1944 and beyond: Crimean Tatars and the persistence of Russian Colonial Violence
Accepting Russia's occupation of Crimea would not only be a historical injustice, but it would also threaten Europe's future.
Today, Crimean Tatars around the world are commemorating the greatest trauma in their history: the mass deportation from their homeland at the behest of Stalin in 1944. From the 18th until the 20th of May, the NKVD forced virtually every Crimean family on the peninsula into cattle wagons and deported them to Central Asia. The deportation occurred shortly after the Red Army had reconquered Crimea from the German invaders. The Soviet state accused the Crimean Tatars collectively of having collaborated with the German enemy. In reality, thousands of Crimean Tatar men were still serving in the Soviet army while their families were being forcibly deported. The majority of the deportees were women, children, and older adults. Many did not survive the brutal week-long journey to Central Asia without adequate food and water. In the Ukrainian documentary “1944” (2019, directed by Fatima Osman and Yunus Paşa), a survivor of the deportation recounts how a woman who had just given birth was also forced into one of the waggons. Her newborn baby died in her arms; NKVD officers forced it out of her hands and threw her child out of the window.
This genocidal act against an entire people was the brutal climax of colonial policies of marginalisation, displacement, and discrimination. The Russian colonial empire annexed Crimea in 1783 during the reign of Catherine II (the so-called „Great“). The annexation took place in the course of the wars against the Ottoman Empire and the expansion into southern Ukraine. At the time of the conquest, the Crimean Khanate was formally independent, but de facto, it was under the control of the Ottoman Empire. In addition to the dominant Crimean Tatars, Greeks, Bulgarians, Karaites (a branch of Judaism), and numerous other ethnic and religious groups lived there.
After the annexation, Catherine initially pursued a classic imperial strategy, which aimed at fostering the loyalty of the Tatar elites (the Beys) to St. Petersburg by guaranteeing religious freedom to all Crimean residents. Under the guidance of the German-Baltic nobleman Baron Osip Igel'strom, Crimea became a testing ground for a new Islam policy in the Russian Empire: the integration of Muslim elites was intended to guarantee their loyalty to the empire. This loyalty was also staged on a symbolic level: during Catherine II's grand tour in 1787, she was accompanied at times by Crimean Tatar regiments. Historians such as Robert Crews have argued that this policy shows that the Russian Empire was, in essence, a tolerant entity, even a protector of Islam. Ironically, this interpretation replicates one of Russia’s classic narratives for the legitimation of its rule over non-Russian peoples. Catherine’s policy was instead a strategy of colonial accommodation aimed at securing the empire’s hold on Crimea. Structurally, the Russian language and culture, as well as Russian Orthodoxy, were privileged in the empire until its demise, while the Islamic faith was regularly demonised.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, Crimean Tatars were constantly marginalised. Russian nobles were granted land in Crimea, and new cities, such as Sevastopol, emerged to compete with Muslim ones. The Crimean Tatar heritage was suppressed, and Crimean Tatar toponyms were erased and replaced with Russian ones. A defining moment for the Crimean Tatar population was the Crimean War, fought from 1853 to 1856 between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, as well as France and Great Britain. The siege of Sevastopol, which lasted about a year, established the myth of the city as a place of Russian suffering and heroism.
For the Crimean Tatars, the war was a disaster: accused of disloyalty, they were subjected to harassment and in the wake of the war, around 200,000 of them emigrated to the Ottoman Empire – a move that was initially welcomed by the Russian authorities. It was not until the 1860s that it became clear that the population loss was harming the peninsula's economy. From this time onward, the tsarist state attempted to keep the Crimean Tatars from emigrating to the Ottoman Empire. After the Crimean War, the expansion of the Russian Orthodox Church into Crimea intensified, and in public discourse, Crimea was increasingly conceptualised as a “Christian” territory. The settlement of Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking farmers continued. By the end of the 19th century, only about a third of the population was Crimean Tatar.
