CRIMEAN
TATARS
THE
STRUGGLE
OF
AN
ENTIRE
PEOPLE by G. STEPANOVICH
In 1783, when Russian troops marching south occupied Crimea, the country was inhabited by more than 500,000 Tatars. By the end of the 1800s, persecution had reduced their number to less than 200,000. But the October Revolution represented a fundamental break with the past, a liberation for the Tatar nation. Not only were the cultural and linguistic rights of the Tatars recognized, but in addition, in 1921 they were granted the right to form an autonomous republic, the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Crime, even though the Tatars represented no more than one-fourth of the total population of the Crimea. During the second world war the Tatars actively participated in the anti-Nazi resistance. But as it turned out, the liberation of their country was the beginning of a nightmare that has yet to end. On the night of August 18-19, 1944, "special troops" invaded the Tatar villages and gave the inhabitants twenty minutes to pack their bags. In the course of that night, 238,500 people were deported, 205, 900 of them women and children. Slightly more than half of them survived the tribulations to which they were subjected. In 1946 a decree dissolved the ASSR of Crimea. For more than ten years the Tatars, along with other peoples of the USSR - the Volga Germans, the Balkars, the Chechens, Ingush, Karachais, Meskhets, Kalmyks, and Black Sea Greeks* - endured the fate of proscribed people, forbidden to move around, required to report to police stations every two weeks, etc. The reasons for these deportations have never been explained. None of the official or unofficial pretexts peddled by the bureaucracy to the effect that the peopies concerned had committed some sort of "treason" - in fact, none of them had collaborated with the Nazis and some had never even been in direct contact with the Nazi occupation - can stand up in the harsh light of the facts. As for the "strategic" reasons that have been cited in the West in the case of the Crimean Tatars, the Meskhets, or even the Black Sea Greeks, they are Insufficient. *The Volga Germans were deported shortly after the beginning of the war. The other peoples, most of them Muslims of the northern Caucuses - except the Kalmyks, who are Buddhists of the Asfrakhan region, and the Greeks, who are Greek Orthodox - were deported beginning in late 1943: the Karachais in October 1943, the Kalmyks in December. On February 22, 1944, it was the turn of the Chechens and Ingush, in March of that year, the Balkars. In 1949 the Meskhets, Muslims of southern Georgia, and the Greeks of the region suffered the same fate. Of all these populations, only the Meskhets and the Tatars were prevented from returning to their homes at the end of the 1950s.
TATARS As proletarian internationalism was abandoned by the Stalinists, great Russian nationalist ideology, already denounced by Lenin, became the de facto ideology of the bureaucracy and was reflected in a policy of Russification and outrageous centralization, which included the liquidation of the national intelligentsias and non-Russian cadres during the 1930. The deportation of various nationalities was the most "paranoiac" aspect of this policy. Like the anti-Semitic campaign of the late 1940s and early 1950s, another break with October, this policy indicates the thread that connects certain themes of Stalinist ideology to the ideology of Tsarist Russia. The Twentieth Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, the 1956 congress at which Khrushchev delivered his "secret speech, " lifted these bans. Since then, the Tatars have been engaged in a long struggle that will not end until they have won the right to return to their country.
*In 1956, after being kept waiting in Moscow for one month, a delegation of Tatars was finally received by Khrushchev, who promised that the question of the Tatars would be examined by the Central Committee. Since that time, the movement of Tatars may be considered an organized mass movement.
*In 1957 a letter signed by 14,000 Tatars was sent to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist party, and tens of thousands of individual letters were sent to all the state bodies.
*In 1958 the letters and telegrams were still numerous. Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan received the representatives of the Tatar people and promised to present their case to Khrushchev, During this interview, the 12 delegates handed Mikayan a letter signed by 16,000 people. That August another letter, signed by 12,000 Tatars, was sent to the Central Committee. The reaction of the bureaucrats was not long in coming: repression, primarily directed against Tatar members of the Soviet Communist party, who were expelled from the party and even deprived of their employment.
*In 1959 the movement continued, in spite of the repression: A new request, signed by 10,000 Tatars, was delivered to the authorities. *In 1961 yet another letter, with 18, 000 signatures, was sent to the Central Committee. Several months later, a delegation came with a letter to the preparatory commission of the Twenty-Second Congress of the Soviet CP; it was signed by 8,000 people. This delegation was forcibly expelled from Moscow.
*In 1964 (October) the Tatars used the fall of Khrushchev as an occasion to relaunch their struggle. A delegation sent to Moscow spent sixteen months seeking every possible audience with most of the leading bodies of the party and the state, During this period, more than twenty-four volumes of letters and documents backed by more than 100,000 signatures, not to mention hundreds of thousands of individual letters, were sent to the authorities.
*In 1967 the Tatar nation was officially rehabilitated by a decree of the Supreme Soviet; but this august body "requested" that the Tatars stay put. Nevertheless, in spite of the repression, some Tatars tried to return to their country without permission. *In 1968, in March, a delegation of more than 800 Tatars was expelled from Moscow with unprecedented brutality. In April a huge assembly was organized in Chirchik in Central Asia on the occasion of Lenin's birthday; it was brutally dispersed. The year 1968 saw a linkup between the struggle of the Tatars and a part of the Soviet opposition. Support to the struggle of the Tatars is an expression of the most advanced part of the opposition, essentially its progressive wing. Several oppositionists have paid quite dearly for this support, not only General Grigorenko, but also Ilya Gabai, a young Muscovite, who was tried along with Jemilev and sentenced to three years! internment.
*Today the KGB is hunting down the most active militants of the movement, among them Jemilev, who may already be dead, for he has been on hunger strike for more than seven months. In spite of the repression, the vitality and breadth of the movement of Crimean Tatars has exemplary value: The policy of Russification and centralization implemented by the bureaucracy is meeting growing resistance from the non-Russian nationalities. Today the national question appears as one of the most decrepit pillars of the bureaucratic edifice. D