The Mass Deportation of the Crimean Tatars 77 Years ago
jottopohl.substack.com
Introduction This year marks the 77th anniversary of the Stalinist ethnic cleansing of the Crimean Tatars from their homeland. On 18-20 May 1944, the Soviet NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) loaded up almost the entire Crimean Tatar population including old men, women, children, and even loyal communists and shipped them on unsanitary trains to Uzbekistan and the Urals. They then proceeded to erase the evidence of the several centuries the Crimean Tatars lived there from the Crimean peninsula. The Crimean Tatars themselves suffered incredible demographic losses as a result of a massive increase in premature deaths due to material deprivation in their new areas of settlement. In a few short years they lost over a fifth of their population. This series of actions meets all of the requirements set forth to constitute a case of genocide under the original definition of the term set forth by Raphael Lemkin and the subsequent 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide even if only a hand full of scholars currently use the term to describe what happened to the Crimean Tatars (Eric Weitz, “Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges,”
The Mass Deportation of the Crimean Tatars 77 Years ago
The Mass Deportation of the Crimean Tatars 77…
The Mass Deportation of the Crimean Tatars 77 Years ago
Introduction This year marks the 77th anniversary of the Stalinist ethnic cleansing of the Crimean Tatars from their homeland. On 18-20 May 1944, the Soviet NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) loaded up almost the entire Crimean Tatar population including old men, women, children, and even loyal communists and shipped them on unsanitary trains to Uzbekistan and the Urals. They then proceeded to erase the evidence of the several centuries the Crimean Tatars lived there from the Crimean peninsula. The Crimean Tatars themselves suffered incredible demographic losses as a result of a massive increase in premature deaths due to material deprivation in their new areas of settlement. In a few short years they lost over a fifth of their population. This series of actions meets all of the requirements set forth to constitute a case of genocide under the original definition of the term set forth by Raphael Lemkin and the subsequent 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide even if only a hand full of scholars currently use the term to describe what happened to the Crimean Tatars (Eric Weitz, “Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges,”