of political and cultural sophistication, religious tolerance and geopolitical nous, far from the dreaded image that imperial narratives ascribed to them, and by the 1760s the Khanate was prosperous and flourishing. Yet their homeland on the Crimean Peninsula had for centuries been a nexus of imperial battles – and the Khanate fell after Catherine II’s annexation of the peninsula in 1783. What followed was a “slow genocide” of the Crimean Tatars under successive Russian empires: a systematic process of ecological and urban destruction, occupation and displacement, Russification, and erasure of cultural heritage. 

Looking back on the history of the Crimean Tatars, Rayfield and Schulmann will explore how the legacy of alliances, imperial betrayals and ethnic cleansing lives on in the present persecution of the Crimean Tatars, and what it tells us about the evolving relationship between western and eastern states – and the smaller nations that lie between them. 

You can read our interview with Donald Rayfield here.

Donald Rayfield OBE is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. A distinguished historian, linguist, and literary scholar, Rayfield is the author of numerous influential works, including Stalin and His Hangmen, (Penguin, 2004), a biography of Anton Chekhov, and Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia (Reaktion Books, 2012). He has also translated a wide range of Georgian, Russian, and Uzbek literature.

Ekaterina Schulmann is a leading Russian political scientist whose research focuses on legislative institutions, bureaucracy, and policy-making in modern autocratic systems, particularly in Russia. Since relocating to Berlin in 2022, she has held a non-resident fellowship at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and lectures in political science at Freie Universität Berlin's Osteuropa Institut. Schulmann is the author of several political science publications in Russian and a co-author of The New Autocracy: Information, Politics, and Policy in Putin’s Russia (Brookings Institution Press, 2018).

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