Wednesday, May 18, 2011

67th Anniversary of the Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

This is a follow up to my last post. One nationality in the USSR that lost all semblance of the right to national self-determination were the Crimean Tatars. The Soviet government attempted to forcibly liquidate the Crimean Tatars as a national entity on 18 May 1944. The Stalin regime ruthlessly deported them from their homeland in Crimea to special settlement restrictions in Uzbekistan and the Urals. They lost the right to live in their ancestral homeland, their national-state formation in the form of the Crimean ASSR, almost all of their collective and private property, all institutions in their native language, and tens of thousands of lives as a result of this act of ethnic cleansing. I have a lot more detailed posts from years pasts remembering this horrible tragedy. If you look up posts made on 17 May 2009,  18 May2007, and 18 May 2006  you can get a more detailed summary of the deportations and their horrific aftermath.

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