Introduction
In the case of the Chechen-Ingush and the Crimean Tatars, collaboration with the Nazis was massive, involving most of the population. To try to isolate and punish “only the guilty” would have been to split the nation up. This would probably have destroyed the nation and there would have been very few young men for the young women to marry. Instead, the national group was kept together, and their population grew. [2]
Nearly all of Furr's claims in this paragraph alone are wrong. A detailed debunk of Furr with regards to the Soviet deportations can be found here.
This thesis, written by Josiah Selednik (owner of Stand Up For History) seeks to further refute any Neo-Stalinist claims that this crime was somehow justified. However, it more importantly provides a convincing historical argument that these deportations meet the legal definition for genocide, and that therefore, the Soviet Union committed genocide against the Crimean Tatars.
Something worth noting is that the Stalinist regime also deported Balkars, Meskhetian Turks, Karachays, Kalmyks, Volga Germans, Chechens, Ingush, and other ethnic groups during World War 2. However, this thesis will focus on the Deportation of the Crimean Tatars.
Background to the Deportations
TOP SECRET
STATE DEFENSE COMMITTEE
State Defense Committee Decree No. 5859ss
11 May 1944
Moscow, the Kremlin
On the Crimean Tatars
During the Patriotic War [World War II], many Crimean Tatars betrayed the Motherland, deserting Red Army units that defended the Crimea and siding with the enemy, joining volunteer army units formed by the Germans to fight against the Red Army; as members of German punitive detachments, during the occupation of the Crimea by German fascist troops, the Crimean Tatars particularly were noted for their savage reprisals against Soviet partisans, and also helped the German invaders to organize the violent roundup of Soviet citizens for German enslavement and the mass extermination of the Soviet people.
The Crimean Tatars actively collaborated with the German occupation authorities, participating in the so-called "Tatar national committees," organized by the German intelligence organs, and were often used by the Germans to infiltrate the rear of the Red Army with spies and saboteurs. With the support of the Crimean Tatars, the "Tatar national committees," in which the leading role was played by White Guard-Tatar emigrants, directed their activity at the persecution and oppression of the non-Tatar population of the Crimea and were engaged in preparatory efforts to separate the Crimea from the Soviet Union by force, with the help of the German armed forces.
Taking into account the facts cited above, the State Defense Committee decrees that:
- All Tatars are to be banished from the territory of the Crimea and resettled permanently as special settlers in the regions of the Uzbek SSR. The resettlement will be assigned to the Soviet NKVD. The Soviet NKVD (comrade Beria) is to complete the resettlement by 1 June 1944.
- The following procedure and conditions of resettlement are to be established:
- The special settlers will be allowed to take with them personal items, clothing, household objects, dishes and utensils, and up to 500 kilograms of food per family.
Property, buildings, outbuildings, furniture, and farmstead lands left behind will be taken over by the local authorities; all beef and dairy cattle, as well as poultry, will be taken over by the People's Commissariat of the Meat and Dairy Industries, all agricultural production by the USSR People's Commissariat of Procurement, horses and other draft animals by the USSR People's Commissariat of Agriculture, and breeding cattle by the USSR People's Commissariat of State Grain and Animal Husbandry Farms.
Exchange receipts will be issued in every populated place and every farm for the receipt of livestock, grain, vegetables, and for other types of agricultural production.
By 1 July this year, the USSR NKVD, People's Commissariat of Agriculture, People's Commissariat of the Meat and Dairy Industries, People's Commissariat of State Grain and Animal Husbandry Farms, and People's Commissariat of Procurement are to submit to the USSR Council of People's Commissars a proposal on the procedure for repaying the special settlers, on the basis of exchange receipts, for livestock, poultry, and agricultural production received from them.- …
To facilitate the receipt of livestock, grain, and agricultural production from the special settlers, the USSR People's Commissariat of Agriculture (comrade Benediktov), USSR People's Commissariat of Procurement (comrade Subbotin), USSR People's Commissariat of the Meat and Dairy Industries (comrade Smirnov), and USSR People's Commissariat of State Grain and Animal Husbandry Farms (comrade Lobanov) are to dispatch the required number of workers to the Crimea, in coordination with comrade Gritsenko.- The People's Commissariat of Railroads (comrade Kaganovich) is to organize the transport of the special settlers from Crimea to the Uzbek SSR, using specially formed trains, according to a schedule devised jointly with the USSR NKVD. The number of trains, loading stations, and destination points are to be determined by the USSR NKVD.
