Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

The deportation of the Crimean Tatars (Crimean Tatar: Qırımtatar halqınıñ sürgünligi, Cyrillic: Къырымтатар халкъынынъ сюргюнлиги) or the Sürgünlik ('exile') was the ethnic cleansing and the cultural genocide of at least 191,044 Crimean Tatars which was carried out by the Soviet authorities from 18 to 20 May 1944, supervised by Lavrentiy Beria, chief of Soviet state security and the secret police, and ordered by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Within those three days, the NKVD used cattle trains to deport the Crimean Tatars, mostly women, children, and the elderly, even Communist Party members and Red Army members, to the Uzbek SSR, several thousand kilometres away. They constituted one of the several ethnicities which were subjected to Stalin's policy of population transfer in the Soviet Union.

Officially, the Soviet government presented the deportation as a policy of collective punishment, based on its claim that some Crimean Tatars collaborated with Nazi Germany, but several modern scholars believe that the Soviet government carried out the deportation as a part of its plan to gain access to the Dardanelles and acquire territory in Turkey, where the Turkic ethnic kin of the Tatars lived, or remove minorities from the Soviet Union's border regions. This was despite the fact that twice as many Crimean Tatars served in the Red Army, 40,000, than had collaborated with the Axis powers, 20,000. Nearly 8,000 Crimean Tatars died during the deportation, and tens of thousands of other Crimean Tatars subsequently perished due to the harsh living conditions which they were forced to live under during their exile. The deportation of the Crimean Tatars resulted in the abandonment of 80,000 houses and it also resulted in the abandonment of 360,000 acres of land.

After it deported the Crimean Tatars, the Soviet government launched an intense detatarization campaign in an attempt to erase the remaining traces of Crimean Tatar existence. By the end of the deportation, not a single Crimean Tatar lived in Crimea. In 1956, the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev condemned Stalin's policies, including the deportation of various ethnic groups, and he allowed most of these deported ethnic groups to return to their homelands, but he did not lift the directive which forbade the Crimean Tatars from returning to their homeland. The Crimean Tatars remained in Central Asia for the next three decades, until the perestroika era of the late 1980s, when 260,000 Crimean Tatars returned to Crimea. Their exile had lasted a total of 45 years. On 14 November 1989, the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union declared that the deportations had been a crime, and it also declared that the ban on their return to Crimea was officially null and void.

By 2004, the number of Crimean Tatars who had returned to Crimea had increased their share of the peninsula's population to 12 percent. The Soviet authorities had not assisted them during their return to Crimea nor had it compensated them for the land which they had lost during the deportation. The Russian Federation never provided reparations, it never compensated those who lost their property during the deportation, and it never filed any legal proceedings against the perpetrators of the forced resettlement. The deportation and the subsequent assimilation efforts in Asia are crucial events in the history of the Crimean Tatars. Between 2015 and 2019, the deportation was formally recognised as a genocide by Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Canada.