The 80th anniversary of a tragedy that continues until today

May 2000 - the 56th anniversary of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars. Photo: Piotr Andrusieczko

Never forget

The last time I visited Crimea was in May 2019. It was the 75th anniversary of the deportation. Again I saw a small, informal gathering of Crimean Tatars in Simferopol. However, this event, despite being organized for the same cause, had a completely different character from the one I had seen 19 years earlier. The rally was closely watched by Russian police. At that time, any commemorations of the deportation were considered illegal by the Russian authorities. As it is in the case of authoritarian and totalitarian systems, memory which goes against official propaganda is often treated as dangerous. Therefore, the only commemorations that the Russian authorities in Crimea would allow would be the official ones, full of half-truths.

At that time I spoke with Nariman Dzhelyal, a Crimean Tatar activist who was present at the rally and remained on the peninsula despite the annexation: “It does not matter if it’s been 75 years or if it will be 90 years, this date is crucial for Crimean Tatars because the crime committed by the Stalinist regime was so terrible, so inhumane, that it will live on in future generations and define our psychology, our lives. Even more so there are still people in Crimea and around the world who are justifying this crime. Some people say that everything was just, that everything was done humanely. And that’s why it can’t be forgotten,” Dzhelyal told me on May 18th 2019.

The unofficial mourning ceremony ended with a plaque commemorating the displacement at the train station. There, Russian police officers read out a warning to rally participants: “In case of any attempts to violate public order … the participants and spectators of mass gatherings who do not comply with the rules may be held administratively and criminally responsible in accordance with the current legislation of the Russian Federation … the leadership of the interior ministry of the city of Simferopol warns you about the inadmissibility of breaking the law when holding meetings, rallies, demonstrations, pickets …. We ask you to disperse!”

“And what have we done that is unlawful?” asked those who were at the rally. “We are in our homeland. We have the right to honour the memory of our people on the day of the deportation!”

“Let them not think we are afraid!” one woman stated firmly.

In 1939, the Crimean Tatars were the second largest nationality group, after Russians (19.4 per cent), living on the Crimean Peninsula. The third largest group consisted of Ukrainians. In 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Crimea came under German occupation, which officially ended on May 12th 1944. A month later, Lavrentiy Beria, an accomplice in Stalin’s purges, issued a decree to cleanse the peninsula of all “anti-Soviet elements”. This was only a prelude to the ethnic cleansing.

On May 11th 1944 Stalin signed “Order Number 5859”, which organized the deportation of all Crimean Tatars from the peninsula. The official reason for the deportation was their alleged “mass desertions” from the Red Army at the beginning of the war and their “total collaboration” with the German occupiers. In reality, the number of deserters among the Crimean Tatars was comparable to other nationalities fighting in the Soviet Army. Many Tatars fought until the end of the war in the ranks of the Red Army. Among them were also soldiers who were awarded the title of “Hero of the Soviet Union”.

Deportation

Some historians believe that there were actually “pragmatic” reasons behind the deportation. After all, Stalin was preparing for a war with Turkey over the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits. The deportation in Crimea, as well as that in the South Caucasus, was intended to clear the areas that would be the hinterland of a new war of potentially disloyal populations. The deportation campaign began on May 18th 1944 and lasted for two days. It was carried out by the NKVD, the Soviet predecessor to the KGB. Tatar families were given about 15 minutes to collect their belongings, which could weigh up to 500 kilogrammes alongside food per family. In practice, most people took what they could hold in their own hands.

“I was 12 years old at the time … We were all deported in the same way, but each of us experienced it in our own way … They knocked on our door on the night of May 17th to 18th. Soldiers came in and told us to gather, we had 15 minutes or we would get deported. It was about three or four o’clock in the morning. My father was sick, he was shaking, he had Parkinson’s. Our house was in a Tatar village, not many people knew Russian there, we too understood only a little. My mother took a sheet from the mattress to collect the most important things. My brother and I began to dress my father because he could not dress himself. By the time we dressed him, the 15 minutes had passed. The soldier told us that time was up and we were asked to come out. This is how they chased us out. My father couldn’t walk, and the soldier was cursing at him not to pretend. They were from the NKVD – they behaved like the Gestapo,” an 87-year-old Medzhit Mambetov, who died a few years later, told me in 2019.

Later, cars arrived to take his family and other residents to a place where a freight train was waiting. They were herded into train wagons. Mambetov recalled that it was hot, with 60 people riding in one train car. There was no toilet in it and only four small windows. The doors were closed and it was difficult to breathe. The adults thought they were being transported to be shot. The men managed to use a knife to cut a hole in the floor for a toilet. The door was allowed to open only after they left Ukraine. The train travelled for 18 days. Mambetov recalled that they were fed only three times during the trip. They were given some porridge with water and a small amount of potatoes, as well as three loaves of bread for the whole wagon.

