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,” Slavic Review, vol. 61, no. 1, 27-28.) But, regardless of the technical legal term used to characterize the deportation of the Crimean Tatars to Uzbekistan, it cannot be denied that the experience of removal, transport, and initial life in exile constituted a horrific infliction of suffering upon them by the Soviet government. This short article will provide a short narrative description of the 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars and its immediate consequences based upon archival documents from the State Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF). These documents obviously provide an official view of the deportation and the conditions suffered by the Crimean Tatars. Nevertheless, these documents provide significant important information on the subject. They cannot completely hide or whitewash the reality of the deportation and its horrific consequences. Thus while flawed these sources are very useful building blocks in constructing a clearer and more accurate narrative of recent Crimean Tatar history.
The Deportation
The first document by the NKVD directly pertaining to the deportation of the Crimean Tatars is dated 10 May 1944. An NKVD report by Lavrenty Beria to Stalin in his capacity as head of the State Defense Committee on this date called for the resettling the entire Crimean Tatar population to Uzbekistan as punishment for engaging in collective treason against the USSR. This short summary made a number of fantastic accusations against the Crimean Tatars which are not supported by any evidence and some of which are contradicted by the report itself. The first thing that is notable is that the report supports the “evicting of all Tatars from the territory of Crimea” a population that it estimates to number between 140-160 thousand people. Yet the same report only puts the alleged number of Crimean Tatar collaborators with the German occupation at “more than 20 thousand.” This number appears to be based on the number of Crimean Tatars that had served in the Soviet military that went missing in 1941, mostly captured as POWs. Beria asserted, however, “From units of the Red Army in 1941 deserted – more than 20 thousand Tatars, that betrayed the Motherland, going over to serve the Germans with weapons in hand to fight against the Red Army.” The number of Crimean Tatars which the NKVD had enough evidence to even arrest under the arbitrary and draconian laws of the USSR at the time was far fewer. The report notes that by 7 May 1944 that the NKVD and NKGB had only arrested 5,381 people, the vast majority of whom were not Crimean Tatars, for betraying the Motherland, assisting the German-Fascist occupation, and other anti-Soviet acts. This number is remarkably close to the number of rifles confiscated by the security organs, 5,395. It appears that the sweep merely detained anybody not actively serving in the Red Army or Soviet partisans that had a gun. The other 15,000 Crimean Tatars accused of fighting against Soviet forces are not accounted for in this document (GARF F. 9401, o. 2, d. 65, l. 41-42). In reality the number of Crimean Tatars to serve in German organized self-defense battalions did not come anywhere close to twenty thousand. The real figure appears to have been around 5,000 at the most. The retreating German military evacuated some 2,500 collaborators of all nationalities and the NKVD sweep of the peninsula from 11 April to 14 May 1944 only netted 1,137 Crimean Tatars accused of being “anti-Soviet elements.” The German figures show rather than 20,000 Crimean Tatars joining them in 1941 that by early 1942 that they had only succeeded recruiting 1,632 volunteers from their population (Andrew Dale Straw, “Exposing Dishonest History: The Creation and Propagation of Stalin’s False Allegation of ‘Mass Treason’ against Crimean Tatars during World War II,” International Crimes and History, no. 16 (2015), 31-32). In contrast over 32,000 Crimean Tatars fought against the Nazis during World War II either in the Red Army or in partisan units (Straw, 27-28.) The charge of mass collective treason underlying the mass uprooting of the Crimean Tatars from their homeland and their exile to Uzbekistan had in fact no evidentiary basis.
Beria’s report concluded with the time frame of the operation to deport the Crimean Tatars to Uzbekistan. The deportations are to begin on the 20-21 of May and conclude on 1 June 1944 (GARF F. 9401, o. 2, d. 65, l. 43). This is later than the actual date of the forced removal. The actual resolution of the State Committee of Defense “On Crimean Tatars” ordering the deportation of the population to Uzbekistan was issued under the signature of Joseph Stalin the following day. After a two paragraph rehashing of the accusations against the Crimean Tatars by Beria the day before, but this time without any numbers, the resolution sets out instructions for the forcible resettlement of the Crimean Tatars from their homeland to Uzbekistan. The first operative clause reads as follows:
All Tatars are to be evicted from the territory of Crimea and settled as permanent inhabitants with the status of special settlers in districts of the Uzbek SSR. The eviction is to be undertaken by the NKVD USSR. The NKVD USSR (Comrade Beria) required to finish the eviction of the Crimean Tatars by 1 June 1944 (GARF F. 9401, o. 2, d. 65, l. 45).
