Editor’s Note: This is the sixth story in the Kyiv Post’s “Honest History” project, a series of stories and videos that aim to debunk myths about Ukrainian history that are used by propagandists. May 18 is the day of commemoration for the victims of the 1944 deportation of the indigenous people of Crimea, the Crimean Tatars. They were deported from their homeland by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who claimed they had collaborated with the Nazis during their occupation of the peninsula. This series is supported by the Black Sea Trust, a project of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Opinions expressed do not necessarily represent those of the Black Sea Trust, the German Marshall Fund or its partners.

Zera Gdanova, 80, had just turned six when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin ordered her family, along with hundreds of thousands of other Crimean Tatars labeled as “traitors of the Soviet Union,” out of their homeland in 1944.

Her return, 44 years later in 1988, as an adult woman with a family of her own, was no less arduous than the journey to Uzbekistan in crowded, dirty trains.

The Kremlin has triumphantly proclaimed Russia’s invasion and occupation of Crimea, which started in 2014, as the return of the peninsula to its historic motherland. The Kremlin’s propaganda line is that Crimea is, and has always been, part of Russia.

That, of course, is a lie.

First annexed in 1783 by the Russian Empire, Crimea was under Russian control, first under the empire and then as part of Soviet Russia, until 1954, when it was granted to Soviet Ukraine. In 2014, 60 years later, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that the transfer had violated Soviet law and launched a military takeover of Crimea followed by a sham referendum on March 16, 2014.

The referendum, illegitimate under Ukrainian and international law, was held during Russia’s military occupation of the peninsula and didn’t give voters the option of retaining the status quo. The result announced by the Russians, with an overwhelming 96 percent of the population in favor of joining Russia, was also suspiciously high given the results of previous polling.

However, looking at the demographic makeup of Crimea in 2014, the ethnic Russian population was indeed dominant. Ethnic Russians made up over a half of the peninsula’s population, while its indigenous people, the Crimean Tatars, accounted for only around 11 percent.

But it hasn’t always been so.

Slavic people — mostly Russians but also Ukrainians — began to migrate to Crimea in the late 18th century, but full-scale Russification only started after Stalin exiled the Crimean Tatars, having accused them of collaborating with the Nazis during World War II.

Exile

World War II came to Crimea in the summer of 1941. German troops rapidly advanced through the western part of the Soviet Union, and by October, Crimea was occupied. In July 1942, after a 170-day siege, the famous port city of Sevastopol fell.

Zera’s family lived some 40 kilometers from Sevastopol, in the small village of Zalanköy. In the early days of the Nazi occupation, Zera’s older sister, 16-year-old Shemsnur, and other youths from the village were taken to Germany to work. Like many victims of Nazi experiments on humans, Shemsnur was sterilized and could never have children.

In April 1944, the Soviet army retook the peninsula. Soon after the liberation, Moscow ordered the peninsula cleared of “anti-Soviet elements.”

At dawn on May 18, 1944, Crimean families were woken by officers of the feared Soviet secret police, the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD.

“My father opened the door, and I saw two soldiers with rifles,” Zera recalls. “They gave my parents 15 minutes to get the children ready. We began crying. One of the soldiers said ‘Take some clothes; it is going to be chilly, and some food for 3–4 days.’”

Zera grabbed her favorite doll, but one of the soldiers took it away saying “You won’t need it!”

Nobody explained to them what was happening. Zera’s father had seen the Nazis shooting Jews in the forest outside of Sevastopol, and he feared they would be executed too. Zera’s mother was pregnant with their eighth child.

Instead, they were packed into trains and sent to Uzbekistan, a country completely unknown to them.

According to a telegram from May 18 sent by NKVD deputy chief Ivan Serov to Moscow, 48,000 people were put onto 17 trains and sent from Crimea as of 8 p. m.

On May 20, NKVD Chief Lavrentiy Beria reported to Stalin that the operation had been completed, and 180,014 Crimean Tatars had been sent to Uzbekistan. He didn’t mention, however, that 6,000 Crimean Tatars had been conscripted to the Red Army, and 5,000 had been sent to work in coal mines.

In the subsequent weeks, thousands of Crimean Tatar families were sent to the Volga-Urals region and Siberia. Other ethnic minorities that lived in Crimea, such as Bulgarians, Greeks, Armenians and Germans, were also expelled.