Payment for the transport will be based on the rate at which the prisoners are transported;- To each train of special settlers, the USSR People's Commissariat of Public Health (comrade Miterev) is to assign, within a time frame to be coordinated with the USSR NKVD, one physician and two nurses, as well as an appropriate supply of medicines, and to provide medical and first-aid care to special settlers in transit;
- The USSR People's Commissariat of Trade (comrade Liubimov) will provide all trains carrying special settlers with hot food and boiling water on a daily basis.
To provide food for the special settlers in transit, the People's Commissariat of Trade is to allocate the quantity of food supplies indicated in Appendix No. 1.- By 1 June of this year, the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Uzbekistan, comrade Iusupov, the Chairman of the Uzbek SSR Council of People's Commissars, comrade Abdurakhmanov, and the Uzbek SSR People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, comrade Kobulov, are to carry out the following steps in regard to the acceptance and settlement of the special settlers:
- To accept and settle within the Uzbek SSR 140 to 160 thousand special settlers -- Tatars, sent by the USSR NKVD from the Crimean ASSR.
The settlement of the special settlers will occur in state farm communities, existing collective farms, farms affiliated with enterprises, and in factory communities, for employment in agriculture and industry;- To establish commissions in oblasts where the special settlers are resettled, consisting of the chairman of the oblast executive committee, secretary of the oblast committee, and chief of the NKVD administration, charging them with the implementation of all measures in connection with the acceptance and distribution of the newly arrived special settlers;
- To organize raion troikas, consisting of the chairman of the raion executive committee, secretary of the raion committee, and chief of the raion branch of the NKVD, charging them with preparation for the distribution and organization of the acceptance of the newly arrived special settlers;
- To arrange the automotive transport of the special settlers, mobilizing the vehicles of any enterprises or institutions for this purpose;
- To grant plots of farm land to the newly arrived special settlers and to help them build homes by providing construction materials;
- To organize special NKVD commandant's headquarters, to be maintained by the USSR NKVD, in the raions of settlement;
- By 20 May of this year, the Uzbek SSR Central Committee and Council of People's Commissars are to submit to the USSR NKVD (comrade Beria) a plan for the settlement of the special settlers in the oblasts and raions, indicating the destination points of the trains.
- Seven-year loans of up to 5,000 rubles per family, for the construction and setting up of homes, are to be extended by the Agricultural Bank (comrade Kravtsov) to special settlers sent to the Uzbek SSR, in their places of settlement.
- Every month during the June-August 1944 period, equal quantities of flour, groats, and vegetables will be allocated by the USSR People's Commissariat of Procurement (comrade Subbotin) to the Uzbek SSR Council of People's Commissars for distribution to the special settlers, in accordance with Appendix No. 2.
Flour, groats, and vegetables are to be distributed free of charge to the special settlers during the June-August period, as repayment for the agricultural production and livestock received from them in the areas from which they were evicted.- To augment the automotive transport capacity of the NKVD troops, garrisoned in the raions of settlement in the Uzbek, Kazakh, and Kirgiz SSR's, the People's Commissariat of Defense (comrade Khrulev) is to provide 100 recently repaired "Willys"3 motor vehicles and 250 trucks during the May-June 1944 period.
- By 20 May 1944, the Main Administration for the Transport and Supply of Petroleum and Petroleum Products (comrade Shirokov) is to allocate and supply 400 tons of gasoline to locations specified by the USSR NKVD, and 200 tons of gasoline are to be placed at the disposal of the Uzbek SSR Council of People's Commissars.
