Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

The deportation of the Crimean Tatars (Template:Langx, 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,Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn 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%. 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 2025, the deportation was formally recognised as a genocide by Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Canada, Poland, Estonia, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands.

Background

File:Black Sea with the Crimea highlighted.svg

Crimea highlighted on a map of the Black Sea

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.Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn

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% of the total population of Crimea. The Russian Empire used that fact as the ideological foundation to further Russify "New Russia".Template:Sfn Eventually, the Crimean Tatars became a minority in Crimea; in 1783, they comprised 98% of the population,Template:Sfn but by 1897, this was down to 34.1%. 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.

File:Evpatoria red terror corpses at sea coast.jpg

Corpses of victims of the winter 1918 Red Terror in Evpatoria, Crimea

After the 1917 October Revolution, Crimea received autonomous status inside the USSR on 18 October 1921,Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn By one estimate, three-quarters of the famine victims were Crimean Tatars.Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn

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% of the population, were Crimean Tatars.Template:Sfn 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.

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",Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn

Number of Crimean Tatars in CrimeaTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Year	Number	Percentage
1783	500,000	98%
1897	186,212	34.1%
1939	218,879	19.4%
1959	—	—
1979	5,422	0.3%
1989	38,365	1.6%

Many Crimean Tatar communists strongly opposed the occupation and assisted the resistance movement to provide valuable strategic and political information.Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn The Nazis implemented a brutal repression, destroying more than 70 villages that were together home to about 25% 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.Template:Sfn

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.Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn

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.Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn

In response to these circumstances, the German authorities sanctioned the establishment of Crimean Tatar Schuma battalions, tasked with defending their communities against such raids.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn 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.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn The Russian historian I. A. Makhalova, an expert on collaborationism during World War II, has commented on these dynamics:Template:Sfn

Since the Crimean Tatars were more likely to collaborate militarily, while the Russians and Ukrainians were primarily involved in administrative functions and police service, the latter were more actively involved in the process of persecution and extermination of the Jewish population. This may explain, among other things, the harsher punishments they received after the liberation of Crimea.... The Crimean Tatar battalions did not participate in the persecution and physical extermination of the Jewish population of Crimea. This conclusion is supported by the testimony of former members of Einsatzgruppe D, who emphasized the role of the Crimean Tatar battalions in the fight against the partisans, while denying their involvement in the process of solving the "Jewish question". Taking into account the national composition of the police, it can be concluded that the Russians and Ukrainians were more actively involved in the Holocaust than the Crimean Tatar volunteers who were engaged in the fight against the partisans.
— Irina Makhalova

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 (Crimean Jews), and Romani Crimean Tatars were exterminated by the Nazis, the monument to the victims of the massacre mentions only Jews and Krymchaks but completely omits any mention of the Romani Crimean Tatars who were killed in the exact same spot. Years after the Nazi massacre of Crimean Tatars in the village of Burlak-Toma who were accused of being "tatar-gypsies", the government refused to acknowledge that the victims were Crimean Tatars, despite strong protests from witnesses and surviving family members of the victims, who consistently gave sworn testimony that they were indeed Crimean Tatars.

Nikolai Bugay and his disciples, including A. M. Gonov, A. S. Khunagov, and others, have endeavored to provide a justification for the deportation of various ethnic groups within the USSR. In light of the inability to rely on discredited accusations that were repudiated by the KGB during the Perestroika period in the 1980s, these scholars resort to employing omissions, ambiguous insinuations, and conclusions that lack logical coherence with their initial premises. Furthermore, there are instances of document falsification that undermine the credibility of their arguments.Template:Sfn

Deportation

We were told that we were being evicted and we had 15 minutes to get ready to leave. We boarded boxcars – there were 60 people in each, but no one knew where we were being taken to. To be shot? Hanged? Tears and panic were taking over.Template:Sfn

— Saiid, who was deported with his family from Yevpatoria when he was 10

File:Demographics of Crimea.png

Chronology of the ethnic makeup of Crimea. The sharp drop of the Crimean Tatars is visible after the deportation.

