A Brief History
On May 18, 1944, Soviet leader Josef Stalin ordered the deportation of the Tatar population of the Crimea to far away Uzbekistan. Stalin accused the Tatars of collaborating with the German army that had invaded Ukraine and the USSR, and he was ruthless with his “relocation,” moving women and children but also communist party members and members of the Soviet armed forces.
Digging Deeper
Like other ethnic groups in Ukraine, the Tatars had come from somewhere else originally, in this case a Turkic people that had settled in the peninsula from the 13th to the 17th centuries, joining Crimean Cumans, another Turkic people that had settled the area centuries earlier.
Stalin and the Soviets were ruthless people, especially toward Ukraine and Ukrainian people of all stripes. This legacy is evidenced today by the policies of Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, a former KGB officer, toward Ukraine with his war to occupy Crimea and the rest of Ukraine.
Question for students (and subscribers): Is Putin trying to resurrect the USSR? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Naimark, Norman. Stalin’s Genocides. Princeton University Press, 2011.
Uehling, G. Beyond Memory: The Crimean Tatars’ Deportation and Return. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by V_Sykov, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
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