The supply of gasoline [for this purpose] is to be carried out in conjunction with a corresponding reduction of supplies to all other consumers.- By 15 May of this year, the Main Supply Administration of the USSR Ministry of Forestry, USSR Council of People's Commissars (comrade Lopukhov), is to deliver 75,000 2.75-meter railroad car boards to the People's Commissariat of Railroads, using any means at its disposal.
- In May of this year, the People's Commissariat of Finance (comrade Zverev) is to transfer 30 million rubles from the reserve fund of the USSR Council of People's Commissars to the USSR NKVD, for the implementation of special measures.
I. Stalin
Chairman, State Defense Committeecc : Comrades Molotov, Beria, Malenkov, Mikoian, Voznesenskii,Andreev, Kosygin, Gritsenko, Iusupov, Abdurakhmanov, Kobulov (Uzbek SSR NKVD), Chadaev -- entire document; Shatalin, Gorkin, [illegible] Smirnov, Subbotin, Benediktov, Lobanov, Zverev,Kaganovich, Miterev, Liubimov, Kravtsov, Khrulev, Zhukov,
Shirokov, Lopukhov -- appropriate sections.
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| Photo of the 1st page of Stalin's order for the Deportation of the Crimean Tatars[8] |
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| Lavrentiy Beria, chief of the NKVD from 1938-1945. He was the main organizer of this crime. |
But, is this really the case?
It is true that 20,000 Crimean Tatars collaborated with the Nazis. But, there are other facts that must be considered.
Firstly, the majority of the 20,000 Crimean Tatars who had collaborated with the Nazi regime during the occupation had retreated towards German territory by the time the Soviets reoccupied Crimea[9]. That being said, the vast majority of Crimean Tatars living in Crimea were women and children, and other individuals who had nothing to do with the war[10]. The Soviet government was using collective punishment against people who were very clearly not Nazi collaborators, instead of simply rooting out the collaborators within each ethnic group.
Secondly, it is worth noting that, as explored before, many Crimean Tatars served in the Red Army to defend their homeland from Nazi aggressors. Interestingly, 534 Crimean Tatar officers, 1,392 Crimean Tatar sergeants, and 7,079 Crimean Tatar rank and file soldiers were recorded at the "special settlements" in 1949[11]. Thus, they had been branded as traitors by the Stalinists and deported because of their ethnicity, in spite of their service to the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War. An additional 742 members of the Communist Party and 1,225 Komsomolists were also recorded at being at the special settlements[12].
Thirdly, although there was Crimean Tatar collaboration, collaboration with the Axis Powers existed in every ethnicity. Keep in mind that, out of the 1,000,000-1,500,000 Soviet citizens who collaborated with Nazi Germany[13], only 20,000 were Crimean Tatars. Many more Ukrainians, Russians, and Balts collaborated with the Nazis, yet these ethnic groups were not deported in their entirety.
The above facts refute claims made by Stalin apologists that this deportation was justified due to the official state narrative of Nazi collaboration.
The Deportation
We were told that we were being evicted and we had 15 minutes to get ready to leave.
We boarded boxcars – there were 60 people in each, but no one knew where we were being taken to. To be shot? Hanged? Tears and panic were taking over.
-Saiid, a survivor of the deportations[14].
On May 18, 1944, 23,000 NKVD officers[15], along with 9,000 NKVD-NKGB operatives[16], began the deportation of the Crimean Tatars. 100 Willys Jeeps[17], 250 trucks[18], and 16 train echelons[19] were allocated for the operation.
NKVD soldiers went house to house informing the Crimean Tatars that they had betrayed the Motherland, and that therefore they were being deported. The Crimean Tatars were only given 15 minutes to pack up as many belongings as possible, in accordance with GKO Order No. 5859ss[20]. Anyone who dared to resist the deportation was shot and killed on the spot[21]. Furthermore, Crimean Tatar families were allowed to bring 500kg (1102 lbs) of belongings into exile, but due to the short amount of time given to gather these belongings, most families did not bring anywhere near 500kg of belongings into exile[22].