  Crimean Tatars

Officially due to the collaboration with the Axis powers during World War II, the Soviet government collectively punished ten ethnic minorities,Template:Sfn among them the Crimean Tatars.Template:Sfn Punishment included deportation to distant regions of Central Asia and Siberia.Template:Sfn Soviet accounts of the late 1940s indict the Crimean Tatars collectively as an ethnicity of traitors. Although the Crimean Tatars denied that they had committed universal treason, this idea persisted during the Soviet period and Russian scholarly and popular literature.Template:Sfn

According to various estimates, around 20,000 Crimean Tatars volunteered to fight for Nazi Germany,Template:Sfn as opposed to 40,000 who fought for the Red Army.Template:Sfn On 10 May 1944, Lavrentiy Beria recommended to Stalin that the Crimean Tatars should be deported away from the border regions due to their "traitorous actions".Template:Sfn Stalin subsequently issued GKO Order No. 5859ss, which envisaged the resettlement of the Crimean Tatars. The deportation lasted only three days,Template:Sfn 18–20 May 1944, during which NKVD agents went house to house collecting Crimean Tatars at gunpoint and forcing them to enter sealed-offTemplate:Sfn cattle trains that would transfer them almost Template:Sfn to remote locations in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. The Crimean Tatars were allowed to carry up to of their property per family.Template:Sfn The only ones who could avoid this fate were Crimean Tatar women who were married to men of non-punished ethnic groups.Template:Sfn The exiled Crimean Tatars travelled in overcrowded wagons for several weeks and lacked food and water.Template:Sfn It is estimated that at least 228,392 people were deported from Crimea, of which at least 191,044 were Crimean TatarsTemplate:Sfn in 47,000 families.Template:Sfn Since 7,889 people perished in the long transit in sealed-off railcars, the NKVD registered the 183,155 living Crimean Tatars who arrived at their destinations in Central Asia.Template:Sfn The majority of the deportees were rounded up from the Crimean countryside. Only 18,983 of the exiles were from Crimean cities.Template:Sfn

File:Deportation of the Crimean Tatars uk.png

Destinations of the deported Template:In lang

On 4 July 1944, the NKVD officially informed Stalin that the resettlement was complete.Template:Sfn However, not long after that report, the NKVD found out that one of its units had forgotten to deport people from the Arabat Spit. Instead of preparing an additional transfer in trains, on 20 July the NKVD boarded hundreds of Crimean Tatars onto an old boat, took it to the middle of the Azov Sea, and sank the ship. Those who did not drown were finished off by machine guns.Template:Sfn

Officially, Crimean Tatars were eliminated from Crimea. The deportation encompassed every person considered by the government to be Crimean Tatar, including children, women, and the elderly, and even those who had been members of the Communist Party or the Red Army. As such, they were legally designated as special settlers, which meant that they were officially second-class citizens, prohibited from leaving the perimeter of their assigned area, attending prestigious universities, and had to regularly appear before the commandant's office.Template:Sfn

During this mass eviction, the Soviet authorities confiscated around 80,000 houses, 500,000 cattle, 360,000 acres of land, and 40,000 tons of agricultural provisions.Template:Sfn Besides 191,000 deported Crimean Tatars, the Soviet authorities also evicted 9,620 Armenians, 12,420 Bulgarians, and 15,040 Greeks from the peninsula. All were collectively branded as traitors and became second-class citizens for decades in the USSR.Template:Sfn 1,119 Germans and 3,652 foreign citizens were also expelled.Template:Sfn Among the deported, there were also 283 persons of other ethnicities: Italians, Romanians, Karaims, Kurds, Czechs, Hungarians, and Croats.Template:Sfn During 1947 and 1948, a further 2,012 veteran returnees were deported from Crimea by the local MVD.Template:Sfn

File:Uzbekistan in its region.svg

Uzbekistan, the main destination of the deported

File:Численность "спецпоселенцев"-крымских татар по субъектам СССР на 1 января 1953 г.png

Distribution of resettled Crimean Tatars within Soviet subdivisions, 1 January 1953.

