Crimean Tatars - Orientation

Identification. The Crimea had been settled by diverse Asian and European peoples for 2,500 years before becoming the ancestral homeland of the Crimean Tatars in the fourteenth century. Since then the ethnic mix has continued to be notable. From the early fifteenth century, the Crimea was dominated by a Tatar Khanate ruled by the Giray family. Following the region's conquest by Russian armies in 1783, it was incorporated into the Russian Empire, eventually becoming part of Tavricheskaia Province ( guberniia ) . As the civil war between Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik forces wound down, the Crimea was designated the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on 18 October 1921. Following the forced exile of nearly the entire Tatar population in May 1944, however, that status was abrogated and the region transferred to the administrative control of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) in 1946. In 1954 the Crimea became an oblast within the Ukrainian SSR. Tatar petitions for restoration of autonomous status and transferrai of their homeland to the RSFSR once again were submitted to Communist party and state authorities in the last years of the Soviet Union. With most of the Crimean Tatars dispersed in Central Asia (principally in the Krasnodar region [Kherson Oblast] of Uzbekistan, in and around Tashkent) and still severely limited in their right to return home, their numbers in the Crimea account for less than 1 percent of the population, the bulk of which is made up of Russians and Ukrainians. By 1993, however, about 250,000 Crimean Tatars had returned to the Crimea and about 700,000 were living elsewhere in the former Soviet Union.

Location. The Crimea is a peninsula bounded on the north by the rest of Ukraine, on the east by the Sea of Azov, and on the south and west by the Black Sea. Its location is approximately 44° to 46° N and 32° to 38° E. Topographically the region is divided into three parts: the steppe lowland in the north, constituting little more than 75 percent of the peninsula, a range of foothills and low mountains to the south (about 20 percent), and a narrow coastal lowland along the Black Sea shore. Semiarid and treeless, the steppe lowland has a continental climate, with mild winters (mean January temperature is about 0° C) and hot summers (mean July temperature is about 23° C). Average annual rainfall is between 27 and 40 centimeters. Lower temperatures and higher precipitation distinguish the mountains from the surrounding regions. The southern shore, Mediterranean in climate and flora, has long been famous among tourists and spa seekers.

Demography. Beginning in 1946 the Crimean Tatars ceased to be officially recognized as a distinct ethnic group, instead being subsumed under a broader Tatar rubric. As a consequence, the best current demographic information results largely from informal surveys conducted by the Crimean Tatars themselves and statistical extrapolations yielding gross approximations of between 1.1 and 1.3 million. Better figures were expected from the 1989 census, which restored "Crimean Tatar" to the list of nationalities, but a preliminary total from unpublished data of only 268,739 Crimean Tatars suggests that the demographic situation remains confused.

Linguistic Affiliation. Crimean Tatars speak a language of their own (Crimean Tatar) that survived Soviet political assault for forty-five years. It is part of the Kipchak Branch of the Turkic Family, with significant influences from Anatolian (Ottoman) Turkish, itself belonging to the Oghuz Branch. The Turkic languages are, in turn, part of the larger Uralo-Altaic community of languages. Until 1928 Crimean Tatar was written with the Arabic script; in that year the Arabic script was replaced by the Latin, which was in turn replaced by the Cyrillic in 1938-1939. Today Crimean Tatar intellectuals, in their literary journal Yildiz, are fostering a revival of the Arabic script both as a gesture of ethnic independence and as a vehicle for reading the rich corpus of literary treasures that their culture has produced. Some debate has also ensued over the "purity" of the language (i.e., the appropriateness of inclusion of foreign words) and its orthography in Cyrillic.