The Tatars, formerly also spelled Tartars, is an umbrella term for different Turkic ethnic groups bearing the name "Tatar" across Eastern Europe and Asia. Initially, the ethnonym Tatar possibly referred to the Tatar confederation. That confederation was eventually incorporated into the Mongol Empire when Genghis Khan unified the various steppe tribes. Historically, the term Tatars was applied to anyone originating from the vast Northern and Central Asian landmass then known as Tartary, a term which was also conflated with the Mongol Empire itself. More recently, however, the term has come to refer more narrowly to related ethnic groups who refer to themselves as Tatars or who speak languages that are commonly referred to as Tatar.
From 1930 to 1952, the government of the Soviet Union, on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and under the direction of the NKVD official Lavrentiy Beria, forcibly transferred populations of various groups. These actions may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population, deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill ethnically cleansed territories. Dekulakization marked the first time that an entire class was deported, whereas the deportation of Soviet Koreans in 1937 marked the precedent of a specific ethnic deportation of an entire nationality.
Crimean Tatars or Crimeans are a Turkic ethnic group and nation indigenous to Crimea. The formation and ethnogenesis of Crimean Tatars occurred during the 13th–17th centuries, uniting Cumans, who appeared in Crimea in the 10th century, with other peoples who had inhabited Crimea since ancient times and gradually underwent Tatarization, including Ukrainian Greeks, Italians, Ottoman Turks, Goths, Sarmatians and many others.
Special settlements in the Soviet Union were the result of population transfers and were performed in a series of operations organized according to social class or nationality of the deported. Resettling of "enemy classes" such as prosperous peasants and entire populations by ethnicity was a method of political repression in the Soviet Union, although separate from the Gulag system of penal labor. Involuntary settlement played a role in the colonization of virgin lands of the Soviet Union. This role was specifically mentioned in the first Soviet decrees about involuntary labor camps. Compared to the Gulag labor camps, the involuntary settlements had the appearance of "normal" settlements: people lived in families, and there was slightly more freedom of movement; however, that was permitted only within a small specified area. All settlers were overseen by the NKVD; once a month a person had to register at a local law enforcement office at a selsoviet in rural areas or at a militsiya department in urban settlements. As second-class citizens, deported peoples designated as "special settlers" were prohibited from holding a variety of jobs, returning to their region of origin, attending prestigious schools, and even joining the cosmonaut program. Due to this special settlements have been called by J. Otto Pohl a type of apartheid.
The Crimea Germans were ethnic German settlers who were invited to settle in the Crimea as part of the Ostsiedlung.
After it was established on most of the territory of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union remained the world's largest country until it collapsed in 1991. It covered a large part of Eastern Europe while also spanning the entirety of the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Northern Asia. During this time, Islam was the country's second-largest religion; 90% of Muslims in the Soviet Union were adherents of Sunni Islam, with only around 10% adhering to Shia Islam. Excluding the Azerbaijan SSR, which had a Shia-majority population, all of the Muslim-majority Union Republics had Sunni-majority populations. In total, six Union Republics had Muslim-majority populations: the Azerbaijan SSR, the Kazakh SSR, the Kyrgyz SSR, the Tajik SSR, the Turkmen SSR, and the Uzbek SSR. There was also a large Muslim population across Volga–Ural and in the northern Caucasian regions of the Russian SFSR. Across Siberia, Muslims accounted for a significant proportion of the population, predominantly through the presence of Tatars. Many autonomous republics like the Karakalpak ASSR, the Chechen-Ingush ASSR, the Bashkir ASSR and others also had Muslim majorities.
The deportation of the Crimean Tatars or the Sürgünlik ('exile') was the ethnic cleansing and the cultural genocide of at least 191,044 Crimean Tatars that was carried out by Soviet Union 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, even Soviet Communist Party members and Red Army members, from Crimea to the Uzbek SSR, several thousand kilometres away. They were one of several ethnicities that were subjected to Stalin's policy of population transfer in the Soviet Union.
Lenine Raion or Yedy-Kuiu Raion was one of the twenty-five districts of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea in Ukraine until its abolition in 2020. It continues to be used by the Russian administration known as the Republic of Crimea, as Russia has occupied Crimea since 2014.