In total, 151,136 Crimean Tatars were deported to the Uzbek SSR; 8,597 to the Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic; and 4,286 to the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic; and the remaining 29,846 were sent to various remote regions of the Russian SFSR.Template:Sfn When the Crimean Tatars arrived at their destination in the Uzbek SSR, they were met with hostility by Uzbek locals who threw stones at them, even their children, because they heard that the Crimean Tatars were "traitors" and "fascist collaborators."Template:Sfn The Uzbeks objected to becoming the "dumping ground for treasonous nations." In the coming years, several assaults against the Crimean Tatars population were registered, some of which were fatal.Template:Sfn

The mass Crimean deportations were organized by Lavrentiy Beria, the chief of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, and his subordinates Bogdan Kobulov, Ivan Serov, B. P. Obruchnikov, M.G. Svinelupov, and A. N. Apolonov. The field operations were conducted by G. P. Dobrynin, the Deputy Head of the Gulag system; G. A. Bezhanov, the Colonel of State Security; I. I. Piiashev, Major General; S. A. Klepov, Commissar of State Security; I. S. Sheredega, Lt. General; B. I. Tekayev, Lt. Colonel of State Security; and two local leaders, P. M. Fokin, head of the Crimea NKGB, and V. T. Sergjenko, Lt. General.Template:Sfn In order to execute this deportation, the NKVD secured 5,000 armed agents and the NKGB allocated a further 20,000 armed men, together with a few thousand regular soldiers. Two of Stalin's directives from May 1944 reveal that many parts of the Soviet government, from financing to transit, were involved in executing the operation.Template:Sfn

On 14 July 1944 the GKO authorized the migration of 51,000 people, mostly Russians, to 17,000 empty collective farms on Crimea. On 30 June 1945, the Crimean ASSR was abolished.

Soviet propaganda sought to hide the population transfer by claiming that the Crimean Tatars had "voluntarily resettle[d] to Central Asia".Template:Sfn In essence, though, according to historian Paul Robert Magocsi, Crimea was "ethnically cleansed."Template:Sfn After this act, the term Crimean Tatar was banished from the Russian-Soviet lexicon, and all Crimean Tatar toponyms (names of towns, villages, and mountains) in Crimea were changed to Russian names on all maps as part of a wide detatarization campaign. Muslim graveyards and religious objects in Crimea were demolished or converted into secular places.Template:Sfn During Stalin's rule, nobody was allowed to mention that this ethnicity even existed in the USSR. This went so far that many individuals were even forbidden to declare themselves as Crimean Tatars during the Soviet censuses of 1959, 1970, and 1979. They could only declare themselves as Tatars. This ban was lifted during the Soviet census of 1989.

Aftermath

Mortality and death toll

Mortality of deported Crimean Tatars according to NKVDs filesTemplate:Sfn

Year	Number of deceased
May 1944 – 1 January 1945	13,592
1 January 1945 – 1 January 1946	13,183

The first deportees started arriving in the Uzbek SSR on 29 May 1944 and most had arrived by 8 June 1944.Template:Sfn The consequent mortality rate remains disputed; the NKVD kept incomplete records of the death rate among the resettled ethnicities living in exile. Like the other deported peoples, the Crimean Tatars were placed under the regime of special settlements. Many of those deported performed forced labor:Template:Sfn their tasks included working in coal mines and construction battalions, under the supervision of the NKVD. Deserters were executed. Special settlers routinely worked eleven to twelve hours a day, seven days a week.Template:Sfn Despite this difficult physical labor, the Crimean Tatars were given only around Template:Sfn to of bread per day.Template:Sfn Accommodations were insufficient; some were forced to live in mud huts where "there were no doors or windows, nothing, just reeds" on the floor to sleep on.Template:Sfn

