Ukraine honors memory of victims of Crimean Tatars’ deportation

The deportation of the Crimean Tatars began at 03:00, May 18, 1944, and lasted until early June.

The formal reason for the deportation of the Crimean Tatar people was the accusation of the Crimean Tatars of alleged mass treason and collaboration with Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

Some 183,144 Crimean Tatars were deported according to official figures and 228,500 in accordance with the Tatar sources. About 46% of those deported died in the first and a half years of exile.

Some 32,000 NKVD officers participated in the punitive operation. People were given from a few minutes to half an hour to take their personal belongings, food, and household equipment. Obviously, most of their property was left and seized by the state. Most deportees were sent to a special settlement in Uzbekistan, some to the Gulag, and the rest to replenish the special contingent for the Moscow Coal Basin.

Deportation was one of the means of ‘de-Tatarization’ of Crimea. Cultural and historical monuments were destroyed, and the historical names of the places were replaced by the new ones, such as ‘Sovetsky’, ‘Pervomaysk’, ‘Krasnogvardeysk’, etc. Crimea was inhabited by immigrants from Russia and other republics. During the post-war period, the population in Crimea increased by almost ten times.

After the transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, a decree was issued (but not published) in 1956 on the rehabilitation of the Crimean Tatars, but practically without the right to return home in Crimea. The mass return of the Crimean Tatars to their homeland began only in the late 1980s.

Seventy years after the deportation, the Crimean Tatar people again faced the threat of discrimination in their native land due to Russia’s encroachment. In order to support the struggle of the Crimean Tatars as the citizens of Ukraine for their rights, the President of Ukraine issued a decree on May 16, 2014, establishing May 18 as Day of Fighting for the Rights of the Crimean Tatar People.