According to the estimates from the Crimean Tatar national movement, the total number of those deported was around 240,000 people, almost half of whom were children. It is believed that 46 percent of those deported died in the first years of exile from disease, malnutrition, and poor living conditions.

New land

The journey to Uzbekistan in wooden freight wagons, normally used for transporting cattle and captive soldiers, took over a month. The trains were dirty, airless, and full of bedbugs, Zera recalls.

“The trains were so packed that people could only sit or stand. Old people died of heart attacks but they couldn’t be buried according to Muslim tradition. At every 15-minute stop, soldiers collected the dead bodies,” she says.

Arriving at a village in Chust district of Namangan Oblast in eastern Uzbekistan, the family was shunned. Told that the newcomers had helped Nazis in the war, locals were wary of them.

“In the beginning, the Uzbeks treated us badly. But over the time they saw that we were Muslims like them, and they began to help us,” Zera says.

“We survived,” Zera says simply of their first year in the foreign land.

They survived hunger, malaria, sleeping in a barn with rats, and a cruel winter. During the second year, Zera started school. The nearest one was a Russian-language school named after Stalin. The class, mostly made up of the deported kids, didn’t know Russian. Struggling to remember the unusual names of her new students, the Russian teacher gave them Russian names. Zera became Zoya.

Myth of betrayal

The crime of collective punishment by deportation committed against the Crimean Tatars was justified by lies.

In a letter to Stalin from May 10, 1944, NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria asked for a permission to start the eviction of Crimean Tatars to Uzbekistan as a punishment for “their treacherous actions against the Soviet people.”

“In 1944, over 20,000 Tatars defected from the Red Army who betrayed their motherland, turned to serve the Germans and with arms in their hands fought against the Red Army,” Beria wrote.

But Gulnara Bekirova, a Ukrainian historian and a member of the Special Commission for the study of the genocide against the Crimean Tatars, says that collaboration with the Nazis was common across all Nazi-occupied territories. Judging a person’s complicity requires a deep understanding of the extreme political and psychological circumstances of wartime, she says.

At the same time, thousands of Crimean Tatars fought in the Red Army and in Soviet partisan movements, she says.

“Soviet history manufactured a heroic myth about the Great Patriotic War, and for years depicted it in monochrome, black-and-white tones, creating an endless variety of stereotypes,” Bekirova wrote in one of her essays about Crimean Tatar history. “Reiterating the Soviet myth about the betrayal of the Crimean Tatars means justifying the crime of deportation and the entire repressive policy of Stalin.”

Bekirova says the Crimean Tatars weren’t the only groups Stalin suspected or accused of disloyalty.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Stalin targeted for political repression many smaller ethnic groups, such as Koreans, Estonians, Meskhetian Turks, Chechens and Ingush, to name a few. An estimated six million people were deported from their homelands to Central Asia and Siberia. Soviet propaganda either depicted the deportations as a “voluntary resettlement program” or said nothing about them at all.

“The constant search for ‘enemies’ and ‘anti-Soviet elements’ was one of the fundamental features of the Soviet totalitarian regime,” Bekirova says. “When it comes to deportation, the reasons and pretexts differ. Stalin viewed Crimea as an important border area and he wanted it to be populated by the people he considered the most outstanding of all the Soviet nations — the Russians.”

In 2015, Ukraine recognized the 1944 deportation as an act of genocide.

Not only were the Crimean Tatars banished from their homeland, they were deprived of their identity, language, and culture. For decades, they were considered to be Tatars, people of Tatarstan. Geographical names in Crimea were changed to Russian ones — Zera’s home village Zalanköy became Kholmovka.

Resettlement

In 1967, after the Crimean Tatar national movement in Uzbekistan petitioned Soviet leaders and held demonstrations, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet cancelled the treason charges against the Crimean Tatars.

But the ban on repatriation wasn’t lifted until 1989. Meanwhile, Crimean Tatars could live anywhere in the Soviet Union if they had a job and a residency permit — except Crimea. Nobody in Crimea wanted to hire Crimean Tatars or sell them property. Reportedly, local residents were warned they could be prosecuted if they helped Crimean Tatars resettle in their homeland.

But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Soviet authorities opened a small window of opportunity to return for the Crimean Tatars under a job program in the peninsula. Applicants weren’t supposed to have a higher education and had to live in designated areas, mostly the steppe.