The sole transport to these remote areas and labour colonies was equally as strenuous. Theoretically, the NKVD loaded 50 people into each railroad car, together with their property. One witness claimed that 133 people were in her wagon.Template:Sfn They had only one hole in the floor of the wagon which was used as a toilet. Some pregnant women were forced to give birth inside these sealed-off railroad cars.Template:Sfn The conditions in the overcrowded train wagons were exacerbated by a lack of hygiene, leading to cases of typhus. Since the trains only stopped to open the doors at rare occasions during the trip, the sick inevitably contaminated others in the wagons. It was only when they arrived at their destination in the Uzbek SSR that the Crimean Tatars were released from the sealed-off railroad cars. Still, some were redirected to other destinations in Central Asia and had to continue their journey. Some witnesses claimed that they travelled for 24 consecutive days.Template:Sfn During this whole time, they were given very little food or water while trapped inside.Template:Sfn There was no fresh air since the doors and windows were bolted shut. In Kazakh SSR, the transport guards unlocked the door only to toss out the corpses along the railroad. The Crimean Tatars thus called these railcars "crematoria on wheels."Template:Sfn The records show that at least 7,889 Crimean Tatars died during this long journey, amounting to about 4 % of their entire ethnicity.Template:Sfn

We were forced to repair our own individual tents. We worked and we starved. Many were so weak from hunger that they could not stay on their feet.... Our men were at the front and there was no one who could bury the dead. Sometimes the bodies lay among us for several days.... Some Crimean Tatar children dug little graves and buried the unfortunate little ones.Template:Sfn

— anonymous Crimean Tatar woman, describing life in exile

The high mortality rate continued for several years in exile due to malnutrition, labor exploitation, diseases, lack of medical care, and exposure to the harsh desert climate of Uzbekistan. The exiles were frequently assigned to the heaviest construction sites. The Uzbek medical facilities filled with Crimean Tatars who were susceptible to the local Asian diseases not found on the Crimean peninsula where the water was purer, including yellow fever, dystrophy, malaria, and intestinal illness.Template:Sfn The death toll was the highest during the first five years. In 1949 the Soviet authorities counted the population of the deported ethnic groups who lived in special settlements. According to their records, there were 44,887 excess deaths in these five years, 19.6% of that total group.Template:Sfn Other sources give a figure of 44,125 deaths during that time,Template:Sfn while a third source, using alternative NKVD archives, gives a figure of 32,107 deaths.Template:Sfn These reports included all the people resettled from Crimea (including Armenians, Bulgarians, and Greeks), but the Crimean Tatars formed a majority in this group. It took five years until the number of births among the deported people started to surpass the number of deaths. Soviet archives reveal that between May 1944 and January 1945 a total of 13,592 Crimean Tatars perished in exile, about 7% of their entire population.Template:Sfn Almost half of all deaths (6,096) were of children under the age of 16; another 4,525 were adult women and 2,562 were adult men. During 1945, a further 13,183 people died.Template:Sfn Thus, by the end of December 1945, at least 27,000 Crimean Tatars had already died in exile.Template:Sfn One Crimean Tatar woman living near Tashkent recalled the events from 1944:

Estimates produced by Crimean Tatars indicate mortality figures that were far higher and amounted to 46% of their population living in exile.Template:Sfn In 1968, when Leonid Brezhnev presided over the USSR, Crimean Tatar activists were persecuted for using that high mortality figure under the guise that it was a "slander to the USSR." In order to show that Crimean Tatars were exaggerating, the KGB published figures showing that "only" 22% of that ethnic group died.Template:Sfn The Karachay demographer Dalchat Ediev estimates that 34,300 Crimean Tatars died due to the deportation, representing an 18% mortality rate. Hannibal Travis estimates that overall 40,000–80,000 Crimean Tatars died in exile.Template:Sfn Professor Michael Rywkin gives a figure of at least 42,000 Crimean Tatars who died between 1944 and 1951, including 7,900 who died during the transitTemplate:Sfn Professor Brian Glyn Williams gives a figure of between 40,000 and 44,000 deaths as a consequence of this deportation.Template:Sfn The Crimean State Committee estimated that 45,000 Crimean Tatars died between 1944 and 1948. The official NKVD report estimated that 27% of that ethnicity died.Template:Sfn

Various estimates of the mortality rates of the Crimean Tatars:

18%	82%
Died in exile	Survived in exile

27%Template:Sfn	73%
Died in exile	Survived in exile

46%Template:Sfn	54%
Died in exile	Survived in exile

Rehabilitation

File:Deportation of the Crimean Tatars.jpg

A Crimean Tatar family in the 1960s during deportation after Soviet authorities refused to permit them to live in Crimea. Even after the "special-settlers" regime was lifted, Crimean Tatars were not allowed to live in Crimea without a residence permit

