76th anniversary of the Crimean Tatar people deportation

[Ülev]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deport...Crimean_Tatars
https://www.gov.pl/web/ukraina/joint...le-deportation
https://warsawinstitute.org/annivers...rimean-tatars/

[KirillMazur]

A little historical background.
1) On October 18, 1921 the Crimean ASSR was formed. The Crimean Tatars, like many other "small nations", contrary to popular myths, were not mercilessly assimilated by the Bolsheviks, on the contrary they received such benefits that they could not even dream of before. The Tatar language was recognized as the state language of the peninsula (the second state language was Russian), their national culture developed, schools and universities were opened. National cadres (= Tatar elites) received carte blanche and everywhere held leadership positions.

The Crimean Tatars, which, according to the 1939 census, accounted for approximately 20% of the population of the ASSR, were by no means a oppressed minority, on the contrary they were a privileged minority. But the leaders of this minority saw in their privileges not the outstretched hand of friendship, but the weakness of the Russians.

2) After the start of World War II, the Crimean Tatars, together with other peoples of our multinational country, came to its defense. However, their service did not last long. Of the twenty thousand people drafted into the ranks of the Red Army, all deserted almost without exception. For the Tatars who were captured, the Germans, skillfully playing on national feelings, created completely different conditions than the Russians. Crimean Tatar youth, brought up as a "privileged nation", willingly went to the Germans. Every tenth Crimean Tatar voluntarily fought on the side of the Nazis. Just as many people took the enemy’s side as were drafted into the Red Army, and if based on German data, then twice as many.

Tatar units were used to protect prisoners of war, the fight against Soviet partisans and in punitive actions. In exactly the same way as other "national formations" that did the dirty work for the Wehrmacht. And just like most other "auxiliary units", the Crimean Tatar units again turned their weapons, but against the Germans when the Soviet soldiers began their inexorable movement to the West (the turning point is the Kerch-Eltigen landing operation).

3) During the Kerch-Eltigen landing operation, the Red Army troops succeeded in successfully landing and created a bridgehead on the peninsula. And while the Soviet troops were preparing for the liberation of Crimea, the Tatars were preparing for their meeting. Hundreds of collaborators joined to partisan detachments, switched to the side of yesterday’s enemies with whole formations. And if in the most difficult years for partisans, Tatars could be counted literally on the fingers, then by January 1944 their number had reached six hundred people.

On May 12, 1944, Crimea was completely liberated by Soviet troops. Even during the fighting, the internal affairs departments began to search for and capture the traitors who had not time to hide, having detained more than five thousand collaborators.

4)

"... Given the treacherous actions of the Crimean Tatars against the Soviet people and based on the undesirability of further living of Crimean Tatars on the border outskirts of the Soviet Union, the NKVD of the USSR submits for your consideration a draft decision of the State Defense Committee on the eviction of all Tatars from the territory of Crimea ..."

From a letter from Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria to Stalin

5)The people, every tenth representative of whom betrayed their homeland, were relocated to the deep rear. They didn’t send them to internment camps, as they did in the United States with one hundred and twenty thousand “suspicious” Japanese (it is indicative that deportation was called a form of political repression on Wikipedia, and internment was not), they were not sent to forced labor or almost guaranteed death in all the famous "GULAGs" and "shtrafbat" and no one was even shot.

Yes, settling in at a new place was not easy, just like people deploying evacuated enterprises in the fall of the 41st. However, people who arrived at their new place of residence settled, got a job and worked on a par with other Soviet citizens, who were not traitors and, for the third year, sparing themselves, brought victory closer.

6) I remembered another possible reason for the deportation. There are no "Crimean Tatars", in fact, and never have been. There were and are Crimean Turks, who for some reason were recorded in the Tatars (like all Turkic peoples in the Russian Empire).
Crimean Turks have the dominant "western" (or Turkic) haplogroup R1b, and our Volga Tatars have the Slavic-Baltic-Indo-Iranian R1a.
Therefore, the Crimean Turks are quite distant relatives to our Volga Tatars, much further than the Russians.
So deportation could well be the result of an existential East-West conflict.

[Arsen_]

Why are they talking only about Crimean Tatars?? A lot of other peoples who were suspected of collaborating with the Germans were deported.

The deportation of the Crimean peoples included: Germans in August 1941, Italians on February 8-10, 1942, Crimean Tatars on May 18-19, 1944, and then Armenians, Bulgarians, Greeks on June 24-27, 1944. Then there were expelled from Crimea to Uzbekistan, citizens of Greece, Turkey and Iran, several hundred people of Hungarians, Romanians and Italians, as well as about 2000 Germans (not evicted in 1941), were deported.