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Mass return Crimean Tatars began with the Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 666 of July 11, 1990. According to it, Crimean Tatars could receive free land and building materials in Crimea, but at the same time they could sell the plots with houses in Uzbekistan they had previously obtained, so migration in the period before the collapse of the USSR brought great economic benefits to the Crimean Tatars.
Finally, in November 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR recognized the deportation of the Crimean Tatars as "illegal and criminal."
The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in its Decree No. 493 of September 5, 1967 “On citizens of Tatar nationality living in Crimea” recognized that “after the liberation of Crimea from the Nazi occupation in 1944, the facts of active cooperation with the German invaders of a certain part of the Tatars living in Crimea were unreasonably attributed to the entire Tatar population of Crimea.
Only on April 28, 1956, by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the Crimean Tatars were released from administrative supervision and the special settlement regime, but without the right to return property and return to Crimea.
The bulk of able-bodied migrants were sent to work both in agriculture and in industry and construction. The shortage of labor during the war was felt almost everywhere, especially in the collection and processing of cotton. The work that the special settlers received, as a rule, was hard, and often dangerous to life and health. More than a thousand of them, for example, worked at the ozocerite mine in the village of Shorsu, Fergana region. Crimean Tatars were sent to build the Nizhne-Bozsu and Farkhad hydroelectric power stations, they worked on the repair of the linen of the Tashkent railway, at industrial plants, chemical enterprises. Living conditions in many areas were unsatisfactory. People were housed in stables, sheds, basements and other unequipped premises. Unaccustomed climate, constant malnutrition led to the spread of malaria and gastrointestinal diseases. Only from June to December 1944, 10.1 thousand special settlers from the Crimea died from illness and exhaustion in Uzbekistan, that is, about 7% of the number of arrivals.
“It is interesting that initially Uzbekistan agreed to receive only 70 thousand Crimean Tatars, but later it had to “reconsider” its plans and agree with the figure of 180 thousand people, for which purpose a department of special settlements was organized in the republican NKVD, which was supposed to prepare 359 special settlements and 97 commandant's offices. And although the time of the resettlement of the Crimean Tatars, in comparison with other peoples, was relatively comfortable, however, the data on morbidity and high mortality speak quite expressively about what they had to do in a new place: about 16 thousand back in 1944 and about 13 thousand in 1945,” says Pavel Polyan’s book “Not of my own free will…”
The transfer of 71 trains to the east took about 20 days. In a telegram dated June 8, 1944, addressed to Lavrentiy Beria, People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Uzbek SSR Yuldash Babadzhanov reported: “I report on the completion of the reception of echelons and the resettlement of special settlers of the Crimean Tatars in the Uzbek SSR ... In total, special settlers of families were accepted and settled in Uzbekistan - 33,775, people - 151,529, including men - 27,558, women - 55,684, children - 68,287. 191 people died on the way in all echelons. Settled by regions: Tashkent - 56,362 people. Samarkand - 31,540, Andijan - 19,630, Fergana - 19,630, Namangan - 13,804, Kashka-Darya - 10,171, Bukhara - 3983 people. The resettlement was mainly carried out in state farms, collective farms and industrial enterprises, in empty premises and due to the compaction of local residents ... The unloading of the trains and the resettlement of the special settlers took place in an organized manner. There were no incidents."
A group of Crimean Tatars who arbitrarily seized land on the collective farm "Ukraine" in the Bakhchisarai region, 1989
Valery Shustov/RIA NovostiAfter the eviction of the Crimean Tatars, according to the commission of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, there remained: 25561 houses, 18736 household plots, 15000 outbuildings, cattle and birds: 10700 cows, 886 young animals, 4,139 calves, 44,000 sheep and goats, 4,450 horses. 43 207 pcs. Total dishes and other various products 420,000.
As indicated in the book by Natalia Kiseleva and Andrey Malgin "Ethno-political processes in the Crimea: historical experience, modern problems and prospects for their solution", special orders were issued along the fronts for the dismissal of the Crimean Tatars from the Red Army, who were also sent to a special settlement. The rank and file and sergeants, most of the junior officers, underwent this fate. Only senior officers, as a rule, did not leave the army and continued to be at the front until the end of the war.
Including former military personnel total number migrants - the Crimean Tatars amounted to over 200 thousand people.
Following the Tatars, on the basis of GKO resolution No. 5984ss of June 2, 1944, 15,040 Greeks, 12,422 Bulgarians, 9,621 Armenians, 1,119 Germans, Italians and Romanians, 105 Turks, 16 Iranians, etc. were evicted from the Crimea to the republics of Central Asia and regions of the RSFSR. (total 41,854 people). In total, by the end of 1945, according to the NKVD of the USSR, there were 967,085 families in the special settlement in the amount of 2,342,506 people.
“In addition, the Crimean military commissariats mobilized 6,000 Tatars of draft age, who are sent to Guryev, Rybinsk, Kuibyshev according to the orders of the Red Army Head Office of Provisions. Of the 8,000 special settlers sent on your instructions to the Moskvugol trust, 5,000 are also Tatars. In total, 191,044 persons of Tatar nationality were taken out of the Crimean ASSR,- also noted in the report of Kobulov and Serov.
As the leaders of the operation noted in their report, during the eviction, 1,137 "anti-Soviet elements" were arrested, for a total of 5,989 people. 10 mortars, 173 machine guns, 192 machine guns, 2,650 rifles, 46,603 kg of ammunition were seized.
On May 20, State Security Commissars Kobulov and Serov reported to Beria: “The operation to evict the Crimean Tatars, which began on May 18 on your instructions, ended today at 4 p.m. 180,014 people were evicted, loaded into 67 echelons, of which 63 echelons of 173,287 people were sent to their destination, the remaining 4 echelons will be sent today.”
As in the case of the eviction of the Kalmyks, when the measures taken against the people did not affect some high-ranking representatives, for example, General Oka Gorodovikov, a number of Crimean Tatars, who managed to become famous on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War. First of all, we are talking, of course, about an outstanding military pilot, twice a Hero Soviet Union(1943, 1945) Ahmed Khan Sultan and his classmate Emir Usein Chalbash.
“My father on the eve of the liberation of Crimea Soviet troops the Germans tried to steal him to work in Germany, but he fled, then hid, and on May 18, 1944, the NKVD troops expelled him, - TASS quotes the words of the Crimean Tatar Rustem Emirov. “They didn’t explain anything to anyone, for what and why they were being expelled. From the mother’s side and from the father’s side during the Great Patriotic War, she and my uncles went missing, where they are buried is still unknown.”
From the book of the historian Kurtiev: “According to the official documents of the State Defense Committee of the USSR, the material and medical support along the route and in the places of special settlements was sufficient. However, in reality, according to the recollections of the deported Crimean Tatars themselves, living conditions, food, clothing, medical care, etc. were horrendous, which caused mass deaths of people in special settlements.
It was so crowded that people could not stretch their legs. Fires were lit at stops, and water was sought. The trains left without notice. Someone, having taken water, managed to return, run to the car, someone did not and disappeared without a trace. Those who died on the road were thrown out along the train, not allowing them to be buried.
In turn, Beria sent a telegram to Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, in which he reported on the progress of the deportation. Here is what followed from the text: “The NKVD reports that today, May 18, an operation has begun to evict the Crimean Tatars. 90,000 people have already been brought to the railway loading stations, 48,400 people have been loaded and sent to the places of new resettlement, and 25 echelons are being loaded. There were no incidents during the operation. The operation continues."
Bogdan Kobulov and Ivan Serov telegraphed their boss Lavrenty Beria about the progress of the operation.
“In pursuance of your instruction, today, on May 18 of this year, at dawn, an operation was launched to evict the Crimean Tatars. As of 20:00, 90,000 people were brought to the loading stations, of which 17 echelons were loaded and 48,000 people were sent to their destinations. There are 25 echelons under loading. There were no incidents during the operation. The operation continues,” the security officers wrote.
“During the eviction, our train stood for a long time at the Seitler station,” recalled Dzhafer Kurtseitov. - Apparently, he was one of the last, so he was slaughtered by people who were caught in different places. War invalids were thrown into it, who were drawn to their native villages after the liberation of Crimea, like our uncle Benseit Yagyaev, who served in aviation, arrived from the hospital on May 17, and on May 18, together with everyone else, was thrown into the cattle car of our train.
As Osmanova recalled, the soldiers explained to some that they were not being taken to be shot, but would be evicted. But their family was evicted so cruelly that they were not even allowed to take anything with them, except for one bag of wheat. All the way they ate this wheat.
“On May 18, 1944, at dawn, a strong knock woke up the whole family, this is the Crimean Tatar Ninel Osmanova. - Mom did not have time to jump out of bed, as the doors swung open - and soviet soldiers with machine guns in their hands, they ordered to go out into the yard. Mom began to collect crying children, and soldiers with rifles began to push us out of the house. Mom thought we were being shot. When we went out into the yard, there was a cart, we were seated and taken outside the village to a hollow. Our fellow villagers with their families were already sitting there.”
