Because of Stalin, he deported the Crimean Tatars. Deportation of the Crimean Tatars: what is hidden behind the passage of years

So, friends - today there will be a post about quite tragic events - it marks exactly 75 years since the Stalinist genocide Crimean Tatars V . On May 18, 1944, the Crimean Tatars were deported in freight cars from Crimea to remote areas of the USSR - in particular, to sparsely populated areas of Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. The deportation was carried out by the punitive authorities of the NKVD, and the deportation order was signed personally.

“But Stalin won the war!” — lovers of the USSR speak in the comments — “If Stalin had not sent people to concentration camps, then Hitler would have done it for him!” - Neo-Stalinists and conspiracy theorists echo them. However, the truth is that there can be no justification for this genocide - just as there is no justification for Stalin’s other crimes - such as deportation and.

So, in today’s post I will tell you about the deportation of the Crimean Tatars - something that should not be forgotten today, so that it does not happen again amid cries of “we can do it again!” In general, be sure to go under the cat, write your opinion in the comments, and well add as a friend Do not forget)

Why did the deportation begin?

It was created in 1922, and in the same year Moscow recognized the Crimean Tatars as the indigenous population of Crimea. During the interwar period, in the 1920-30s, Tatars made up almost a third of the population of Crimea - about 25-30%. In the thirties, after Stalin came to power, mass repression against the Tatar population of Crimea - dispossession and eviction of the Tatars, repressions, mass "purges" of the intelligentsia in 1937-38.

All this turned many Tatars against the Soviet regime - during the war, several thousand Tatars fought against the USSR with weapons in their hands - in fact, I touched on this issue a little in the post with - how and why people fought against the USSR. In the post-war years, this allegedly became the “official reason” for the deportation of the Crimean Tatars - although by the same logic it was possible to deport all Russians from Russia - at least 120-140 thousand of whom fought in Vlasov’s army alone (not counting other formations).

In fact, the Tatars were deported for completely different reasons - the Crimean Tatars were historically strongly associated with Turkey and were also Muslims - and Stalin decided to deport them precisely for this reason - since they did not fit into the picture of the “ideal USSR” in his head and were "superfluous people." This version is also supported by the fact that, along with the Tatars, other Muslim ethnic groups - Chechens, Ingush, Karachais and Balkars - were evicted from the areas adjacent to Turkey.

How exactly did the deportation take place?

NKVD soldiers broke into Tatar houses and declared people “enemies of the people” - supposedly because of “treason to the motherland” they would be evicted from Crimea forever. According to official documents, each family could take with them up to 500 kilograms of luggage - however, in reality, people managed to take much less, and most often they went into freight cars simply in what they were wearing - houses and abandoned things were looted by the military and NKVD soldiers.

People were transported by truck to the railway stations - later sending about 70 trains with the doors of freight cars tightly closed and nailed, overcrowded with people, to the east. During the movement of people to the east alone, more than 8,000 people died - most often people died from typhus or thirst. Many, unable to bear the suffering, went crazy.

In the first two years, about half (up to 46%) of all deported people died - unable to adapt to the harsh conditions of the lands to which they were sent. Almost half of these 46% were children under the age of 16 - they had the hardest time. People died from a lack of clean water, from poor hygiene - due to which malaria, dysentery, yellow fever and other diseases spread among the deportees.

Soviet concentration camps and erased memory.

There is one more very important point in this whole tragedy - which Russian sources are silent about. The settlements themselves where people were sent were not some kind of villages or cities. Most of all they looked like real concentration camps- these were special settlements fenced with barbed wire, around which there were checkpoints with armed guards.

The exiled Tatars were used for slave labor in the form of almost free labor - they worked for food on collective farms, state farms and industrial enterprises - the exiled Crimean Tatars were entrusted with the most difficult and dirty work, such as manually harvesting cotton treated with pesticides or the construction of the Farhad hydroelectric station.

In 1948, Soviet Moscow declared that this would always be the case - the Tatars were recognized as life prisoners and had no right to leave the territories of the special settlement camps. The Soviet government also constantly incited hatred towards the Crimean Tatars - the locals were told terrible stories that terrible “traitors to the motherland, cyclops and cannibals” were coming to them - from whom they needed to stay away. According to eyewitness accounts, many local Uzbeks then felt the Crimean Tatars to find out if they were growing horns?

In 1957, the USSR began to erase all memory of the Crimean Tatar people. By this year, all publications in the Crimean Tatar language were banned, and from the Great Soviet encyclopedia about the Crimean Tatars - as if they never existed.

