How and why the deportation of the Crimean Tatars was carried out. Why did Stalin deport Crimean Tatars Deportation of Kazan Tatars from Crimea

On May 18, 1944, the deportation of the Crimean Tatar people began.
The deportation operation began in the early hours of 18 May 1944 and ended at 4:00 pm on 20 May. It took the punitive authorities only 60 hours and over 70 echelons, each of which had 50 wagons, to carry it out. For its implementation, the NKVD troops were involved in the amount of more than 32 thousand people.

The deportees were given from several minutes to half an hour to collect, after which they were transported by trucks to the railway stations. From there, the trains with the escorted went to the places of exile. According to eyewitnesses, those who resisted or could not walk were often shot on the spot. On the road, the exiles were fed rarely and often with salty food, after which they were thirsty. In some trains, the exiles received food for the first and last time in the second week of their journey. The dead were hastily buried next to the railroad tracks or not buried at all.

The official reason for the expulsion was the mass desertion of the Crimean Tatars from the Red Army in 1941 (the number was called about 20 thousand people), the good reception of the German troops and the active participation of the Crimean Tatars in the formations of the German army, SD, police, gendarmerie, apparatus prisons and camps. At the same time, deportation did not touch most of the Crimean Tatar collaborators, since the bulk of them were evacuated by the Germans to Germany. Those who remained in the Crimea were identified by the NKVD during the “cleansing operations” in April-May 1944 and condemned as traitors to the motherland. For those who say that all Crimean Tatars were traitors and accomplices of the Nazis, I will give a few figures.
Crimean Tatars who fought in the Red Army were also deported after demobilization. In total, in 1945-1946, 8995 Crimean Tatar veterans of the war were sent to the places of deportation, including 524 officers and 1392 sergeants. In 1952 (after the famine of 1945, which claimed many lives), only in Uzbekistan, according to the NKVD, there were 6,057 participants in the war, many of whom had high government awards.

From the memories of deportation survivors:

“In the morning, instead of a greeting, a choice mat and a question: are there any corpses? People cling to the dead, cry, do not give back. Soldiers throw the bodies of adults out the door, children out the window ... "

“There was no medical care. The dead were taken out of the car and left at the station, without being allowed to bury.

“There was no question of medical care. People drank water from reservoirs and stocked up from there for future use. There was no way to boil water. People began to get sick with dysentery, typhoid fever, malaria, scabies, lice overcame everyone. It was hot and constantly thirsty. The dead were left at the junctions, no one buried them.”

“After a few days of travel, the dead were carried out of our car: an old woman and a little boy. The train stopped at small stations to leave the dead. ... They didn’t let them bury.”

“My grandmother, brothers and sisters died in the first months of deportation before the end of 1944. Mom lay unconscious in such heat with her dead brother for three days. Until adults see her.

A significant number of immigrants, exhausted after three years of living in the Crimea occupied by the Germans, died in places of deportation from starvation and disease in 1944-45 due to the lack of normal living conditions (in the early years people lived in barracks and dugouts, did not have enough food and access to health care). Estimates of the number of deaths during this period vary widely: from 15-25% according to various Soviet official bodies to 46% according to estimates by activists of the Crimean Tatar movement who collected information about the dead in the 1960s. So, according to the OSP of the UzSSR, only “for 6 months of 1944, that is, from the moment of arrival in the UzSSR and until the end of the year, 16,052 people died. (10.6%)".

For 12 years until 1956, the Crimean Tatars had the status of special settlers, which implied various restrictions on their rights, in particular, a ban on unauthorized (without written permission from the special commandant's office) crossing the border of a special settlement and criminal punishment for its violation. Numerous cases are known when people were sentenced to many years (up to 25 years) in camps for visiting relatives in neighboring villages, the territory of which belonged to another special settlement.

The Crimean Tatars were not just evicted. They were subjected to the deliberate creation of such living conditions for them, which were calculated for the complete or partial physical and moral destruction of the people so that the world would forget about them, and they themselves would forget to which clan-tribe they belonged and in no case thought about returning to native lands.

The total deportation of the Crimean Tatars was the greatest betrayal on the part of the Soviet authorities, since the main part of the male population of the Crimean Tatars, drafted into the army, continued at that time to fight on the fronts for the same Soviet power. About 60 thousand Crimean Tatars were called to the front in 1941, 36 thousand died defending the USSR. In addition, 17 thousand Crimean Tatar boys and girls became activists of the partisan movement, 7 thousand participated in underground work.

The Nazis burned 127 Crimean Tatar villages because their inhabitants helped the partisans, 12,000 Crimean Tatars were killed for resisting the occupation regime, and more than 20,000 were forcibly driven to Germany.
Crimean Tatars who fought in the Red Army were also deported after being demobilized and returning home from the front to Crimea. Crimean Tatars were also deported, who did not live in Crimea during the occupation and managed to return to Crimea by May 18, 1944. In 1949, in the places of deportation, there were 8995 Crimean Tatars - participants in the war, including 524 officers and 1392 sergeants.

According to the final data, 193,865 Crimean Tatars (over 47,000 families) were deported from Crimea.
After the deportations in Crimea, two decrees from 1945 and 1948 renamed settlements whose names were of Crimean Tatar, German, Greek, Armenian origin (in total, more than 90% of the settlements of the peninsula). The Crimean ASSR was transformed into the Crimean Oblast. The autonomous status of Crimea was restored only in 1991.

Unlike many other deported peoples who returned to their homeland in the late 1950s, the Crimean Tatars were formally deprived of this right until 1974, but in fact until 1989. The mass return of the people to Crimea began only at the end of Perestroika.

