Who are the Crimean Tatars?

The notion of the Crimea as a “Russian land” glosses over the peninsula's rich multicultural past before its conquest by the Russian Empire. It also conceals the inconvenient fact that ethnic Russians came to constitute a majority in the Crimea only after Stalin had all the Crimean Tatars deported on false charges of treason in 1944.

Beginning in the seventh century bc, Aegean Greek cities es­tablished trading outposts on the Crimean coast. These cities de­veloped over time into thriving colonies. The Greeks traded with the nomads who controlled the rest of the peninsula and the lands beyond: at first, the Iranian-speaking Scythians, later the Sarmatians, and others. Some Germanic Goths apparently survived in the Crimea for a millennium after the Huns displaced them from what is now mainland Ukraine in the fourth century, incidentally prompting Hitler to consider the Crimea a historical “German land.” During World War II, the Nazis conducted archaeological research on the Crimean Peninsula and renamed its capital of Simferopol as Gothenburg.

The masters of the Crimean coast changed over the centuries, and by the thirteenth century ad the Italian maritime republics of Venice and Genoa controlled trading emporiums on the Black Sea's northern coast. The Crimean hinterland also saw new nomadic, usually Turkic-speaking, peoples come and go, often assimilated by new arrivals. In the mid-thirteenth century the Mongols conquered the Crimea at the same time as they did the Rus principalities, but when their colossal empire began disintegrating two centuries later, the local Turkic elites invited a descendent of Genghis Khan to serve as the ruler of their own polity, the Crimean Khanate (1449-1774). However, the Khanate could not take the fortified Italian cities on the coast without the assistance of the ascendant great power across the Black Sea, the Ottoman Empire, and as a result it quickly became a vassal state of the Ottoman Sultans.

The Crimea's Turkic-speaking population gradually coalesced into the Crimean Tatar, or Kirimli, ethnic group that was ruled by khans of the Giray dynasty. Their palace and the minarets still standing in the city of Bakhchysarai serve as reminders of a rich Muslim Tatar cultural past in the Crimea. The Khanate generated much of its wealth from the slave trade, frequently raiding and taking captives from what is now Ukraine. It fell as a result of Russian imperial ex­pansion southward in the late eighteenth century, after Catherine the Great's generals won a war against the Ottomans. In 1783 the tsarina incorporated the Khanate into her empire. Many Crimean Tatars took refuge in Turkey, and over half of the entire population was expelled by the Russian government or emigrated during sev­eral Russo-Turkish wars that were waged in the nineteenth century. Thousands escaped on Allied ships after the Crimean War.

Only since the 1860s, after the forced mass exodus of the Tatars, have Russian and Ukrainian settlers come to constitute any signifi­cant share of the Crimean population. The peninsula soon became a popular resort for the empire's upper and middle classes, as well as a major winemaking area. By 1897 the remaining Crimean Tatars still constituted the largest ethnic group, with 35.6 percent of the population. Mainly engaged in the service industry, the “European” settlers perceived the Tatars as second-class citizens, yet the small secular Tatar intelligentsia was already developing a modern na­tional identity and a network of cultural organizations.

During the Revolution the Crimea became detached from the rest of Taurida province, which had a Ukrainian majority and had be­come part of Ukraine. The peninsula served as the last stronghold of the Russian Whites during the civil war, until the Reds stormed it in November 1920. By then the Russians had become a plurality in the Crimea, but the Bolsheviks recognized it as the historical homeland of the Crimean Tatars and briefly imagined it as a potential revolu­tionary bridgehead into the Islamic world.

The Crimea was under Nazi occupation for only about a year, in 1942-1943, but after its liberation Stalin perceived the Crimean Tatars as a nation of traitors. In fact, the degree of collaboration was not out of proportion to other occupied areas; only some 9,000 Tatars joined the German auxiliary Tatar Legion, and many more served in the Red Army. Still, in May 1944 the NKVD rounded up and deported to Central Asia the entire Crimean Tatar population of 239,000, with tens of thousands dying of starvation and disease in cattle cars along the way or in the place of exile, resulting in the death of some 100,000 people. The survivors' civil rights were restored in 1967, but the Soviet state allowed their mass return to the Crimea only in the late 1980s.