79: Crimean Tartars

 Today is The Day of Remembrance of the Deportation of the Crimean Tatars.

(Picture: A Crimean Tatar boy deported from Crimea for "betrayal of the Soviet Union" – in a “Special Settlement”  - 1944, Krasnovishersk, Molotov Region, Russia, USSR.)

79 years ago today (May 18, 1944) Stalin sent 32,000 NKVD Secret Police to round -up every Crimean Tartar Man, Woman and Child in Crimea.

That included: Soldiers in the Soviet Red Army, the Elderly, the Disabled, New born Babies and Pregnant Women.

Three days later -  May 20, 1944 - the Soviets had rounded-up and deported 109, 956 Crimeans from Crimea to the Uzbekistan Soviet Socialist Republic several Thousand Miles away.

8,000 Crimean Tartars died while being deported.

Between May 1944 – January 1, 1945 13,592 Crimean Tartars died from harsh conditions (including Forced Labor, Beatings, etc.) imposed on them by the Soviet Government in their “Special Settlements” in Exile.

Between January 1, 1945 – January 1, 1946 13,183 Crimean Tartars died from the harsh conditions (including Forced Labor, Beatings, etc.) imposed on them by the Soviet Government in their “Special Settlements” in Exile.

46% of the Crimean Tartars died in Exile from 1944-1991.

The Crimean Tartar Deportation resulted in the abandonment of 80,000 households and 360,000 acres of land.

An intense campaign of Detatarization followed to try to erase the remaining traces of Crimean Tatar existence (with the Soviets erasing Crimean Tartar Culture, History and Language along with its’ People.)

In 1956, the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev condemned Stalin's policies, including the Deportation of various Ethnic Groups like the Crimean Tartars, but did not lift the directive forbidding the return of the Crimean Tatars despite allowing most other deported peoples to return.

The Crimean Tatars remained in Central Asia for several more Decades until the Perestroika Era in the late 1980s, when 260,000 Crimean Tatars returned to Crimea.

Those that returned found that Ethnic Russians had been legally given their property and homes and they received no compensation.

Their exile had lasted 45 years. The ban on their return was officially declared null and void when the Supreme Council of Crimea declared on November 14, 1989 that the Deportations had been a crime.

Crimea became a part of an independent Ukraine when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

In March 2014 Putin’s Russia invaded, occupied and illegally annexed Crimea, Ukraine into the Russian Federation.

Since 2014 Putin has waged both Cultural and Human Genocide against the Ethnic Tartars and the Ethnic Ukrainians in Crimea.

The Russians have banned the use of the Tartar Language, the Ukrainian Language, have shut-down all Tartar and Ukrainian Cultural Sites and have deported many Tartars and Ukrainians from Crimea to the Russian Federation to “beat the Tartar and the Ukrainian out of them.”

Between 2015 and 2019, the 1944 Crimean Tartar Deportation was formally recognized as Genocide by Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Canada.