GENERAL RESULTS OF THE DEPORTATION:
The Crimean Tatar people lost:
- native land, in which the ancestors, mastering the land, from the XIII century formed as a nationality, calling their land in their native language Crimea, and themselves Crimean Tatars;
- monuments of material culture, created by the hands of talented representatives of the people for many centuries.
The Crimean Tatar people were liquidated:
- primary and secondary schools teaching in the native language;
- higher and secondary educational institutions, special and vocational, technical schools with teaching in the native language;
- national ensembles, theaters and studios;
- newspapers, publishing houses, radio broadcasting and other national bodies and institutions (Unions of writers, journalists, artists);
- research institutes and institutions for the study of the Crimean Tatar language, literature, art and folk art.

The Crimean Tatar people have destroyed:
- cemeteries and graves of ancestors with tombstones and inscriptions;
- monuments and mausoleums of historical figures of the people.
From the Crimean Tatar people were taken away:
- national museums and libraries with tens of thousands of volumes in their native language;
- clubs, reading rooms, prayer houses - mosques and madrasahs.

The history of the formation of the Crimean Tatar people as a nationality was falsified and the original toponymy was destroyed:
- names of cities and villages, streets and quarters, geographical names of localities, etc. have been renamed;
- folk legends and other types of folk art, created over the centuries by the ancestors of the Crimean Tatars, have been altered and appropriated.

And the Day of struggle for the rights of the Crimean Tatar people. #Letters collected shocking but important facts about the deportation of the Crimean Tatars and its consequences.

1. EVEN VETERANS WERE DEPORTED

It is well known that the formal reason for the deportation of the Crimean Tatars - the indigenous people of Crimea - was the accusation of collaborationism. The resolution of the State Defense Committee of the USSR No. GOKO-5859 dated 05/11/1944 on the eviction of the Crimean Tatars from their historical homeland stated that many of them betrayed the Soviet Union, went over to the side of the enemy, and even joined the German punitive detachments. Worse, “the Crimean Tatars were especially notable for their brutal reprisals against Soviet partisans and helped the German invaders in organizing the forcible removal of Soviet citizens into German slavery,” the authors of the document claimed. In their minds, deportation was a symmetrical response.

But it should be remembered that before the war and in the period from June 22, 1941 to May 9, 1945, about 21 thousand Crimean Tatars were drafted into the Red Army from the Crimean ASSR. During the war, four Crimean divisions were formed on the territory of the autonomous republic. One of them (Evpatoria) was disbanded almost immediately due to a lack of weapons, but this problem soon affected the defense capability of other links. Most of the mobilized Tatars, however, did not fight on the territory of the ASSR, but on the Transcaucasian and Southwestern fronts.

Many Soviet historians cited the figure - about 20 thousand Crimean Tatar deserters. In the post-Soviet period, Ukrainian historians come to the conclusion that this figure is overestimated at times. During the fighting for the Crimea, no more than 4.9 thousand Crimeans went missing, and it is impossible to say that they all went over to the side of the enemy - probably, many just joined the partisan detachments. At the same time, more than 3,000 Crimean Tatars were killed during the war.

The family of the famous Soviet pilot Amet Khan Sultan was also deported

The demobilized were also subjected to deportation - the number of deported Crimean Tatar veterans is estimated at almost 9 thousand people. People who had been evacuated from the Crimea before the start of the occupation and returned home by the spring of 1944 were also expelled.

2. THERE WERE 15 MINUTES FOR CAMPAIGN

When soldiers began to arrive in trucks on the evening of May 17 in some villages, the Tatars, as was customary, offered them to share the table, Sabe Useinova recalls. But by 19:00, the guests switched to an official tone and began to drive people out of their houses with rifle butts. Many in the confusion did not have time to take documents with them.

The time allotted for the training camp depended on the whim of the commander of the group of soldiers, since the prescribed 2 hours for the training camp were practically not given to anyone. True, there is evidence of how the Chailak family was allowed to bake before sending the cakes - just about 2 hours delay. Usually 10-15 minutes were given, and sometimes even less: in Ak-Bash - 7, in Bakhchisarai - 5.

It is clear that it was impossible to collect the allowed 500 kg of things per family for such a period of time. Any official permits, including the rations due to the special settlers, turned into a mockery.

3. TOTALLY MORE THAN 190 THOUSAND PEOPLE WAS DEPORTED CIVIL

A telegram from the NKVD addressed to Stalin reported that 183,155 people had been deported from Crimea (after demobilization in 1945, this figure would increase). Most of the Crimean Tatars (151 thousand) were deported to Uzbekistan. Smaller groups ended up in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, the Mari ASSR and the Urals.

“In the course of the eviction of the Tatars, 1,137 anti-Soviet elements were arrested, and in total during the operation 5,989 people,” a telegram of May 20, 1944, addressed to Beria, was reported.

The total number of deportees in it is already 191 thousand. The last train arrived at the places of the special settlement on June 8. On this day, Comrade Beria himself reported from Tashkent that 191 people died on the way - that is, approximately one in a thousand. Undoubtedly, this figure is significantly underestimated.

People on the trains died not only from hunger (some of them received state-owned food only once), thirst, stuffiness, and various diseases, but also from catastrophic stress. Numerous testimonies of corpses being pushed out of the windows under the roof of the car, and in the best case, left without burial somewhere at the stop, confirm the fact that the deaths numbered in the thousands. According to historians, more than 7.8 thousand people died during transportation.

