page_title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars
section_title: Deportation
hierarchical_section_title: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars / Deportation
caption_attribution_description: Lavrenty Beria
context_page_description: The deportation of the Crimean Tatars or the Sürgünlik was the ethnic cleansing of at least 191,044 Crimean Tatars in 18–20 May 1944 carried out by the Stalinist regime, specifically by Lavrentiy Beria, head of the Soviet state security and secret police, acting on behalf of Joseph Stalin. Within three days, Beria's NKVD used cattle trains to deport mostly women, children, the elderly, even Communists and members of the Red Army, to the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, several thousand kilometres away. They were one of the ten ethnicities who were encompassed by Stalin's policy of population transfer in the Soviet Union.
  The deportation officially was intended as collective punishment for the perceived collaboration of some Crimean Tatars with Nazi Germany, in spite of hostile attitudes to Crimean Tatars from the Nazis, who considered Crimean Tatars to be "racially inferior" and "Mongol sub-humanity"; modern sources theorize that the deportation was part of the Soviet plan to gain access to the Dardanelles and acquire territory in Turkey where the Tatars had ethnic kinsmen.
context_section_description: Officially due to the collaboration with the Axis Powers during World War II, the Soviet government inflicted a collective guilt and punishment on ten ethnic minorities, among them the Crimean Tatars. Punishment included deportation to distant regions of Central Asia and Siberia. Soviet accounts of the late 1940s indict the Crimean Tatars as an ethnicity of traitors. Although refused by Crimean Tatars, this opinion was widely accepted in the Soviet period and persists in the Russian scholarly and popular literature.
  On 10 May 1944, Lavrentiy Beria recommended to Stalin that the Crimean Tatars should be deported away from the border regions due to their "traitorous actions". Stalin subsequently issued GKO Order No. 5859ss, which envisaged the resettlement of the Crimean Tatars. The deportation lasted only three days, 18–20 May 1944, during which NKVD agents went house to house collecting Crimean Tatars at gunpoint and forcing them to enter sealed-off cattle trains that would transfer them almost 3,200 kilometres (2,000 mi) to remote locations in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. The Crimean Tatars were allowed to carry up to 500 kg of their property per family. By 8:00 on the first day, the NKVD had already loaded 90,000 Crimean Tatars distributed in 25 trains. The next day, a further 136,412 persons were boarded onto railroad cars. The only ones who could avoid this fate were Crimean Tatar women who were married to men of other non-punished ethnic groups. They travelled in overcrowded wagons for several weeks and were plagued by a lack of food and water. It is estimated that at least 228,392 people were deported from Crimea, of which at least 191,044 were Crimean Tatars in 47,000 families. Since 7,889 people perished in the long transit in sealed-off railcars, the NKVD registered 183,155 Crimean Tatars who arrived at their destinations in Central Asia. The majority of the deportees were rounded up from the Crimean countryside. Only 18,983 of the exiles were from Crimean cities.
  On 4 July 1944, the NKVD officially informed Stalin that the resettlement was complete. However, not long after that report, the NKVD found out that one of its units forgot to deport people from the Arabat Spit. Instead of preparing an additional transfer in trains, the NKVD boarded hundreds of Crimean Tatars onto an old boat, took it to the middle of the Azov Sea, and sank the ship, on 20 July. Those who did not drown were finished off by machine-guns.
  Officially, Crimean Tatars were eliminated from Crimea. The deportation encompassed every person considered by the government to be Crimean Tatar, including children, women, and the elderly, and even those who had been members of the Communist Party or the Red Army. As such, they were legally designated as special settlers, which meant that they were officially second-class citizens, prohibited from leaving the perimeter of their assigned area, attending prestigious universities, and had to regularly appear before the commandant's office.
  During this mass eviction, the Soviet authorities confiscated around 80,000 houses, 500,000 cattle, 360,000 acres of land, and 40,000 tons of agricultural provisions. Besides 191,000 deported Crimean Tatars, the Soviet authorities also evicted 9,620 Armenians, 12,420 Bulgarians, and 15,040 Greeks from the peninsula. All were collectively branded as traitors and became second class citizens for decades in the USSR. Among the deported, there were also 283 persons of other ethnicities: Italians, Romanians, Karaims, Kurds, Czechs, Hungarians, and Croats. During 1947 and 1948, a further 2,012 veteran returnees were deported from Crimea by the local MVD.
  In total, 151,136 Crimean Tatars were deported to the Uzbek SSR; 8,597 to the Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic; and 4,286 to the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic; and the remaining 29,846 were sent to various remote regions of the Russian SFSR. When the Crimean Tatars arrived at their destination in the Uzbek SSR, they were met with hostility by Uzbek locals who threw stones at them, even their children, bec
caption: Lavrentiy Beria, the chief of the Soviet NKVD
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