This paragraph sealed the fate of the Crimean Tatars. On the basis of this operative clause the NKVD ethnically cleansed the Crimean Tatars from their ancestral homeland and shipped them to Uzbekistan where the vast majority of them remained in exile until the last years of the USSR.
The decree proceeded with another eight operative clauses providing instructions to Soviet state institutions on the resettlement of the Crimean Tatars from the Crimean ASSR to the Uzbek SSR. First it dealt with what to do with the property of the deported Crimean Tatars. They were only allowed to bring 500 kg of personal possessions such as clothes, plates, and food with them. All other private and collective property such as buildings, furniture, garden plots, food stores, cattle, domestic fowl, and horses were to be taken over by various people’s commissariats of the USSR. The deportees were supposed to receive vouchers for cattle, grain, vegetables, and domestic fowl that could be exchanged in Uzbekistan (GARF F. 9401, o. 2, d. 65, ll. 45-46). This meant that the Soviet government never even considered providing the Crimean Tatars with compensation for the loss of buildings, furniture, or horses. This property was simply stolen.
The decree assigned the NKPS (People’s Commissariat of Transportation) under Lazar Kaganovich to organize the train echelons to move the Crimean Tatar special settlers from Crimea to Uzbekistan. The NKVD was to bring the Crimean Tatars to the appropriate train stations and load them onto the train cars. The Peoples’ Commissariat of Health was to provide each train echelon involved in the deportation was to have one doctor and two nurses as well as a supply of medical supplies to provide medical care to the deportees during their journey to Uzbekistan. The Peoples’ Commissariat of Trade was to provide all the deportees on each train echelon with hot food and boiling water once per a day (GARF F. 9401, o. 2, d. 65, l. 46). Despite these provisions, disease and malnutrition were a serious problem for the Crimean Tatar deportees.
The journey by train from Crimea to Uzbekistan proved to be extremely arduous for the Crimean Tatars. The NKVD provided them with only the minimal amount of food to survive and even then it proved insufficient to keep many alive. The daily ration of food for the Crimean Tatars during transit consisted of a mere 500 grams of bread, 70 grams of meat or fish, 60 grams of cereal, and 20 grams of fat per person (GARF F. 9401, o. 2, d. 65, l. 49). This poor diet combined with the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions of the train cars led to very high rates of morbidity and subsequent mortality among the Crimean Tatar deportees, especially among children and the elderly.
On 4 July 1944, Beria on behalf of the NKVD reported to Stalin in his capacity as head of the State Committee on Defense on the results of the ethnic cleansing of Crimea. Since 10 May 1944, the NKVD had removed 225,009 people from Crimea on the basis of their ethnic origins. The vast majority of these people, 183,155 (81.4%), were Crimean Tatars followed by 15,040 Greeks, 12,422 Bulgarians, 9,621 Armenians, 1,119 Germans, and 3,652 stateless people. The NKVD deported 151,606 (83%) Crimean Tatars to Uzbekistan and the remaining 31,551 to various regions of the R.S.F.S.R. (GARF F. P-9401, o. 2, d. 65, l. 275). The Stalin regime ethnically cleansed the Crimean peninsula of all its non-Slavic elements as well as the Slavic Bulgarians who having a homeland outside the borders of the USSR were deemed untrustworthy along with the Crimean Tatars, Greeks, Armenians, and Germans. A recount in 1948 showed 186,864 special settlers from Crimea in the USSR as of 1 July 1948 out of a total of 228,392 initial deportees and an additional 13,783 later settlers, mostly discharged Red Army soldiers. They thus constituted about 7% of the total number of special settlers deported between 1930 and 1948 and 8.3% of the special settlers counted in July 1948. This made them the fourth largest contingent of special settlers after former “kulaks”, Germans, and Chechens, Ingush, Karachais, and Balkars (GARF R-9479 o. 1, d. 573, ll. 286-288). The Crimean Tatars as an individual nationality deported in its entirety came in third among the special settlers after ethnic Germans and Chechens.