Infographics: Ukrinform

4. ARABAT TATARS FORGOT TO SEND - AND REMEMBERING, DEAL WITH THEM

Due to the lack of documentary evidence, many consider the tragedy at the Arabat Spit a myth. We are talking about the Crimean Tatars, who lived along a narrow strip of land near the Sea of ​​\u200b\u200bAzov. For some reason, the residents of the Arabat Spit escaped deportation. When in 1945 Bogdan Kobulov was informed about the omission, he ordered to clear the area within two hours (subsequently, the period was extended to a day). A few Crimeans were gathered at the pier, loaded into the hold of an old barge - or several - and then towed out to sea and opened the kingstones, battening down the upper hatches.

Although it is difficult to say for sure about the reality and scale of this tragic episode, a similar action in the Chechen village of Khaibakh speaks in favor of its veracity, where local residents who could not be deported in time were burned by the NKVD in one of the stables.

Installation by Roman Mikhailov “Radif. The Last Child” is a book made from the metal of railroad freight cars used during the deportation.

5. Special settlers were sent to typhoid state farms

The incidence of the Crimean Tatars in comparison with the inhabitants of Uzbekistan was huge. The main carrier of diseases, including malaria and dysentery, was dirty water. In addition, the Soviet authorities neglected the danger of the spread of quarantine diseases. Even before the arrival of the trains, a telegram was sent to Moscow stating that not a single settlement in the Kermeninsky district of Uzbekistan was ready to receive settlers. The reason is the spread in it of two forms of typhus (F-1 and F-5). Both forms are extremely dangerous and are easily transmitted from person to person. The patients were supposed to be completely isolated - but nothing of the kind, of course, happened. Crimean Tatars were sent to state farms suffering from typhus, did not receive proper medical care and died with their families. In 1944-48. mortality among them was higher than the birth rate by almost 7 times.

6. PROPAGANDA STIGMATIZED THE DEPORTED TATARS – AND NOT ONLY AS “COLLABORATIONISTS”

Along the route of the trains with the population, “explanatory work” was carried out. Moreover, the Crimean Tatars were presented not just as traitors to the socialist homeland and accomplices of Hitler, but literally as some fantastic monsters: dangerous animal-like creatures and even cannibals. Historian Valery Vozgrin says: “In Andijan, some Uzbek woman felt for a long time the head of Asanov’s son Murtaza, trying to find horns, even if they were very small.” The locals either tried to stay away from the trains passing through the stations, or vice versa, prepared stones to throw at the newcomers.

A resident of the near-station village Boz-Su recalled: “Everyone was quiet. They were waiting for the door to open. And so the escort opened the door, and all the people leaned forward - each with his own weapon. What appeared before our eyes cannot be described at once. I still can't forget this. Those eyes, those faces, those living corpses that looked at us from the boxcars, barely lifting themselves from the floor in their arms. These half-dead people are before my eyes now and they always stand before me all my life when I look into the eyes of elderly Crimean Tatars. It seems to me that it was them that I saw then on the platform.

7. THOUSANDS OF LIBRARIES DESTROYED

Of course, Stalin's policy towards the Crimean Tatars was not limited to physical displacement and extermination. The genocide also had its own cultural aspect. More than 500 rural national libraries, 861 school libraries (following the schools themselves), several large libraries and more than 100 large private collections were liquidated. Books in the Crimean Tatar language, stored in Russian libraries, were also destroyed - as a rule, they were burned.

“Crimean Tatars. Whoever has never been to the Crimea has never seen beauty.” Postcard by E.M. Bem (1910)

The library collection "Tavrika" of the 19th century, which included rare books, manuscripts, maps and drawings, was plundered at the beginning of the occupation of Crimea, but the Germans were not interested in exporting books in the language of the Crimean Tatars, and the Soviet leadership was not interested in saving them. In May 1944, the remaining books were burned in the courtyard of the Central Republican Museum. Most of the pre-revolutionary and medieval manuscripts also did not survive this period.

8. LATER EVERYONE RETURNED TO THE HOMELAND

As you know, not only the Crimean Tatars were deported in the 1940s. In 1944, Crimean Armenians, Greeks and Bulgarians were also deported. But, unlike them, who returned to their homeland in the late 50s, the Tatars were formally deprived of such a right until 1974 (in fact, until the 1980s). Many special settlers simply did not have the financial opportunity to return.

Often, Crimean Tatar orphans kept in orphanages received Russian or Uzbek surnames. Later, this prevented them from establishing contact with relatives.

9. THE OLD TOPONYMS WERE NOT SERIOUS ALSO

Crimean Tatars were not just separated from their families and torn from their homes. The very memory of them had to be destroyed, right down to the article from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Most geographical names were "Sovietized".

In 1944–1945 in Crimea, 11 regional centers were renamed (Larindorfsky district became Pervomaisky, Ak-Mechetsky - Chernomorsky) and 327 villages. Sometimes the renaming commissions chose traditional “red” toponyms, but sometimes fanciful names like New World, Burevestnik and Zhemchuzhina appeared.

Fragment of the map of Crimea of ​​the Crimean Statistical Office, 1922

In September 1948, Stalin visited the Crimea, and after his meeting with the secretary of the Yalta City Party Committee, a resolution was adopted "On the renaming of settlements, streets, certain types of work and other Tatar designations." Local governments were forced to choose new names even for mountains and rivers. During the last renaming, 1062 settlements and more than a thousand natural objects received new names - about 80% of their total number. In the 1950s, the process slowed down, although Cape Toprak-Kaya still managed to become a Chameleon.

