Crimean Tatars - History and Cultural Relations



The Crimean Tatars are culturally linked to the western Turkic group that includes the Ottoman Turks and the Azerbaijanis. They entered the historical record as "Tatars" in the aftermath of the Mongol conquest of the Crimean Peninsula and surrounding territory in the mid-thirteenth century. By the 1440s they had succeeded in establishing their own state, the Crimean Khanate, albeit under Ottoman hegemony from 1475. The khanate survived until the Russian conquest and incorporation of its territory in 1783. The reigning Russian monarch, Catherine II, sought to develop the Crimea by providing incentives for thousands of foreign agriculturalists (most of them Germans) and other skilled people to settle the region. Much of the peninsula's farmland, abandoned by Tatars who opted to emigrate in periodic waves that may have eventually totaled 1 million by the end of the nineteenth century, was turned over to European immigrants or distributed to privileged Russians who brought serfs from the empire's inner provinces for labor. Under the czars, economic exploitation, social discrimination, and cultural imperialism weighed heavily on the Tatars who did not emigrate and gave rise by the end of the nineteenth century to nationalist aspirations.

Those sentiments were only partially fulfilled under the Soviet system during the 1920s and were subsequently repressed brutally, along with much of the Tatar intelligentsia, in the 1930s with Stalin's rise to preeminence. The crushing blow occurred in 1944 when, despite the service of large numbers of men in the Red Army and in anti-Nazi partisan units, the entire Crimean Tatar people was falsely accused of collaboration with the Nazis and deported to Central Asia and the southern Ural Mountains. This forced exile may have cost the lives of one-half of the Tatar population. Those who survived not only lost their homeland and much of their property but were subjected to special, and exceedingly restrictive, regulations governing their economic, educational, and cultural opportunities. In effect, they were denied any public identity. Since the mid-1950s the Crimean Tatars have waged a relentless campaign for the restoration of their former rights, including the right to return to the Crimea.

In recent decades the Crimean Tatars have been remarkably active as a dissident minority, although they have carefully avoided taking steps that might antagonize the Central Asian populations among whom they have involuntarily lived for over four decades. Efforts to return to the Crimea in large numbers hold the potential for difficulties with the large Russian and Ukrainian communities that now dominate the region.

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