200,000 wiped from face of the Earth by Stalin

ON May 10, 1944, the head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, drew up a memorandum for Joseph Stalin. It concerned the Crimean Tatars, the descendants of nomads who had lived on the northern lip of the Black Sea for centuries.

The author, Lavrentiy Beria, reported that he had looked into the activities of the Crimean Tatars after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union three years earlier, and reached the conclusion that they were collectively guilty of treason against the USSR.

Not only had they failed to resist the advancing German forces, but 20,000 Tatar men were accused of deserting to fight alongside the enemy. Beria’s recommendation to Stalin was approved the next day: all Crimean Tatars were to be deported en masse to Central Asia.

A week later, 32,000 members of the NKVD swung into action. Men, women and children were woken in a carefully planned operation before dawn and given 15 minutes to pack.

They were then loaded into train wagons that set off on a two and a half thousand mile journey into the unknown. No information was given as to where the trains were headed, or what would happen when they finally reached their destination. Conditions were appalling. As one NKVD officer involved put it, the Tatars were ‘packed into the wagons like sardines; the wagons were locked and sealed and put under the guard of military detachments’.

Soon death began to take its toll. The wagons were ‘like mobile gas chambers’, one survivor wrote later, claiming the lives of ‘the old, the young and the weak. They died of thirst, suffocation and the stench...’ Corpses lay decomposing alongside the living, and were only tossed out when the trains stopped to take on food and water.

Less than a month after Stalin’s decree, more than 150,000 Crimean Tatars had been deported to Central Asia, with another 30,000 arriving a matter of weeks later.

According to some estimates, by the middle of the 1950s, fully one third of those who had been moved east were dead – killed during the journey, claimed by disease or hunger.By then, traces of their previous lives were being systematically eradicated.

Villages, mosques and cemeteries were demolished, while towns and regions in Crimea were renamed to give the impression that the Tatars – who had not just lived there, but had also ruled Crimea and the steppe lands north of the Black Sea for hundreds of years – had never been there at all.

THE whitewashing of history continued, with the Soviet story set out in the official newspaper Izvestia a year after the end of the war. While ‘the peoples of the Soviet Union had been defending the honour and independence of the Fatherland’ against Hitler’s invasion, the Crimean Tatars had done nothing to help, and worse, had supported the Germans. Yet this was hardly true. A few thousand Crimean Tatars had joined German battalions, presumably to avoid the conditions that Soviet prisoners of war were faced with (nearly half the seven million Soviet soldiers taken by the Germans died in captivity), but passing off an entire people as having committed collective treason masked other issues.

Paramount was the need to account for the chronic failure of the Red Army to deal with the German invasion. Identifying and blaming ‘culprits’ avoided painful truths closer to home.

In that sense, the Crimean Tatars were amongst many who suffered similar fates: the Chechens, Kalmyk, and the Ingush were amongst many ethnic populations that were deported and treated with astonishing cruelty.

Meting out brutal punishment was part of Stalin’s method of controlling the Soviet Union. Phantom plots and implausible conspiracies were everywhere before, during and after the war, which meant that ethnic peoples who regularly pushed for greater rights in Communist times (as they had done under the Tsar) were considered particularly suspect.

By the time the Soviet authorities formally lifted the charges of treason from the Crimean Tatars in 1967, it was too late. The damage had been done. A homeland had been lost, history had been twisted, and ironically, Crimea was becoming the summer idyll of choice for the Moscow elites.

In Stalin’s USSR, no one was safe – and many would say the same of Russian under Vladimir Putin.

Dr Peter Frankopan is an Oxford academic and author of The Silk Roads: A New World History