“The village of Biyuk-Yashlav, the former estate of the Crimean Tatar nobles, was named Repino, because the artist Repin was supposedly there once,” says historian Gulnara Bekirova. “But such thoughtfulness is rare, usually the process was chaotic.”

10. PERSECUTION OF THE CRIMEAN TATARS AS AN ETHNOUS DID NOT END WITH THE XX CENTURY

In 2014, Mustafa Dzhemilev noted that the Russian authorities are thinking about “creating conditions that will maximize the exit of Crimean Tatars from Crimea.” Too often one hears about new searches, disappearances of Crimean Tatars and their oppression on the annexed peninsula. Thus, a new wave of repressions was reported on May 8, when Russian security forces took away the son of the head of the district Majlis, Ilver Ametov, in an unknown direction.

The Mejlis itself is recognized in Russia as an extremist association. According to European human rights activists, this contradicts the decree on the rehabilitation of the peoples of Crimea, which Putin signed after the annexation of the peninsula.

In 2016, the vice-speaker, the so-called. The Crimean State Council Remzi Ilyasov said that the Crimean Tatars would not hold large mourning rallies on May 18. “We agreed that the initiative that was filed last year should be continued this year and that this day be spent peacefully, remembering all our relatives and friends who did not live to see their return to Crimea,” he said.

In fact, this means an unspoken ban on holding mass gatherings by Crimean Tatars.

In Kyiv, on the contrary, actions are being held in support of the Tatars, and the Verkhovna Rada honored the victims of the genocide with a minute of silence. Like the Crimean Tatars, many Ukrainians are deprived of the opportunity to return to their homeland, so solidarity and common memory are more important than ever.

In chapter

On the eve of the anniversary of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, the head of the Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, handed out hundreds of keys to new apartments to the descendants of the exiles, as if once again compensating them for the moral costs of the hardships and suffering they had suffered. But how much can one “pay and repent” if back in Soviet times the country’s authorities paid for the deportation of the Crimean Tatars at least three times?

That's right: the Soviet Union three times compensated the deported Crimean Tatars for their material costs incurred as a result of resettlement in the republics of Central Asia, as well as in Moscow (!), Samara, Guryev and Rybinsk. Only at the disposal of the Moskvougol trust, as follows from a telegram addressed to People's Commissar Lavrenty Beria dated May 20, 1944, 5 thousand "limiters" of Crimean Tatar nationality were sent. The resolution of the State Defense Committee No. 5859 dated May 11, 1944 stipulated that the settlers in the new place would be compensated “according to exchange receipts” for real estate, livestock, poultry and agricultural products accepted from them in the Crimea. All compensation was paid before March 1, 1946. At the same time, at the new place of residence, each family of migrants was provided with housing - an apartment in the city or a house in the countryside. In other words, the deportees were given money for housing left in Crimea and were immediately provided with new houses and apartments free of charge. But that's not all. In 1989, by decrees of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, as well as the Councils of Ministers of Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, the settlers were compensated for their material costs for the third time. For migrants arriving in Uzbekistan (Crimean Tatars were not deported to Tajikistan, they moved there later and solely of their own free will), the Agricultural Bank provided interest-free loans for household equipment - 50 thousand rubles per family with installments up to 7 years. Also, each migrant was given 8 kilos of flour, 8 kilos of vegetables and 2 kilos of cereals every month free of charge. Recall that it was the summer of 1944, the war was still going on, and in many parts of the country there was hunger.

The cruelty of the Crimean Tatars surprised even the SS

Until now, scientists are arguing how many Crimean Tatars were deported from Crimea, although it seems that there is nothing to argue about - it is enough to study archival documents. In a telegram sent on May 20, 1944 to People's Commissar Lavrenty Beria by his deputy Bogdan Kobulov, these figures are given: 191,044 people were evicted. By the way, this document contains other very interesting figures. Today, there is a lot of talk about the repressions that Crimean Tatars were subjected to en masse, although one can hardly talk about mass character. For the entire "Crimean operation" of 1944, 5989 "anti-Soviet elements of the Crimean Tatar nationality" were arrested. Is this a lot, considering that only in the first two months of the occupation, 20 thousand Crimean Tatars took the oath of allegiance to the Fuhrer? At the same time, during the deportation, 10 mortars, 173 light machine guns, 2650 rifles, 192 machine guns and more than 46 thousand pieces of ammunition were confiscated from the deportees! In total, after the liberation of Crimea, 9888 rifles, 724 machine guns, 622 machine guns and 49 mortars were seized from the Tatars.

The Germans even issued a special circular forbidding Crimean Tatars serving in the SS to independently conduct interrogations

“In January 1942, Hitler issued an order to form the Crimean Tatar units of the SS under the leadership of Obergruppenführer Ohlendorf,” recalled the head of the Crimean partisan movement, writer Georgy Seversky. - Part of the volunteers - 10 thousand fighters - were enrolled in the Wehrmacht, another 5 thousand were accepted into the so-called reserve to replenish the formed combat units. In addition, the village elders gathered another 4,000 people into "detachments to combat partisans." For comparison: about 10 thousand Crimean Tatars went to serve in the Red Army, but most of them deserted from the 51st Army during the retreat from the Crimea.” And either 391 or 598 Crimean Tatars were partisans in Crimea - in fairness it should be noted that 12 of them were nominated for the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

The Crimean Tatars served Hitler, as they say, to the conscience. The tragedy of the "Crimean Khatyn" - the Greek village of Laki is well known. On March 23, 1942, Crimean Tatar punishers burned alive several hundred inhabitants of this village, mostly Greeks and Armenians, most of whom were women, children and the elderly. “Partisans who managed to escape from captivity said that the Crimean Tatars, their guards, were distinguished by unheard-of cruelty,” Seversky recalled. “The Germans even issued a special circular forbidding the Crimean Tatars serving in the SS to conduct interrogations on their own, they knew how to torture so cruelly and subtly.” Meanwhile, Mustafa Dzhemilev, who fled to Kyiv, insists: “There have never been traitors among the Crimean Tatars! We have nothing to repent of!” Whom to believe?