Crimes without statute of limitations. Instead of an epilogue.

All the time that happened from the moment of deportation, the Crimean Tatars fought for their right to return to their homeland - constantly reminding the Soviet authorities that such a people exist, and it will not be possible to erase the memory of them. The Tatars held rallies and fought for their rights - and finally, in 1989, they achieved the restoration of their rights, and the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in November 1989 recognized the deportation of the Crimean Tatars illegal and criminal.

As for me, these crimes of the Soviet government have no statute of limitations and are no different from Hitler’s Holocaust - he also chose an “undesirable people” and tried to destroy them and all the memory of them.

The good thing is that the USSR itself recognized these actions as crimes. The bad thing is that now there has been a reversal - many on the Russian side are now again looking at Stalin’s deeds and shouting “Krymnash!” and “we can repeat it” - apparently, these are the descendants of those who once built concentration camps for the Crimean Tatars and stood at checkpoints with machine guns...

Write in the comments what you think about all this.

Deportation of Crimean Tatars to Last year Great Patriotic War was a mass eviction of local residents of Crimea to a number of regions of the Uzbek SSR, Kazakh SSR, Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and other republics Soviet Union. This happened immediately after the liberation of the peninsula from the Nazi invaders. The official reason for the action was the criminal assistance of many thousands of Tatars to the invaders.

Collaborators of Crimea

The eviction was carried out under the control of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs in May 1944. The order for the deportation of the Tatars, who were allegedly part of collaborationist groups during the occupation of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, was signed by Stalin shortly before, on May 11th. Beria justified the reasons:

Desertion of 20 thousand Tatars from the army during the period 1941-1944;
- unreliability of the Crimean population, especially pronounced in the border areas;
- a threat to the security of the Soviet Union due to the collaborationist actions and anti-Soviet sentiments of the Crimean Tatars;
- the abduction of 50 thousand civilians to Germany with the assistance of the Crimean Tatar committees.

In May 1944, the government of the Soviet Union did not yet have all the figures regarding the real situation in Crimea. After the defeat of Hitler and the counting of losses, it became known that 85.5 thousand newly-made “slaves” of the Third Reich were actually driven to Germany from among the civilian population of Crimea alone.

Almost 72 thousand were executed with the direct participation of the so-called “Noise”. Schuma are auxiliary police, and in fact - punitive Crimean Tatar battalions subordinate to the fascists. Of these 72 thousand, 15 thousand communists were brutally tortured in the largest concentration camp in Crimea, the former collective farm "Krasny".

Main charges

After the retreat, the Nazis took some of the collaborators with them to Germany. Subsequently, a special SS regiment was formed from their number. Another part (5,381 people) were arrested by security officers after the liberation of the peninsula. During the arrests, many weapons were seized. The government feared an armed rebellion by the Tatars due to their proximity to Turkey ( Hitler's last hoped to drag him into a war with the communists).

According to the research of the Russian scientist, history professor Oleg Romanko, during the war, 35 thousand Crimean Tatars helped the Nazis in one way or another: they served in the German police, participated in executions, betrayed communists, etc. For this, even distant relatives traitors were subject to exile and confiscation of property.

The main argument in favor of the rehabilitation of the Crimean Tatar population and its return to historical homeland What happened was that the deportation was actually carried out not on the basis of the actual actions of specific people, but on a national basis.

Even those who did not contribute to the Nazis in any way were sent into exile. At the same time, 15% of Tatar men fought along with other Soviet citizens in the Red Army. IN partisan detachments 16% were Tatars. Their families were also deported. This mass participation precisely reflected Stalin’s fears that the Crimean Tatars might succumb to pro-Turkish sentiments, rebel and find themselves on the side of the enemy.

The government wanted to eliminate the threat from the south as quickly as possible. Evictions were carried out urgently, in freight cars. Many died on the road due to overcrowding, lack of food and drinking water. In total, about 190 thousand Tatars were expelled from Crimea during the war. 191 Tatars died during transportation. Another 16 thousand died in their new places of residence from mass starvation in 1946-1947.

On May 18, 1944, the deportation of the Crimean Tatar people began.
The deportation operation began in the early morning of May 18, 1944 and ended at 16:00 on May 20. To carry it out, the punitive authorities needed only 60 hours and over 70 trains, each of which had 50 cars. To carry it out, NKVD troops of more than 32 thousand people were involved.