Yuri Bekirovich Osmanov was a scientist, engineer, Marxist–Leninist, and Crimean Tatar civil rights activist. He was one of the co-founders of the National Movement of Crimean Tatars, which sought full right of return of the Crimean Tatar people to their homeland and restoration of the Crimean ASSR.
Tatarophobia refers to the fear of, the hatred towards, the demonization of, or the prejudice against people who are generally referred to as Tatars, including but not limited to Volga, Siberian, and Crimean Tatars, although negative attitudes against the latter are by far the most severe, largely as a result of the Soviet media's long-standing practice of only depicting them in a negative way along with its practice of promoting negative stereotypes of them in order to provide a political justification for the deportation and marginalization of them.
The de-Tatarization of Crimea refers to the Soviet and Russian efforts to remove traces of the indigenous Crimean Tatar presence from the peninsula. De-Tatarization has been manifested in various ways throughout history, ranging from the full-scale deportation and exile of Crimean Tatars in 1944 to other measures such as the burning of Crimean Tatar books published in the 1920s and toponym renaming.
Refat Fazylovich Appazov was a Soviet-Crimean Tatar rocket scientist and colleague of Sergei Korolev who served as head of the ballistics department of Energia from 1961 to 1988. Unlike most Crimean Tatars, he was spared special settler status and exile to Central Asia since the authorities forgot to include him in the deportation due to being in Izhevsk at the time. As a result, he was left cut off from the rest of Crimean Tatar society in the Soviet Union for much of his life. Nevertheless, he managed to become an engineer in OKB-1 and later a teacher at the prestigious Moscow Aviation Institute despite repeatedly facing discrimination. After keeping quiet about his Crimean Tatar identity for most of his life, he became heavily involved in the right of return movement after seeing the 1987 announcement about the conclusion by the Gromyko commission downplaying the entire issue and rejecting full right of return to Crimea. He went on to be a member of the second committee dedicated to considering the issue of Crimean Tatar return, which overturned the conclusions of the Gromyko commission, and in 1991 he was elected as a delegate of the Crimean Tatar Qurultay.
Rollan Kemalevich Kadyev was a Crimean Tatar physicist and civil rights activist in the Soviet Union. A defendant in the Tashkent process, he became known as a firebrand opponent of marginalization and delimination Crimean Tatars, publicly denouncing the restrictions on returning to Crimea as well as the government policy of claiming Crimean Tatars were not a distinct ethnic group that was exemplified by official use of the euphemism "people of Tatar nationality who formerly lived in the Crimea" instead of their proper ethnonym of "Crimean Tatar". For his activities such as distributing leaflets and verbally confronting those who endorsed the status quo against of national policy relating the Crimean Tatars, he was imprisoned on charges of "defaming the Soviet system", despite passionately making the case that discriminatory and assimilationist policies against Crimean Tatars was a huge deviation from proper Leninist national policy. Later on in his life he significantly softened his tone after a 1979 imprisonment for getting into a fight with a party organizer, controversially signing off an open letter critical of Ayshe Seitmuratova's activities with Radio Liberty, which was published in Lenin Bayrağı and Pravda Vostoka in February 1981.
Decree No. 493 "On citizens of Tatar nationality, formerly living in the Crimea" was issued by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet on 5 September 1967 proclaiming that "Citizens of Tatar nationality formerly living in the Crimea" [sic] were officially legally rehabilitated and had "taken root" in places of residence. For many years the government claimed that the decree "settled" the "Tatar problem", despite the fact that it did not restore the rights of Crimean Tatars and formally made clear that they were no longer recognized as a distinct ethnic group.
The Gromyko Commission, officially titled the State Commission for Consideration of Issues Raised in Applications of Citizens of the USSR from Among the Crimean Tatars was the first state commission on the subject of addressing what the dubbed "the Tatar problem". Formed in July 1987 and led by Andrey Gromyko, it issued a conclusion in June 1988 rejecting all major demands of Crimean Tatar civil rights activists ranging from right of return to restoration of the Crimean ASSR.
