Global InformationDeportation of the Crimean Tatars information
| Deportation of the Crimean Tatars | |
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| Part of forced population transfer in the Soviet Union and World War II | |
 Left to right, top to bottom: Memorial to the deportation in Eupatoria; candle-lighting ceremony in Kyiv; memorial rally in Taras Shevchenko park; cattlecar similar to the type used in the deportation; maps comparing the demographics of Crimea in 1939 and 2001. | |
| Location | Crimea |
| Date | 18–20 May 1944 |
| Target | Crimean Tatars |
Attack type | Forced population transfer, ethnic cleansing, genocide[1] |
| Deaths | Several estimates a) 34,000[2] b) 40,000–44,000[3] c) 42,000[4] d) 45,000[5] e) 109,956[6] |
| Victims | 191,044 to 423,100 Crimean Tatars deported to forced settlements in the Soviet Union |
| Perpetrators | NKVD, the Soviet secret police |
| Motive | Tatarophobia, Islamophobia |
| Part of a series on |
| Forced population transfer in the Soviet Union |
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| Peoples |
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| Operations |
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| WWII POW labor |
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| Massive labor force transfers |
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The deportation of the Crimean Tatars (Crimean Tatar: Qırımtatar halqınıñ sürgünligi, Cyrillic: Къырымтатар халкъынынъ сюргюнлиги) or the Sürgünlik ('exile') was the ethnic cleansing and the cultural genocide[c 1] of at least 191,044[c 2] Crimean Tatars which was carried out by the Soviet 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, mostly women, children, and the elderly, even Communist Party members and Red Army members, to the Uzbek SSR, several thousand kilometres away. They constituted one of the several ethnicities which 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,[10] but several modern scholars believe that the Soviet government carried out the deportation 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. This was despite the fact that twice as many Crimean Tatars served in the Red Army, 40,000, than had collaborated with the Axis powers, 20,000. Nearly 8,000 Crimean Tatars died during the deportation, and tens of thousands of other Crimean Tatars subsequently perished due to the harsh living conditions which they were forced to live under during their exile.[4] The deportation of the Crimean Tatars resulted in the abandonment of 80,000 houses and it also resulted in the abandonment of 360,000 acres of land.
After it deported the Crimean Tatars, the Soviet government launched an intense detatarization campaign in an attempt to erase the remaining traces of Crimean Tatar existence. By the end of the deportation, not a single Crimean Tatar lived in Crimea. 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 deported ethnic groups to return to their homelands, but he did not lift the directive which forbade the Crimean Tatars from returning to their homeland. The Crimean Tatars remained in Central Asia for the next three decades, until the perestroika era of the late 1980s, when 260,000 Crimean Tatars returned to Crimea. Their exile had lasted a total of 45 years. On 14 November 1989, the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union declared that the deportations had been a crime, and it also 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 authorities had not assisted them during their return to Crimea nor had it compensated them for the land which they had lost during the deportation. The Russian Federation never provided reparations, it never compensated those who lost their property during the deportation, and it never filed any legal proceedings against the perpetrators of the forced resettlement. The deportation and the subsequent assimilation efforts in Asia are crucial events in the history of the Crimean Tatars. Between 2015 and 2019, the deportation was formally recognised as a genocide by Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Canada.
- ^ Naimark 2010, pp. 2–14, 126, 135.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
buckley207was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Williams 2015, p. 109.
- ^ a b Rywkin 1994, p. 67.
- ^ Ukrainian Congress Committee of America 2004, pp. 43–44.
- ^ Hall 2014, p. 53.
- ^ Закон РСФСР от 26 апреля 1991 г. N 1107-I «О реабилитации репрессированных народов» (с изменениями и дополнениями) Article 2 "Репрессированными признаются народы (нации, народности или этнические группы и иные исторически сложившиеся культурно-этнические общности людей, например, казачество), в отношении которых по признакам национальной или иной принадлежности проводилась на государственном уровне политика клеветы и геноцида, сопровождавшаяся их насильственным переселением, упразднением национально-государственных образований, перекраиванием национально-территориальных границ, установлением режима террора и насилия в местах спецпоселения"
- ^ Закон «О реабилитации репрессированных народов» (1991) // РИА — 26.04.2016
- ^ Allworth 1988, p. 6.
- ^ Bezverkha 2017, p. 127.
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