File:Сакля в Крыму.jpg

An empty Tatar home in Crimea, photographed in 1968

Stalin's government denied the Crimean Tatars the right to education or publication in their native language. Despite the prohibition, and although they had to study in Russian or Uzbek, they maintained their cultural identity. In 1956 the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, held a speech in which he condemned Stalin's policies, including the mass deportations of various ethnicities. Still, even though many peoples were allowed to return to their homes, three groups were forced to stay in exile: the Soviet Germans, the Meskhetian Turks, and the Crimean Tatars.Template:Sfn In 1954, Khrushchev allowed Crimea to be included in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic since Crimea is linked by land to Ukraine and not with the Russian SFSR.Template:Sfn On 28 April 1956, the directive "On Removing Restrictions on the Special Settlement of the Crimean Tatars... Relocated during the Great Patriotic War" was issued, ordering a de-registration of the deportees and their release from administrative supervision. However, various other restrictions were still kept and the Crimean Tatars were not allowed to return to Crimea. Moreover, that same year the Ukrainian Council of Ministers banned the exiled Crimean Tatars, Greeks, Germans, Armenians and Bulgarians from relocating even to the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv and Odesa Oblasts in the Ukrainian SSR.Template:Sfn The Crimean Tatars did not get any compensation for their lost property.Template:Sfn

In the 1950s, the Crimean Tatars started actively advocating for the right to return. In 1957, they collected 6,000 signatures in a petition that was sent to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union that demanded their political rehabilitation and return to Crimea.Template:Sfn In 1961 25,000 signatures were collected in a petition that was sent to the Kremlin.Template:Sfn

Mustafa Dzhemilev, who was only six months old when his family was deported from Crimea, grew up in Uzbekistan and became an activist for the right of the Crimean Tatars to return. In 1966 he was arrested for the first time and spent a total of 17 years in prison during the Soviet era. This earned him the nickname of "Crimean Tatar Mandela."Template:Sfn In 1984 he was sentenced for the sixth time for "anti-Soviet activity" but was given moral support by the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, who had observed Dzhemilev's fourth trial in 1976.Template:Sfn When older dissidents were arrested, a new, younger generation emerged that would replace them.Template:Sfn

On 21 July 1967, representatives of the Crimean Tatars, led by the dissident Ayshe Seitmuratova, gained permission to meet with high-ranking Soviet officials in Moscow, including Yuri Andropov. During the meeting, the Crimean Tatars demanded a correction of all the injustices of the USSR against their people. In September 1967, the Supreme Soviet issued a decree that acknowledged the charge of treason against the entire nation was "unreasonable" but that did not allow Crimean Tatars the same full rehabilitation encompassing the right of return that other deported peoples were given. The carefully worded decree referred to them not as "Crimean Tatars" but as "citizens of Tatar nationality who having formerly lived in Crimea […] have taken root in the Uzbek SSR", thereby minimizing Crimean Tatar existence and downplaying their desire for the right of return in addition to creating a premise for claims of the issue being "settled".Template:Sfn Individuals united and formed groups that went back to Crimea in 1968 on their own, without state permission, but the Soviet authorities deported 6,000 of them once again.Template:Sfn The most notable example of such resistance was a Crimean Tatar activist, Musa Mamut, who was deported when he was 12 and who returned to Crimea because he wanted to see his home again. When the police informed him that he would be evicted, he set himself on fire.Template:Sfn Nevertheless, 577 families managed to obtain state permission to reside in Crimea.Template:Sfn

In 1968 unrest erupted among the Crimean Tatar people in the Uzbek city of Chirchiq.Template:Sfn In October 1973, the Jewish poet and professor Ilya Gabay committed suicide by jumping off a building in Moscow. He was one of the significant Jewish dissidents in the USSR who fought for the rights of the oppressed peoples, especially Crimean Tatars. Gabay had been arrested and sent to a labour camp but still insisted on his cause because he was convinced that the treatment of the Crimean Tatars by the USSR amounted to genocide.Template:Sfn In 1973, Dzhemilev was also arrested for his advocacy for Crimean Tatar right to return to Crimea.Template:Sfn

File:Amet-khan Sultan.jpg

Amet-khan Sultan was a highly decorated Crimean Tatar flying ace who was twice awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Amet-khan was one of the first people in the Soviet Union to publicly request the rehabilitation and right of return for the Crimean Tatars in 1956.