“In conditions of extreme food insufficiency, drinking water, lack of sanitary conditions, people got sick, died of hunger and mass infectious diseases. In the first year, my younger sister Shekure Ibragimova died of starvation and inhuman conditions, she was 6 years old. In September 1944, I fell ill with malaria,” Urie Borsaitova shared her experience.
“People died of starvation, illness, lack of medical care, suffered mental suffering along the way,” recalled Crimean Tatar Urie Borsaitova, quoted by krymr.com, in 2009. She and her numerous relatives were taken away from the station in Evpatoria. — The walls and floors of the cattle cars were dirty and smelled of manure. Up to 45-50 people or 8-10 families of Crimean Tatars were placed in one car. The echelon after 19 days of travel arrived at the Hungry Steppe station. We were sent to the place of settlement - the collective farm of Kirov, Mirzachul district, Tashkent region, UzSSR. Our family was settled in an old dugout without windows and doors, the roof was made of reeds.”
“Our eviction was carefully prepared in advance so that even neighbors and relatives would not end up in the same destination. So, already when boarding trucks and at the railway station in the cars, everyone was thoroughly mixed with different villages. Even our own grandmother was placed in another car, saying that they would meet on the spot, ”witnesses said.
Son of World War I veteran Jafer Kurtseitov, who was a teenager at the time of deportation: “Accustomed to executions and destruction during the German occupation, people thought of the worst. They took the Koran with them and prayed. After all, yesterday everyone was happy to meet the soldiers of the liberators, treated them to what they had.
Let us again turn to the work of local historian Kurtiev “Deportation. How it was”: “Old men, women and children, pushed with butts, were herded into dirty freight cars, the windows of which were shrouded in barbed wire. Inside the wagons were equipped with 2-tiered wooden bunks. There were no toilets or water."
In case of disobedience, people are beaten without ceremony. Armed resistance, as in other similar operations, ended with the liquidation of the "rebel" on the spot.
A fighter of the 222nd separate rifle battalion of the 25th rifle brigade of the NKVD troops, Alexei Vesnin, who was 19 years old at the time of the operation, subsequently wrote his memoirs about the events, published under the title "Following the order."
“At four in the morning, they started the operation. We went into the houses, raised the hosts from the bed and announced: “In the name of Soviet power! For treason, you are deported to other regions of the Soviet Union. People perceived this team with humble humility, ”said Vesnin.
Said Tsarnaev/RIA Novosti
The first batches of people are collected outside the villages, where trucks have already been brought. Women, old people and children, who barely had time to get dressed and hastily collect the most necessary things, are put in a truck and taken to the nearest railway stations. Trains are waiting there, surrounded by armed fighters.
Said Tsarnaev/RIA Novosti
It should be noted that officially - according to the GKO decree of May 11, special settlers were allowed to take with them personal belongings, clothes, household equipment, dishes and food in the amount of up to 500 kg per family. Who is deliberately distorting the facts here? Most likely, as usual, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Those who survived the deportation often said that in reality the authorities did not always follow their own decrees ...
However, the former NKVD officer Vesnin cited somewhat different information. According to him, they still had two hours for the training, and each family was allowed to take 200 kg of cargo with them.
The Crimean Tatars were given even more tough conditions than other deported peoples. So, no more than 10-15 minutes are allotted for the fees. It is allowed to take bundles weighing no more than 10-15 kg with you.
Sleepy citizens are forced to open doors and let intruders into their homes. Officers cross the threshold, accompanied by soldiers.
"In the name of the Soviet government, for treason to the Motherland, you are being evicted to other regions of the Soviet Union,"- with such a phrase, according to the historian Kurtiev, the head of each group invariably "welcomed" the astonished owners of the dwelling.
This is how Alexei Vesnin, a fighter of the 222nd separate rifle battalion of the 25th rifle brigade of the NKVD troops, recalled the beginning of the operation, whom in his work “Deportation. How it was,” historian Kurtiev quoted: “We walked for several hours and early in the morning on May 18 we reached the village of Oisul in the steppe. Around the village put up 6 light machine guns.
The operation to expel Crimean Tatars from Crimea has begun! Groups of NKVD officers and soldiers that have accumulated in settlements go home and hit the doors and windows with rifle butts to wake people up.
Wikimedia Commons
The word to the Crimean Tatar historian Refat Kurtiev: “19 thousand people assisting the NKVD, 30 thousand employees of the NKVD and the NKGB were involved in the action. The operatives were assisted by about 100 thousand servicemen of the Soviet army. For the mobile execution of the order, troikas were formed from the involved military resources: three servicemen were assigned to one operative. Thus, for one Crimean Tatar, whether he was an old man or a baby, there were more than one punisher.
public domain
Some researchers assure that in some settlements the Chekists and soldiers began to implement the eviction late in the evening of May 17 and diligently "worked" all night. Allegedly, in Simferopol, the first places of the operation were Grazhdanskaya Street and the nearby streets of Krasnaya Gorka. Then came the turn of the inhabitants of Simeiz. One of the sources gives a story about the deportation in the village of Ak-Bash, where the NKVD and NKGB officers arrived in five trucks.
“Who fries meat, who fries potatoes, who pasties. And the soldiers are so happy, during the three years of the war, each of them missed home-cooked food, ”sabe Useinova, a local resident, recalled.
At 7 pm, well-fed Red Army soldiers "scattered" around the village, driving people out into the street with butts, and Sabe's husband stood with his hands up. Then they drove everyone to the village square, loaded them into cars, and until dawn on May 18 they were not allowed to leave them. Well, then everything went on, as everywhere else.
In the autumn of 1917, the Crimean Tatar nationalists united in the Milli Firka party fiercely fought against the Red Guard detachments trying to establish Soviet power in the Crimea. Perhaps the reasons for antagonism should be sought in the revolutionary events too. You can read about how the power of the Soviets was proclaimed on the peninsula in Gazety.Ru.
Kurtiev: “When thousands of sons of the Crimean Tatar people fought and died on the fronts of the Patriotic War and in the occupation, Crimea still smelled of the burning of burned villages, the tears of mothers did not dry for the dead, tortured, shot, burned and driven away children to Germany, when there were still battles for complete release Crimea from the Nazis, Soviet punishers were preparing the deportation of the Crimean Tatars.
The Crimean Tatar local historian Refat Kurtiev, who devoted many years to studying the problem, noted that a significant part of the population actually fought the Germans in the same way as other peoples of the USSR. “The war came to the Crimean peninsula on June 22, 1941 at 03:13 with the bombing of Sevastopol. The German army, after 3 months of battles with the Soviet army, approached Perekop. Soon the Crimea was occupied (October 18, 1941-May 14, 1944), the researcher wrote in his book Deportation. How it was". — During this period, the Crimean Tatar people fully experienced all the horrors of the war: 40,000 went to the front, the Nazis burned more than 80 Crimean Tatar villages, 20,000 young people were deported to Germany (2,300 of them were in German camps). By the time of the liberation of Crimea, 598 partisans of the Crimean Tatars were fighting the fascist invaders in the forests.
“The deportations caused significant damage to the country's economy: the work of many enterprises was suspended, entire agricultural areas fell into disrepair, the traditions of transhumance, terraced farming, etc. were lost. Psychology underwent a radical change deported peoples, their attitude to the socialist system, international ties collapsed, ”said historian Nikolai Bugay in his book Joseph Stalin to Lavrenty Beria:“ They must be deported.
Already after the Great Patriotic War, in March 1949, the power structures of the USSR began to implement Operation Surf to deport residents of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania who were found to have links with the nationalist underground. Nearly 100,000 anti-Soviet citizens of the Baltic States were forcibly evicted from their usual places to Siberia.
Gazeta.Ru wrote about these events in.
Said Tsarnaev/RIA Novosti
At the end of December last year, 75 years passed since the forced deportation of the Kalmyks, who were severely punished by the Soviet authorities for the collaborationism of individual representatives of the people during the German occupation. Over 90,000 people were put into railway cattle cars in a few hours and sent from Kalmykia to Siberia and Central Asia. By the summer of 1944, the total number of evicted people had grown to 120,000 due to Kalmyks from other regions and the military.
tuva.asia
The security services began to expel the Crimean Tatars from their homes at dawn on May 18. In the meantime, we have a night, we remember other peoples who shared the same fate a little earlier.
In the late stages of the Great Patriotic War, in 1943-1944, forced deportations of entire peoples to remote areas of the Soviet Union occurred one after another. Previously, Gazeta.Ru, as Karachays were expelled from their original habitats in the North Caucasus on charges of collaborationism.