Medzhyt Mambetov, a Crimean Tatar who survived the deportation, states the following:
At three a.m., someone knocked at the door. Or, maybe it happened at four a.m. The Tatars were lying on the floor that time. They were sleeping there, as it was May, and it was warm enough. Two soldiers came in and said that we would be deported. We were given fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes to grab a few things. Father started trembling; he could not get dressed. My older brother and I started helping him get dressed. It took fifteen minutes to get him dressed. That's all - the fifteen minutes passed. We had to leave the house! My mother took the first thing that she could grab, the mattress, and put everything else in. But our good things were in the living room, where the officers slept. The chest was there, but soldier didn't let us go there.[23]
Elvira Mamutova, another Crimean Tatar who was deported, states the following:
At 3 a.m., mother woke up, I was a child and do not remember all that in detail. She went to wake him [a Soviet soldier living in Mamutova's home at the time] up and then came back. In 5 minutes, we heard a knock on our door, at our bedroom. The officer sat on the arm of the sofa and said, "Today everyone will be deported from Crimea except for the Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Bulgarians, and Turks." [24]
The NKVD proceeded to take Crimean Tatars to the nearest train station, and loaded them into box cars for deportation[25].
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| Crimean Tatars being unloaded on to box cars by the Stalinists[26] |
By the end of the day on May 18, 1944, the Stalinists had successfully unloaded around 90,000 Crimean Tatars into box cars, with about 48,000 having began the journey to Central Asia[27]. The Stalinists continued the deportation the next day. By the end of May 19, 1944, the Stalinists had unloaded 165,515 Crimean Tatars (including the 90,000 deported the day before) into box cars[28], with 136,412 having began the journey. On May 20, 1944, the Stalinists continued deporting the Crimean Tatars, and increased the number of deported Crimean Tatars to 183,155[29]. By this point, the deportation was over. The Stalinists deported an additional 11,000 young Crimean Tatars to forced labor camps[30], and deported 5,000 Crimean Tatars to hard labor in the Moscow Coal Trust[31]. In total, the Stalinist NKVD had deported about 194,155 Crimean Tatars from their homelands[32].
On July 4, 1944 (after the Crimean Tatars had settled in the special settlements) the NKVD reported to Stalin that the deportation of the Crimean Tatars was complete. However, it was found out that some Crimean Tatar villages on the Arabat Spit had not been deported.
The NKVD decided to resolve this problem by mass murdering the remaining Crimean Tatars. The NKVD rounded up all Crimean Tatars in these villages and placed them on a boat. They sent this boat out into the Azov Sea, and sunk it, this causing the Crimean Tatars in the boat to drown[33]. Some Crimean Tatars tried to survive the massacre by swimming to the shore. The NKVD fired at these people with machine guns, thus killing them[34].
Mikhail Blohin, an eyewitness of this massacre, says the following[35]:
I have kept this secret that I am about to tell you with me my entire life, but I can not do it any longer. At that time they ordered us Komsomols (Young Communists) not to reveal what we have seen to anyone and made us swear to keep it as a secret forever. This was a very strict order. We then promised to forget this tragic event and swore not to mention it to anyone. I kept my promise for more than half a century, but I no longer have a choice.
It was the summer of 1944. My family was residing in the village of Seyit-Cugut on the shores of Azov. The harbor divided our village, the Crimean Tatar Seyit- Cugut and the Russian Seyit-Cugut. The Crimean Tatar Seyit-Cugut was buried in total silence after Surgun, the mass deportation.