The Geographical Distribution and Economic Conditions of the Crimean Tatars
The Soviet government finished resettling the Crimean Tatars across the territory of Uzbekistan on 11 June 1944. In total the NKVD dispersed 151,604 Crimean Tatars consisting of 26,749 adult men, 53,537 adult women, and 71,318 children across seven oblasts. Most of them were assigned to live on kolkhozes in rural areas, a total of 87,116 people. Another 30,315 were assigned to sovkhozes and finally 34,173 to factories and construction sites (GARF F. 9479, o. 1, d. 180, l. 5). The NKVD placed over a third of the Crimean Tatars forcibly resettled in Uzbekistan in the Tashkent Oblast surrounding the capital city of the republic.
Distribution of Crimean Tatars in Uzbekistan 11 June 1944(GARF F. 9479, o. 1, d. 180, l. 5)
Name of Oblast Number of Crimean Tatar Special Settlers
Tashkent
56,641
Samarkand
31,604
Andizhan
19,773
Fergana
16,096
Namagan
13,431
Kashka-Dara
10,012
Bukhara
4,047
Total
151,604
Initially the NKVD reported providing decent housing to the Crimean Tatars resettled on kolkhozes and sovkhozes. But, very poor conditions for those assigned to industrial enterprises and construction sites. An NKVD report from 25 June 1944 to Deputy Chief of the NKVD Chernyshov provided a brief description of the living conditions of the resettled Crimean Tatars. It noted that the 87,116 Crimean Tatars settled on kolkhozes had mostly received sections of houses or huts to live in that had attached kitchen plots to grow vegetables and fruits. Meanwhile the 30,315 settled on sovkhozes each had one room per family. The conditions for the 34,173 distributed to industrial and construction sites were far worse. Several of them had no free living space and housed the newly arriving Crimean Tatars in unconverted barracks, dug outs, club houses, schools, and other such buildings. At the Nizhne-Bossuiskoi Hydro Electric Station in Tashkent Oblast 850 families lived in half destroyed dug outs that were extremely overcrowded with up to 15 families in each one. Housing conditions for Crimean Tatars were similar at the construction site of the Farhad dam. At the Yangi-Yul brick factory also in Tashkent Oblast up to 100 families with children were assigned to live in a summer club since the factory had no other possible place to house them (GARF F. 9479, o. 1, d. 180, ll. 5-9). The overcrowded and unsanitary housing conditions enforced upon the Crimean Tatars in such places proved to greatly facilitate the spread of typhus (GARF F. 9479, o. 1, d. 180, l. 8). Combined with malnutrition this proved highly deadly to the exiled Crimean Tatars.
The food available to the Crimean Tatars during their initial time in exile in Uzbekistan was grossly insufficient. Upon their immediate arrival when none of them had any work days on kolkhozes, access to kitchen plots, or money the NKVD only provided the deportees rations of 8 kg of flour, 8kg of vegetables, and 2 kg of cereal per person per month (GARF F. 9401, o. 2, d. 65, l. 50). The lack of food greatly contributed to excess premature mortality from diseases such as malaria and typhus.
