Muslim Crimean Tatars

[Marwat Khan Lodhi]

the Crimean Khanate in 1600

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Mongol Empire gradually collapsed and the Golden Horde lost its power over Russia and surrounding lands. However, the ethnically mixed, Turkic-speaking remnants of the Golden Horde did not disappear. They regrouped and formed the Crimean Khanate on the shores of the Black Sea, under the leadership of Genghis Khan's lineal descendants.

The Crimean Tatars, as their neighbors dubbed them, had converted to Islam in the 1300s. In 1475, the Crimean Khanate became a protectorate of the Ottoman Empire, while itself still clinging to power over the expansionist (and virulently anti-Tatar) Duchy of Muscovy. However, in 1480, the Muscovites threw off the "Tatar Yoke," and began the unification of Russia under Slavic rulers. By 1503, those rulers would declare Russia the Third Roman Empire, and take the title of tsar or Caesar.

To the south, the Crimean Tatars made use of their strategic position between the Ottomans and the Russians. They supplied slaves for the Ottoman Janissary corps from the neighboring peoples; so many, in fact, that even the English word "slave" derives from the ethnic signifier "Slav."

World War I changed everything for the Crimean Tatars. The Russian Empire fell to communist revolutionaries in 1917, and after centuries of decline, the Ottoman Empire fell just a few years later in 1922. In the turmoil, the Tatars proclaimed the creation of a secular, democratic state called the Crimean People's Republic on December 26, 1917. After just one month, however, the Bolsheviks conquered the Crimean Peninsula and summarily executed the President of Crimea, Noman Celebicihan.

The Ukrainians immediately counter-attacked, seizing the Crimean Peninsula from the Soviets in the Ukrainian-Soviet War of 1917-22. After years of bitter fighting, the Bolsheviks defeated the Ukrainians. Ukraine, including the Crimean Peninsula, became the Soviet-dominated Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, one of the original states of the USSR.

Under the Soviets, the Tatars were a persecuted minority. As many as half of the Crimean Tatars were either killed or deported to the gulag by the state between 1917 and 1933. Nonetheless, when World War II broke out in 1939, an estimated 20,000 Crimean Tatar men joined the Red Army, out of a total surviving population of 218,000.

As with other oppressed minorities in the Soviet Union such as the Cossacks and Chechens, some Crimean Tatars joined the Nazi invasion force in 1941. An estimated 6,000 to 7,000 Tatars fought for the Nazis over the course of the war.

Based more upon deep-seated traditional hatred of the Mongols than anything else, after the Soviets cleared the Nazis from Ukraine, Joseph Stalin accused the Tatars as an entire people of collaborating with the Germans. He officially charged the entire ethnic group with treason against the USSR, and ordered the deportation of all surviving Crimean Tatars to Central Asia on May 18, 1944. Families were given 30 minutes to gather their belongings, then NKVD troops herded them at bayonet point onto cattle-cars.

In the wink of an eye, about 195,000 Crimean Tatars were rounded up and deported, including eight Red Army veterans who were recipients of the "Hero of the Soviet Union" medal for bravery. The trip took three weeks, and the authorities only opened the train car doors every few days to remove the bodies of those who died along the way.

The largest group, approximately two-thirds of the Tatars, were sent to Uzbekistan. Others ended up in Russian gulags or in Kazakhstan. Local authorities were not notified that the deportees were coming, so had no food or housing prepared for them. Homeless and starving in a harsh environment, about 46% of the deportees died of malnutrition or disease.

After Stalin's death in 1953, his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, rehabilitated most of the deported ethnic groups, including the Chechens and Ingush, and allowed them to return to their homelands. The Tatars, however, were not pardoned until 1967, and could not return to the Crimean Peninsula until after the Soviet Union began to totter in 1989 - 1991. Today, they are concentrated in the less-desirable areas of Crimea; ethnic Ukrainians and Russians dominate the prime Black Sea coast lands.

Crimean Tatar warrior fighting a Polish soldier.

Tatars fighting Zaporozhian Cossacks

At the Southern Border of Moscva state by Sergey Vasilievich Ivanov.

The famous Tatar commander Tugai Bey.

Swedish King Charles X Gustav in skirmish with Tatars near Warsaw