One evening our village officials announced a scheduled meeting with some high officials from the city and asked all the komsomols to congregate in front of the administration building. The next morning we congregated at the aforementioned location. The officials in military uniforms lectured us on loyalty and duty (to our state) and tried to stir hatred towards the enemies of our state and socialist system. Soon after they loaded us on trucks and took us to the shores of Azov Sea. We could see the bulldozers digging ditches. As we approached the shore we were all horrified of the sight in front us. There was no place to step on the shore as it was full of corpses, dead bodies, and the waves were vibrating the ones still in the water. Those who were supervising us ordered us to form teams of two and start carrying the corpses to the ditches. We worked long and hard, and the horror we experienced made us so tired we had no energy left to say a word. I have never been able to erase the sight of the corpse of a young mother clinging on to her child; my friend and I tried to separate them but just couldn't. We had to throw them into the ditch together. I will not be able to forget this sight until I die, until my last breath. There were so many corpses, and most of them were women, children and elderly men. There was rarely any young man among them.
Once we finished collecting and burying all the corpses, the military officials from the city met with us again. They tried to explain the cause of this tragedy. Supposedly there was a gigantic wave that had passed through Arabat Spit causing severe flooding of these villages which in turn caused drowning of all these villagers. Even though we all knew this to be a lie, no one said a word. They forced us to swear three more times to the secrecy of this tragedy and to forget it completely.
This massacre has become known as the Arabat Spit Tragedy.
In the journey to Central Asia, the Crimean Tatars suffered. For one, the box cars that the Crimean Tatars had to stay in during the entire deportation were overcrowded. About 50 Crimean Tatars, along with their things, were crammed into single box cars[36]. This led to many outbreaks of typhus[37][38].
The box cars were also extremely unsanitary. Mark Taplin describes some of the unsanitary conditions in Open Lands: Travel Through Russia's Once Forbidden Places[39]:
The cattle cars set aside for Beria's ugly errand [the deportation of the Crimean Tatars] had already been used for his earlier deportations; they were caked in old feces, and smeared in dried blood and urine. With practice the NKVD had perfected these sinister operations to a ruthless science.
Many Crimean Tatars also suffered from starvation and dehydration[40][41]. Medical care was also poor[42]. Death was common during the journey, and the train echelons had to constantly stop in order to bury the dead[43]. Various survivor testimonies attest to the extremely poor conditions that the Crimean Tatars were forced to endure during transit.
Elvira Mamutova, the woman mentioned before, says the following about what happened in her box car during transit[44]:
What the road was like... It's scary to remember. We were transported in railway cattle wagons. There were several families in one wagon. Both the doors and windows were shut. The doors were shut with such a bang! All of a sudden we reached a station, people were screaming and crying. Somebody died. A couple men went out and in a few minutes they had to dig the grave. They managed to dig about 20 centimeters of ground and the train left. They were running after it. That's what the trip was like.
Another survivor says the following[45]:
The doors of the wagons were usually opened in stations where the train stopped for a few minutes. The panting people gulped fresh air, and they gave way to the sick who were unable to crawl to the exit to breath it. But along the length of the wagon one officer in a blue hat hastily strolled with soldiers and, glancing into the wagon, asked the same question, "Any bodies? Any bodies?" If this was the case, they pulled them out of the wagon; they were mainly children and the old. There and then, three meters from the rail embankment [the bodies] were thrown into hollows with dirt and refuse.
Medzhyt Mambetov, also mentioned above, describes some of the conditions in the box cars[46]:
Thus, we were loaded into the carriages. The carriages were double-deckers. They were made for the cattle with 50 mm boards set to the floor. We could only crawl in the lower and upper levels; there was no place to walk upright. Here were sixty people in our carriage. No toilet, no water, and only four little windows above and the barbed wire. Because there was no fresh air inside; everyone was trying to get to those windows to breathe.
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| These types of wagons were used by the NKVD to deport the Crimean Tatars[47] |
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| Empty Crimean Tatar village in 1945. All inhabitants of this village were deported by the Stalinists in 1944[53]. |
The "Special Settlements"
We were forced to repair our own individual tents. We worked and we starved. Many were so weak from hunger that they could not stay on their feet.... Our men were at the front and there was no one who could bury the dead. Sometimes the bodies lay among us for several days.... Some Crimean Tatar children dug little graves and buried the unfortunate little ones
-Anonymous Crimean Tatar woman who survived the special settlements[54].