The Crimean Tatar civil rights movement was a loosely-organized movement in the second half of the 20th century among the Crimean Tatars, who were living in exile following their deportation from Crimea in May 1944. It had the primary goals of regaining recognition as a distinct ethnic group, the right to return to live in Crimea, and restoration of the Crimean ASSR. When the movement started in the 1950s, its leaders were exclusively Communist Party workers and Red Army veterans, who were confident that the Soviet Union would soon fully rehabilitate them in accordance with proper adherence to Leninist national policy. As decades passed and the party remained hostile to even the most basic requests from Crimean Tatar petitions and deletions, a split emerged in the movement; many youths who were deported as children gave up hope in communism and took issue with the Leninist line towed by leaders of the movement. Eventually in 1989 the Soviet government lifted the restrictions on moving to Crimea from all exiled Crimean Tatars, and began the rehabilitation process. Since then, in the period of a few years, over 200,000 Crimean Tatars returned to Crimea, but they continue to lack a national autonomy of their own in Crimea.
The main wave of Crimean Tatar repatriation occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s when over 200,000 Crimean Tatars left Central Asia to return to Crimea whence they had been deported in 1944. While the Soviet government attempted to stifle mass return efforts for decades by denying them residence permits in Crimea or even recognition as a distinct ethnic group, activists continued to petition for the right of return. Eventually a series of commissions were created to publicly evaluate the prospects of allowing return, the first being the notorious Gromyko commission that lasted from 1987 to 1988 that issued declaring that "there was no basis" to allow exiled Crimean Tatars to return en masse to Crimea or restore the Crimean ASSR.
The Haytarma ensemble, originally called the State Song and Dance Ensemble of the Crimean Tatars is a Crimean Tatar music and dance group. The group was formed in Simferopol in 1939 with the Crimean State Philharmonic with Ilyas Bakhshish as artistic director, Yaya Sherfedinov as musical director, and Usein Bakkal as choreographer. After the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944 the ensemble was abolished, but in 1957 the group was re-established in exile in Uzbekistan. The ensemble re-established in Crimea in 1992 after the return of Crimean Tatars to Crimea. Many famous Crimean Tatar artists worked for the ensemble at some point, including Enver Sherfedinov, Sabriye Erecepova, Edem Nalbandov among many others.
Mubarek zone was the name given to a Soviet-Uzbek project to promote Crimean Tatar settlement into the newly formed Mubarek District of the Uzbek SSR, instead of allowing for a return to their homeland in the Crimea. The project was very unpopular with Crimean Tatars, who wanted to return to Crimea instead of settling into the Uzbek desert. Many viewed the project as an extension of the wider Uzbek cotton scandal. The Mubarek District was established in 1978, and the whole settlement project was largely abandoned after the death of its mastermind, Sharof Rashidov in 1983.
Timur Şahmurad oğlu Daĝcı was a Crimean Tatar journalist and newspaper editor. In his youth he was involved in the Crimean Tatar rights movement, but later became active in the Communist Party and actively promoted the Mubarek resettlement scheme intended to resettle Crimean Tatars in the Uzbek desert.
The term Crimean Tatar was permitted to be used in the nationality column of official documents before 1944, like this award sheet nominating Emir Lyumanov for the title Hero of the Soviet Union.
This article from the Soviet propaganda magazine Weekly News Bulletin issue from 1928 uses the term "Crimean Tartar," an alternative spelling of the term "Crimean Tatar."
A 1933 Soviet postage stamp featuring Crimean Tatars from the "Peoples of the Soviet Union" postage stamp series. At the time, Crimean Tatars were considered a separate ethnic group in Soviet censuses.
Clipping from 1967 Soviet newspaper with Ukaz 493. At the time, Crimean Tatars were not considered a distinct ethnic group and the term "Crimean Tatar" was censored from titles of written works, so the decree uses the term “Citizens of Tatar nationality formerly living in Crimea."
Soviet politician Andrey Gromyko was a major proponent of Crimean Tatar denialism: he described Crimean Tatars as an "invented people" to their face in a 1987 meeting with a delegation of Crimean Tatars (see Gromyko Commission) [34]