Why did the Crimean Tatars move to Tajikistan and not to the Crimea

It is generally accepted that the Tatars were allowed to return to Crimea by General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev - on November 14, 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR adopted a declaration on the restoration of the rights of the deported peoples. For this, Gorbachev, who authorized this mass repatriation, is idolized by the Crimean Tatars. In fact, it was not the instigator of “perestroika” who allowed the repatriates to return. Back in 1956, a decree was prepared by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on the restoration of the national autonomy of the Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks and Karachays - in fact, these peoples were thereby rehabilitated. It was expected that the Crimean Tatars would be pardoned at the same time, but the then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev initially crossed out the mention of them from the draft decree with his own hand.

Two people worked for the Crimean Tatars - Anastas Mikoyan and Leonid Brezhnev. And they eventually persuaded the Secretary General. So at the end of April 1956, a decree was issued “On lifting restrictions on special settlements from Crimean Tatars, Balkars, Turks - citizens of the USSR, Kurds, Hemshils and members of their families evicted during the Great Patriotic War.” From that moment on, Crimean Tatars were not forbidden to settle anywhere on the territory of the USSR, including in the Crimea. But for some reason, the settlers rushed to Tajikistan, and not to their small homeland. The reason for this was that the leadership of the republic especially favored the Crimean Tatars, providing migrants with a lot of special opportunities. By the way, this explains the fact that today in Crimea more than a third of doctors are Crimean Tatars by nationality. The fact is that in Soviet times there was an unspoken agreement between the Crimean Tatar diaspora and the leadership of Tajikistan that the quota of Crimean Tatars in the Republican Medical Institute would be 90%, while in the Ukrainian Soviet Crimea no one promised Crimean Tatars such preferences.

In general, the deportees were clearly not going to move en masse to Crimea, and the leadership of the USSR decided to encourage them to do so. In August 1965, a large group of Crimean Tatars - mostly communists and war veterans - were invited to the Kremlin. They were received by the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Anastas Mikoyan, formally the second person in the state after Brezhnev. “Why don’t you return to Crimea?” the Soviet leader asked. “We will return as soon as Moscow declares Crimea a Crimean Tatar national autonomy,” the head of the delegation, Riza Asanov, answered Mikoyan. In general, I found a scythe on a stone: it was ridiculous to turn the peninsula into national autonomy, given that even a tenth of its inhabitants would not have been from the Crimean Tatars. But the leaders of the Tatars rested: if there is no autonomy, there will be no mass return to Crimea. The result is known to all: repatriation was postponed until the end of the 80s.

Sergey MARKOV, political scientist, member of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation:

– We have already recognized – at the highest state level – that the expulsion of the Crimean Tatar people was cruel and unfair. The country's leadership expressed its sympathy to all the innocent victims of this expulsion. However, the obvious fact must also be admitted that the reason for the expulsion was valid. The Crimean Tatar SS units committed monstrous atrocities. They killed the elderly, and children, and women. They were killed so brutally that the Germans complained about their atrocities to Berlin. Were the conditions of deportation more cruel than the actions of the Crimean Tatar punishers?

Image copyright getty Image caption Every year in May, the Tatars celebrate the anniversary of the deportation. This year, the Russian authorities banned the rally in Simferopol

On May 18-20, 1944, NKVD fighters, on orders from Moscow, rounded up almost the entire Tatar population of Crimea to railway cars and sent them to Uzbekistan in 70 echelons.

This forced deportation of the Tatars, whom the Soviet authorities accused of collaborating with the Nazis, was one of the fastest deportations in world history.

How did the Tatars live in Crimea before the deportation?

After the creation of the USSR in 1922, Moscow recognized the Crimean Tatars as the indigenous population of the Crimean ASSR as part of the indigenization policy.

In the 1920s, the Tatars were allowed to develop their culture. In Crimea, Crimean Tatar newspapers and magazines were published, educational institutions, museums, libraries and theaters worked.

The Crimean Tatar language, together with Russian, was the official language of the autonomy. More than 140 village councils used it.

In the 1920s-1930s, Tatars made up 25-30% of the total population of Crimea.

However, in the 1930s, Soviet policy towards the Tatars, like other nationalities of the USSR, became repressive.

Image copyright hatira.ru Image caption Crimean Tatar State Ensemble "Khaitarma". Moscow, 1935

First began the dispossession and eviction of the Tatars to the north of Russia and beyond the Urals. Then came forced collectivization, the Holodomor of 1932-33, and the purges of the intelligentsia in 1937-1938.

This turned many Crimean Tatars against the Soviet regime.

When did the deportation take place?

The main phase of the forced resettlement took place over less than three days, starting at dawn on May 18, 1944 and ending at 4:00 pm on May 20.

In total, 238.5 thousand people were deported from Crimea - almost the entire Crimean Tatar population.

For this, the NKVD attracted more than 32 thousand fighters.

What caused the deportation?

The official reason for the forced resettlement was the accusation of the entire Crimean Tatar people of high treason, "mass extermination of Soviet people" and collaborationism - cooperation with the Nazi occupiers.

Such arguments were contained in the decision of the State Defense Committee on deportation, which appeared a week before the start of the evictions.