Upon arrival in Central Asia, the Stalinists placed the Crimean Tatars in special settlements. Most Crimean Tatars were settled in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic as planned. However, some Crimean Tatars were sent to other places in Central Asia and the Urals.
The Stalinists divided up the Crimean Tatars among the oblasts of the Uzbek SSR[55].
56,632 were sent to the Tashkent Oblast
31,540 were sent to the Samarkand Oblast
19,630 were sent to the Andijan Oblast
16,039 were sent to the Fergana Oblast
13,804 were sent to the Namangan Oblast
10,171 were sent to the Kashga Darya Oblast
3,983 were sent to the Bukhara Oblast
The conditions in the special settlements were awful. The Crimean Tatars were forced to live in huts, dug-outs, and barracks outside factories[56]. There was a lack of medical supplies[57]. Most notably, the food situation was absolutely atrocious. The Soviet government provided only 200[58] to 400[59] grams of food per day to each Crimean Tatar. No milk, fat, or meat was provided[60]. There was a lack of clean water, and this led to outbreaks of malaria, yellow fever, and dysentery[67].
A contemporary NKVD report from October 10, 1944 describes the awful conditions in many Crimean Tatar settlements[61]:
In Kologriv raion preparations for winter barracks move slowly. Due to an absence of glass window frames can not be repaired. Clothes and shoes for resettlers have not been provisioned. Special settlers work in the forest bare foot. The supplies to special settlers of bread are interrupted for two to three days at a time. From 16 to 20 August we gave absolutely no bread to the Fonfonova section of the Pongov lumber enterprise. Families of special settlers receive food irregularly, the quality of this food is unsatisfactory, the bread given is rationed at 150 grams a person. Wages were not paid for July this year. Medical service is unsatisfactory. Among the special settlers in the lumber sections of Fofanova, Markovlug and Shirokii Luga have spread diseases like dysentery, mange, and eczema.
Medzhyt Mambetov also describes some of the poor conditions in the special settlements[62]:
We lived there [in the special settlements] in very bad conditions. The houses were named "Kibitka". These were houses made of thin, sun-dried mud bricks. Can you imagine 14 cm walls in winter? That year - 1944-1945 - was very cold in Uzbekistan. There was a 10 cm layer of snow and it was windy for three months. So the walls were frozen over. The commandant would to collect our day's ration. He sold that and drank away the money. He didn't give anything to the people. So we didn't have anything to eat.
As was planned, the Crimean Tatars also had to do forced labor in the special settlements. Some Crimean Tatars were sent to kolkhozes, some to sovkhozes, while others were sent to industrial towns[63]. The Crimean Tatars worked in factories, mines, cotton fields, construction, and even hydroelectric stations[64[65]. The work they had to do was dangerous, especially in the hydroelectric stations, and also very unhealthy[66]. They had to work for 12 hours every day[68].
The Crimean Tatars also, initially, endured persecution at the hands of native Uzbeks. The NKVD had spread slanderous claims that the Crimean Tatars were traitors and Nazi collaborators[69]. Since the Nazi believed that Central Asians were subhuman, the local Uzbek peoples reacted violently. They stoned many Crimean Tatars to death[70].
Elvira Mamutova describes the reaction of the Uzbeks in the Fergana region[71]:
Those Uzbeks were calling us betrayers. They took stones and sticks to beat and kill us. That's how we were met.
The persecution, however, eventually stopped, after the Uzbeks realized that the Crimean Tatars were fellow Muslims[72].
Of course, the Crimean Tatars were not allowed to leave the special settlements without NKVD permission[73][74].
Because of the extremely poor living conditions in the special settlements, coupled with the dangerous work they had to endure, large amounts of Crimean Tatars began to die. Things began to reach absolutely nightmarish proportions. As evidenced by the below table, for the first few years, more Crimean Tatars in the special settlements were dying than being born.
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| Crimean Tatar Births vs Deaths in the Special Settlements[75]. |
The Stalinists had now created hell on earth for the Crimean Tatars.
