BAKHCHISARAY, Crimea — Fatime Saifulayeva is too young to remember clearly her first years in the frigid Ural Mountains village where her parents lived — and nearly died — after being deported from Crimea.

Local villagers took pity on Tatars like her family, exiled in 1944 on Stalin’s orders. They whispered to Tatar parents to register their children as being younger than they actually were, to save them from doing brutal hard labor cutting down trees in the Siberian winter. Locals taught the Tatars to feed their starving children watered-down moonshine, despite Islamic customs against alcohol, which warmed their bodies and gave small sustenance.

When her family moved to Uzbekistan in 1958 to join hundreds of thousands of other exiled Crimean Tatars, Saifulayeva was just 2. Like most other Tatars, her family struggled to survive, and yearned for the day they could return to their ancestral homeland on the Black Sea.

With the Soviet collapse in 1991, Saifulayeva and her family returned and, like thousands of other returning Tatars, tried to build new lives. Now, after Russia annexed Crimea and began incorporating the region as a Russian territory, she and many other Tatars say the visceral fears that were dormant for so long are returning.

“We’re all living in fear that history is repeating itself, like it’s 1944 all over again,” she said.

Weeks after Russia moved with lightning speed to seize Crimea, Ukrainian military forces are continuing their humiliating withdrawal, and border and customs posts are going up along the line between the mainland and the peninsula. Moscow has moved to integrate the peninsula’s 2 million people into Russia’s legal, social and economic networks — for example, replacing the Ukrainian hryvnia with the Russian ruble as the fiat currency.

Just as quickly, authorities have begun issuing Russian passports, and long lines of eager Crimeans are showing up outside registration departments in the capital city, Simferopol, and elsewhere signing up for citizenship in their new country.

For many of the roughly 300,000 Crimean Tatars, however, the new government is an old story pointing ominously to the future. Tatar loyalty to Kyiv has been lukewarm at best since the Soviet breakup; many Tatars say Ukraine’s government has done little for them, financially, politically or legally. Support for Moscow is virtually nonexistent, rooted in the searing memories of what Tatars call “surgunlek.” Its 70th anniversary will be observed next month.