ABSTRACT
The Russian takeover, the Crimean Karaims feared that they might share the fate of quite many local Tatars, and Armenians, Greeks, Georgians and residents of Italian colonies in the peninsula, displaced in the late 1770s. The successive decades were hardly a period of decline for the Karaims in the Russian Empire. In the late 19th and early 20th century the Crimean Karaims occupied a relatively high position in Russian society. The new party’s manifesto, presented in the News of the Taurida and Odessa Karaim Religious Board, argued – in line with the self-determination paradigm – that the Karaims are a separate people, within the “Turkic-Semitic race”. In an adopted resolution, the Karaims were described as not only a religious group but primarily a nation, understood in terms of ethnicity. The February Revolution and the subsequent changes in 1917 could not but provide an outlet for the energies and capabilities of this venerable person of considerable influence on Crimean affairs.
