Deportation of the Crimean Tatars (1944)

State Defense Committee Decree No. 5859ss

1. 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.

During the Great Patriotic War, 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;

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.

signed by the chairman of the committee, Joseph Stalin

The NKVD rounded up close to 200,000 Crimean Tatars during those three days and sent them by train eastward towards Central Asia.

Chechens, Karachais, Ingush, Balkars, Kalmyks, Germans, Crimean Tatars and others

They had loaded a recorded total of 180,014 Crimean Tatars into train wagons and sent the echelons eastward

This brought the total number of Crimean Tatars evicted from Crimea in May 1944 up to 191,044.

A report from 10 V 1944 from head of the NKVD Beria, to head of the GKO (State Defense Committee) Stalin accused the Crimean Tatars of mass treason claiming that over 20,000 had defected from the Red Army in 1941 and gone over with their arms to fight with the Germans.

The number of Crimean Tatars to assist the German occupation in any way was a small minority.

Malaria, malnutrition, and other maladies claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Crimean Tatar lives during their first couple of years in Uzbekistan.

On 4 July 1944, they revised this figure to 183,155.

In a mere three days, the Soviet government forcibly removed 194,155 Crimean Tatars from the Crimea.

The Crimean Tatar families had only 15 to 20 minutes to attempt to gather up the 500 kg allowed by GKO resolution N5859ss. Most did not take anything near 500 kg of belongings with them into exile.

This resolution diverted 31,551 of the 183,155 Crimean Tatars destined for special settlements in Uzbekistan

The Uzbeks met the exiled Crimean Tatars with hostility.

Not only did the Uzbeks refuse to assist the dislocated Crimean Tatars, but in some cases they stoned them.

This decree officially recognized 11 "Repressed Peoples" including the Crimean Tatars.

Signed by Boris Yeltsin, this law was the first official recognition by the Russian government that Stalin's actions towards the Crimean Tatars and others was genocide.

against whom was conducted at a state level a policy of slander and genocide, accompanied by forced resettlement,

Fighting against the Nazis were an equally large number of Crimean Tatars in the Red Army.

In total, close to 20,000 Crimean Tatars served in German organized self-defense battalions during WWII.

The German military authorities in the Crimea began creating self defense battalions from Crimean Tatar POWs in January 1942.

Eight of these soldiers even won the Hero of the Soviet Union award.

Despite the fact that Crimean Tatars were the second largest nationality in the partisans after Russians

Most of the Crimean Tatar population remaining in the Crimea in May 1944 were women and children.

the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet officially rescinded the charges of treason against the Crimean Tatars on 5 September 1967

Despite an official recognition of the falsehood of this charge by the Soviet government in 1967, it is still repeated by some Russian chauvinists today.

The Crimean Tatars actively petitioned and lobbied Moscow for rehabilitation from 1957 on.

On 21 April 1968, Crimean Tatars in Chirchik, Uzbekistan staged a major demonstration to celebrate Lenin's birthday and demand repatriation to the Crimea.

In a little over four years nearly 250,000 or almost half of all Crimean Tatars in the former Soviet Union managed to returnto the Crimea.

According the NKVD archives between May 1944 and 1 January 1945, 13,592 Crimean Tatars died in Uzbkistan.

This figure represents 9.1% of the Crimean Tatars exiled to Uzbekistan

In a year and a half, 17.8% of the Crimean Tatars exiled to Uzbekistan perished.

A report from Col. V. Shiain on the work of the MVD Section on Special Settlers dated April 1953 provides some important figures on special settler mortality.

between arriving in the special settlements and 1 July 1948, the recorded number of Crimean Tatar, Greek, Armenian and Bulgarian deaths is 44,887, 19.6% of those deported.

Adjusting for natural deaths, Michael Rywkin calculates that 42,000 Crimean Tatars perished as a result of the deportations by May 1949

Many Crimean Tatar activists cite 100,000 or 46% of the 1939 Crimean Tatar population.

At a bare minimum, Stalin's deportations, exile, and forced labor mobilization killed more than 20% of the Crimean Tatar population in less than five years.

The NKVD recorded a total of 191 Crimean Tatars dying enroute to Uzbekistan.

Between 18 May and 6 June 1944, more than 6,000 Crimean Tatars permanently disappeared.

Brian Williams places the number of deaths of Crimean Tatars enroute to the special settlements at 7,000.

Michael Rywkin places it at 7,900.

deportation of Crimean Tatars from Crimea in 1944 genocide of Crimean Tatar people