The Hidden Ethnic Cleansing of Muslims in the Soviet Union: The Exile and Repatriation of the Crimean Tatars

Abstract

The summer of 1989 was an eventful time in the Soviet Union on the nationalist level. Throughout the multi-ethnic union of Soviet nationalities the concept of homo sovieticus, the Russian-speaking Soviet citizen who had transcended his or her narrow sense of nationality in order to forge a greater sense of identification with the Soviet workers' state, was being shattered. In the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, national fronts were being organized to commemorate their countries' illegal annexation by the USSR during the second world war. In the Trans-Caucasus, Armenians and Azerbaijanis were beginning a spiral of ethno-communal violence that was to lead to bloody warfare between these neighbouring citizens of the 'Great Friendship of Nationalities'. In Georgia, Soviet troops brutally crushed protesters demanding a greater recognition of Georgian national identity and language. In Uzbekistan, native Uzbeks launched bloody pogroms against a small ethnic group, the Meshketian Turks, who had been deported by Stalin to their republic during the second world war. Overlooked in this growing ethnic turmoil during the summer and autumn of 1989, was the strange migration of a small Turco-Muslim national group, the Crimean Tatars, from the depths of Soviet Central Asia to the Crimean Peninsula. From 1989 to 1994, a quarter of a million Crimean Tatars migrated from Central Asia, predominantly from Uzbekistan, to the Crimean Peninsula. In many ways this migration was a symbolic victory for the traditionally passive Crimean Tatars who had been brutally deported from their homeland by Stalin during the second world war. For almost half a century this exiled people of no more than half a million had been denied the right to express its ethnic identity, to speak its language or to return to its cherished villages and homeland on the distant shores of the Black Sea. It was only towards the end of Mikhail Gorbachev's presidency of the USSR that this liberalizing leader decided to rectify one of the greatest injustices carried out by his predecessors and allow the exiled Crimean Tatars to return to their ancient homeland. Today, approximately half of the former USSR's Crimean Tatars have returned from their places of exile in Central Asia to a largely unwelcoming homeland that has been Slavicized in their absence. For anthropologists, political scientists and historians alike the exile and repatriation of the Crimean al of Contemporary History Copyright ? 002 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and elhi, Vol 37(3), 32 -347. -0094(2 0207)37: ;32 -347;024825]