Crimea’s indigenous Tatar population has faced occupation, oppression and even mass deportation for generations. A decade after Moscow’s forces seized the peninsula in 2014, the regime of Vladimir Putin has failed to break Tatars speaking out against its rule and they continue to be an obstacle to Moscow’s efforts to use the peninsula as a launching pad for advancing the war on Ukraine.
The 80th anniversary of the forced deportation of Crimean Tatars by Moscow is commemorated by their descendants on May 18. During World War II, Joseph Stalin smeared them as Nazi agents. The entire Tatar population, over 200,000 men, women, and children, was evicted from their homeland.
They were transported by cattle trains hundreds of miles across Russia to Uzbekistan, elsewhere in Central Asia, the Urals and Siberia. With little food or water, over a third perished during the journey or in the first months of exile. In Crimea, Stalin launched a process of “detatarization,” trying to destroy reminders of the Tatar culture, from monuments to books, and giving their homes and land to Russian settlers.
It took almost 50 years before the survivors won their right to return home, strengthened when Ukraine became independent in 1991 as the Soviet Union came apart.
In 2014, the Kremlin, under a treaty imposed on Ukraine, had Russian troops garrisoned at its military base in Crimea. In uniforms without insignia, they spearheaded Moscow’s illegal seizure of the peninsula. Tens of thousands of Crimean Tatars mobilized against Moscow’s occupation. Russian authorities launched police raids and shut down the Tatar-language press.
Since the beginning of 2024, hundreds of Crimean Tatar and other Ukrainians in Crimea have been added to Moscow’s long “list of terrorists and extremists.” Many face abduction without legal rights, clandestine torture chambers or long incarceration in Russian jails. Events commemorating the deportation of the Tatars are banned by Moscow.
“‘Extremism’ is what the Russian invaders call honoring the victims of the 1944 deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar people from their homeland,” Halya Coynash wrote May 8 for the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.
Ukrainian, Tatar culture flowered
Conquered by the czarist army in 1783, Crimea was dominated by Moscow for over two centuries. But there was a brief flowering of independence following the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Bolsheviks, under V.I. Lenin’s leadership, recognized the right of self-determination for all nationalities oppressed under the former czarist prison house of nations. The Tatars were able to establish an autonomous socialist republic, as were the Ukrainians. Native culture flourished and national pride grew.
But by the late 1920s a counterrevolution against Lenin’s proletarian internationalist course was underway headed by Joseph Stalin. National rights were crushed in Crimea, Ukraine and across the Soviet Union.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tatars returned home to rebuild their cultural and political life, including Tatar-language schools and press. They set up their own national assembly, the Mejlis, with Mustafa Dzhemilev elected as its head
A baby when his family was rounded up in the 1944 deportation, Dzhemilev became an outspoken opponent of the Stalinist regime. He was repeatedly imprisoned over 15 years. The Militant joined the international campaign that won his freedom.
After 2014, Russian occupation authorities banned the Mejlis. Putin denied that Tatars are the indigenous people of Crimea. Dzhemilev, like tens of thousands of others, left for mainland Ukraine.
While Crimean Tatars are now only an eighth of the peninsula’s population of 2 million, they make up the great majority of those arrested or kidnapped by Moscow’s occupation forces. Since the full-scale war began, nearly 45,000 Crimeans were conscripted and over 500 killed. Many were Tatars.
Yet Moscow’s use of Crimea as a military base is weakening. After a third of the Russian Black Sea fleet was sunk or damaged by Ukrainian strikes, the rest had to retreat to the Russian mainland. Thousands of Crimeans are looking for ways to actively resist Putin’s occupation.