Sürgünlik

The deportation of the Crimean Tatars (, Cyrillic: Къырымтатар халкъынынъ сюргюнлиги) or the ('exile') was the ethnic cleansing and the cultural genocide of at least 191,044 Crimean Tatars that was carried out by Soviet Union authorities from 18 to 20 May 1944, supervised by Lavrentiy Beria, chief of Soviet state security and the secret police, and ordered by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Within those three days, the NKVD used cattle trains to deport the Crimean Tatars, even Soviet Communist Party members and Red Army soldiers, from Crimea to the Uzbek SSR, several thousand kilometres away. They were one of several ethnicities that were subjected to Stalin's policy of population transfer in the Soviet Union.

Officially, the Soviet government presented the deportation as a policy of collective punishment, based on its claim that some Crimean Tatars collaborated with Nazi Germany in World War II, despite the fact that the 20,000 who collaborated with the Axis powers were half the 40,000 who served in the Soviet Red Army. Several modern scholars believe rather that the government deported them as a part of its plan to gain access to the Dardanelles and acquire territory in Turkey, where the Turkic ethnic kin of the Tatars lived, or remove minorities from the Soviet Union's border regions. By the end of the deportation, not a single Crimean Tatar lived in Crimea, and 80,000 houses and 360,000 acres of land were left abandoned. Nearly 8,000 Crimean Tatars died during the deportation, and tens of thousands subsequently perished due to the harsh living conditions in which they were forced to live during their exile. After the deportation, the Soviet government launched an intense detatarization campaign in an attempt to erase the remaining traces of Crimean Tatar existence.

In 1956, the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev condemned Stalin's policies, including the deportation of various ethnic groups, and he allowed most of these ethnic groups to return to their homelands, but he did not lift the directive that forbade the Crimean Tatars from returning. The Crimean Tatars remained in Central Asia for the next three decades, until the perestroika era of the late 1980s, when 260,000 of them returned to Crimea, after 45 years in exile. On 14 November 1989, the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union declared that the deportations had been a crime, and declared that the ban on their return to Crimea was officially null and void.

By 2004, the number of Crimean Tatars who had returned to Crimea had increased their share of the peninsula's population to 12 percent. The Soviet government had not assisted them during their return to Crimea nor had it compensated them for the land they lost in the deportation. The deportation and the subsequent assimilation efforts in Asia are crucial events in the history of the Crimean Tatars. Between 2015 and 2024, the deportation was formally recognised as a genocide by Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Canada, Poland, Estonia and the Czech Republic.

Background

The Crimean Tatars controlled the Crimean Khanate from 1441 to 1783, when Crimea was annexed by the Russian Empire as a target of Russian expansion. By the 14th century, most of the Turkic-speaking population of Crimea had adopted Islam, following the conversion of Ozbeg Khan of the Golden Horde. It was the longest surviving state of the Golden Horde. They often engaged in conflicts with Moscow—from 1468 until the 17th century, Crimean Tatars fought several wars with the Tsardom of Russia. Thus, after the establishment of the Russian rule, Crimean Tatars began leaving Crimea in several waves of emigration. Between 1784 and 1790, out of a total population of about a million, around 300,000 Crimean Tatars left for the Ottoman Empire.

The Crimean War triggered another mass exodus of Crimean Tatars. Between 1855 and 1866 at least 500,000 Muslims, and possibly up to 900,000, left the Russian Empire and emigrated to the Ottoman Empire. Out of that number, at least one third were from Crimea, while the rest were from the Caucasus. These emigrants comprised 15–23 percent of the total population of Crimea. The Russian Empire used that fact as the ideological foundation to further Russify " New Russia". Eventually, the Crimean Tatars became a minority in Crimea; in 1783, they comprised 98 per cent of the population, but by 1897, this was down to 34.1 per cent. While Crimean Tatars were emigrating, the Russian government encouraged Russification of the peninsula, populating it with Russians, Ukrainians, and other Slavic ethnic groups; this Russification continued during the Soviet era. Vardys (1971), p. 101

After the 1917 October Revolution, Crimea received autonomous status inside the USSR on 18 October 1921, but collectivization in the 1920s led to severe famine from which up to 100,000 Crimeans perished when their crops were transported to "more important" regions of the Soviet Union. By one estimate, three-quarters of the famine victims were Crimean Tatars. Their status deteriorated further after Joseph Stalin became the ''de facto'' Soviet leader and implemented repressions that led to the deaths of at least 5.2 million Soviet citizens between 1927 and 1938.

