The Ongoing Struggle of the Crimean Tatars

On a recent visit to Bagçasaray (Bakhchisarai), Crimea – the former capital of the Crimean Tatar Khanate and now a city in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea in Ukraine – I came upon two Orthodox novices unloading bricks from a contractor’s truck and working to renovate the beautifully-sited Uspenskii (Assumption) Cave Monastery. It was, at first, a heartening scene, a moment symbolizing the determination and hard work of the past decade that have restored and revived a place of pilgrimage nearly destroyed by the Soviet regime.

But then I noticed a portrait of Stalin prominently placed in the truck’s windshield. It seemed to escape the notice of the monks, who likely would have found disturbing the makeshift homage to a man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of clerics. But the portrait was not directed at them in any case. In Ba?çasaray, the portrait was a message meant for the Crimean Tatars, an indigenous Muslim people who continue to return to the peninsula from the exile in Central Asia that Stalin brutally imposed on them at the end of World War II. It was, in effect, a call for a new deportation.

In the middle of the night on May 18, 1944, one month after the Red Army regained Crimea from German occupation, most of the ancestors of these Crimean Tatar returnees were given mere minutes to collect their belongings, ordered from their homes at gunpoint, and herded onto the cattle carts of waiting trains by thousands of NKVD officers. This ethnic cleansing came at the order of Stalin, who wished the Black Sea peninsula purged of so-called “agents and resident spies of the Germans.” Despite the fact that hundreds of Crimean Tatar soldiers had won medals for their valor in the Red Army in World War II, the Crimean Tatars were accused of mass collaboration with Nazi occupiers and deported eastward along with Greeks, Armenians, and Bulgarians in an event remembered in the Crimean Tatar language as Sürgün (The Exile). Of the approximately 200,000 deportees, half are believed to have died over the course of the 2,000 mile journey to Central Asia from lack of water and food and vicious treatment by the NKVD. After their arrival, hundreds more perished from hunger, exposure, and disease in spetsposeleniye (special settlement camps). Only in recent years have the descendents of these deportees returned to settle in their ancestral homeland, where they now endure socio-economic discrimination and struggle to claim property and, not least of all, respect.

The Soviet regime conceded the falsity of the mass collaboration charges in 1967, after decades of “discursive cleansing” in which little mention of the “Crimean Tatar” ethnonym was made in print media. But the concession – which in fact undermined the Crimean Tatars’ right of return to their homeland by emphasizing their “rootedness” in Central Asia – was made quietly and received little to no attention in Moscow, Kyiv, or Crimea itself. As a result, many Russian and Ukrainian residents of Crimea continue to see the Tatars as traitors more or less deserving of their punishment, while others on the fringe argue that Stalin was in fact too lenient and should have eliminated the Crimean Tatar nation entirely. On July 8, 2006, for example, such extremists assaulted a group of Crimean Tatar demonstrators in Ba?çasaray peacefully protesting the use of the grounds of their Azizler (“holy [or dear] ones”) cemetery as a commercial bazaar. (The bazaar has since been closed.) Before throwing rocks and overturning cars, these thugs confronted the Crimean Tatar protestors with placards reading "chemodan, vokzal, Baku" (suitcase, train station, Baku), at once evoking the deportation as a painful memory and casting it as a threatening potentiality. (Video of this event can be found at http://5tv.com.ua/newsline/231/0/29409/.)

The efforts on the part of Ukrainian authorities in Kyiv to attend to the needs of the Crimean Tatars since 1991 have been commendable at times, but much more needs to be done, particularly by the Crimean parliament. Local authorities have been resistant to Crimean Tatar requests to reclaim property, restore the cultural and religious institutions dismantled by Soviet authorities, and recognize Crimean Tatar (alongside Ukrainian and Russian) as an official language of Crimea. Some parliamentarians on the peninsula have even intimated, outrageously, that the Crimean Tatars – who have conducted their quest for justice over the past 60 years peacefully, with dignity – harbor ties with Islamic terrorists.

As Lutfi Osman explained to me at the Rebirth of Crimea Foundation in Bagçasaray (www.rcf.crimea.ua), the situation is exacerbated by history textbooks that devote little attention to the Crimean Tatar tragedy. Making restitution for Stalin’s ethnocide and bringing justice to the Crimean Tatar people therefore rely in part on the more concerted efforts of historians and scholars from the Black Sea region and around the world to facilitate the important work of historical reconciliation. We need to do our part to help put Stalin’s legacy in Crimea’s collective rearview.