My niece, Menube Seyhislamova, with ten children, was deported with us. Her husband, who had been in the Soviet Army from the first day of the war, had been killed. And the family of this fallen soldier perished of hunger in exile in Uzbekistan. Only one little girl, Pera, remained alive, but she became a cripple as a result of the horror she had experienced and of hunger.
Our men folk were at the front and there was no one to bury the dead. Corpses would lie for several days among the living. Adshigulsim Adzhimambetova's husband had been captured by the Fascists. Three children, a little girl and two boys, remained with her. This family was also starving just as we were. No one gave either material or moral help. As a result, first of all, the little girl died of hunger, then in one day, both the boys. Their mother could not move from starvation.
Then the owner of the house threw the two children's bodies onto the street, onto the side of the irrigation canal. Then some children, the Crimean Tatars, dug little graves and buried the poor little boys. Can one really tell it all? I have such a weight on my heart that it is difficult to remember all. Tell me why did they allow such horrors to happen?
-Account of a Crimean Tatar who survived the special settlements[76].
People were dying in droves every day, from hunger, exhaustion, and the unaccustomed climate, but no one would help them bury their dead. People died from the sharp changes in the climate and the unbearable work, from dystrophy and other illnesses, from cold and malnutrition in the absence of medical care, from nostalgia and from grief over the lost members of their family.
-Reshat Dzhemilev, a Crimean Tatar dissident[77].
There were unsanitary conditions everywhere. We had seven or eight bodies every day.
-Nijar, another survivor of the special settlements[78].
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Crimean Tatar child in a special settlement[79]. |
The Crimean Tatars endured these conditions for a very long time.
Return to Crimea
Death toll
Was it a genocide?
New conceptions require new terms. By ‘‘genocide” we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin tide (killing), thus corresponding in its formation to such words as tyrannicide, homicide, infanticide, etc. Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.
The UN defines genocide in the following way[91]:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
These are the two most common definitions of genocide. Keep both of these definitions in mind, as they are very important.
Now, here are my arguments for why the deportation of the Crimean Tatars fits the above definition.
Argument #1: The Stalinists collectively punished the Crimean Tatars.
Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.
Argument #2: The Stalinists forced this ethnic group, which they had collectively punished, into special settlements with poor conditions.
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
This is exactly what the Stalinists did. They placed conditions of life on the group that did lead to its physical destruction in part, as evidenced by the large amount of Crimean Tatars who died due to these conditions.
Argument #3: The Stalinists attempted to destroy the culture and traditions of the Crimean Tatars
The Stalinists launched a systematic attempt to destroy the culture and even the memory of the Crimean Tatars. They took multiple actions in order to do this:
-The Stalinists banned all publications of the native Crimean Tatar language in the special settlements[94].
-The Crimean Tatars in the special settlements were not allowed to receive education in their native language[95][96].
Argument #4: The Stalinists killed off massive parts of the Crimean Tatar population
What are the counter-arguments?
Anti-Soviet historians often describe the enforced resettlements as acts of 'genocide'. This is implied in the title of Robert Conquest's book on the transplantations -- 'The Nation Killers'.
In fact, the UN Convention on the Prevention and punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted in December 1948, defines genocide as an act, "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, or religious group, as such."
But enforced resettlement of national groups can in no way be identified with intent to destroy them. Indeed, even such a hostile commenter as Robert Conquest is compelled to admit: "Nothing here matches the horror of the Nazi gas chambers. These groups were not physically annihilated."
There are multiple problems with Bland's assessment.
Bland claims that "enforced resettlements" cannot be classified as genocide. However, they can. The UN Convention on the Prevention and punishment of the Crime of Genocide clearly says that....
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
.....is an act of genocide. Notice how Bland mendaciously omitted this part when he defined genocide based on the UN's definition.
We already saw how the Stalin regime clearly brought about conditions of life upon the Crimean Tatars that were extremely poor, and did end up bringing about its physical destruction in part.