The deportees were given anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour to get ready, after which they were transported by truck to railway stations. From there, trains with escorts were sent to places of exile. According to eyewitnesses, those who resisted or could not go were often shot on the spot. On the road, the exiles were fed rarely and often with salty food, after which they became thirsty. In some trains, the exiles received food on the first and second last time in the second week of the journey. The dead were hastily buried next to the railroad tracks or not buried at all.

Officially, the basis for the deportation was declared to be the mass desertion of the Crimean Tatars from the ranks of the Red Army in 1941 (the number was said to be about 20 thousand people), a good reception German troops and the active participation of the Crimean Tatars in the formations of the German army, SD, police, gendarmerie, prison and camp apparatus. At the same time, deportation didn't touch most Crimean Tatar collaborators, since the bulk of them were evacuated by the Germans to Germany. Those who remained in Crimea were identified by the NKVD during the “cleansing operations” in April-May 1944 and condemned as traitors to the homeland. For those who say that all Crimean Tatars were traitors and collaborators of the fascists, I will give some numbers.
Crimean Tatars who fought in the Red Army were also subject to deportation after demobilization. In total, in 1945-1946, 8,995 Crimean Tatar war veterans were sent to deportation sites, including 524 officers and 1,392 sergeants. In 1952 (after the famine of 1945 that claimed many lives), in Uzbekistan alone, according to the NKVD, there were 6,057 war participants, many of whom had high government awards.

From the memories of survivors of deportation:

“In the morning, instead of a greeting, a choice curse and a question: are there any corpses? People cling to the dead, cry, and do not give up. The soldiers throw the bodies of adults out of doors, children - out of windows... "

“There was no medical care. The dead were taken out of the carriage and left at the station, not allowed to be buried.”

“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 suffer from dysentery, typhoid fever, malaria, scabies, and lice overwhelmed everyone. It was hot and I was constantly thirsty. The dead were left on the road, no one buried them.”

“After several days of travel, the dead were taken out of our carriage: an old woman and a little boy. The train stopped at small stops to leave the dead. ... They didn’t let me bury him.”

“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 the adults saw her.”

A significant number of displaced people, exhausted after three years life in German-occupied Crimea, died in places of deportation from hunger and disease in 1944-45 due to lack normal conditions residence (in the first years, people lived in barracks and dugouts, did not have sufficient food and access to medical care). Estimates of the death toll during this period vary widely, from 15-25% according to estimates by 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. Thus, according to the OSP of the UzSSR, only “in 6 months of 1944, that is, from the moment of arrival in the UzSSR 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. There are numerous cases where 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 that 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 which clan-tribe they belonged to and in no way thought about returning to their native lands.

The total deportation of the Crimean Tatars was the greatest betrayal on the part of the Soviet government, since the bulk of the male population of the Crimean Tatars, drafted into the army, continued to fight on the fronts at that time 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 partisan movement, 7 thousand - participated in underground work.

The Nazis burned 127 Crimean Tatar villages because their residents provided assistance to the partisans, 12 thousand Crimean Tatars were killed for resisting the occupation regime, and more than 20 thousand were forcibly taken to Germany.
Crimean Tatars who fought in Red Army units were also subject to deportation after demobilization and returning home to Crimea from the front. Crimean Tatars who did not live in Crimea during the occupation and who managed to return to Crimea by May 18, 1944 were also deported. In 1949, there were 8,995 Crimean Tatars who participated in the war in the places of deportation, including 524 officers and 1,392 sergeants.

According to final data, 193,865 Crimean Tatars (more than 47 thousand families) were deported from Crimea.
After the deportations in Crimea, two decrees of 1945 and 1948 renamed settlements whose names were of Crimean Tatar, German, Greek, Armenian origin (in total more than 90% settlements peninsula). The Crimean ASSR was transformed into the Crimean region. 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, and in fact - until 1989. The mass return of people to Crimea began only at the end of Perestroika.

GENERAL RESULTS OF DEPORTATION:
The Crimean Tatar people lost:
- native land, in which the ancestors, developing the land, from the 13th century formed as a nationality, calling their region native language Crimea, and themselves Crimean Tatars;
- monuments of material culture created by the hands of talented representatives of the people over many centuries.
The following were liquidated from the Crimean Tatar people:
- primary and secondary schools teaching in their native language;
- higher and intermediate educational establishments, special and vocational, technical schools with teaching in their 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 following were destroyed among the Crimean Tatar people:
- cemeteries and ancestral graves with gravestones and inscriptions;
- monuments and mausoleums of historical figures of the people.
The following were taken away from the Crimean Tatar people:
- national museums and libraries with tens of thousands of volumes in their native language;
- clubs, reading rooms, houses of worship - mosques and madrassas.