However, historians name other, unofficial reasons for the resettlement. Among them is the fact that the Crimean Tatars historically had close ties with Turkey, which the USSR at the time viewed as a potential rival.

Image copyright hatira.ru Image caption Spouses in the Urals, 1953

In the plans of the USSR, the Crimea was a strategic springboard in case of a possible conflict with Turkey, and Stalin wanted to play it safe from possible "saboteurs and traitors", whom he considered the Tatars.

This theory is supported by the fact that other Muslim ethnic groups were resettled from the Caucasian regions adjacent to Turkey: Chechens, Ingush, Karachays and Balkars.

Did the Tatars support the Nazis?

Between nine and 20 thousand Crimean Tatars served in anti-Soviet combat units formed by the German authorities, writes historian Jonathan Otto Paul.

Some of them sought to protect their villages from Soviet partisans, who, according to the Tatars themselves, often persecuted them on ethnic grounds.

Other Tatars joined the German troops because they were captured by the Nazis and wanted to alleviate the difficult conditions of their stay in the prisoner of war camps in Simferopol and Nikolaev.

At the same time, 15% of the adult male Crimean Tatar population fought on the side of the Red Army. During the deportation, they were demobilized and sent to labor camps in Siberia and the Urals.

In May 1944, most of those who served in the German detachments retreated to Germany. Mostly wives and children who remained on the peninsula were deported.

How did the forced resettlement take place?

Employees of the NKVD entered the Tatar dwellings and announced to the owners that they were being evicted from the Crimea due to treason.

To collect things, gave 15-20 minutes. Officially, each family had the right to take up to 500 kg of luggage with them, but in reality they were allowed to take much less, and sometimes nothing at all.

Image copyright memory.gov.ua Image caption Mari ASSR. Team at the logging site. 1950

People were taken by trucks to the railway stations. From there, almost 70 echelons were sent to the east with tightly closed freight cars, crowded with people.

During the move, about eight thousand people died, most of them children and the elderly. The most common causes of death are thirst and typhus.

Some people, unable to endure suffering, went crazy. All the property left in the Crimea after the Tatars, the state appropriated to itself.

Where were the Tatars deported to?

Most of the Tatars were sent to Uzbekistan and neighboring regions of Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. Small groups of people ended up in the Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the Urals and the Kostroma region of Russia.

What were the consequences of the deportation for the Tatars?

During the first three years after the resettlement, from starvation, exhaustion and disease, according to various estimates, from 20 to 46% of all deportees died.

Almost half of those who died in the first year were children under 16.

Due to the lack of clean water, poor hygiene and lack of medical care, malaria, yellow fever, dysentery and other diseases spread among the deportees.

Image copyright hatira.ru Image caption Alime Ilyasova (right) with her friend, whose name is unknown. Early 1940s

The newcomers had no natural immunity against many local ailments.

What status did they have in Uzbekistan?

The overwhelming majority of the Crimean Tatars were transferred to the so-called special settlements - surrounded by armed guards, roadblocks and fenced with barbed wire, the territories looked more like labor camps than civilian settlements.

Newcomers were cheap labor, they were used to work in collective farms, state farms and industrial enterprises.

In Uzbekistan, they cultivated cotton fields, worked in mines, construction sites, plants and factories. Among the hard work was the construction of the Farkhad hydroelectric power station.

In 1948, Moscow recognized the Crimean Tatars as lifelong migrants. Those who, without the permission of the NKVD, went outside their special settlement, for example, to visit relatives, were in danger of 20 years in prison. There have been such cases.

Even before the deportation, propaganda incited hatred for the Crimean Tatars among local residents, stigmatizing them as traitors and enemies of the people.

As historian Greta Lynn Ugling writes, the Uzbeks were told that "cyclops" and "cannibals" were coming to them and were advised to stay away from the newcomers.

After the deportation, some local residents felt the heads of visitors to check that horns did not grow on them.

Later, when they learned that the Crimean Tatars were of the same faith, the Uzbeks were surprised.

The children of migrants could receive education in Russian or Uzbek, but not in Crimean Tatar.

By 1957, any publications in Crimean Tatar were banned. An article about the Crimean Tatars was removed from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

This nationality was also forbidden to enter in the passport.

What has changed in Crimea without the Tatars?

After the Tatars, as well as the Greeks, Bulgarians and Germans, were evicted from the peninsula, in June 1945 Crimea ceased to be an autonomous republic and became a region within the RSFSR.

The southern regions of Crimea, where the Crimean Tatars used to live, were deserted.

For example, according to official data, only 2,600 residents remained in the Alushta region, and 2,200 in Balaklava. Subsequently, people from Ukraine and Russia began to move here.

"Toponymic repressions" were carried out on the peninsula - most of the cities, villages, mountains and rivers that had Crimean Tatar, Greek or German names received new Russian names. Among the exceptions are Bakhchisaray, Dzhankoy, Ishun, Saki and Sudak.

The Soviet government destroyed Tatar monuments, burned manuscripts and books, including volumes of Lenin and Marx translated into Crimean Tatar.

Cinemas and shops were opened in mosques.

When were the Tatars allowed to return to Crimea?

The regime of special settlements for the Tatars lasted until the era of Khrushchev's de-Stalinization - the second half of the 1950s. Then the Soviet government softened their living conditions for them, but did not withdraw charges of high treason.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Tatars fought for their right to return to their historical homeland, including through demonstrations in Uzbek cities.

