The Crimean Tatar exile in Central Asia: a case study in group destruction and survival

Abstract

One of the most unusual waves of settlement in Central Asia, the deportations of entire national groups in the 1940s (and to a lesser extent during the 1930s), however, serves to remind one that empires are often built on the suffering of non-ruling groups. From the time of Tiglath Pileser of Assyria to the late twentieth century, states have brutally massacred, expelled and exiled rebellious tribes and ethnic groups as means of maintaining power and crushing real or perceived threats to the centre's monopoly on power. Rarely, however, has the forced expulsion of ethnic groups been so all encompassing (or so hidden) as was the deportation of whole nations during the Soviet period. The Soviet totalitarian regime used all the modern Orwellian resources at its disposal to transplant forcefully entire national groups from their homelands to Central Asia in a brutal process that would today be considered a terrifyingly efficient example of 'ethnic cleansing'. Among the small national groups deported to Central Asia en masse were the Chechens, Ingush, Karachai, Balkars, Kalymks, Volga Germans, Meskhetian Turks, and Crimean Tatars. In all, more than one and a half million people were wrested from their homelands and deposited in the vastness of the Soviet empire's Central Asian republics during Josef Stalin's rule. In 1997, the author travelled to Uzbekistan and the Crimean peninsula to research this understudied aspect of Central Asian history from the perspective of one of the deported nations, the Crimean Tatars. Before this work could begin, a background understanding of who the Crimean Tatars were prior to the deportations was necessary as a gauge for evaluating the effects of the deportation on this people.