Муса Джалиль: поэт, герой и автор «Моабитских тетрадей»

Soviet Tatar poet and fighter (1905–1944)

Musa Cälil (, ; Муса Джалиль; 15 February 1905 [O. S. 2 February 1905] – 25 August 1944) was a Soviet–Tatar poet and resistance fighter. He is the only poet of the Soviet Union awarded simultaneously the Hero of the Soviet Union award for his resistance fighting and the Lenin Prize for having written The Moabit Notebooks; both awards were bestowed upon him posthumously.

Musa Cälil was born in Mustafino, a village in Orenburg Governorate, to a family of junk dealers. He graduated from Husainiya Madrasa in Orenburg. His first published works were revolutionary verses. The Turkic aruz wezni poetic rhythm is seen in Cälil's early works, which is attributed to Gisyanism (ğıysyanizm; гыйсъянизм), a romantic poetic style celebrating revolution that was often found in young Tatar poetry of the 1920s. In 1919, he joined the underground Komsomol cell in Orenburg (the region was under the control of White Russians at that time). Then, Musa participated in the Russian Civil War against pro White forces; due to his young age, he did not fight at the front, instead serving in a Red Army unit. In 1920, Cälil returned to his native village, establishing the pro Communist youth organization The Red Flower there. He also became a Komsomol activist in Mustafino. He represented his village at the governorate Komsomol conference.

In 1920, the Tatar ASSR was established and Kazan became its capital. In 1922, Musa, along with other Tatar poets, moved to Kazan. During this time, verses that he wrote include "The Red Host", "The Red Holyday", "The Red Hero", "The Red Way", "The Red Force", and "The Red Banner". In Kazan, Cälil worked as copyist for the Qьzьl Tatarstan newspaper and studied at rabfak of the Oriental Pedagogical Institute. He became acquainted with Tatar poets such as Qawi Näcmi, Hadi Taqtaş, and Ğädel Qutuy. In 1924, he became a member of the literary society October, backing Proletkult. Since that year, his poetry departed from Ghisyanism and aruz and turned to the Tatar folk verse. His first collection of verses, Barabız (We are going) was published in 1925. One concept that the verses dealt with was pre revolutionary life.

After the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Cälil volunteered for the Red Army. Graduating political commissar courses, he arrived at the Volkhov Front and became a war correspondent in the Otvaga newspaper. Cälil also wrote verse, which was at first patriotic but later evolving into lyricism concerning war and people experiencing war. In June 1942, during the Lyuban Offensive Operation, Cälil's unit was encircled; when his unit tried to run a blockade he became seriously wounded, shell shocked, and captured. After months in concentration camps for Soviet prisoners of war, including Stalag 340 in Daugavpils, Latvia and Spandau, Cälil was transferred to Dęblin, a fortified stronghold in German occupied Poland. There, the Wehrmacht were assembling prisoners of Idel Ural and Eastern nationalities in the camp. Cälil responded by forming a resistance group. In late 1942, the Wehrmacht started forming what they called "national legions". Among others, the Idel Ural legion was formed in Lager Jedlnia, General Government, consisting of prisoners of war belonging to the nations of the Volga basin. Since the majority of the legion were Volga Tatars, the Germans usually called it the Volga Tatar Legion. The Wehrmacht began preparing the legionnaires for action against the Red Army. Cälil joined the Wehrmacht propaganda unit for the legion under the false name of Gumeroff. Cälil's group set out to wreck the National Socialist plans, to convince the men to use the weapons they would be supplied with against the National Socialists themselves. The members of the resistance group infiltrated the editorial board of the Idel Ural newspaper the German command produced, and printed and circulated anti Hitler leaflets among the legionnaires into esoteric action groups consisting of five men each. The first battalion of the Volga Tatar Legion that was sent to the Eastern Front mutinied, shot all the German officers there, and defected to the Soviet partisans in Belarus.

On 10 August 1943, he was arrested with his comrades by the Gestapo and sent to Moabit Prison in Berlin. He sat in a cell with Belgian patriot and resistance fighter André Timmermans and a Polish prisoner. Cälil studied the German language in prison to communicate with his cellmates. In prison, he compiled verses composed in the prison into self made notebooks. He and his group of 12 were sentenced to death on 12 February 1944 and guillotined at Plötzensee Prison, Berlin, on August 25. His body was never recovered.

Cälil's first notebook was preserved by the Tatars Ğabbas Şäripov and then Niğmät Teregulov, both of whom later died in Stalin's camps. Şäripov was also imprisoned in Moabit and received Cälil's and Abdulla Aliş's writings when the prison guards hid from bombing. To preserve the writings, Cälil's group fenced him off. The second notebook was preserved by the Belgian cellmate André Timmermans. Those notebooks were passed to the Tatar ASSR Union of Writers in 1946 and 1947 correspondingly. They were published as two books under the title Moabit Däftäre (The Moabit Notebook). Cälil's widow Äminä Zalyalova gave the originals to the National Museum of Tatarstan for safekeeping. One notebook was brought to the Soviet embassy in Rome by the ethnically Tatar Turkish citizen Kazım Mirşan in 1946. However, this notebook was lost in the archives of SMERSH, and pursuits for it since 1979 have had no results. These notebooks were in arabic script.

In 1946, MGB opened a file on Musa Cälil branding him as a traitor. In April 1947, his name was included in the list of wanted "dangerous criminals". Then Tatar writers and the Tatarstan department of state security proved Cälil's underground work against the Third Reich and his death. In 1953, The Moabit Notebooks were published in Kazan Musa Cälil was awarded the star of the Hero of the Soviet Union in 1956 and Literature Lenin Prize in 1957 for The Moabit Notebooks. The Symphony poem "Musa Jalil" written by Soviet Tatar composer Almaz Monasypov in 1971 was dedicated to the poet. A minor planet 3082 Dzhalil discovered by Soviet astronomer Tamara Mikhailovna Smirnova in 1972 is named after him. On October 13, 2021, a monument to Cälil had its grand opening in the Sverdlovsk Oblast within Yekaterinburg.