The official view of the events of 75 years ago is currently undergoing serious adjustments. So, in early May, it was announced that a section on the collaborationism of the Crimean Tatars during the Nazi occupation would be cut out of the textbook on the history of Crimea for grade 10. The Republican Ministry of Education and Science explained that the corresponding decision was made "in order to relieve social tension." Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Lavrenty Beria, Matvey Shkiryatov (front row from right to left), Georgy Malenkov and Andrei Zhdanov (second row from right to left) at a joint meeting of the Council of the Union and the Council nationalities I session of the USSR Supreme Council of the 1st convocation, 1938
RIA News"On May 13, a commission of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR arrived in Crimea to organize the reception of household property, livestock, and agricultural products from special settlers. To help the members of the commission, local authorities allocated up to 20 thousand people from among the party and economic activists of cities and regions to practical work on accounting and protection of abandoned property. The commission developed an instruction containing a list and the number of essential items that a special settler could take with him, although in practice the requirements of the instruction were often not followed. Dozens of freight trains were formed at railway stations. Convoys were drawn to areas densely populated by Crimean Tatars for the subsequent transportation of the evicted to the places of landing in trains. Parts internal troops dispersed in settlements to organize the dispatch of people and the subsequent cleansing of the territory. In the mountainous forest area, SMERSH operatives completed the last searches. According to Djilas, in 1943 or 1944, Stalin complained to Tito that US President Franklin Roosevelt was demanding that he create a kind of enclave of the Jewish diaspora in Crimea in exchange for Lend-Lease supplies. Allegedly, without the corresponding guarantees of Stalin on this issue the Americans even refused to open a second front. In general, the head of the Soviet state had no choice but to liberate the Crimea for the Jews, for which it was necessary to evict the Tatars. It is alleged that the leaders of the United States and the USSR seriously discussed the candidacy of the head of the future territorial entity. Allegedly, Roosevelt insisted on Solomon Mikhoels, while Stalin offered his longtime and faithful ally Lazar Kaganovich for this role.
Considering the foregoing, the State Defense Committee decided:
“Evict all Tatars from the territory of Crimea and settle them for permanent residence as special settlers in the regions of the Uzbek SSR. The eviction is to be assigned to the NKVD of the USSR. To oblige the NKVD of the USSR (comrade Beria) to complete the eviction of the Crimean Tatars by June 1, 1944.
It sounded like a sentence!
“During the Patriotic War, many Crimean Tatars betrayed their homeland, deserted from the units of the Red Army defending the Crimea, and went over to the side of the enemy, joined the volunteer Tatar military units formed by the Germans, who fought against the Red Army; during the occupation of the Crimea by the Nazi troops, participating in the German punitive detachments, the Crimean Tatars were especially distinguished by their brutal reprisals against the Soviet partisans, and also helped the German occupiers in organizing a forcible hijacking Soviet citizens into German slavery and the mass extermination of Soviet people,” the GKO decree said, signed by its chairman, Joseph Stalin. – The Crimean Tatars actively cooperated with the German occupation authorities, participating in organized German intelligence the so-called "Tatar national committees" and were widely used by the Germans for the purpose of sending spies and saboteurs to the rear of the Red Army. The “Tatar National Committees”, in which the White Guard-Tatar emigrants played the main role, with the support of the Crimean Tatars, directed their activities to the persecution and oppression of the non-Tatar population of Crimea and carried out work to prepare for the forcible secession of Crimea from the Soviet Union with the help of the German armed forces.
tuva.asia
As indicated in the collection of the Russian historian, the largest specialist in deportations in the USSR Nikolai Bugay "Joseph Stalin - Lavrentiy Beria:" They must be deported", events in the Crimean ASSR developed in a difficult environment. “The active actions of nationalist elements contributed to the fact that during the war years, many of the Crimean Tatars were in the service of the enemy, supported him, although a significant part of the Tatar population was loyal to the Soviet government,” the book says. - Measures aimed at preventing hostile actions of nationalists, according to government services, were not enough, and on May 11, 1944, the State Defense Committee adopted resolution No. 5859ss on the eviction of the Crimean Tatars. The commissioners of state security Bogdan Kobulov and Ivan Serov were appointed the leaders of the operation.
According to the NKVD, sent to the head of the Soviet state, Joseph Stalin, 183,155 people were evicted. Some Crimean Tatar organizations give a fundamentally different figure - 423,100 inhabitants, of which 377,300 were women and children. According to various estimates, as a result of the deportation, from 34 to almost 200 thousand people died. After the deportation of the Crimean Tatars as a result of the abolition of the Crimean ASSR on June 30, 1945, the Crimean region was formed.
On May 18, 1944, the forced expulsion of the Crimean Tatar population of the Crimean ASSR to Central Asia and remote regions of the RSFSR began by the NKVD and the NKGB. As in the case of the deportation of other peoples accused of collaborating with the German occupiers and collaborating during the Great Patriotic War, the operation was developed and personally supervised by one of the leaders of the Soviet special services, Lavrenty Beria. Gazeta.Ru reproduces the tragic page of the Stalin era in historical online.
Wikimedia Commons
On May 18, 1944, the deportation of the Crimean Tatar people began.
The deportation operation began in the early hours of 18 May 1944 and ended at 4:00 pm on 20 May. It took the punitive authorities only 60 hours and over 70 echelons, each of which had 50 wagons, to carry it out. For its implementation, the NKVD troops were involved in the amount of more than 32 thousand people.
The deportees were given from several minutes to half an hour to collect, after which they were transported by trucks to the railway stations. From there, the trains with the escorted went to the places of exile. According to eyewitnesses, those who resisted or could not walk were often shot on the spot. On the road, the exiles were fed rarely and often with salty food, after which they were thirsty. In some trains, the exiles received food for the first and last time in the second week of their journey. The dead were hastily buried next to the railroad tracks or not buried at all.
The official reason for the expulsion was the mass desertion of the Crimean Tatars from the Red Army in 1941 (the number was called about 20 thousand people), the good reception of the German troops and the active participation of the Crimean Tatars in the formations of the German army, SD, police, gendarmerie, apparatus prisons and camps. At the same time, deportation did not touch most of the Crimean Tatar collaborators, since the bulk of them were evacuated by the Germans to Germany. Those who remained in the Crimea were identified by the NKVD during the “cleansing operations” in April-May 1944 and condemned as traitors to the motherland. For those who say that all Crimean Tatars were traitors and accomplices of the Nazis, I will give a few figures.
Crimean Tatars who fought in the Red Army were also deported after demobilization. In total, in 1945-1946, 8995 Crimean Tatar veterans of the war were sent to the places of deportation, including 524 officers and 1392 sergeants. In 1952 (after the famine of 1945, which claimed many lives), only in Uzbekistan, according to the NKVD, there were 6,057 participants in the war, many of whom had high government awards.
From the memories of deportation survivors:
“In the morning, instead of a greeting, a choice mat and a question: are there any corpses? People cling to the dead, cry, do not give back. Soldiers throw the bodies of adults out the door, children out the window ... "
“There was no medical care. The dead were taken out of the car and left at the station, without being allowed to bury.
“There was no question of medical care. People drank water from reservoirs and stocked up from there for future use. There was no way to boil water. People began to get sick with dysentery, typhoid fever, malaria, scabies, lice overcame everyone. It was hot and constantly thirsty. The dead were left at the junctions, no one buried them.”
“After a few days of travel, the dead were carried out of our car: an old woman and a little boy. The train stopped at small stations to leave the dead. ... They didn’t let them bury.”
“My grandmother, brothers and sisters died in the first months of the deportation before the end of 1944. Mom lay unconscious in such heat with her dead brother for three days. Until adults see her.
A significant number of migrants, exhausted after three years of living in the Crimea occupied by the Germans, died in places of deportation from starvation and disease in 1944-45 due to the lack of normal living conditions (in the early years people lived in barracks and dugouts, did not have enough food and access to health care). Estimates of the number of deaths during this period vary greatly: from 15-25% according to various Soviet official bodies to 46% according to estimates by activists of the Crimean Tatar movement who collected information about the dead in the 1960s. So, according to the OSP of the UzSSR, only “for 6 months of 1944, that is, from the moment of arrival in the UzSSR and until the end of the year, 16,052 people died. (10.6%)".
For 12 years until 1956, the Crimean Tatars had the status of special settlers, which implied various restrictions on their rights, in particular, a ban on unauthorized (without written permission from the special commandant's office) crossing the border of a special settlement and criminal punishment for its violation. Numerous cases are known when people were sentenced to many years (up to 25 years) in camps for visiting relatives in neighboring villages, the territory of which belonged to another special settlement.
The Crimean Tatars were not just evicted. They were subjected to the deliberate creation for them of such living conditions that were calculated for the complete or partial physical and moral destruction of the people so that the world would forget about them, and they themselves would forget to which tribe they belonged and in no case thought about returning to native lands.
The total deportation of the Crimean Tatars was the greatest betrayal on the part of the Soviet authorities, since the bulk of the male population of the Crimean Tatars, drafted into the army, continued at that time to fight on the fronts for the same Soviet power. About 60 thousand Crimean Tatars were called to the front in 1941, 36 thousand died defending the USSR. In Crimea, 17 thousand Crimean Tatar boys and girls became activists of the partisan movement, 7 thousand participated in underground work.