Bland further quotes Robert Conquest. Conquest first states that "nothing here matches the horror of the Nazi gas chambers". This, however, is a strawman argument. No scholar or historian has ever alleged that the Stalinists used homicidal gas chambers or gas vans in the deportation of the Crimean Tatars. And, a crime does not have to be as bad as the Nazi genocide of Jews to fit the definition of genocide.
Conquest also says, "these groups [the Crimean Tatars in this case] were not physically annihilated." Actually, they were, in part. We already saw before how very large parts of the Crimean Tatar population died due to the deportation and subsequent special settlements.
This crushes the counter-argument that there was no genocide simply because the Stalinists did not immediately and directly kill the Crimean Tatars. They placed the Crimean Tatars in extremely poor conditions, which very clearly meets the UN definition of genocide.
Another counter-argument commonly used against the genocide theory is the alleged lack of evidence that racism played a role in the deportation. Proponents of this counter-argument state that there is no evidence that racism played a role in the deportation, and that thus the deportation cannot be classified as a genocide.
However, this is fallacious at best. For one, the Stalinists collectively branded each and every Crimean Tatar as a "German collaborator", and forced them into special settlements. Claiming that each and every member of a certain ethnic group is a Nazi is an inherently racist statement. If someone nowadays were to claim that all black people are Nazis, they would correctly be classified as racist. The case is no different with Crimean Tatars, or any other ethnicity for that matter.
Not only that, but even after the deportation, the Stalinist government in Moscow spread racist propaganda against the Crimean Tatars. They held a conference in 1948 called "Bolshevik Party in the Struggle Against the Tatar Bourgeois Nationalists", which was dedicated to promoting racism against Crimean Tatars[105]. Crimean Tatar "betrayal stories" were also spread across the USSR to further slander the Crimean Tatars[106]. It is very clear that the Stalinists held hate against the Crimean Tatars.
Another common counter-argument used less to dispute the genocide definition, but more to outright justify the entire deportation, is the alleged Crimean Tatar collaboration with the Nazi occupiers. I discussed before that, while Nazi collaboration obviously existed among the Crimean Tatars, there were also a large amount of Crimean Tatars who fought in the Red Army, and most of the Crimean Tatars who collaborated had retreated towards German territory in 1944.
However, I also stated that 20,000 Crimean Tatars collaborated with the Germans, which is almost 10% of the Crimean Tatar population. That is a large amount of the population. In the wake of this, neo-Stalinist author Grover Furr argues that collectively punishing the Crimean Tatars was actually justified. He says[107]:
In the case of the Chechen-Ingush and the Crimean Tatars, collaboration with the Nazis was massive, involving most of the population. To try to isolate and punish “only the guilty” would have been to split the nation up. This would probably have destroyed the nation and there would have been very few young men for the young women to marry. Instead, the national group was kept together, and their population grew.
Of course, collective punishment of an entire ethnicity is not justified, and Grover Furr is wrong.
Firstly, Furr over-exaggerates the amount of collaboration among the Crimean Tatars. He claims that "collaboration with the Nazis was massive, involving most of the population". However, only 10% of the population collaborated, which is not "most".
More importantly, Furr's claim that the population of the Crimean Tatars grew is a lie. Brian Glyn Williams, a historian who was written a lot about the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, says the following[108]:
Kremlin sources based upon the bi-weekly reports made by Crimean Tatars in the special settlements state that the Crimean Tatar population in Uzbekistan had dwindled from 151,604 to 119,460 by the year 1946 (i.e. a loss of 30,000, 'only' 20 per cent of the total exile population). By 1948 between 40,000 and 44,000 Crimean Tatars had died in Uzbekistan and their number was certainly not replaced by 6,564 births in this period.
As you can clearly see by both this and the table mentioned before, the Crimean Tatar population did not "grow" like Furr claims. It went down.
Grover Furr is unable to explain why innocent people deserved to be deported. He can only ramble about Nazi collaboration, while deliberately ignoring historical facts in his quest to whitewash Joseph Stalin.
Conclusion
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| May 18 is commemorated in Crimea as Deportation of the Crimean Tatars Memorial Day. |
