On May 18 the Crimean Tatars will commemorate the 55th anniversary of their deportation from the Crimea by Stalin in 1944. The anniversary closely follows the official celebration of Victory Day on May 9.
This year, in a bid for the left-wing vote, President Kuchma's Victory Day speech to the veterans on May 7 in Crimea included praise of Stalin for leading the Soviet people to victory in the war.
Whether Kuchma made any in-roads into gaining support among communist voters through such a comment is yet to be seen. But it is extremely unlikely that he did. The official veterans organization in Ukraine, after all, is led by members of former Soviet military and secret police elite who are determined to get rid not only of the present government but also the independent Ukrainian state. Thus, it was hardly worth paying homage to Stalin, a tyrant that committed millions of Ukrainians to death before, during and after the war.
What Kuchma should have been doing in Crimea was lambasting Stalin's crimes against humanity, including the mass deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1945, a process that killed up to half of the Tatar population, according to Tatar figures.
The bare facts are that in May 1944, Stalin ordered the deportation of every Crimean Tatar – not only from Crimea but from everywhere in the USSR – to concentration camps east of the Urals. Within a span of two days, May 17 and 18, every Tatar on the peninsula – some 500,000, again according to Tatar statistics – was sent away. Of those, the Tatars allege, about 200,000 died in transit and in exile within the first year.
Along with the Tatars, about 1.5 million citizens of other ethnicities – Chechens, Ingushi, Karachievtsi, Kalmyks, Volga Germans, even Greeks – were also carted off to slave camps in 1945. Stalin's reason for deporting whole ethnic groups was that they allegedly supported the Germans. In reality, those peoples were deported strictly because of their race.
The Tatars did not begin returning to the Crimea en masse until the USSR loosened up under Gorbachev. Actually, they did make one aborted attempt in the 1960s, but were rudely turned away. Former Soviet Major General Petro Grigorenko, who discussed the plight of the Crimean Tatars in the 1960s in his Memoirs (published by Harvill Press in London, 1983), recalls a visit to Crimea in 1968, in which he saw the first community of Tatars returning from exile:
'The situation there was unbelievable. The railway station, the airport, and the city parks in Simferopol were swarming with Tatars. They had even set up a tent city near Simferopol reservoir. From morning to night their representatives besieged government and party institutions and the police, seeking just one thing – registration as residents. They were received nowhere. It is impossible for me to render the horrors that I saw. The multitude of half-naked, dirty children sleeping on the cement of the railway station and the airport were the fortunate. What about those who slept on the bare earth in the parks! At night it is cold there; often I heard the freezing children crying.'
Now 270,000 Tatars have returned to Crimea, with another 200,000 expected in the near future. While their living conditions are better than those described by Grigorenko, they remain far from luxurious. Most live in shanty towns around the mainly Slavic cities in the Crimea. And over half of the Tatars in Crimea are still clamoring for the same thing their doomed predecessors wanted: registration as residents.
It is time that Ukrainian politicians stopped pandering to Soviet and racial sympathies on the peninsula. They should offer the Tatars full rights as citizens of Ukraine, so that they can vote and enjoy full rights to social benefits – meager as those benefits might be.
Unfortunately, it remains a grossly unpopular move to do anything good for the Tatars because it isolates the leftist electorate. As evidence to that, the Ukrainian government has done more to appease the Russians than to help the Tatars resettle. It has given wide economic powers to the autonomous Crimean government, which is now totally in the hands of the Leonid Grach's Communist Party – the same party that praises Stalin, openly calls for the re-creation of his state, and expresses no regret for his crimes. An attempt earlier this year to place a monument to Grigorenko, a fierce proponent of Tatar rights, in Sevastopol was sabotaged by the communist city council. Such Soviet heroes are not welcomed in the city of 'Russian glory.'
Ukraine should set an example by doing something to make the Tatars feel more welcome instead of catering to their antagonists and condoning the kind of ethnic hatred that's all too popular in this part of the world. Giving them unilateral citizenship would be a good start.