Repatriation

Despite de-Stalinization, the situation did not change until Gorbachev's perestroika in the late 1980s. A 1987 Tatar protest near the KremlinTemplate:Sfn prompted Gorbachev to form the Gromyko Commission which found against Tatar claims, but a second commission recommended "renewal of autonomy" for Crimean Tatars.Template:Sfn In 1989 the ban on the return of deported ethnicities was declared officially null and void and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union further declared the deportations criminal,Template:Sfn paving the way for the Crimean Tatars to return. Dzhemilev returned to Crimea that year, with at least 166,000 other Tatars doing the same by January 1992.Template:Sfn The 1991 Russian law On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples rehabilitated all Soviet repressed ethnicities and abolished all previous Russian laws relating to the deportations, calling for the "restoration and return of the cultural and spiritual values and archives which represent the heritage of the repressed people."Template:Sfn

By 2004 the Crimean Tatars formed 12% of the population of Crimea. The return was fraught: with Russian nationalist protests in Crimea and clashes between locals and Crimean Tatars near Yalta, which needed army intervention. Local Soviet authorities were reluctant to help returnees with jobs or housing,Template:Sfn After the dissolution of the USSR, Crimea was part of Ukraine, but Kyiv gave limited support to Crimean Tatar settlers. Some 150,000 of the returnees were granted citizenship automatically under Ukraine's Citizenship Law of 1991, but 100,000 who returned after Ukraine declared independence faced several obstacles including a costly bureaucratic process.Template:Sfn

Annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation

File:2016 Memorial day of Deportation of the Crimean Tatars in Kyiv 15.jpg

An event commemorating the victims of the Crimean Tatar deportation in Kyiv in 2016

File:Mustafa Abdülcemil Kırımoğlu.jpg

Mustafa Dzhemilev, a Crimean Tatar activist of the OKND faction, spent 17 years in jail for his advocacy

In March 2014, the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation unfolded, which was, in turn, declared illegal by the United Nations General Assembly (United Nations General Assembly Resolution 68/262) and which led to further deterioration of the rights of the Crimean Tatars. Even though the Russian Federation issued Decree No. 268 "On the Measures for the Rehabilitation of Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek, Crimean Tatar and German Peoples and the State Support of Their Revival and Development" on 21 April 2014,Template:Sfn in practice Russia has intensified persecution of Crimean Tatars and their human rights situation has significantly deteriorated. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a warning against the Kremlin in 2016 because it "intimidated, harassed and jailed Crimean Tatar representatives, often on dubious charges",Template:Sfn while the representative body the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People was banned.Template:Sfn

The UN reported that of the over 10,000 people left Crimea after the annexation in 2014, most were Crimean Tatars, which caused a further decline of their fragile community. Crimean Tatars stated several reasons for their departure, among them insecurity, fear, and intimidation from the new Russian authorities.Template:Sfn In its 2015 report, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that various human rights violations were recorded in Crimea, including the prevention of Crimean Tatars from marking the 71st anniversary of their deportation.Template:Sfn

Modern views and legacy

The KGB collaborators are furious that we are gathering statistical evidence about Crimean Tatars who perished in exile and that we are collecting materials against the sadist commandants who derided the people during the Stalin years and who, according to the precepts of the Nuremberg Tribunal, should be tried for crimes against humanity. As a result of the crime of 1944, I lost thousands upon thousands of my brothers and sisters. And this must be remembered!Template:Sfn

— Mustafa Dzhemilev, 1966

Historian Edward Allworth has noted that the extent of marginalization of the Crimean Tatars was a distinct anomaly among national policy in the USSR given the party's firm commitment maintaining the status quo of not recognizing them as a distinct ethnic group in addition to assimilating and "rooting" them in exile, in sharp contrast to the rehabilitation other deported ethnic groups such as the Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars, and Kalmyks experienced in the Khrushchev era.Template:Sfn

