As of this morning Russian forces control the Crimean peninsula, home to some 2 million people, the vast majority of whom are ethnically Russian. On the phone with President Obama yesterday, Putin justified the seizure of the area by claiming that Russia has the right to defend the well-being of its “citizens and numerous compatriots,” and the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine. One of the doctrines of Russian foreign policy, as my colleague Julia Ioffe explained, is that “Russian ethnicity and citizenship trump national sovereignty.” In Crimea, that has historically meant that Russia will deport and erase any claim that the peninsula’s oldest community—the Tatars—may have on the land in order to secure complete control. Finding themselves once again under Russian control is a nightmare scenario for the Tatars, the biggest victims of Russia’s new Crimean war.

The Tatars have been in Crimea since at least the late 14th century. They came to the area as part of Genghis Khan’s army and stayed there after the Mongol Empire split up into the four khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, Sibir, and Crimea. Russia quickly swept up all but Crimea, which became part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1783, the Ottomans handed it over to Catherine the Great, and Crimea remained part of Russia for almost two centuries—as far as Russians are concerned, Crimea was, is, and will be a part of their country.

Under Tsarist rule, anti-Tatar policies were enforced and thousands of Russian speakers settled the peninsula, displacing the Muslim Tatar minority. Things got better—briefly—after the formation of the Soviet Union, when the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was created and the Tatars benefited from Bolshevik policies supporting Russia’s many ethnic minorities (two-thirds of the Bolshevik leadership was not ethnically Russian). They were represented in the Soviet government, and both Crimean Tatar and Russian were recognized as official languages in the region. There was even what scholars have called a Tatar “cultural revival” in Crimea up until 1928, when Stalin implemented his catastrophic Five-Year Plan.

Then agricultural collectivisation and sweeping purges of the Soviet population began; famine killed millions in Ukraine and, as Andrew Wilson of the European Council on Foreign Relations has pointed out, Crimea and Russification programs meant that Crimean Tatar had to be written in cyrillic instead of the Latin alphabet. Tatar historian Alan Fisher has said that between 1917 and 1933, 150,000 Tatars—about 50% of the population at the time—either were killed or forced out of Crimea.

Then in 1944, Stalin accused the entire population of Crimean Tatars of collaborating with the Nazis and deported them to Siberia en masse. Piled body to body in cattle cars--“crematoria on wheels,” half of the Tatar population died on the way. The Tatar population of Crimea fell to zero, all Tatar mosques were destroyed, and Stalin achieved his goal of expanding the Russian population further south.