Image copyright hatira.ru Image caption Osman Ibrish with his wife Alime. Settlement Kibray, Uzbekistan, 1971

In 1968, the occasion for one of these actions was Lenin's birthday. The authorities dispersed the rally.

Gradually, the Crimean Tatars managed to achieve the expansion of their rights, however, an informal, but no less strict ban on their return to Crimea was in force until 1989.

Over the next four years, half of all Crimean Tatars who then lived in the USSR returned to the peninsula - 250 thousand people.

The return of the indigenous population to the Crimea was difficult and was accompanied by land conflicts with local residents who managed to get used to the new land. However, major confrontations were avoided.

A new challenge for the Crimean Tatars was the annexation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014. Some of them left the peninsula due to persecution.

Others have themselves been banned by Russian authorities from entering Crimea, including Crimean Tatar leaders Mustafa Dzhemilev and Refat Chubarov.

Does the deportation have signs of genocide?

Some researchers and dissidents believe that the deportation of the Tatars is consistent with the UN definition of genocide.

They argue that the Soviet government intended to destroy the Crimean Tatars as an ethnic group and deliberately went to this goal.

In 2006, the kurultai of the Crimean Tatar people turned to the Verkhovna Rada with a request to recognize the deportation as genocide.

Despite this, in most historical writings and diplomatic documents, the forced resettlement of Crimean Tatars is now called deportation, not genocide.

In the Soviet Union, the term "resettlement" was used.

Myths of the Great War. "Deportation" of the Crimean Tatars: the facts of history against the facts of consciousness
Myths of the Great War. "Deportation" of Crimean Tatars: The Logic of War and the Price of Punishment
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The Soviet leadership did this because, in the context of the continuation of the war on its territory, I.V. Stalin did not consider it necessary and possible to persecute and destroy thousands of Tatar "renegades"; chase them through the mountains and forests; catch and deal with everyone, losing their people, dooming local residents to new suffering, wasting resources, time, efforts on a tedious, exhausting struggle for the country, which could drag on for many years. The decision was made differently. It did not provide for deportation, which would mean expulsion from the USSR, but the forced resettlement of Tatars to those areas where their adaptation would take place as quickly and sparingly as possible, without provoking new religious and national strife, and would not threaten the country's security.

In fact, this resettlement in Crimea removed the inevitable clash between the Tatars and the rest of the Crimeans (including those returning home from the front), whose loved ones were destroyed by them during the occupation. How serious this was, we can judge from the events of 1943-1944 in southeastern Poland and Western Ukraine (Polesie, Kholmshchyna, Eastern Galicia), where, according to some sources, about 100 thousand people died on both sides in clashes between Ukrainians and Poles, and hundreds of villages and villages were burned. Then, in order to avoid further bloodshed, the governments of Poland and the Soviet Union carried out an “exchange” of the population, during which 810 thousand Poles were resettled in Poland and 483 thousand Ukrainians in the Ukrainian SSR, as well as about 40 thousand Czechs and Slovaks in Czechoslovakia. So the Tatars were actually saved from physical extermination and given the opportunity to atone for their guilt if possible.

In pursuance of this, on May 11, 1944, the State Defense Committee adopted a resolution "On the Crimean Tatars", which announced the decision on their resettlement in Central Asia. In particular, it said: “During the Patriotic War, many Crimean Tatars betrayed their homeland, deserted from the Red Army units defending the Crimea, and went over to the side of the enemy, joining the volunteer Tatar military units formed by the Germans, who fought against the Red Army; during the occupation of the Crimea by the Nazi troops, participating in the German punitive detachments, the Crimean Tatars especially distinguished themselves by their brutal reprisals against Soviet partisans ... ". To what extent this corresponds to reality, everyone can now judge for himself.

In addition to defining the general task, the State Defense Committee outlined the procedure and conditions for resettlement in detail. In accordance with this, “special settlers were allowed to take with them personal belongings, clothes, household equipment, utensils, food in the amount of up to 500 kg per family.” The rest of the property was described with the preparation of an appropriate document (the so-called "exchange receipts") for subsequent compensation. For each echelon, a doctor and nurses were allocated “with an appropriate supply of medicines for the medical and sanitary care of special settlers on the way. To provide people with hot meals and boiling water on the way, it was necessary to allocate food ... at the rate of the daily norm for 1 person: bread 500 g, meat and fish 70 g, cereals 60 g, fats 10 g. In places of resettlement, it was allowed to issue a loan in the amount of up to 5,000 rubles per family for housing construction and housekeeping with an installment plan of 7 years. Immediately upon arrival, adult special settlers were provided with work in state farms and industrial enterprises. In addition, during June-August 1944, everyone received food assistance (the norm per month per person: flour and vegetables - 8 kg each, cereals - 2 kg).

It is worth noting that “not all Crimean Tatars were subjected to forced eviction ... Members of the Crimean underground, Crimean Tatars who acted behind enemy lines in the interests of the Red Army and members of their families were exempted from the“ resettlement status ”. Often, requests to return to the Crimea and the front-line Tatars were granted. Tatar women who married Russians were not evicted either. Proposals for this were set out in a Report addressed to the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR L.P. Beria dated August 1, 1944, signed by V. Chernyshov and M. Kuznetsov.
Upon completion of the resettlement, in a telegram to I.V. Stalin People's Commissar of Internal Affairs L.P. Beria reported that “all Tatars arrived at the places of resettlement and settled in the regions of the Uzbek SSR - 151604 people, in the regions of the RSFSR - 31551 people. In a telegram from the people's commissar of internal affairs of the Uzbek SSR, Babzhanov, addressed to Beria, it was reported that 191 people died along the way of trains with Tatars to Uzbekistan.