Between May 18th and 20th 1944, 180,014 people were resettled under the issued decree. They were sent to places of special settlement. In addition to that, some 6,000 Tatars were sent to the Gulag, while 5,000 were made to do forced labour in mines. More than 6,000 arrived in Red Army reserve training camps. Another 3,141 Crimean Tatars were deported at the end of June 1944 along with local Bulgarians, Greeks and Armenians.

Most of the deportees (78 per cent) were sent to the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, with 2.2 per cent to Kazakhstan. The remainder were resettled in other regions of the USSR east of the Urals. In 1946, another nearly 9,000 Crimean Tatars released from military service were sent to places of “special settlement”. It is estimated that between 191 and 320 died during the journey from Crimea to the resettlement sites. Yet the real horror awaited the Tatars at the actual deportation sites. Many women were sent to work in cotton fields. In the summertime, the temperature could reach almost 50 degrees Celsius. There was a shortage of water, so they took the water which was being irrigated to the fields. The Tatars were used to clean water from wells. In Uzbekistan, it had to be boiled and often there was nothing to boil it with. Infection and malaria reigned. It is estimated that 20 to 25 per cent of the Tatars who were resettled from Crimea died in the first years. According to the Crimean Tatar movement, this figure may have been even higher.

The Tatars had the status of being displaced for life. They faced up to 20 years of imprisonment for arbitrarily leaving their places of settlement. In 1945 Crimea’s autonomy was abolished. The republic became an oblast (administration region) in the Soviet Union. The entire cultural base of the Crimean Tatars was destroyed. Overall, 1,500 libraries and 860 schools were liquidated, while higher and secondary Tatar-language education was completely eliminated. By 1948, about 90 per cent of the Crimean Tatar place names had been changed.

The struggle to return

Some changes came after Stalin’s death. In February 1954, the Crimean region was incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In July of that year the decree punishing the Tatars with 20 years in camps for arbitrarily leaving their places of residence was rescinded. Subsequently, decrees on administrative control over the displaced were also withdrawn. Tatars misunderstood this as permission to return home. Local authorities and the militia quickly explained to them that they still had no right to return or reclaim their property. In the summer of 1956, a delegation of Crimean Tatars travelled to Moscow. They requested to meet with the leadership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union but were ignored. They therefore articulated their demands in a letter addressed to Mikhail Suslov, who was then in charge of ideology at the Central Committee. In November 1956, the Committee passed the renewal of the national autonomies concerning those deported in 1944. This concerned the Kalmyks, Karachays, Balkars, Chechens and Ingush, but not the Crimean Tatars.

In 1957, 14,000 Crimean Tatars signed a letter to the Central Committee demanding the renewal of their rights. This yielded nothing and the only response they received was further repressions. In early 1961, an underground Crimean Tatar Youth Union was established in Tashkent working for the return of the Tatars to their homeland. A few months later, its first two activists were sentenced to seven and five years in prison for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”.

Among the union’s members was Mustafa Dzhemilev, then 18 years old and later the leader of the Crimean Tatar national movement. As he recounted in May 2011, most conversations in Crimean Tatar homes in exile revolved around Crimea. It was thanks to them that the identity of the young generation of Tatars growing up outside their homeland was formulated.

“Interestingly, Soviet propaganda did not work on us. We received all the information from our parents,” Dzhemilev recalled back in 2011. He was not arrested in 1961 but the convictions of two members of his organization strongly influenced him. “I realized then that I would fight to the end to defeat the Soviet authorities. And from that time I began to prepare for prison.”

In April 1962, more youth activists were arrested and sentenced, which only strengthened the resistance. Tatars signed petitions, sent letters to Soviet authorities and organized rallies in Uzbekistan. In 1965 Dzhemilev was imprisoned, serving a total of 15 years in the Soviet Union.

Russian repressions led to the emergence of a “more radical” wing in the Crimean Tatar movement, which believed that no changes will happen without the democratization of power. Crimean Tatars thus began to cooperate with Soviet dissidents. According to Dzhemilev, this is how the Crimean Tatar movement became part of a large democratic movement in the USSR.

“We distinguished ourselves from the dissidents by having more support. They could collect a maximum of no more than 200 signatures under their appeals, while we collected tens of thousands. Admittedly, our appeals were not as strident. Unlike the dissidents, if one of us got arrested, all our relatives, friends, all our people tried to support such a person. Whereas Russians, they often forgot about their comrades,” Dzhmeilev told me in 2011.

