Communist era

That is until communism came and Joseph Stalin decided to embark on a campaign of “collectivization”, forcing the peasants across the USSR to either “voluntarily” join collective farms (kolkhozes, which in theory were co-ops, but in practice, they were little different from state-operated sovkhozes), or face persecution as “kulaks”.

By Soviet definition, a kulak was anyone who owned more than 8 acres, or 3.2 hectares of land. To put that in perspective, that is 32,000 sqm; a perfect square of that surface can be strolled around at a leisurely pace in under 10 minutes.

The Stalinist collectivization is nowadays recognized by many as a deliberate action intended to cause an engineered famine. In Ukraine, it was, and is, known as Holodomor, the Great Famine, and it may have killed as many as 5 mln people in Ukraine alone.

Crimea, although at that time administratively part of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, was also affected, and as many as 150,000 Tatars alone (50% of their population at the time) are believed to have died. Many have also fled to Turkey and Bulgaria.

Following the Great Famine, the population of Crimean Tatars began to bounce back, but Stalin was not done with the Tatars yet.

May 18, 1944 - Sürgünlik

In 1944, the Red Army reconquered Crimea from the Germans. The war would still last for almost another year. But Joseph Stalin, the bloodthirsty dictator of the Soviet Union, who had developed a habit of moving entire nations to distant and desolate parts of his empire on an apparent whim, although under the guise of “developing” them, would not wait that long. Now he decided to focus on the Tatars.

On May 18, the entire Tatar population of Crimea was herded into cattle cars. The entire population, numbering between 190,000 and 240,000, was deported, mainly to the Uzbek SSR in Central Asia.

The estimates vary by 50,000, that much is true, but the Soviets were never as concerned with keeping tabs on the number of people they oppressed, deported, or murdered in the same way the German Nazis were.

Incidentally, the supposed reason for the deportation was the Tatars’ collaboration with the Nazis during World War Two. And it cannot be denied that some have collaborated. Amongst almost any ethnicity that inhabited the Soviet Union, the Nazis found more or less willing collaborators, including among ethnic Russians. If someone welcomes Nazis, of all the people, as liberators, that kind of tells you all you need to know about what the Soviets have put them through over the preceding two decades …

But Stalin was not satisfied with punishing those who had been found to have collaborated with the Nazis. Collective punishment was the name of the game for the Red Tsar.

So he removed the entire population of Crimean Tatars from their homeland.

In just three days: between May 18 and May 20. Men, women, children, the elderly. Some 8,000 of them did not survive the journey. Many more died after arriving on the spot. The Soviets had a habit of unloading the deportees in the middle of a desolate steppe and telling them to just get on with it.

Many other ethnic groups have already been subjected to this kind of deportation, including the Poles in the areas the Soviets jointly partitioned with Nazi Germany in 1939.

In 1956, the new leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev condemned Stalinist atrocities and the “Cult of Personality” that surrounded “Uncle Joe”. But it was not until Gorbachev’s “perestroika”, that the Tatars were allowed to return to their homeland. And since 1989, and then following the collapse of the Soviet Union, many did. And many did not: almost half of those descended from the 1944 deportees remain in Uzbekistan to this day.

But almost 250,000 Crimean Tatars have resettled or were born, back in their ancestral Crimean homeland. They made up between 11% and 13% of the population of the Peninsula when Russia illegally and unilaterally annexed it in the sham referendum following Russia’s occupation of Crimea.

2014

Having experienced the Soviet Union at its worst, Crimean Tatars were certainly glad not to be part of it anymore, and having experienced the rule of the Red Tsars of the Kremlin, they were not keen to find themselves under the rule of the Kremlin again, whether it be red, white, or, like today, the black-and-orange of St. George’s ribbon.

The Crimean Tatars were glad to return to their homeland. And they were glad that their homeland was part of any country, but one ruled from the Kremlin. When Russian “Little Green Men” took over Crimea, Tatars went out into the streets hoisting Ukrainian flags to protest. The Crimean Tatar community has boycotted the illegal referendum organized by the Russian occupiers, that would annex Crimea to the Russian Federation.

The Russians cracked down on the Tatars. Tatar activists were arrested.

The Mejlis was founded in 1991, to act as a representative body for the Crimean Tatars which could address grievances to the Ukrainian central government, the Crimean government, and international bodies. The Russian government abolished the Mejlis in 2016, branding it as an “extremist organization”: a catch-all term that translates into civilized language as anyone that dares to speak out against Putin’s regime. Russian occupation authorities in Crimea have arrested numerous Crimean Tatar activists and leaders and sent them to the modern equivalents of gulags.

Nearly 80 years ago Soviet Russia perpetrated the crime of genocide, which ethnic cleansing falls under, against the Tatar people of Crimea. And for the past eight years, the Kremlin despot has been doing the same to the Tatars of Crimea who have returned to their ancestral homeland.

Ukraine recognizes the deportation of Tatars as something to remind the world about and honors its victims. Russia peddles a narrative of liberating the people of southern and eastern Ukraine from “a fascist regime”. Yet, as Russia has done over the past several centuries, apparently the people they liberate need to be liberated despite what they themselves want. And if they do not want to be a part of the “Russkiy Mir” (Russian World)? Well, they be damned…