Was this decision out of the ordinary? Hardly. This is evidenced by the already mentioned "exchange" of citizens between Poland and the USSR in 1944, as well as the "Vistula" operation carried out in Poland in April-August 1947 after a series of terrorist acts carried out by UPA fighters (Bandera) on its territory. As a result of this operation, local Ukrainians living in the southeastern part of Poland (Western Galicia, the so-called Kholmshchyna and Podlasie) were resettled in the Vistula regions, where the Germans had previously lived. In addition, 14 million Germans were deported to Germany from the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1945-1949. And this expulsion took place in such monstrous conditions that two million Germans died, including the elderly, women, children, in the "death marches" when they were driven in columns to Germany.

Now representatives of the Crimean Tatars say that up to 46% of them died on the way and in the first months after the resettlement. As if they were not in warm Central Asia, but in a fierce winter in besieged Leningrad. As if they had to live in the winter cold in dilapidated unheated houses, receiving the so-called eighth. "bread" (125 g) per day. Of course, the conditions in which the Crimean Tatars found themselves were difficult. At first, there was nowhere to live. We had to build temporary houses first, and only then permanent housing. The tragedy of the situation of the Tatars was aggravated by the loss of their homeland, the internal state of the "exodus", exile. But otherwise, their living conditions were no worse than the situation of those millions of Soviet people who, at the beginning of the war, after the evacuation, found themselves beyond the Urals without housing, and upon returning to their native villages and cities after the war were forced to completely restore them.

Trite, but everything is known in comparison. And we need to compare the situation of the Tatars not with today, but with what could be seen throughout the country during and immediately after the war. However, there is an example from the 1990s: refugees from Chechnya who lived in tents for more than one year. It is very difficult to live in such conditions, but we have not observed any data on the mass death of people in refugee camps. They did not observe it, because such a percentage of mortality, which the representatives of the Crimean Tatars call, is possible only in the event of organized physical extermination of people or a mass epidemic.

So, let's think: who suffered more in this war? Who had it harder? Who suffered more tragedy and gave more lives? And then we will have to admit that the description of the conditions for the resettlement of the Crimean Tatars, certainly harsh, can hardly be compared with the hardships experienced by the Soviet people, who were forced to evacuate beyond the Urals in 1941, fleeing from the rapidly advancing German troops. Then all their property fit in one or two suitcases or several duffel bags. The echelons leaving to the east were constantly bombed. Water, food and fuel were sorely lacking. And then there were difficult everyday life of the rear. I had to live and work, both in the rain and in severe frost, in unheated rooms, or simply in tents, where the machines and equipment of the factories evacuated to the rear stood. Work, producing products for the front, for adults and children, seven days a week, 12 hours a day. To work despite hunger, chronic sleep deprivation and the cold that fettered my hands. And people not only survived, but also won. They won because they believed in their country and, in spite of everything, remained people, not allowing hatred to spill out onto other peoples.

The socio-political structure of the Soviet Union, which, according to S.G. Kara-Murza “a system with negative feedback in relation to conflicts…”, where “when the contradiction aggravated, economic, ideological and even repressive mechanisms automatically turned on, which resolved or suppressed the conflict, “calming down” the system” and not allowing one peoples to exterminate others.

Can the policy of resettlement of the Crimean Tatars be considered genocide after this, if in reality genocide means a course towards the destruction of the people, the systematic reduction of their numbers and social degradation? Can the actions of the authorities be considered genocide if they were based on the most sparing option for the participants in the war to resolve an extremely tense problem? Apparently not. But now everything looks different. And the “miraculously surviving people”, returning to their homeland in order to establish their life here, considers the forced eviction from Crimea as a historical insult that gave advantages not to the “true owners of Crimea” - the Crimean Tatars, but to its “tenants”, as the Crimean Tatars often call the Russian Crimean population.

Something in this story was forgotten, something was not so remembered. Once again history is used as an argument in today's struggle for power, territory and resources. In it, the Soviet Union continues to look like an "evil empire", and the violence used by the Soviet government is initially "criminal even in the most critical periods when government agencies were forced to solve urgent and emergency tasks in order to save many lives of citizens." Why are these arguments not accepted by many citizens of Ukraine and Russia even now? Apparently, this is due to the dominance of certain mythologies, the purpose of the emergence and functioning of which has not yet been completed.

So, even on the example of only one episode of the Great War, it is clear that the history of the twentieth century has not yet been written, since so many questions turned out to be much more complicated than it seemed earlier by official historiography. And one of the most interesting and topical issues of this period concerns understanding the role of the “Muslim legions” of the Crimean Tatars in the Great Patriotic War, as well as the policy of the Soviet government during the Great War, in the context of both the logic of the System itself and the logic of war. Its modern analysis, in particular, shows how simplified and one-sided, and, therefore, extremely mythologized, the presentation of information during the period of “perestroika”, which went down in history under the slogans of demythologization and a return to historical truth, was. Then it was not very clear what was behind all this, and who was behind it. The secret springs of these processes had not yet emerged, the mechanism of their deployment was not entirely clear. But the contours of globalization, which manifested themselves in all their might in the last decade of the 20th century after the US victory in the Cold War, force us to perceive these processes as a small, but very important component of the new Great Game. A game in which peoples will again be the object of politics and a means, and their historical grievances will be used in the struggle for world resources to separate them, weaken them as much as possible and submit to new winners who expect that this will always be the case.

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Link
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See: Senchenko N.I. An extermination society is a strategic perspective of "democratic reforms". K: MAUP, 2004. 224 p.
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