The mortality rate suffered by the Crimean Tatars during their first years as exiled special settlers in Uzbekistan was extremely high. From first of July 1944 to first of July 1945 the NKVD recorded a total of 22,355 deported Crimean Tatars perishing in Uzbekistan. This amounted to a full 14.81% of their population (GARF F. 9479, o. 1, d. 246, l. 45). This massive human loss from malnutrition and diseases resulting from the poor material conditions the Stalin regime imposed upon the Crimean Tatars
One of the side effects of the lack of food for Crimean Tatars in Uzbek rural areas during the twelve months from July 1944 to July 1945 was the mass movement from kolkhozes and sovkhozes to factories, construction sites, and other non-agricultural employment. The lack of private plots to provide supplementary food spurred Crimean Tatar migration to factory, construction, and mining jobs that had a guaranteed salary. In July 1944 out of 72,104 Crimean Tatars assigned to work in Uzbekistan 42,085 (58.2%) worked on kolkhozes, 15,697 (21.8%) on sovkhozes and 14,372 (20%) outside of agriculture. By July 1945 these numbers had shifted to 22,119 (35%) on kolkhozes, 13,262 (21%) on sovkhozes, and 27,702 (44%) in work outside of agriculture (GARF F. 9479, o. 1, d. 246, l. 46). This shift in the occupational profile of the Crimean Tatars in Uzbekistan from agriculture to factory, construction, and industrial work in the years immediately after the deportation proved to be permanent.
The Special Settlement Regime
The Crimean Tatars sent to Uzbekistan and other eastern regions of the USSR were not free and equal citizens. The Stalin regime placed the deported Crimean Tatars under special settlement restrictions until 28 April 1956 (N.F. Bugai, Deportatsiia narodov kryma: Dokumenty, fakty, kommentarii, doc. 185, 192-193). This meant that they could not move from their assigned settlement without permission from their local NKVD special commandant and had to report to the special commandant regularly. The restrictions of the special settlement regime for the Crimean Tatars and other nationalities deported during World War II were codified on 8 January 1945 by the SNK (Council of Peoples’ Commissariats). Below I have reproduced this document in English translation.
Council of People's Commissariats Union of SSRs
Resolution No. 35
From 8 January 1945 Moscow, Kremlin
On the legal situation of special settlers
Council of Peoples Commissariats Union of SSRs RESOLVES:
Special settlers enjoy all rights of citizens of the USSR, with the exception of
restrictions, provided for in the present Resolution.
All able bodied special settlers are obliged to be engaged in socially useful labor.
Towards this goal local Soviets of workers deputies in coordination with organs of the NKVD are to organize labor arrangements of the special settlers in agriculture, industrial enterprises, construction, and economic cooperative organizations and institutions.
The violation of labor discipline by special settlers is subject to punishment
according to existing laws.
Special settlers do not have the right without the authorization of the NKVD
special commandant to be absent from the boundaries of the region of settlement served by their special commandant.
Voluntary absence from the boundaries of the region of settlement, served
by the special commandant, will be viewed as flight and treated as a criminal matter.
Special settlers – heads of families or people substituting for them are required
within a three day period to report to the special commandant of the NKVD all events that change the composition of the family (birth of a child, death of a family member, flight, etc.).
Special settlers are obliged to strictly observe the established regime and social
order of the places of settlement and obey all orders of the special commandant of the NKVD.
The violation of the regime and social order in the places of settlement by special settlers is subject to administrative sanction in the form of a fine up to 100 rubles or arrest up to five days.
Deputy Chairman
Council of Peoples Commissariats Union of SSRs V. Molotov
Administrative Affairs
Council of Peoples Commissariats Union of SSRs Ia. Chadaev (V.N. Zemskov, Spetsposelentsy, 1930-1960 (Moscow: Nauk, 2005), 120-121).
In Uzbekistan the Soviet government assigned a small network of NKVD special commandants administrating and enforcing the special settlement restrictions. This network consisted of only 76 NKVD special commandants and 103 assistants for a total of only 179 people (GARF F. 9401, o. 2, d. 65, l. 50). These men policed nearly 200,000 internal exiles placed under severe movement restrictions.
Conclusion
The mass deportation of the Crimean Tatars 77 years ago to Uzbekistan and the Urals caused great damage to the nationality. It dispersed them across an alien land without sufficient means for a very large minority of them to physically survive. Confined to localities lacking food, housing, and medical care in the midst of malaria and typhus epidemics tens of thousands of them perished in the first few years following their ethnic cleansing. The Soviet government knew ahead of time that this would be the inevitable result of the deportations and deliberately carried them out anyways. The deportation of the Crimean Tatars thus meets the legal definition of genocide since the key issue of intent was in fact present.