After the collapse of the tsarist colonial empire in 1917, a power struggle emerged in Crimea. In many cities, representatives of the Provisional Government and rivalling councils of soldiers and sailors were formed, with Sevastopol being the most important centre. However, Crimean Tatar politicians sought something different: not a political reorganisation of what had been the Russian Empire but the restoration of the Crimean Khanate, which Catherine II had destroyed in 1783. After their coup in 1917 in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks came to power and, ultimately, managed to forcibly integrate Crimea into the newly founded Soviet Union after the Red Army conquered the territory. In 1921, the Autonomous Crimean Tatar Soviet Republic was established as part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR).
The Soviet nationality policy of the 1920s aimed, as in other non-Russian Soviet republics, to create nationally organised communist cadres that would be loyal to Moscow. The Crimean Tatar language was promoted, and the party apparatus was ‘Tatarised’, but at the same time, Muslim dignitaries were persecuted. However, this period of strategic support for Crimean Tatar culture and language did not last very long. During the Stalinist terror of the 1930s, Crimean Tatar cultural and intellectual elites were persecuted and murdered as ‘nationalists’, and Crimea was also affected by the massive famine at the beginning of the 1930s (known as the Holodomor in Ukraine). After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, Crimea became a theatre of Germany's war of extermination. The recapture by the Red Army (April-May 1944) made Crimea, and particularly Sevastopol, a mythical place in Moscow’s state propaganda, this time celebrating the city’s Soviet heroism. For the Crimean Tatars, however, the recapture was a disaster. It resulted in the loss of their homeland in 1944; approximately 189,000 people were deported.
The Crimean Tatars remember this event as ‘Sürgünlik’ (exile). In the West, this event is hardly known. The Second World War radically changed the population structure of Crimea, which was reinforced by the massive influx of mainly Russian-speaking Ukrainians and Russians after 1945. In 1954, the infamous ‘transfer’ of Crimea (now only an administrative district, or oblast’) to Soviet Ukraine took place, ostensibly to mark the 300th anniversary of the alleged ‘reunification’ of Russians and Ukrainians in 1654. In reality, infrastructural and economic considerations were the decisive factors. The Crimean Tatars were not officially rehabilitated until 1967. Crimean Tatars became dissidents in the 1960s, the most famous being Mustafa Dzhemilev (born in 1943). They fought for the right to return to Crimean, but this was not granted until 1989. In Crimea, they often encountered hostility from the local population, who were now living in their homes, resulting in the emergence of slums on the outskirts of towns. Poverty was a defining experience for many Crimean Tatar returnees in the 1990s. In 1991, the majority of the population in Crimea voted for Ukrainian independence.
While the Ukrainian state was not particularly supportive of the Crimean Tatars in the 1990s, nor did it engage in the kind of colonising policies which Russia had subjected them to for centuries. This is one of the reasons why Crimean Tatars were at the forefront of defending their homeland from a Russian takeover in 2014. The pictures of Crimean Tatars waving Ukrainian, Crimean Tatar, and sometimes European flags in the face of Russian aggression left a deep impression on mainland Ukraine. Since then, the plight of the Crimean Tatars and their history has received much more attention. The Crimean Tatars have become outspoken and visible members of the Ukrainian nation.
The deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944 stands as a stark example of the broader colonial policies pursued by both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union toward non-Russian communities. This act of forced displacement was not isolated; it was part of a broader pattern that included the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush during the Second World War as well as the mass expulsion of thousands of families from Western Ukraine during the 1940s and 1950s. However, the colonial dimension of these Soviet policies has not been sufficiently acknowledged—politically, in public discourse, or within Western academia. In Western scholarship, a structural privileging of Russian perspectives still prevails at the expense of the voices and historical experiences of colonised peoples.
Today, the continued persecution of Crimean Tatars under Russian occupation follows the same oppressive patterns which they experienced in the 19th and 20th centuries. If the cycle of colonial violence is not confronted and broken, it will persist, with devastating consequences. Recognising Russia's occupation of Crimea would not only constitute a historic injustice and a betrayal of the Crimean Tatars and all other people resisting the Russian occupation of their homeland—it would also pose a grave threat to all of Europe. Such recognition would effectively reward Russia’s genocidal war of aggression and amount to the successful dismantling of the post-1945 European security order, which has made the world a safer place.