ON THIS DAY · 20 MAY 1944

Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

18–20 May 1944 — In three days the NKVD deported the Crimean Tatars, about 191,000 people, mostly to Uzbekistan. Estimates of the share who died in the first years range from about a fifth in NKVD records to almost half in Crimean Tatar surveys. They could not go home until 1989.

The moment in context

The shift from promoting nations to deporting them began on the borders, where nationality and foreign policy met. Soviet planners worried that minorities with homelands abroad, such as Poles, Germans, Finns and Koreans, could serve an enemy in war. In 1936 tens of thousands of Poles and Germans were moved from Ukraine’s western border zone to Kazakhstan. In August 1937 a decree ordered the removal of all Koreans from the Far East, where Japan threatened from Manchuria, and in September and October about 172,000 people were loaded onto trains for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, as the longest arrow on the map shows. The “national operations” of the Great Terror, the mass arrests and shootings of 1937–38, targeted minorities suspected of spying for a foreign state, and the Polish operation alone shot about 111,000 people. A whole people could now be treated as guilty by association, and that logic drove every deportation that followed.

From Stalin’s ethnic deportations, chapter 7 of The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953 (1944).

The place: Deportation of the Crimean Tatars — map and full story →

The atlas that shows it

The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953

12 CHAPTERS · AN INTERACTIVE SITUATION MAP