By Olha Chepil | 2024-08-08

KYIV -- Following Canada, Lithuania and Latvia, Poland has become the latest country to recognize Joseph Stalin's 1944 mass deportation of Crimean Tatars as genocide.

Historians call the series of international denunciations a significant blow to the Kremlin's policy of rewriting Crimean history.

In mid-July, a resolution adopted by the Sejm, Poland's lower chamber of parliament, decried the "acts of genocide" perpetrated upon the Tatars.

Stalin, in his paranoia, accused the entire ethnic group of collaboration with Nazi Germany.

"Over the course of three days, almost 200,000 men, women and children were herded into cattle cars and deported to Central Asia and Siberia in inhuman conditions. Eight thousand people did not survive the deportation, and another 45,000 died soon after arrival," reads the resolution, which received 414 votes in the chamber. Only 16 voted against it, and two abstained.

Attempting to erase history

Russians, whether Tsarist, Soviet or contemporary, have been trying to "erase" Crimean Tatars from the peninsula's history, say historians.

The Tatars and their state, the Crimean Khanate, which existed for more than 300 years starting in the mid-1400s, are inconvenient for the narrative of Crimea being "originally" Russian.

"Russian historiography has always worked toward this myth," Gulnara Abdullayeva, a Kyiv-based historian who researches the Crimean Khanate period, told Kontur.

After the 1944 deportation of the Tatars, Soviet "pseudo-historians" rewrote history to benefit the Kremlin, she said.

"They were simply tasked with promoting the theory that Crimea belongs to the Russians. ... the Crimean Tatars were superfluous in this whole construct."

However, the Russians were the actual latecomers.

The peninsula was entirely foreign to the Russian Empire until the late 1700s, argues Anna Yurlovska, a Kyiv-based show producer who recently completed the European Union-backed documentary "The Real History of Crimea.

Catherine II occupied Crimea in 1783 after violating a treaty with the Ottoman Empire, Yurlovska told Kontur.

The treaty was supposed to guarantee Crimea's independence.

"In reality, Russian history in Crimea goes back less than 300 years, which amounts to nothing in the time scale of world history," said Yurlovska.

Her research uncovered "historical parallels" between the Russian annexations of Crimea in 1783 and 2014, she said.

Crimea was part of Tsarist Russia from 1783 and then Soviet Russia till 1954, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred it to the Ukrainian SSR. It remained part of Ukraine through post-Soviet times till the illegal Russian annexation of 2014.

In both eras, "the Russians ... violated international treaties that they themselves signed, bribed elites in Crimea to promote their interests there and used psychological operations," she said.

"Today they do it through the media, but back then it was through spies ... who spread various rumors in city bazaars," she said.

Under the Russian Empire

After 1783, Crimea experienced a constant outflow of the Crimean Tatar population. The Russian Empire persecuted it and seized Tatars' land.

"The Crimean Tatars resisted," Abdullayeva said. "The figures ... indicate that 30,000 people were killed. But of course, there were many more victims."

A second wave of forced migration of Crimean Tatars began in the mid-19th century, when the Russian Empire waged a new war against the Ottoman Empire.

By the beginning of the 1900s, Russians had supplanted Crimean Tatars as the majority on the peninsula.

When the Russian Empire collapsed, Crimean Tatars proclaimed the Crimean People's Republic and discussed a union with the Ukrainian People's Republic in Kyiv.

However, the Bolsheviks gained the upper hand, executing Noman Çelebicihan, a Tatar leader, in Sevastopol in 1918.

Soviet repressions

Subsequently, the Soviet government only intensified its repression of the Crimean Tatars, whom it considered "disloyal." In 1944, it deported the entire ethnic group.

Only in 1989-1994, when restrictions ended, did a quarter-million Crimean Tatars stream back into Crimea from other parts of the dying USSR.

"We cannot know which of the Kremlin barbarians came up with the idea of deporting the Crimean Tatars [in 1944]," said Abdullayeva.

"I think it was simply necessary [for Moscow] to get rid of the Muslim element in Crimea and present Crimea as completely different on the global stage."

Today Russia is continuing precisely the same policy, which can be seen in the way it discredits and persecutes Crimean Tatars in Crimea. On the peninsula, books libel Crimean Tatars as "traitors to the motherland."

Scholars consider it vital for the world to call out the real criminals.

"Our task is to convey the true history of Crimea to our Western partners and all of Western society. To communicate specific facts and evidence of how many crimes Russia has committed throughout history against Crimea and Crimean Tatars," said Yurlovska.

"The history of Crimea that most people end up learning -- the real one or the one imposed by Russia -- will ultimately determine the future of diplomatic negotiations over the fate of Crimea."