But there were those who found other, unofficial paths back to their homeland.

In the 1970s, a number of Crimean Tatar families tried to resettle in Crimea. Some faced deportation as soon as they showed any intention to stay. Others seized land plots and built houses, only to see them destroyed by the local authorities.

Having once spent a holiday in Alushta on Crimea’s southern coast, Zera and her husband dreamed of living in Crimea again one day. It took three attempts before their dream came true.

In 1981, they were sent away by policemen who said Crimean Tatars couldn’t live in Crimea. In 1983, they were evicted again from the peninsula and settled in Kherson Oblast — as close as they could to their homeland.

Good news finally came in 1988.

“My husband came home after work and said Crimean Tatars were allowed to get residency permits in Crimea,” Zera says. “I was so excited that I couldn’t wait. Me and my daughter Zarema immediately went to Simferopol to look for a house.”

The Russian woman who owned a house they liked was wary: “Are you Crimean Tatars? I don’t want any problems!”

Zera had to lie: “No, we’re not. We’re from Kherson. My name is Zoya,” she said, using the Russian name she had been given at school in Uzbekistan.

The Russian owner initially refused to sell the house, but finally was convinced that the buyers had not come from Central Asia but from Kherson.

Zera and her family thus became some of the first legal Crimean Tatar returnees to Crimea. She still lives in the house in Simferopol with her older sister Shemsnur, in Russian-occupied Crimea.

“The Crimean Tatars have been through everything. You see, fate decided, and we’re back in our homeland,” she says.

Repatriation

Eskender Bariyev, 43, remembers the exact day he visited Crimea for the first time as a 16-year-old boy. It was June 22, 1990, and he flew to Simferopol from the Uzbek city of Namangan, where he had been born into a family of deported Crimean Tatars.

“Crimea felt very familiar, as if I had already been there,” he recalls while sitting in his office at the Crimean Tatar Resource Center in Kyiv, a civil organization that advocates for the rights of Crimean Tatar people and the preservation of their culture.

Like many of his generation born in exile, Bariyev was raised with a deep love for his lost homeland. “At home I often heard that no matter how life was good in Uzbekistan, we have our homeland, and we will eventually return there.”

Bariyev moved to Simferopol a year later to attend the same medical school his grandparents used to study at long time ago. By that time, Crimean Tatars had already begun to return to Crimea en masse from Central Asia: they were officially allowed to relocate in 1989.

The repatriation peaked in 1990-1991. The Crimean Tatar population grew from 2,000 people in 1970 to 150,000 by the end of 1991, but reached the pre-deportation level only in the 2000s.

Having returned to their homeland, Crimean Tatars had to fight for a place to live. Although the Ukrainian government adopted a program for the accommodation of Crimean Tatars and other deported nations, in reality the local authorities didn’t allocate lands for the new arrivals.

“Every Crimean Tatar family was ready to build homes by themselves if the authorities gave them land plots. They didn’t ask for their ancestors’ houses back, knowing other people lived there,” says Bariyev.

“When they didn’t get land, people began protesting and seizing it illegally. They would set up camp sites in fields and start building houses.”

It became clear that the reintegration of the Crimean Tatars was impossible without fully restoring their political rights. In 1991, the Crimean Tatars elected the Mejlis, their representative body, and 14 members of it were elected to the parliament of the newly established Republic of Crimea within Ukraine.

Bariyev himself didn’t become a doctor and went into politics instead, later becoming a member of the Mejlis, which was outlawed by the Kremlin-appointed authorities after Russia invaded and started to occupy the peninsula in 2014.

Prior to the Russian occupation, the Crimean Tatar language and culture, which were banished for decades under Soviet rule, had slowly begun to revive too with the rehabilitation of the Crimean Tatar theater and Crimean Tatar newspapers and broadcasting. The Crimean Tatar language was again taught in schools and universities.

However, the question of toponymy remained open, although the current Ukrainian legislation allows the original, Crimean Tatar geographical names to be restored.

“Despite the fact Crimea is currently occupied, it is internationally recognized as part of Ukraine,” Bariyev says. “If the Ukrainian parliament orders that the Russian names be changed to Crimean Tatar ones, international cartography will use them. This is an important issue.”