Perhaps it was the determination and sheer size of the Crimean Tatar movement that forced Moscow to change its policy. In 1967, the Soviet authorities issued a decree titled “On citizens of Tatar nationality” that concerned those who lived in Crimea. It erased accusations of treason and restrictions on residence. Mass attempts to return to Crimea followed this decree. The Soviet authorities were frightened by this development and tried to somehow manage the process by restricted it administratively. Yet, the Tatars still tried to settle on the peninsula on their own by buying houses there.

Returning home

The real change came only after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. In July 1987, around 1500 Tatars came out to demonstrate on Moscow’s Red Square, calling for a return to Crimea. Despite the reconstruction already underway, this was something unprecedented. The protesters handed a letter addressed to Gorbachev to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which was signed by 30,000 people. Dzhemilev believes that year was to some extent a breakthrough. A commission was formed under the chairmanship of Andrei Gromyko to investigate the complaints and demands of the Tatars. The commission was not so much to bring about a change in the situation but primarily to show some goodwill on behalf of the authorities.

However, influenced by the further actions of the Tatars, on November 14th 1989, the Supreme Council issued a declaration declaring the forced resettlement unlawful and guaranteeing full restoration of the rights of the deportees. In theory, it obliged the authorities of the republics where Tatars resided to provide assistance to those willing to repatriate. In reality, the Tatars could count on nothing. Nevertheless, the position of the Soviet authorities and the weakening control of the bureaucracy led to the beginning of the mass return of Tatars to Crimea.

At the same time, the Crimean Tatar national movement was also in the process of formalization. On June 26th 1991, an assembly of Crimean Tatar representatives was held in Kyiv, where the formation of the Medjlis was announced. This was declared to be the “highest authorized representative body of the Crimean Tatar people”. Significantly, the strategy of the Crimean Tatar movement states that the Tatars will demand autonomy within Ukraine and speak out against Crimea’s annexation by Russia. According to Dzhemilev, during the independence referendum in December 1991, the majority of Tatars supported Ukraine’s independence.

Once Ukraine’s independence was declared, the Ukrainian state officially gave assurances that it favoured the return of Tatars to their homeland. In practice, the returnees faced numerous problems, which were also related to the overall situation in Crimea, where pro-Russian forces had been active since the early 1990s. In fact, after 1991 Crimea became an area of dispute between Russia and Ukraine. In the 1990s, the returning Tatars faced many problems. It was not until 1999 that the issue of granting them Ukrainian citizenship was finally resolved. Other painful topics such as housing and land acquisition arose. A compromise was reached that would see returning Tatars not claim property that had been taken away from them.

Crimean Tatars often demonstrated against restrictions on their rights, but nevertheless remained loyal citizens of the Ukrainian state. The rationale behind this support was that if Crimea was not Ukrainian, it would become Russian. In 2011 when I spoke with Dzhemilev, he was the chairman of the Medjlis in Simferopol. We discussed the relations between the Tatars and the Ukrainian state. He told me how difficult it was for Tatars to be patriots of Ukraine when the state ignores so many of their problems. Yet at the same time he stressed that Crimea is a part of Ukraine and Ukraine is their state.

Destruction of Crimean Tatar independence

In late February 2014, a Russian military operation to seize the peninsula began in Crimea. On February 26th a rally under the slogan “Crimea is Ukraine” was held in front of the parliament building of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, which was attended by several thousand Tatars. On the night between February 26th and 27th, Russian soldiers without identifying marks occupied the Crimean parliament and government building. The Tatars found themselves targeted by Russian forces from the very beginning. On March 3rd, 39-year-old Reshat Ametov told his family that he was going to enlist as a volunteer in the Ukrainian army. On that day, in the centre of Simferopol a man on Lenin Square in front of the Crimean government building was recorded by cameras. It was Ametov, who was leading a one-man picket against the annexation of Crimea. The footage shows him being approached by several uniformed men from the so-called “Crimean Self-Defence”. They tied his hands and forced him into a car. Two weeks later, his body was found with numerous signs of torture.

This was still the period when the Kremlin tried to “bribe” the Tatars. Vladimir Putin even had a half-hour phone conversation with Dzhemilev.

“There was an impression that Putin was looking for a Tatar version of Ramzan Kadyrov (the strongman Chechen leader loyal to the Kremlin – editor’s note). This did not work out. They tried to use the Kazan Tatars as intermediaries. The Tatarstan president came to us seven or eight times and told us how good things were in Russia. Our people listened attentively and answered him politely: “You have your way, and we have our way,” Dzhmilev told me when we talked in Kyiv in late 2014. In fact, the Russian authorities banned the Medjlis leaders, such as Dzhmilev and Refat Chubar, from entering the peninsula.