Between 1989 and 1994, around a quarter of a million Crimean Tatars returned to Crimea from exile in Central Asia. This was seen as a symbolic victory of their efforts to return to their native land.Template:Sfn They returned after 45 years of exile.Template:Sfn

Not one of the several ethnic groups who were deported during Stalin's era received any kind of financial compensation.Template:Sfn Some Crimean Tatar groups and activists have called for the international community to put pressure on the Russian Federation, the successor state of the USSR, to finance rehabilitation of that ethnicity and provide financial compensation for forcible resettlement.Template:Sfn

File:Deportation of the Crimean Tatars en.svg

Symbol of the anniversary of deportation of the Crimean Tatars

Despite the thousands of Crimean Tatars in the Red Army when it attacked Berlin, the Crimean Tatars continued to be seen and treated as a fifth column for decades.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Some historians explain this as part of Stalin's plan to take complete control of Crimea. The Soviet sought access to the Dardanelles and control of territory in Turkey, where the Crimean Tatars had ethnic kin. By painting the Crimean Tatars as traitors, this taint could be extended to their kin.Template:Sfn Scholar Walter Kolarz alleges that the deportation and the attempt of liquidation of Crimean Tatars as an ethnicity in 1944 was just the final act of the centuries-long process of Russian colonization of Crimea that started in 1783.Template:Sfn Historian Gregory Dufaud regards the Soviet accusations against Crimean Tatars as a convenient excuse for their forcible transfer through which Moscow secured an unrivalled access to the geostrategic southern Black Sea on one hand and eliminated hypothetical rebellious nations at the same time.Template:Sfn Professor of Russian and Soviet history Rebecca Manley similarly concluded that the real aim of the Soviet government was to "cleanse" the border regions of "unreliable elements".Template:Sfn Professor Brian Glyn Williams states that the deportations of Meskhetian Turks, despite never being close to the scene of combat and never being charged with any crime, lends the strongest credence to the fact that the deportations of Crimeans and Caucasians was due to Soviet foreign policy rather than any real "universal mass crimes".Template:Sfn

Modern interpretations by scholars and historians sometimes classify this mass deportation of civilians as a crime against humanity,Template:Sfn ethnic cleansing,Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn depopulation,Template:Sfn an act of Stalinist repression,Template:Sfn or an "ethnocide", meaning a deliberate wiping out of an identity and culture of a nation.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Crimean Tatars call this event Sürgünlik ("exile").Template:Sfn The perception of Crimean Tatars as "uncivilized" and deserving the deportation remains throughout the Russian and Ukrainian settlers in Crimea.

Genocide question and recognition

Some activists, politicians, scholars, countries, and historians go even further and consider the deportation a crime of genocideTemplate:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn or cultural genocide.Template:Sfn Norman Naimark writes "[t]he Chechens and Ingush, the Crimean Tatars, and other 'punished peoples' of the wartime period were, indeed, slated for elimination, if not physically, then as self-identifying nationalities."Template:Sfn Professor Lyman H. Legters argued that the Soviet penal system, combined with its resettlement policies, should count as genocidal since the sentences were borne most heavily specifically on certain ethnic groups, and that a relocation of these ethnic groups, whose survival depends on ties to its particular homeland, "had a genocidal effect remediable only by restoration of the group to its homeland."Template:Sfn Political scientist Stephen Blank described it both as a deportation and a genocide, a centuries-long Russian "technique of self-colonial rule intended to eliminate" minorities.Template:Sfn Soviet dissidents Ilya GabayTemplate:Sfn and Pyotr GrigorenkoTemplate:Sfn both classified the event as a genocide. Historian Timothy Snyder included it in a list of Soviet policies that “meet the standard of genocide." Historians Alexandre Bennigsen and Marie Bennigsen-Broxup included the case of Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks as two examples of successful genocides by Soviet governments. They summed it up by saying that Crimean Tatars, "a nation which for over five centuries had played a major part in the history of Eastern Europe has simply ceased to exist".Template:Sfn Polish scholar Tomasz Kamusella observed that Moscow attempted an "unmaking of Crimean Tatars and their language" by not allowing them even to be registered as Crimean Tatars since the deportation; they could only declare themselves as Tatars. It wasn't until the 1989 census that Crimean Tatars were again recognized as a separate nationality. The Crimean Tatar language was only allowed to be taught again in Soviet schools in the 1980s.Template:Sfn

