Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

Deportation of the Crimean Tatars
Part of forced population transfer in the Soviet Union and World War II
Left to right, top to bottom: Memorial to the deportation in Eupatoria; candle-lighting ceremony in Kyiv; memorial rally in Taras Shevchenko Park; cattlecar similar to the type used in the deportation; maps comparing the demographics of Crimea in 1939 and 2001
Location	Crimea
Date	18–20 May 1944
Target	Crimean Tatars
Attack type	Forced population transfer, ethnic cleansing, genocide[1]
Deaths	Several estimates a) 34,000[2] b) 40,000–44,000[3] c) 42,000[4] d) 45,000[5] e) 109,956[6]
Victims	191,044 to 423,100 Crimean Tatars deported to forced settlements in the Soviet Union
Perpetrators	NKVD, the Soviet secret police
Motive	Tatarophobia, Islamophobia

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^{[c 1]} of at least 191,044^{[c 2]} 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.

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 in World War II,^[10] despite the fact that the 20,000 who collaborated with the Axis powers were half the 40,000 who served in the Soviet Red Army. Several modern scholars believe rather that the government deported them 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. By the end of the deportation, not a single Crimean Tatar lived in Crimea, and 80,000 houses and 360,000 acres of land were left abandoned. Nearly 8,000 Crimean Tatars died during the deportation, and tens of thousands subsequently perished due to the harsh living conditions in which they were forced to live during their exile.^[4] After the deportation, the Soviet government launched an intense detatarization campaign in an attempt to erase the remaining traces of Crimean Tatar existence.

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 ethnic groups to return to their homelands, but he did not lift the directive that forbade the Crimean Tatars from returning. The Crimean Tatars remained in Central Asia for the next three decades, until the perestroika era of the late 1980s, when 260,000 of them returned to Crimea, after 45 years in exile. On 14 November 1989, the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union declared that the deportations had been a crime, and 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 they lost in the deportation. The deportation and the subsequent assimilation efforts in Asia are crucial events in the history of the Crimean Tatars. Between 2015 and 2024, the deportation was formally recognised as a genocide by Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Canada and Poland.

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