The Nazis burned 127 Crimean Tatar villages because their inhabitants helped the partisans, 12,000 Crimean Tatars were killed for resisting the occupation regime, and more than 20,000 were forcibly driven to Germany.
Crimean Tatars who fought in the Red Army were also deported after being demobilized and returning home from the front to Crimea. Crimean Tatars were also deported, who did not live in Crimea during the occupation and managed to return to Crimea by May 18, 1944. In 1949, in the places of deportation, there were 8995 Crimean Tatars - participants in the war, including 524 officers and 1392 sergeants.
According to the final data, 193,865 Crimean Tatars (over 47,000 families) were deported from Crimea.
After the deportations in Crimea, two decrees from 1945 and 1948 renamed settlements whose names were of Crimean Tatar, German, Greek, Armenian origin (in total, more than 90% of the settlements of the peninsula). The Crimean ASSR was transformed into the Crimean Oblast. The autonomous status of Crimea was restored only in 1991.
Unlike many other deported peoples who returned to their homeland in the late 1950s, the Crimean Tatars were formally deprived of this right until 1974, but in fact until 1989. The mass return of the people to Crimea began only at the end of Perestroika.
GENERAL RESULTS OF THE DEPORTATION:
The Crimean Tatar people lost:
- the native land, in which the ancestors, mastering the land, from the XIII century formed as a nationality, naming their land on mother tongue Crimea, and themselves as Crimean Tatars;
- monuments material culture, created by the hands of talented representatives of the people for many centuries.
The Crimean Tatar people were liquidated:
- primary and secondary schools teaching in the native language;
- higher and middle educational establishments, special and vocational, technical schools with teaching in the native language;
- national ensembles, theaters and studios;
- newspapers, publishing houses, radio broadcasting and other national bodies and institutions (Unions of writers, journalists, artists);
- research institutes and institutions for the study of the Crimean Tatar language, literature, art and folk art.
The Crimean Tatar people have destroyed:
- cemeteries and graves of ancestors with tombstones and inscriptions;
- monuments and mausoleums of historical figures of the people.
From the Crimean Tatar people were taken away:
- national museums and libraries with tens of thousands of volumes in their native language;
- clubs, reading rooms, prayer houses - mosques and madrasahs.
The history of the formation of the Crimean Tatar people as a nationality was falsified and the original toponymy was destroyed:
- renamed the names of cities and villages, streets and quarters, geographical names localities, etc.;
- folk legends and other types of folk art, created over the centuries by the ancestors of the Crimean Tatars, have been altered and appropriated.
No need to believe the current propaganda about the innocence of the Crimean Tatars. Their guilt is obvious and documented by many sources. There is no need to believe the wild numbers of deportation victims. Wild because they are called from 25 to 50% of the dead. This is complete nonsense. Remember the main thing is that when our grandfathers and fathers died for their homeland, the grandfathers and fathers of the current Crimean Tatars deserted without exception and went to the service of the Germans. And now the facts:
According to recently declassified data from the Special Folder of the State Defense Committee (as reported on May 1 under the number No. 387 / B), during the occupation of the Crimea by the Germans, Muslim committees were organized there, which “conducted, on the instructions of German intelligence agencies, the recruitment of Tatar youth into volunteer detachments to fight partisans and the Red Army, selected the appropriate personnel to send them to the rear of the Red Army and conducted active pro-fascist agitation among the Tatar population in the Crimea.
In the Crimea, a "Tatar National Committee" was created, which was headed by a Turkish citizen, an emigrant, Abdureshid Cemil. The Committee had branches in all areas of Tatar residence in the Crimea and actively cooperated with the Germans.
In 1943, the Turkish emissary Amil Pasha came to Feodosia, who also called on the Tatar population to support the activities of the German command.
Among the specific and particularly defiant data is the collection of funds to help the German army "after the defeat of the 6th German army of Paulus near Stalingrad." Thus, the Feodosia Muslim Committee collected "one million rubles" among the Tatars.
From the report of Beria to the State Defense Committee No. 366 / B dated April 25, 1944 (from the same Special folder):
“The activities of the “Tatar National Committee” were supported by broad sections of the Tatar population, to whom the German occupation authorities provided all kinds of support: they were not driven to work in Germany (excluding 5,000 volunteers), they were not taken to forced labor, they were provided tax benefits, etc. Not a single settlement with a Tatar population was destroyed.”
From the deserted Crimean Tatars, a special Tatar division was formed, which took part in the battles in the Sevastopol region on the side of the Germans.
The Crimean Tatars who collaborated with the occupiers actively participated in punitive actions.
One of the examples. In the “Dzhankoy region, a group was arrested, including three Tatars, who, on the instructions of German intelligence, poisoned 200 gypsies in a gas chamber in March 1942”, “19 Tatars were arrested in Sudak - punishers who brutally cracked down on captured soldiers of the Red Army. Of the arrested Settars, Osman personally shot 37 Red Army soldiers, Abdureshitov Osman - 38 Red Army soldiers ”(Special folder. Message number 465 / B of May 16, 1944).
In November 1941, all "local police auxiliary forces" in the territory of the Reichskommissariats were organized into units of the "auxiliary order police" (Schutzmannschaft der Ordnungspolizei or "Schuma"). Actually, the Schuma police consisted of the following categories:
- order police in cities and rural areas - Schutzmannschaft-Einseldienst;
- self-defense units - Selbst-Schutz;
- police battalions to fight partisans - Schutzmannschaft-Bataillone;
- auxiliary fire police - Feuerschutzmannschaft;
- reserve auxiliary police for the protection of prisoner of war camps and labor service - Hilfsschutzmannschaft.
Departments of urban and rural police were created immediately after the Germans occupied the cities and large settlements of the Crimea. The main duties of its employees were maintaining order in the settlement and monitoring the implementation of the passport regime.
Personnel The police consisted mainly of three national groups: Tatars, Ukrainians and Russians. And National composition varied depending on the area. So, the Tatars prevailed in the police of Alushta (head - Chermen Seit Memet), Yalta, Sevastopol (head - Yagya Aliyev), Karasubazar and Zuya (head - senior policeman Aliev), they were much less in the police of Evpatoria and Feodosia.
However, neither the city nor the rural police could independently fight the partisans, much less destroy them. Therefore, the occupying authorities did everything to create larger armed formations that could ensure relative order, at least within their own region.
One of the principles of the German occupation policy on the territory of the USSR was the creation of volunteer formations, in particular, it was the opposition of non-Russian peoples and national minorities to the Russian people. In Crimea, this principle was reflected in the German authorities' flirting with the Crimean Tatar population and in the creation of volunteer formations from its representatives in the form of self-defense units and Schuma battalions for use on the territory of the peninsula.
This official document should be supplemented.
Soon after the return of Crimea to Russia's native bosom, President Vladimir Putin received in the Kremlin representatives of the Crimean Tatars, who became our fellow citizens. Very reassuring. Presumably, there was something to talk about, to find out something, to help, to take note, etc. And shortly before that, a Decree on the rehabilitation of the Crimean Tatars was signed. Here, too, there is something to think about.
First, only those who have been convicted can be rehabilitated. But there is not a single country in the world, according to the legislation of which it would be possible to condemn an entire people. There could not be such a code in the USSR either. And the Crimean Tatar people were not and could not be condemned. What happened?
The Great Patriotic War began only 23 years after October revolution which one way or another, and sometimes very unfairly, touched many. And these people were still far from old, at quite active, often at the age of a soldier. Their desire to take advantage of the outbreak of war in their own interests is understandable, to avenge the loss of loved ones or property, position. So thousands of yesterday's Soviet citizens even found themselves in the ranks of the occupiers. And it is surprising not that traitors were found among the 195 million people, but that there were so few of them.
Here is a very valuable testimony of Natalya Vladimirovna Malysheva, a scout, a major in the Red Army, and much later mother Adriana, whose beautiful portrait I saw in the workshop of Alexander Shilov in my old age: “After all, I could go to evacuation with my Aviation Institute (MAI) in Alma-Ata . There is sunshine and fruits. But how to leave when you understand: and here the Germans will walk the streets of Moscow ... I decided: I will not go to the evacuation, I will defend Moscow! .. I still ask myself: well, how was this possible? After all, so many repressed, so many churches destroyed. Nevertheless, my militia division is 11 thousand volunteers who were not subject to conscription in any way. Created in a week! We had children of both the repressed and the priests. I knew two volunteers whose fathers were shot. But no one harbored evil. And these children rose above their grievances, abandoned everything and went to defend Moscow, many of whom she offended. Russian newspaper. December 24, 2009).
But, of course, there were cheaters. These were people of different nationalities in our multinational country, starting with Russians. General Vlasov created an army, although from only two combat divisions, the Germans had both Ukrainian units, and Central Asian, and the Kalmyk Cavalry Corps (KKK) ... I'm not talking about the Balts, who lived under Soviet power for only a year before the war. The Germans treated all these national units with contempt and distrust. Hitler did not even want to see General Vlasov, the most famous traitor. Himmler worked with him. And they armed the Vlasov army only in November 1944, when we entered German soil, and the affairs of the Germans became really bad.