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

Irina Simonenko

Every year on May 18, Crimean Tatars celebrate the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Deportation. Through the efforts of Ukrainian political strategists and their curators, from the original day of grief of the deportation of the Crimean peoples, this day methodically and purposefully turned into the Day of Remembrance of the victims of the exclusively Crimean Tatar, “punished without guilt” people.

The words of Petro Poroshenko are especially cynical: “We are obliged to give the Crimean Tatars the right to self-determination within the framework of a single Ukrainian state. This is what we owe the Crimean Tatars. The Ukrainian authorities should have done this at least 20 years ago. And now the situation would be completely different.”

By the way, no matter how much the “representatives” of the Kyiv Crimean Tatars ask and plead, they will never receive that same definition. For Kyiv, these people have always been a tool for manipulation. And in the entire history of Ukraine, things have not gone beyond promises, only time after time “the need to amend Section 10 of the Constitution of Ukraine is emphasized,” but in reality this will never be allowed.

Ukraine consists of different regions that once belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Turkey, Russian Empire. And if the Crimean Tatars receive self-determination, which the Guarantor of the Constitution enthusiastically talks about every May 18, then they are quite capable of wanting the same “autonomy” in Transcarpathia. And there, further along the chain, Square may lose all its lands.

Ukrainian politicians continue to lead the Crimean Tatar people by the nose by promising their land, their government and mountains of gold. But even on paper, they still do not want to formalize such changes in relation to the already lost territory of Crimea, postponing the adoption of the document for another year, two, three. And so on ad infinitum.

Today, the number of historical hoaxes associated with the “Stalinist expulsion of peoples” is only growing and bottom experts are already calling it “planned genocide.”

It will not be superfluous to understand this issue. What were the reasons for the deportation? What actually happened on the territory of Crimea during the war? There are very few living witnesses of those events left who could tell how everything really happened. But what many eyewitnesses tell, and what is recorded in Soviet and German chronicles is enough to understand that resettlement was the only and most correct decision.

I would like to immediately dot the i's - I in no way want to say that all Crimean Tatars are bad. Many Crimean Tatars valiantly defended the common Soviet Motherland in the ranks of the Red Army, in the ranks of the Crimean partisans they turned the life of German and Romanian Nazis in Crimea into hell, thousands were awarded state awards. Their exploits deserve a separate post. Here, I want to understand why what happened happened.

The deportation was justified by the facts of the people's participation in collaborationist formations that acted on the side of Nazi Germany during the Great Patriotic War.

Of the 200,000 total Crimean Tatar population, 20,000 became fighters in the Wehrmacht, punitive detachments, and in other ways went into the service of the German occupiers, that is, almost all men of military age, as evidenced by the reports of the German command. How would they get along with the Red Army soldiers who returned from the front, what would the war veterans do with them if they learned about what the Tatar punitive forces were doing in the Crimea during German occupation? A massacre would begin, and resettlement was the only way out of this situation. But there was something to take revenge on the Red Army soldiers for, and this is not Soviet propaganda; there are plenty of facts about their atrocities from both the Soviet and German sides.

Thus, in the Sudak region in 1942, a group of Tatar self-defenses liquidated a reconnaissance landing of the Red Army, while the self-defenses caught and burned alive 12 Soviet paratroopers.

On February 4, 1943, Crimean Tatar volunteers from the villages of Beshui and Koush captured four partisans from S.A. Mukovnin’s detachment.

Partisans L.S. Chernov, V.F. Gordienko, G.K. Sannikov and Kh.K. Kiyamov were brutally killed: stabbed with bayonets, laid on fires and burned. Particularly disfigured was the corpse of the Kazan Tatar Kh.K. Kiyamov, whom the punishers apparently mistook for their fellow countryman.

The Crimean Tatar detachments dealt equally brutally with the civilian population. It got to the point that, fleeing the massacre, the Russian-speaking population turned to the German authorities for help.

Beginning in the spring of 1942, a concentration camp operated on the territory of the Krasny state farm, in which at least 8 thousand residents of Crimea were tortured and shot during the occupation.

The concentration camp was the largest fascist concentration camp during the Great Patriotic War on the territory of Crimea, where about 8 thousand Soviet citizens were tortured during the years of occupation.

The German administration was represented by a commandant and a doctor.