On 12 December 2015, the Ukrainian parliament issued a resolution recognizing this event as genocide and established 18 May as the "Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Crimean Tatar genocide." The parliament of Latvia recognized the event as an act of genocide on 9 May 2019. The parliament of Lithuania did the same on 6 June 2019. The Canadian Parliament passed a motion on June 10, 2019, recognizing the Crimean Tatar deportation of 1944 (Sürgünlik) as a genocide perpetrated by Soviet dictator Stalin, designating May 18 to be a day of remembrance. On 26 April 1991 the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, under its chairman Boris Yeltsin, passed the law On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples with Article 2 denouncing all mass deportations as "Stalin's policy of defamation and genocide."Template:Sfn

#	Name	Date of recognition	Source
1	Ukraine	Template:Dts
2	Latvia	Template:Dts
3	Lithuania	Template:Dts
4	Canada	Template:Dts
5	Poland	Template:Dts
6	Estonia	Template:Dts
7	Czech Republic	Template:Dts
8	Netherlands	20 June 2025

A minority dispute defining the event as genocide. According to Alexander Statiev, the Soviet deportations resulted in a "genocidal death rate", but Stalin did not have the intent to exterminate these peoples. He considers such deportations merely an example of Soviet assimilation of "unwanted nations".Template:Sfn According to Amir Weiner, the Soviet regime sought to eradicate "only" their "territorial identity".Template:Sfn Such views were criticized by Jon Chang as "gentrified racism" and historical revisionism. He noted that the deportations had been in fact based on ethnicity of victims.Template:Sfn

• Ukrainian coin commemorating the Genocide of the Crimean Tatars, issued 2015
  Ukrainian coin commemorating the Genocide of the Crimean Tatars, issued 2015
• The projection mapping in Kyiv in 2020 for the Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Crimean Tatar genocide
  The projection mapping in Kyiv in 2020 for the Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Crimean Tatar genocide

In popular culture

File:ESC2016 winner's press conference 01.jpg

Jamala dedicated her 2016 Eurovision winning song "1944" to the deported Crimean Tatars

In 2008, Lily Hyde, a British journalist living in Ukraine, published a novel titled Dreamland that revolves around a Crimean Tatar family return to their homeland in the 1990s. The story is told from the perspective of a 12-year-old girl who moves from Uzbekistan to a demolished village with her parents, brother, and grandfather. Her grandfather tells her stories about the heroes and victims among the Crimean Tatars.Template:Sfn

The 2013 Ukrainian Crimean Tatar-language film Haytarma portrays the experience of Crimean Tatar flying ace and Hero of the Soviet Union Amet-khan Sultan during the 1944 deportations.Template:Sfn

In 2015, Christina Paschyn released the documentary film A Struggle for Home: The Crimean Tatars in a Ukrainian–Qatari co-production. It depicts the history of the Crimean Tatars from 1783 up until 2014, with a special emphasis on the 1944 mass deportation.

Crimean Tatar singer Jamala entered the Eurovision Song Contest 2016 with her song "1944", which refers to the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in the eponymous year. Jamala, an ethnic Crimean Tatar born in exile in Kyrgyzstan, dedicated the song to her deported great-grandmother. She became the first Crimean Tatar to perform at Eurovision and also the first to perform with a song with lyrics in the Crimean Tatar language. She went on to win the contest, becoming the second Ukrainian artist to win the event.Template:Sfn

See also

• Deportation of the Chechens and Ingush
• Deportation of the Meskhetian Turks
• List of ethnic cleansing campaigns
• List of genocides by death toll

General and cited sources

Books

• Template:In lang

External links

• Template:Commons category inline