The Crimean Tatars could not be an exception here. Nationality, national mentality, national memory is not an invention of Stalinist propaganda, but the reality of life ... A curious and very characteristic episode once flashed on television. It seems that seven thousand Germans now live in Crimea, they have some kind of unifying organization. And in the recent days of the reunification of Crimea with Russia, one journalist went to talk to the head of this organization. The conversation was friendly, benevolent, the German said that they would all vote for Russia... But what did we see on TV on the wall of his office? Portrait of Angela Merkel!.. What good did he see from her? Nothing. What did she give him? Nothing. And after all, most likely, his ancestors ended up in Russia under Peter or Catherine, he was a hardened Russian German a long time ago, but on you is a portrait of an angelic Angel. There is only one national feeling and nothing more. Portraits of Hitler could not hang in the houses of the Volga Germans, but still, nevertheless, nevertheless ....
So, thinking about the Crimean Tatars, one must not forget that there was a more powerful Crimean Khanate. For centuries it made devastating raids on Russian lands. What is the only raid of Khan Devlet Giray in May 1571 worth. Taking advantage of the fact that the Russian troops were engaged in the Livonian War, he then, together with the Turks, reached Moscow, burned it all, except for the Kremlin, thousands of Muscovites were killed, thousands were driven into slavery. Khan wanted to conquer the Moscow kingdom. Ivan the Terrible was ready to give him Astrakhan, but this was not enough, the war continued, and only in August of the following year, near the village of Molodi, 60 miles south of Moscow, the Russians, under the command of Prince M.I. Vorotynsky, defeated the army of the Khan and the Turks. And in 1687, 1689 there were our unsuccessful campaigns against the Crimea, which became a Turkish vassal, and only after the victory over Turkey, only in 1783, the Crimea was annexed to Russia. All these complex, difficult, bloody historical vicissitudes, which ended in their defeat, could not but leave a mark in the memory of the Crimean Tatars. Even fresher in the memory of the Ingush and Chechens was the history of the conquest of the Caucasus ...
And the war began ... On November 1, 1941, the Germans captured Simferopol, on November 8 - Yalta. Here are some excerpts from German documents of that time.
“From the diary of military operations of the 11th army in the Crimea. Intelligence department.
Already during the occupation of the Crimean troops, the Tatars showed their friendliness to the Germans. They considered the German troops to be liberators from the yoke, they offered their help ... They have vivid memories of the brotherhood in arms in 1917-1918 ...
They increasingly offered us their help in the fight against the partisans and the Red Army. In Simferopol, Bakhchisarai, Karasubazar, etc. they prayed for the victory of German arms, for the Fuhrer, sent letters of thanks to the Fuhrer, asked to be allowed to take part in the fight against the Bolsheviks ...
On January 20, 1942, a meeting was held in the intelligence department of the army, where it was announced that the Fuhrer had allowed the reception of volunteers from the Crimean Tatars, as well as the creation of Tatar self-defense companies to fight partisans. Einsatzgruppe D creates such companies. Tatars are considered employees of the Wehrmacht and receive the same food and allowance as low-ranking Germans. They take pride in what they wear German uniform and try to learn German and are very proud when they can speak German.
January 3, 1942 at 10.00 began the first official meeting of the Tatar Committee in Simferopol, dedicated to the recruitment of Tatars for the common struggle against Bolshevism. The meeting was held under the leadership of the chief of the Einsatzgruppen. The meeting was opened with a welcoming speech by SS-Oberführer Ohlendorf. He said that he was glad to inform the committee that his request to defend the homeland in this sacred struggle together with the Germans against Bolshevism had been granted.
The present Tatars apprehended these words with enthusiasm and stormily applauded. The mullah of the Muslim association of Simferopol stated that his religion required him to take part in this sacred struggle together with the Germans. The oldest of the Tatars, Ennan Setulla, said that he himself was ready to take up arms, although he was sixty years old. Chairman of the Tatar Committee Abdureshids: “I know that the Tatars as a people (!) are ready to oppose the common enemy. It is a great honor for us to receive permission to fight under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, the greatest leader of the German people. We are all (!) ready to march under the leadership of the German army.” The second chairman of the Tatar Committee, the youth representative of Kermenchikli, said: “Every (!) young Tatar goes into battle with the consciousness that this is a battle against the worst enemy of the German and our peoples.”
After everything was agreed upon, the Tatars asked for this solemn meeting and the beginning of the struggle against the infidels to end with a prayer service. The Tatars, following the mullah, repeated three prayers. The first is for achieving a quick victory for common goals and for the long life of Adolf Hitler. The second is for the German people and their valiant army. The third is for the dead German soldiers ”(VIZH No. 3’1991. P. 91-93).
But what about some oberfuhrer Ohlendorf, unknown to anyone! Here is what the well-known Field Marshal E. Manstein wrote in his memoirs, whose army broke into Crimea in September 1941: “Most (!) of the Tatar population of Crimea was very friendly to us. We even managed to form armed companies from the Tatars for self-defense ... The Tatars immediately sided with us. They saw us as their liberators from the Bolshevik yoke... A Tatar delegation came to me, bringing fruits and beautiful handmade fabrics for the liberator Adolf Efendi.”
Soon the newspaper "Azat Krym" ("Liberated Crimea") began to appear. It printed something like this:
At a meeting hosted by the Muslim Committee, Muslims expressed their gratitude Great Fuhrer Adolf Hitler-effendi for a free life. Then arranged service for the health of Hitler-effendi».
Or: " Great Hitler - liberator of all peoples and religions! Two thousand Tatars from the village of Kokkozy and the surrounding area gathered for a prayer service in honor of the German soldiers. All the Tatar people pray daily and ask Allah to grant the Germans victory over the whole world. Oh Great Leader, we speak from the bottom of our hearts, believe us! We give our word to fight the herd of Jews and Bolsheviks together with the German soldiers. May the Lord bless you, our great lord Hitler”, etc. etc.
And in this whole picture, including such a newspaper, there is nothing surprising or exceptional. There were like-minded people named Tatars among the Russians. About the same thing they wrote in the Vlasov newspapers. And long before the war Athos elder Aristocles prophesied: “Wait until the Germans take up arms, for they have been chosen not only as God's instrument of punishment for Russia, but also as an instrument of deliverance. That's when you hear that the Germans are taking up arms - that's when the time is near ”(The Great Civil War 1941-1945. M. 2002. P. 498).
But the Germans took up arms. Journalist D. Zhukov writes in the same book: “In emigration, the overwhelming majority of priests and parishioners welcomed the outbreak of war, even enthusiastically” (p. 499, 501). Thus, Metropolitan Seraphim (Lukyanov) declared: “May God bless the great Leader of the German people, who raised his sword against the enemies of God himself.” He was echoed by the very liberal Archimandrite John (Shakhovskoy) in the article “The Hour Is Near”: “To what days the coveted days of both sub-Soviet and foreign Russia happened to live ... The bloody operation of overthrowing the Third International is entrusted to a skillful, experienced German surgeon in science” ( p.501). (The aforementioned Zhukov, the parent of the most colorless deputy prime minister of all democratic governments since the Yeltsin era, is the same truth-teller who wrote in Litgazeta that Stalin flew Tehran conference with a cash cow, tried, with the help of dirty slander, to attach to this horde of haters of the Soviet Union and Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky), the future patriarch, whose name this Zhukov cannot even write correctly. He says, "in his sermon at the Patriarchal Cathedral in Moscow, he indirectly supported the outbreak of war" (p. 499). That is, supported, they say, the Germans. For such fabrications, even the parents of vice-premiers are beaten on the head with a chandelier).
But not only churchmen rejoiced at Hitler's attack. Ivan Bunin, a Nobel laureate living in German-occupied France, who seemed to be a classic of Russian literature, in the first days of the war on July 2, 1941, wrote in his diary with obvious gloating: “It is true that Stalin’s kingdom will soon end. Kyiv will probably be taken in a week or two.” The classic was in a hurry, in fact, Kyiv was captured almost three months later. True, later the classic came to his senses somewhat and even rejoiced when we liberated Odessa. I'm not talking about General Krasnov, who twice fought with the Germans against Soviet Russia and deservedly received the gallows in 1946. And General Denikin, who also lived in France then, and after the war drove off across the ocean, hated Soviet Russia to the end of his days and even in 1947, shortly before his death, sent a detailed note to the American president about how it was more clever to defeat the Soviet Union, using the experience of the Civil War and the Great Patriotic War.