All other functions were carried out by soldiers of the 152nd Tatar volunteer battalion, whom the head of the camp, SS Oberscharführer Speckmann, recruited to perform “the dirtiest work.”

With particular pleasure, the future “innocent victims of Stalin’s repressions” mocked the ideologically incorrect prisoners. With their cruelty they resembled Tatar horde the distant past, and were distinguished by a particularly “creative” approach to the issue of extermination of prisoners. In particular, mothers and children were repeatedly drowned in pits with feces dug under camp toilets.

Mass burning was also practiced: living people tied with barbed wire were stacked in several tiers, doused with gasoline and set on fire. Eyewitnesses claim that “those who lay below were the luckiest” - they were suffocating under the weight of human bodies even before the execution.

For their service to the Germans, many hundreds of punitive Crimean Tatars were awarded special signs distinctions approved by Hitler - “For courage and special merits shown by the population of the liberated regions who participated in the fight against Bolshevism under the leadership of the German command.”

Thus, according to the report of the Simferopol Muslim Committee, for 12/01/1943 - 01/31/1944:

“For services to the Tatar people, the German command was awarded: a badge with swords of the 2nd degree, issued for the liberated eastern regions, the chairman of the Simferopol Tatar Committee Dzhemil Abdureshid, a badge of the 2nd degree, the Chairman of the Department of Religion Abdul-Aziz Gafar, an employee of the Department of Religion Fazil Sadyk and the Chairman of the Tatar Table Tahsin Cemil."

Dzhemil Abdureshid took an active part in the creation of the Simferopol Committee at the end of 1941 and, as the first chairman of the committee, was active in attracting volunteers into the ranks of the German army.

In a response speech, the chairman of the Tatar committee, Cemil Abdureshid, said the following:

“I speak on behalf of the committee and on behalf of all Tatars, confident that I express their thoughts. One conscription of the German army is enough and every last one of the Tatars will come out to fight against the common enemy. We are honored to have the opportunity to fight under the leadership of Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, the greatest son of the German people. The faith that lies within us gives us the strength to trust the leadership of the German army without hesitation. Our names will later be honored along with the names of those who spoke out for the liberation of oppressed peoples.”

April 10, 1942. From a message to Adolf Hitler, received at a prayer service by more than 500 Muslims in Karasu Bazar:

"Our liberator! It is only thanks to you, your help and thanks to the courage and dedication of your troops that we were able to open our houses of worship and perform prayer services in them. Now there is not and cannot be such a force that would separate us from the German people and from you. Tatar people swore and gave his word, having signed up as volunteers in the ranks of the German troops, hand in hand with your troops to fight against the enemy to the last drop of blood. Your victory is a victory for the entire Muslim world. We pray to God for the health of your troops and ask God to give you, the great liberator of nations, long life. You are now a liberator, the leader of the Muslim world - gases Adolf Hitler.

Our ancestors came from the East, and until now we were waiting for liberation from there, but today we are witnesses that liberation is coming to us from the West. Perhaps for the first and only time in history it happened that the sun of freedom rose in the West. This sun is you, our great friend and leader, with your mighty German people, and you, relying on the inviolability of the great German state, on the unity and power of the German people, bring us, the oppressed Muslims, freedom. We swore an oath of allegiance to you to die for you with honor and weapons in our hands and only in the fight against a common enemy.

We are confident that together with you we will achieve the complete liberation of our peoples from the yoke of Bolshevism.

On the day of your glorious anniversary, we send you our heartfelt greetings and wishes, we wish you many years of fruitful life for the joy of your people, us, the Crimean Muslims and the Muslims of the East."

Abdul-Aziz Gafar and Fazil Sadyk, despite their advanced years, worked among volunteers and did significant work to establish religious affairs in the Simferopol region.

Tahsin Cemil organized the Tatar Table in 1942 and, working as its chairman until the end of 1943, provided systematic assistance to “needy Tatars and families of volunteers.”

In addition, the personnel of the Crimean Tatar formations were provided with all sorts of material benefits and privileges. According to one of the resolutions of the Wehrmacht High Command, “any person who actively fought or is fighting against the partisans and Bolsheviks” could submit a petition for “allotment of land or payment of a monetary reward of up to 1000 rubles.”

At the same time, his family had to receive a monthly subsidy from the social security departments of the city or district administration in the amount of 75 to 250 rubles.

After the publication of the “Law on the New Agrarian Order” by the Ministry of the Occupied Eastern Regions on February 15, 1942, all Tatars who joined volunteer formations and their families were given full ownership of 2 hectares of land. The Germans provided them with the best plots, taking land from peasants who did not join these formations.