World War II

In 1940, the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic had approximately 1,126,800 inhabitants, of which 218,000 people, or 19.4 percent of the population, were Crimean Tatars. In 1941, Nazi Germany invaded Eastern Europe, annexing much of the western USSR. Crimean Tatars initially viewed the Germans as liberators from Stalinism, and they had also been positively treated by the Germans in World War I. Williams (2015), p. 92

Many of the captured Crimean Tatars serving in the Red Army were sent to POW camps after Romanians and Nazis came to occupy the bulk of Crimea. Though Nazis initially called for murder of all "Asiatic inferiors" and paraded around Crimean Tatar POW's labeled as "Mongol sub-humanity", they revised this policy in the face of determined resistance from the Red Army. Beginning in 1942, Germans recruited Soviet prisoners of war to form support armies. The Dobrujan Tatar nationalist Fazil Ulkusal and Lipka Tatar Edige Kirimal helped in freeing Crimean Tatars from German prisoner-of-war camps and enlisting them in the independent Crimean support legion for the ''Wehrmacht''. This legion eventually included eight battalions, although many members were of other nationalities. From November 1941, German authorities allowed Crimean Tatars to establish Muslim Committees in various towns as a symbolic recognition of some local government authority, though they were not given any political power.

Many Crimean Tatar communists strongly opposed the occupation and assisted the resistance movement to provide valuable strategic and political information. Other Crimean Tatars also fought on the side of the Soviet partisans, like the Tarhanov movement of 250 Crimean Tatars which fought throughout 1942 until its destruction. Six Crimean Tatars were even named the Heroes of the Soviet Union, and thousands more were awarded high honors in the Red Army.

Up to 130,000 people died during the Axis occupation of Crimea. The Nazis implemented a brutal repression, destroying more than 70 villages that were together home to about 25 per cent of the Crimean Tatar population. Thousands of Crimean Tatars were forcibly transferred to work as ''Ostarbeiter'' in German factories under the supervision of the Gestapo in what were described as "vast slave workshops", resulting in loss of all Crimean Tatar support. In April 1944 the Red Army managed to repel the Axis forces from the peninsula in the Crimean Offensive.

A majority of the hiwis (helpers), their families and all those associated with the Muslim Committees were evacuated to Germany and Hungary or Dobruja by the Wehrmacht and Romanian Army where they joined the Eastern Turkic division. Thus, the majority of the collaborators had been evacuated from Crimea by the retreating Wehrmacht. Many Soviet officials had also recognized this and rejected claims that the Crimean Tatars had betrayed the Soviet Union ''en masse''. The presence of Muslim Committees organized from Berlin by various Turkic foreigners appeared a cause for concern in the eyes of the Soviet government, already wary of Turkey at the time.

Falsification of information in propaganda

Soviet publications blatantly falsified information about Crimean Tatars in the Red Army, going so far as to describe Crimean Tatar Hero of the Soviet Union Uzeir Abduramanov as Azeri, not Crimean Tatar, on the cover of a 1944 issue of ''Ogonyok'' magazine – even though his family had been deported for being Crimean Tatar just a few months earlier. The book ''In the Mountains of Tavria'' falsely claimed that volunteer partisan scout Bekir Osmanov was a German spy and shot, although the central committee later acknowledged that he never served the Germans and survived the war, ordering later editions to have corrections after still-living Osmanov and his family noticed the obvious falsehood. Amet-khan Sultan, born to a Crimean Tatar mother and Lak father in Crimea, where he was born and raised, was often described as a Dagestani in post-deportation media, even though he always considered himself a Crimean Tatar.

The partisan movement in Crimea, spearheaded by A. V. Mokrousov, ultimately proved to be unsuccessful, primarily due to Mokrousov's inebriation and military ineptitude. In an attempt to rationalize their military shortcomings, the leadership of the partisan movement propagated allegations against the Crimean Tatars, claiming that they had largely defected to the German forces. This narrative served as a pretext for Soviet partisans to conduct raids on Crimean Tatar villages in search of provisions. During these incursions, partisans engaged in indiscriminate violence against civilians and appropriated food supplies, thereby exacerbating the plight of those who survived and leaving them vulnerable to starvation.

In response to these circumstances, the German authorities sanctioned the establishment of Crimean Tatar ''Schuma'' battalions, tasked with defending their communities against such raids. It is noteworthy that the Crimean Tatars exhibited a form of military collaboration; they either actively resisted the Red Army or defended their villages from partisan attacks. This stands in contrast to the actions of the Russians in Crimea, who were implicated in the repression of civilians and participated in the Holocaust. The Russian historian I. A. Makhalova, an expert on collaborationism during World War II, has commented on these dynamics:

In addition, Crimean Tatar victims of Nazi atrocities are widely ignored and even erased from the historical memory. For example, at the site of the December 1941 Nazi massacre in Simferopol, where both Jews, Krymchaks

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