As for the Russian clergy, even at the present time, ardent admirers of Hitler have not disappeared among them. Here is what you can read in the Russian Orthodoxy magazine No. 4, 2000: “The Catacomb Church has always confessed and now confesses that Hitler for True Orthodox Christians (IPKh) was God’s chosen anointed leader not only in the political, but also in the spiritual and mystical sense, the good fruits of whose deeds are still tangible. Therefore, the IPH pays tribute to him ... As during the life of the German Fuhrer, St. The Church offered up prayers for his health and granting him victory over adversaries, and after his death she prays for his immortal soul” (Ibid., p. 500). Citing these lines, Zhukov did not express his attitude towards them: "We leave the readers to decide on this issue for themselves." And Archpriest Georgy Mitrofanov, who regularly arranges anniversary memorial services for General Krasnov, Vlasov, and Solzhenitsyn, can help to decide. Moreover, he curses the famous General A.A. Brusilov, who after the revolution took the side of the people and their Red Army, but praises Kolchak, Yudenich and Yeltsin (Tragedy of Russia. M. 2009). As you can see, these saints in servility and servility to the Nazis and other enemies of Russia, perhaps even leave behind the mentioned Simferopol mullah and his Crimean Tatar associates during the war.
Meanwhile, in the document of the intelligence department of the 11th German Army cited above, there is also such evidence: “In the villages of the Bakhchisarai region, until January 22, 1942, 565 Tatars voluntarily declared their service with us, but during the call, frequent refusals were noted. On January 30, due to illness and other reasons, there were 176 such people, of which 48 people simply did not appear at the recruiting stations. As a result, out of 565 volunteers, 389 people remained” (op. cit., p. 94). This is very important evidence. Yes, of course, not all Tatars went to serve the Germans. Moreover, the Tatars were in the partisans. So, according to archival data of the Crimean Regional Party Committee, in April 1944, on the eve of the liberation of Crimea, there were 2075 Russians in partisan detachments, 391 Tatars, 356 Ukrainians, 71 Belarusians (Quoted by I. Pykhalov. Stalin's Time. M. 2001 . p.76). Here it is appropriate to mention that during the war years 161 Tatars (I don’t know how many of them are Crimean) became Heroes of the Soviet Union.
But, presumably, the proportion of Tatars who served with the Germans was still quite high. So, in the memorandum of the Deputy People's Commissar of State Security of the USSR B.Z. Kobulov and the Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR I.A. 20 thousand Tatars and all of them deserted during the retreat of our 51st army from the Crimea and ended up in the ranks of the Germans. This is almost the entire Crimean Tatar population of military age ”(Ibid., p. 75).
Much can be judged from the memorandum of Beria, who, as People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, led the eviction operation. He reported to Stalin on May 10, 1944. There is also such data: “The bodies of the NKVD and the NKGB are carrying out in the Crimea the identification and seizure of enemy agents, traitors to the motherland. As of May 7 this year. 5381 such persons were arrested, weapons were confiscated - 5995 rifles, 337 machine guns, 250 machine guns, 31 mortars, a large number of grenades and cartridges.
On July 5, 1944, Beria, summing up, reported: “... 15,990 weapons illegally stored from the population were seized, including 724 assault rifles, 716 machine guns, and 5 million ammunition” (Ibid., p. 84). Machine guns, as you know, are not used for hunting quail ... 716 machine guns are a lot of power in those conditions. And Beria had no reason to exaggerate these figures in a note to Stalin.
Yes, of course, not all Tatars collaborated with the Germans. Not everyone was evicted. For example, they did not touch those Tatars who themselves participated in partisan detachments, and their families. Here you can name the family of S.S. Useinov, a partisan shot by the Germans. Families in which the wife is Tatar and the husband is Russian were not evicted. It was possible to defend their families to the Tatars who were at the front, like the pilot E.U. Chalbash and others (Ibid.).
In evaluating this whole dramatic story, one must take into account a number of important circumstances.
First, eviction on an ethnic basis in war time not Soviet invention. A very knowledgeable and conscientious political scientist, Professor S.G. Kara-Murza writes: “In 1915-1916. the tsarist government carried out the forced eviction of Germans from the front line and even from the Sea of \u200b\u200bAzov. In the same 1915, by order of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, over 100 thousand people were deported from the Baltic to Altai. On February 19, 1942, the most liberal President Roosevelt ordered not even to deport, but to imprison US citizens of Japanese origin in concentration camps. In these camps they were forced to do hard work in the mines. But there was no threat of a Japanese invasion” (Soviet Civilization. Book One, M. 2002, p. 608). And there were about 130 thousand people behind the barbed wire. And it is impossible not to compare: Japan was from the United States across the ocean, and Crimea was then the rear of the fighting Red Army.
Secondly, in all the episodes mentioned above, neither the Germans, nor the Balts, nor the Japanese showed dangerous hostility towards their country or sympathy for its opponent, all the more so, this or that assistance to him. They were expelled in advance, in the order, so to speak, of a preventive military quarantine. Another thing is the Crimean Tatars. They were expelled after the liberation of Crimea, when numerous facts of their active cooperation with the occupiers became reliably known.
Thirdly, because the Germans had not yet been expelled from our land, no one could say when the war would end and what other possible twists and turns in its course. And now, having liberated the Crimea, in such conditions, to leave hostile armed groups in the rear of our army, who have more than 700 machine guns alone? This would be extremely irresponsible and dangerous. What if the Germans would return to the Crimea? It was impossible to rule it out then.
Fourthly, the Crimea is not just a territory, but a strategically extremely important border outskirts of the country, a foothold that should be an absolutely reliable rear of the Red Army.
Fifthly, in the conditions of the war it was simply not possible to deal with each individual suspect, with each specific fact.
Finally, if the Tatars had remained in the Crimea after its liberation, this could have caused many acute, including bloody, conflicts between them and the rest of the population. Lyudmila Zhukova writes in the Literaturnaya Gazeta: “Out of political correctness, it is not customary for us to explain the reason for the deportation of an entire people even today. I remember the meeting in Alushta in the late 70s with the front-line soldiers who liberated the Crimea. They said: “The deportation of the whole people saved them from the retribution of the front-line soldiers, who then were not afraid of anything” (LG. May 21, 14). Yes, the deportation saved the Tatars from the wrath of the people.
And how, under what conditions did the resettlement take place? According to the decree of the State Defense Committee of May 11, 1944, signed by Stalin, each family was allowed to take with them up to 500 kg of things - inventory, dishes, food, etc. For abandoned cattle, grain, vegetables, exchange receipts were issued in order to return on them all accepted at the place of settlement in Uzbekistan. To organize the reception, four named leaders of the people's commissariats were instructed to send the required number of workers to the Crimea. And for the exchange at the place of settlement of everything surrendered to Uzbekistan, a special commission of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR was sent from six responsible officials of a number of people's commissariats, also named by name, headed by Gritsenko, deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR. People's Commissar of Health Miterev was instructed to provide a doctor and two sisters for each echelon "with an appropriate supply of medicines and to provide medical and sanitary care for the special settlers on the way." And one more thing: “To the People's Commissariat of the USSR (comrade Lyubimov) to provide all echelons with daily hot meals. To do this, the People's Commissariat of Trade should allocate products.
Tatars were not thrown out somewhere in a bare field. “The resettlement of special settlers,” the GKO decree said, “is to be carried out in state farm settlements, collective farms, in subsidiary farms of enterprises and factory settlements for use in agriculture and industry." Besides, local authorities it was necessary to “provide the special settlers with personal plots and assist in the construction of houses,” for which each family was given a loan of 5,000 rubles for seven years. Other measures to help the Tatars were also provided, and 30 million rubles were allocated for all activities. I wonder what it cost the Americans to keep the Japanese behind barbed wire...
S. Kara-Murza believes that the deportation of peoples from the Crimea and the Caucasus was a punishment based on the principle of mutual responsibility, when one is responsible for all, and all for one. But it was a very strange punishment. Kara-Murza himself testifies that party and Komsomol organizations remained in the places of the new settlement, people studied in their native language, received education, a specialty, and later did not know any discrimination in obtaining higher education. And finally, this is very typical. Our other well-known researcher Vadim Kozhinov, answering in 1993 to a certain G. Vachnadze, who stated that 50% of Chechens died during the deportation, wrote: “According to reliable census data, in 1944 there were 459 thousand Chechens and Ingush people, and in 1959 - m when they returned to native land, - 525 thousand, i.e. 14.2% more. If half of the people really died, then their numbers could be restored in no less than half a century. So, in 1941-1944, not 50, but “only” 22% of the population of Belarus (2 million out of 9) died, and the pre-war population was able to recover only after 25 years - by 1970 ”(The fate of Russia. M. 1997 168). That is, as Kara-Murza writes, “they returned to the Caucasus as a grown and strengthened people” (op. cit. p. 609). There is no reason to believe that the situation was different among the Tatars or the Kalmyks.
So was the Decree on Rehabilitation necessary? I think that instead of the Decree, on behalf of the state, it would be necessary to apologize to the Tatars for the fact that in wartime conditions it was not possible to comply with all legal norms and formalities and to commemorate with gratitude all the Tatars, living and dead, who fought on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War. Let me remind you again: 161 Tatars, including the poet Musa Jalil, received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union for their exploits during the war. Here, after much more numerous peoples, they are only the fourth ...