Around 50,000 Tatars have fled the peninsula since the annexation in 2014. The Russian repression machine was on overdrive, with blackmail, intimidation and business inspections becoming regular occurrences. By 2016 more than a dozen Crimean Tatars had been kidnapped and some of them are still missing. By then, Russia had fully eliminated the Medjlis from Crimea by issuing a ban on the group’s activities. The next stage of repressions was to stir up cases of extremism or terrorism.

What has been left in Crimea is Milli Firka, an organization of Crimean Tatars which after the annexation has remained in opposition to the Medjlis. While there is nothing wrong with  opposition in theory, Milli Firka was primarily treated as a pro-Russian institution.

“As one Frenchman said, when there are no traitors, no prostitutes, no drug addicts in a nation, what kind of a nation is it? In our country there are also such people, but for Russia their number is critically small,” Dzhemilevi told me in late 2014.

Milli Firka officially supported the Russian annexation. Its head Vasvi Abduraimov explained to me in 2019 that in the “merger” with Russia he saw an opportunity for the development of the Crimean nation as part of Russkiy mir (Russian world). He explained that this Russian world is a “natural socio-cultural matrix” in which the Tatars have lived since the late 18th century, when “Russia first came here”. In his view, Tatars are “saturated with the Russian language, Russian culture, and there is nothing wrong with that”, because this does not mean that they forget about their own culture and language. On top of that, Russia promised to do a lot for the Tatars.

“Unfortunately, instead of the steps that the Russian authorities should have taken, we received just some shuffling. Today I can say with full responsibility that for five years the new authorities in Crimea have not fulfilled their promises,” Abuduraimov told me with clear disappointment in his voice.

Not to make this view just a general opinion, the head of Milli Firki mentioned very concrete problems. They included the lack of adequate representation of the Tatars in Crimea’s authorities, as well as issues concerning education and the failure to solve the land ownership issue. Abuduraimov was especially disappointed with the policies of the Russian authorities when it came to addressing the issues of rehabilitation and autonomy for Tatars in Crimea. Moreover, under the pretext of fighting terrorists, he believes that there are attempts to intimidate people so that they do not dare to protest against what is happening in Crimea.

This harsh criticism of the Russian authorities from a person who supported the Russian operation to annex Crimea in 2014 was surprising to me. But my intuition also tells me that three years later, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he would probably not dare say what he told me back then.

A tragedy that continues

Nariman Dzhelyal, the Medjlis deputy chairman and a charismatic intellectual, was one of the few Crimean Tatars who stayed in Crimea after the peninsula’s annexation. And he stayed for quite some time. Such people are particularly “dangerous” to the Russian system. All the more so when they speak of the universal dimension of ethnic cleansing, which was also the case during the 1944 deportation.

“The deportation of the Crimean Tatars but also the deportations of many other peoples in the Soviet Union are tragic events with huge meaning not only to us. They are important for all of humanity. We should finally learn to live in peace, so that blood is not shed today in Ukraine, Syria or Palestine. So that people are not killed in mosques or in churches, as is happening today. So that the Uighurs are not persecuted like they are in China. So that people finally learn to hear each other. And that is why we, not only for ourselves, but for all of humanity, we try not to forget this day. We mark it, talk about it, even shout about it, so that everyone understands the depth of this tragedy, this crime, and that we can finally learn something,” Dzhelyal said on May 18th 2019.

Two years later, Dzhelyal was arrested along with four other Crimean Tatars. They were accused of blowing up a gas pipeline in Crimea. In 2022, Dzhelyal was sentenced to 17 years in a maximum security penal colony. In addition to his sentence, he received a Stalinist-style ban on his movement for one and a half years.

In early 2024, Ukrainian human rights organizations reported that since the beginning of the annexation, there have been 307 cases of court persecutions for political reasons in Crimea. According to the statistics, 206 of them have involved Crimean Tatars, with 99 of them now sentenced to long prison terms. Evidently, the situation has only worsened since the start of the full-scale invasion and Crimean Tatars are victims of this aggression as well. 

Some of the quoted statements were previously published by New Eastern Europe, Ukrainsky Zhurnal and Outriders.

Piotr Andrusieczko is a journalist and commentator specializing on Ukrainian issues.

Crimea, Crimean Tatars, Deportation, Russian annexation of Crimea, Ukraine