Crimean Tatar Deportation

1944 Soviet ethnic cleansing and genocide

War & ConflictPolitics & GovernmentSocial & Human Rights

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Overview

What happened

Date

May 18, 1944

Location

Crimea, a peninsula in southern Soviet Union

Key people

Lavrentiy Beria oversaw the operation, while Joseph Stalin approved it

What was Crimean Tatar Deportation?

During the Sürgünlik, 'exile' at least 191,044 Crimean Tatars were subjected to ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide through deportation carried out by Soviet Union authorities from 18 to 20 May 1944. The deportation was 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 soldiers, 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.

Destinations of the deported (in Ukrainian)

Background and consequences

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, 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. However, Several modern scholars believe 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 to 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.

Why it matters

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. 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. 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.

Related on thisDay

Crimean Tatar Deportation — May 18, 1944

230,000 Crimean Tatars vanished in 1944 as Soviet forces swept through Crimea, leaving devastation in their wake that lasted decades

Sources and further reading

Use the dated article for the day-specific account; use these references to check the event record and explore its wider historical context.

Date article: Crimean Tatar Deportation — May 18, 1944 Wikipedia source

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MLA

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APA

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