I knew a lot of Tatars in my life. As a child, he was friends with two Tatar brothers, whose last name and names I forgot because of the prescription of time; at the front, in the same company with me were the Tatars Ziyatdinov and Khabibullin; after the war he knew the wonderful poet Mikhail Lvov, who wrote in Russian; I have been friends with the playwright Azat Abdullin for many years. Who else? The wife's friends are Chulpan Malysheva, Musa Jalil's daughter, Galia Alimova. And I can't say a single unkind word about any of them... That's what you should write a song about for Jamala, so that she sings it in Sweden for all of Europe.
V.S. Bushin
Original taken from
On May 18-20, 1944, NKVD soldiers, on orders from Moscow, rounded up almost the entire Tatar population of Crimea to railway cars and sent them to Uzbekistan in 70 echelons
This forced deportation of the Tatars, whom the Soviet authorities accused of collaborating with the Nazis, was one of the fastest deportations in world history.
How did the Tatars live in Crimea before the deportation?
After the creation of the USSR in 1922, Moscow recognized the Crimean Tatars as the indigenous population of the Crimean ASSR as part of the indigenization policy.
In the 1920s, the Tatars were allowed to develop their culture. In Crimea, Crimean Tatar newspapers and magazines were published, educational institutions, museums, libraries and theaters worked.
The Crimean Tatar language, together with Russian, was official language autonomy. More than 140 village councils used it.
In the 1920s-1930s, Tatars made up 25-30% of the total population of Crimea.
However, in the 1930s, Soviet policy towards the Tatars, like other nationalities of the USSR, became repressive.
Crimean Tatar State Ensemble "Khaitarma". Moscow, 1935
First began the dispossession and eviction of the Tatars to the north of Russia and beyond the Urals. Then came forced collectivization, the Holodomor of 1932-33, and the purges of the intelligentsia in 1937-1938.
This turned many Crimean Tatars against the Soviet regime.
When did the deportation take place?
The main phase of the forced resettlement took place over less than three days, starting at dawn on May 18, 1944 and ending at 4:00 pm on May 20.
In total, 238.5 thousand people were deported from Crimea - almost the entire Crimean Tatar population.
For this, the NKVD attracted more than 32 thousand fighters.
What caused the deportation?
The official reason for the forced resettlement was the accusation of the entire Crimean Tatar people of high treason, "mass extermination of Soviet people" and collaborationism - cooperation with the Nazi occupiers.
Such arguments were contained in the decision of the State Defense Committee on deportation, which appeared a week before the start of the evictions.
However, historians name other, unofficial reasons for the resettlement. Among them is the fact that the Crimean Tatars historically had close ties with Turkey, which the USSR at the time viewed as a potential rival.
Spouses in the Urals, 1953
In the plans of the USSR, the Crimea was a strategic springboard in case of a possible conflict with Turkey, and Stalin wanted to play it safe from possible "saboteurs and traitors", whom he considered the Tatars.
This theory is supported by the fact that other Muslim ethnic groups were resettled from the Caucasian regions adjacent to Turkey: Chechens, Ingush, Karachays and Balkars.
Did the Tatars support the Nazis?
Between nine and 20 thousand Crimean Tatars served in anti-Soviet combat units formed by the German authorities, writes historian Jonathan Otto Paul.
Some of them sought to protect their villages from Soviet partisans, who, according to the Tatars themselves, often persecuted them on ethnic grounds.
Other Tatars joined the German troops because they were captured by the Nazis and wanted to alleviate the difficult conditions of their stay in the prisoner of war camps in Simferopol and Nikolaev.
At the same time, 15% of the adult male Crimean Tatar population fought on the side of the Red Army. During the deportation, they were demobilized and sent to labor camps in Siberia and the Urals.
In May 1944, most of those who served in the German detachments retreated to Germany. Mostly wives and children who remained on the peninsula were deported.
How did the forced resettlement take place?
Employees of the NKVD entered the Tatar dwellings and announced to the owners that they were being evicted from the Crimea due to treason.
To collect things, gave 15-20 minutes. Officially, each family had the right to take up to 500 kg of luggage with them, but in reality they were allowed to take much less, and sometimes nothing at all.
Mari ASSR. Team at the logging site. 1950
People were taken by trucks to the railway stations. From there, almost 70 echelons were sent to the east with tightly closed freight cars, crowded with people.
During the move, about eight thousand people died, most of them children and the elderly. The most common causes of death are thirst and typhus.
Some people, unable to endure suffering, went crazy. All the property left in the Crimea after the Tatars, the state appropriated to itself.
Where were the Tatars deported to?
Most of the Tatars were sent to Uzbekistan and neighboring regions of Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. Small groups of people ended up in the Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the Urals and the Kostroma region of Russia.
What were the consequences of the deportation for the Tatars?
During the first three years after the resettlement, from starvation, exhaustion and disease, according to various estimates, from 20 to 46% of all deportees died.
Almost half of those who died in the first year were children under 16.
Due to lack clean water, poor hygiene and lack of medical care, malaria, yellow fever, dysentery and other diseases spread among the deportees.
Alime Ilyasova (right) with her friend, whose name is unknown. Early 1940s
The newcomers had no natural immunity against many local ailments.
What status did they have in Uzbekistan?
The overwhelming majority of the Crimean Tatars were transported to the so-called special settlements - surrounded by armed guards, checkpoints and fenced with barbed wire, the territories more closely resembled labor camps than civilian settlements.
Newcomers were cheap labor, they were used to work in collective farms, state farms and industrial enterprises.
In Uzbekistan, they cultivated cotton fields, worked in mines, construction sites, plants and factories. Among the hard work was the construction of the Farkhad hydroelectric power station.
In 1948, Moscow recognized the Crimean Tatars as lifelong migrants. Those who, without the permission of the NKVD, went outside their special settlement, for example, to visit relatives, were in danger of 20 years in prison. There have been such cases.
Even before the deportation, propaganda incited hatred for the Crimean Tatars among local residents, stigmatizing them as traitors and enemies of the people.
As historian Greta Lynn Ugling writes, the Uzbeks were told that "cyclops" and "cannibals" were coming to them and were advised to stay away from the newcomers.
After the deportation, some local residents felt the heads of visitors to check that horns did not grow on them.
Later, when they learned that the Crimean Tatars were of the same faith, the Uzbeks were surprised.
The children of the settlers could receive an education in Russian or Uzbek, but not in Crimean Tatar.
By 1957, any publications in Crimean Tatar were banned. An article about the Crimean Tatars was removed from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
This nationality was also forbidden to enter in the passport.
What has changed in Crimea without the Tatars?
After the Tatars, as well as the Greeks, Bulgarians and Germans, were evicted from the peninsula, in June 1945 Crimea ceased to be an autonomous republic and became a region within the RSFSR.
The southern regions of Crimea, where the Crimean Tatars used to live, were deserted.
For example, according to official data, only 2,600 residents remained in the Alushta region, and 2,200 in Balaklava. Subsequently, people from Ukraine and Russia began to move here.
"Toponymic repressions" were carried out on the peninsula - most of the cities, villages, mountains and rivers that had Crimean Tatar, Greek or German names received new Russian names. Among the exceptions are Bakhchisaray, Dzhankoy, Ishun, Saki and Sudak.
The Soviet government destroyed Tatar monuments, burned manuscripts and books, including volumes of Lenin and Marx translated into Crimean Tatar.
Cinemas and shops were opened in mosques.
When were the Tatars allowed to return to Crimea?
The regime of special settlements for the Tatars lasted until the era of Khrushchev's de-Stalinization - the second half of the 1950s. Then the Soviet government softened their living conditions for them, but did not withdraw charges of high treason.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Tatars fought for their right to return to their historical homeland, including through demonstrations in Uzbek cities.
Osman Ibrish with his wife Alime. Settlement Kibray, Uzbekistan, 1971
In 1968, the occasion for one of these actions was Lenin's birthday. The authorities dispersed the rally.
Gradually, the Crimean Tatars managed to achieve the expansion of their rights, however, an informal, but no less strict ban on their return to Crimea was in force until 1989.
Over the next four years, half of all Crimean Tatars who then lived in the USSR returned to the peninsula - 250 thousand people.
The return of the indigenous population to Crimea was difficult and was accompanied by land conflicts with local residents who managed to get used to the new land. However, major confrontations were avoided.
A new challenge for the Crimean Tatars was the annexation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014. Some of them left the peninsula due to persecution.
Others have themselves been banned by Russian authorities from entering Crimea, including Crimean Tatar leaders Mustafa Dzhemilev and Refat Chubarov.
Does the deportation have signs of genocide?
Some researchers and dissidents believe that the deportation of the Tatars is consistent with the UN definition of genocide.
They argue that the Soviet government intended to destroy the Crimean Tatars as an ethnic group and deliberately went to this goal.