As noted in the already quoted memorandum of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, State Security Major Karanadze, to the NKVD of the USSR “On the political and moral state of the population of Crimea”:

“Persons who are members of volunteer groups are in a particularly privileged position. All of them receive wages, food, are exempt from taxes, received the best plots of fruit and grape gardens, tobacco plantations, taken away from the rest of the non-Tatar population.

Volunteers are given items looted from the Jewish population.”

All these horrors are not the invention of Soviet political instructors, but the bitter truth. You can give many more examples of the “innocence of the Crimean Tatars,” but this article is not about that.

The whole problem is that modern Tatars are not obliged to bear the stigma of traitors for the rest of their days, because they were not even born then. Likewise, modern Russians have nothing to do with the deportation of the Tatars. We all need to move on, live in peace and harmony. And to do this, we need to stop crying about our long-suffering past, and think about our common future. Russian Tatars and Ukrainians must develop the economy of Crimea together, stop taking skeletons out of closets, blaming each other for what their neighbor’s great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather did.

In the meantime, every May 18th, the Crimean Tatars provide an excellent occasion for all sorts of speculation on the part of the Ukrainian Mejlis and their curators in Ukraine and further to the west, and thanks to their position as “offended and oppressed,” they are used as a bargaining chip to create instability in the region.

The deportation of the Crimean Tatars in the last year of the Great Patriotic War was a mass eviction of local residents of Crimea to a number of regions of the Uzbek SSR, Kazakh SSR, Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and other republics of the Soviet Union.

This happened immediately after the liberation of the peninsula from the Nazi invaders. The official reason for the action was the criminal assistance of many thousands of Tatars to the invaders.

Collaborators of Crimea

The eviction was carried out under the control of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs in May 1944. The order for the deportation of the Tatars, who were allegedly part of collaborationist groups during the occupation of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, was signed by Stalin shortly before, on May 11th. Beria justified the reasons:

Desertion of 20 thousand Tatars from the army during the period 1941-1944;
- unreliability of the Crimean population, especially pronounced in the border areas;
- a threat to the security of the Soviet Union due to the collaborationist actions and anti-Soviet sentiments of the Crimean Tatars;
- the abduction of 50 thousand civilians to Germany with the assistance of the Crimean Tatar committees.

In May 1944, the government of the Soviet Union did not yet have all the figures regarding the real situation in Crimea. After the defeat of Hitler and the counting of losses, it became known that 85.5 thousand newly-made “slaves” of the Third Reich were actually driven to Germany from among the civilian population of Crimea alone.

Almost 72 thousand were executed with the direct participation of the so-called “Noise”. Schuma are auxiliary police, and in fact - punitive Crimean Tatar battalions subordinate to the fascists. Of these 72 thousand, 15 thousand communists were brutally tortured in the largest concentration camp in Crimea, the former collective farm "Krasny".

Main charges

After the retreat, the Nazis took some of the collaborators with them to Germany. Subsequently, a special SS regiment was formed from their number. Another part (5,381 people) were arrested by security officers after the liberation of the peninsula. During the arrests, many weapons were seized. The government feared an armed revolt of the Tatars because of their proximity to Turkey (Hitler hoped to drag the latter into a war with the communists).

According to the research of the Russian scientist, history professor Oleg Romanko, during the war, 35 thousand Crimean Tatars helped the fascists in one way or another: they served in the German police, participated in executions, betrayed communists, etc. For this, even distant relatives of traitors were entitled to exile and confiscation of property.

The main argument in favor of the rehabilitation of the Crimean Tatar population and their return to their historical homeland was that the deportation was actually carried out not on the basis of the actual actions of specific people, but on a national basis.

Even those who did not contribute to the Nazis in any way were sent into exile. At the same time, 15% of Tatar men fought along with other Soviet citizens in the Red Army. In the partisan detachments, 16% were Tatars. Their families were also deported. This mass participation precisely reflected Stalin’s fears that the Crimean Tatars might succumb to pro-Turkish sentiments, rebel and find themselves on the side of the enemy.

The government wanted to eliminate the threat from the south as quickly as possible. Evictions were carried out urgently, in freight cars. On the way, many died due to overcrowding, lack of food and drinking water. In total, about 190 thousand Tatars were expelled from Crimea during the war. 191 Tatars died during transportation. Another 16 thousand died in their new places of residence from mass starvation in 1946-1947.