In 2006, the kurultai of the Crimean Tatar people turned to the Verkhovna Rada with a request to recognize the deportation as genocide.
Despite this, in most historical writings and diplomatic documents, the forced resettlement of Crimean Tatars is now called deportation, not genocide.
In the Soviet Union, the term "resettlement" was used.
Speaking recently at a forum dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Petro Poroshenko went so far as to compare the Russian government in Crimea (without failing to label it as “occupation” as usual) with “the actions of Stalin, who dreamed of destroying the Tatar people ". It is said loudly... And also - falsely and illiterately. In general, very Poroshenko-like. However, in order to fully understand what kind of absurdity the Ukrainian president made, it is necessary to thoroughly understand the true essence of the events of the spring of 1944 in the Crimea, and, above all, with their prerequisites and causes.
May 10, 1944 Chairman state committee In the 18th century of the defense of the USSR, Joseph Stalin signed a decree “On the Crimean Tatars”, on the basis of which 190 thousand representatives of this nationality were evicted from the peninsula within just 10 days. The place of deportation was mainly Uzbekistan, however, some of them ended up in Kazakhstan and other republics of the USSR. About one and a half thousand Tatars remained on the territory of Crimea - members of the anti-Hitler underground, partisans and those who fought in the Red Army, as well as members of their families.
Tragic story? Undoubtedly. However, before shedding tears over its participants, declaring them, one and all, "innocent victims of Stalinism", let's go back in time even further - to 1941. It was then that the foundation of the events that happened three years later was laid - and by none other than the Crimean Tatars themselves. In a memo People's Commissar Internal Affairs of the USSR Lavrenty Beria, which, in fact, became the basis for the adoption of the above-mentioned decision of the State Defense Committee, everything was stated with merciless Beria accuracy and directness. No "lyrics" - only numbers and facts.
Do you want to know how many Crimean Tatars deserted from the ranks of the 51st Army, which was retreating from the Crimea? 20 thousand. And how many of them were drafted into the Red Army? Exactly 20 thousand and it was ... A wonderful example of betrayal, unparalleled, one might say! One hundred percent desertion in itself speaks volumes. But if, having fled, like cockroaches before the advancing Nazis, the Tatars had stopped there! It wasn't like that at all. Before the occupants had time to enter the Crimea, the representatives of the Tatars had already rushed to them with an expression of utter devotion and assurances that they were all ready to faithfully serve "Adolf Efendi", recognizing him as their leader.
Such zeal was favorably accepted by the Nazi leaders, which was reported in the first days of 1942 at the first meeting of the Tatar Committee, held in captured Simferopol. The heroic Sevastopol was still fighting, bleeding, but not giving up, and the Crimean mullahs were already howling prayers for the health of the “great Fuhrer”, “the invincible army of the great German people” and the repose of the vile little souls of the killers from the Wehrmacht. Having prayed, they set to work - security, police and auxiliary units of the Nazis were massively formed from the Crimean Tatars. They were especially valued in the SD and the field gendarmerie.
Many mournful words have been written and said about the death camp, which was located during the war years on the territory of the Krasny state farm near Simferopol. With his horrors, he earned the name "Crimean Dachau." Only shot in it was not less than 8 thousand people. However, it was much less mentioned that there were, in fact, two Germans among the executioners in this terrible place - the "doctor" of the camp and its commandant. The rest of the "staff" consisted of Crimean Tatars who served in the 152nd battalion of SD Shuma. This unit was formed, by the way, exclusively on a voluntary basis. The rabble gathered in it showed simply incredible ingenuity in relation to torture and executions. I will give just one example - one of these "know-how" was the destruction of people who were stacked in piles, tied with barbed wire, doused with gasoline and set on fire. Special luck in this case was to hit the lowest layer - there was a chance to suffocate before the flames broke out ...
The real nightmare of the partisan detachments of the Crimea were the Tatar guides of the fascist Jagd teams and the punitive detachments that hunted for them. Perfectly oriented on the terrain, knowing in the mountains, as they say, every stone, every path, these nonhumans over and over again led the Nazis to the places where our soldiers were hiding, their camps and parking lots. Such “specialists” were so in demand for the Third Reich that in 1944, having abandoned part of their troops in the Crimea, the Germans found an opportunity to evacuate them from the peninsula by sea, subsequently forming first the Tatar Mountain Jaeger Regiment of the SS, and then an entire brigade. Big honor...
You can remember a lot more. About the stones that flew in our prisoners when they were driven through the Tatar villages ... About two hectares of Crimean land, which was allocated to each of the Tatars who entered the service of the invaders, and which was taken from the Russian people. About how desperately the Tatar battalions fought in 1944 near Bakhchisarai and Islam-Terek, trying to stop the Red Army going to liberate the Crimea. About the zeal with which they searched for and destroyed throughout the peninsula communists, wounded soldiers of the Red Army, whom the inhabitants tried to hide, as well as Jews and gypsies, in the extermination of which they took an active part.
It never occurs to anyone that by deporting the Tatars from Crimea, among whom at least one in ten was not only tainted by cooperation with the invaders, but had his hands covered in blood up to the elbow, Stalin and Beria did not destroy them, but saved them ?! Returning from the fields of the Great Patriotic War in a year or two, the veterans would hardly have limited themselves to “verbal censure” of traitors ...
It is impossible not to mention one more point. The “international human rights organizations” and other liberal riff-raff that annually shed tears over the “undeservedly deported” Crimean Tatars, for some reason do not weep over other completely similar stories of the same time. Over the internment of 120 thousand Japanese, as well as thousands of Germans and Italians, who were driven behind the "thorn" in 1941 in the United States. Note - not for any specific crimes, and not even "on suspicion". Simply for nationality! And over 600 thousand Germans who perished during their mass expulsion from European countries after the end of the Second World War are also not moaning. They are silent, infections, like a fish on ice ...
But the Germans - not Nazis, not veterans of the Wehrmacht or the SS, but simply who had the misfortune to belong to this nation, were driven in 1945 from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia by the millions! 500-600 thousand - this is only the documented number of dead and dead during the deportation.
I don't blame or justify anyone. It was just such a time - cruel, bloody, terrible ... And some things that cause shudder today with their categoricalness and their scale were completely normal for him, almost universal practice. This is all to the point that it is incorrect, at least, to declare the deportation of 1944 the pinnacle of world atrocities.
Regarding the fact that they arrested and deported in the spring of 1944 entirely "innocent" and "uninvolved" ... Only small arms were seized during the eviction operation so much that it would be enough to arm rifle division! Okay, ten thousand (!) Rifles ... And more than 600 machine guns and mortars - fifty? What is this all hidden for? Shoot at the sparrows? Severe comrades in cornflower blue caps from the department of Beria, even before the start of the deportation, caught more than 5 thousand representatives of the Crimean Tatar population, whose connection with the Nazis was so obvious, and the crimes were so bloody that most of them, without ceremony, threw a noose around their necks. There were many among those trying to hide spies, saboteurs and simply "sleeping" agents left in the liberated territory with very specific tasks from the fascist masters.
I agree that the whole nation cannot be guilty. No one is blaming a whole nation... Let's not dive into emotions, but turn to dispassionate and dry arithmetic. I will give some figures, and everyone is free to draw the following conclusions for himself.
First of all, so that the extremists and their accomplices who have dug in in Ukraine do not try to speak now, Tatar Crimea before the Great Patriotic War was not in any case. Ukrainian, by the way - even more so! According to the 1939 census, more than half a million Russians, more than 200 thousand Tatars, and a little more than 150 thousand Ukrainians lived on the peninsula. Well, and representatives of other nationalities - Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Bulgarians, in much smaller quantities.
Of these same 200 thousand, according to the leaders of the Tatar Committee operating under the occupiers, carelessly done by the leaders themselves, 20 thousand served the Nazis with weapons in their hands. Every tenth ... However, according to many historians, the figure is shamelessly underestimated - actually collaborated with the Nazis (not only in the ranks of the SS, SD and police, but also as guides, informers and servants), at least 35-40 thousand Crimean Tatars. Every fifth... During the deportation, out of 191 thousand transported, according to the report of the NKVD, 191 people died on the way. One in a thousand... This is not a comparison. This is just elementary arithmetic.
During the Nazi occupation in the Crimea, at least 220 thousand of its inhabitants were destroyed and driven into slavery, 45 thousand soldiers of the Red Army captured were killed in the fascist dungeons and camps located on its territory. There were no Crimean Tatars among those. On the other hand, punishers, policemen, guards from the Tatar formations, who faithfully served the occupiers, are fully involved in all these crimes. They made their conscious choice, and everything that happened after that was the retribution for it. At the same time, there were neither mass executions, nor the total sending of all Tatars to camps - only expulsion.
Did the people, whose sons flooded the land of Crimea with the blood of those who peacefully lived on it next to them, lose the right to walk on this land? Everyone can find their own answer to this question. Stalin just found his ...
