Chapter One
May 18, 1944: The Deportation of Crimean Tatars
Any attempt to comprehend the contemporary complexities of the Crimea's inter-ethnic relations should begin with May 18, 1944. On that day, between 200,000 and 250,000 Crimean Tatars were rounded up on Stalin's orders and sent into internal exile. The Soviet leadership took such draconian action after labeling the Crimean Tatars as traitors, alleging they had collectively collaborated with the enemy during Nazi Germany's occupation of the peninsula from late 1941 until April 1944.
The deportation of an entire national group certainly was not unprecedented in the Soviet Union during World War II: Volga Germans, Chechens and Meskhetian Turks are just some of the other national minorities who suffered a fate similar to that of the Crimean Tatars. Even in the Crimea, Tatars were not alone, as deportations there began shortly after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. In August 1941, roughly 61,000 peninsula residents, mostly ethnic Germans, were forcibly removed. Nevertheless, the deportation of the Crimean Tatars is noteworthy for its vast scale and ruthless efficiency.
The Soviet Army had still not completely driven the Nazi German forces out of Crimea when, on April 13, 1944, a joint order issued by the interior and state security ministries called for "the cleansing of the territory of the Crimean region of agents of German and Romanian intelligence, traitors to the Motherland, and aiders and abettors of the German-fascist occupiers." By early May, Soviet officials were carrying out arbitrary acts of retribution against Crimean Tatars, shooting suspected collaborators without trial. There was a reign of terror in Simferopol, the Crimean capital, with the corpses of the punished hung from trees throughout the city.
The deportation itself was a well-planned operation, carried out at a time when the Soviet Union was still locked in a desperate struggle against Nazi Germany. Supervising the expulsion were about 5,000 agents of the Soviet state security services, supported by 20,000 interior ministry troops and thousands more regular army soldiers. They began rounding up the Crimean Tatars shortly after midnight on May 18, and completed their task by the evening of May 20.
For those who lived through them, the events of May 18, 1944, have been seared into memory as if by a branding iron. One such survivor is Shavki Anafiev, a pensioner who now lives in the Tatar settlement of Kamenka, on the outskirts of Simferopol. When the deportation occurred he was 16, and although more than five decades have passed, his recollections remain vivid:
It was early in the morning-still dark-when they came and knocked on the door. I answered because my mother did not speak Russian. They told us that some kind of resolution had been adopted and that we must leave. They gave us a half-hour to gather some possessions and food. . . . Everyone began to cry as we gathered our things. There were five of us in our family, and together with our neighbors, they loaded us into a truck and drove us away. They took us to a muddy field, which they were using as a collection point, and they made us stand there. All the while a light rain was falling. We were surrounded by soldiers armed with machine guns, and we were not permitted to move. . . . We waited and waited in the rain. People were afraid and they cried. We were aware of what the Germans had done to the Jews. . . . Eventually trucks arrived and we were taken to a spot were two long freight trains were waiting. We were thrown into the ninth car of one of the trains. In our car, there were about 85 people. We spent the whole night in the car, but the train never moved. Only in the early morning [May 19] did the train begin to move. During the journey [to Central Asia] one woman gave birth right in the car. A young boy also died, and they just took the body away and would not allow us to properly bury him.
Nuriye Ismailova is a 69-year-old pensioner. In May 1944, she was a young newlywed whose husband was in the army and fighting at the front. Back then, as now, she lived in Belogorsk, a town about 30 miles east of Simferopol. Remembering the deportation brings tears to her eyes:
At 3:00 am two soldiers knocked on the door. I was the oldest daughter and I had four younger sisters. The soldiers told us: you've got 15 minutes and then we are going to take you away. Our father reminded us about the Germans, and how they had gone around collecting the Jews and then shooting them. He was convinced that the soldiers were going to do the same to all of us. So he told us not to bother taking anything with us-that we were all going to be shot. So we left with only the clothes on our backs. . . . It was only that night that they put the people of our village into trucks and took us to the railroad. . . . When I arrived in Uzbekistan it was about 110 degrees Fahrenheit-unimaginable heat. I was the only one to survive. My father, mother and sisters all perished from the ordeal.
Precise figures are difficult to obtain on the number of Crimean Tatars deported, as well as the number of those who did not survive the ordeal, including the early years in exile. According to Tatar estimates, the deportation took 110,000 lives, or roughly half the number of those removed from the Crimea. Other estimates on casualties are much lower. For example, the Russian-dominated Crimean State Committee on Nationality Affairs and Deported People maintains about 45,000 Tatars died between 1944-48. Whatever the case, the deportation caused an enormous loss of life and property. In addition to the physical removal of the Tatars, Soviet authorities took measures to eradicate signs of their presence in Crimea. After the war, the peninsula was resettled primarily with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. Tatar historical monuments were destroyed, and the names of towns were russified.
The deportation of the Crimean Tatars was not officially announced until two years after the fact. The government, in its decree justifying the deportation, claimed that many Tatars, along with Chechens, had "engaged in armed struggle against the Red Army." The decree, published in the "Izvestiya" daily on June 25, 1946, went on to assign collective guilt to the two national groups because the "bulk of the population . . . took no counter-action against these traitors to the Fatherland."
Today, the charge that the Crimean Tatars collectively collaborated with the Nazis is almost universally recognized as being specious. Certainly, there were instances of Tatar cooperation with German occupying forces. In the most serious case, six battalions of Tatar volunteers fought against Soviet guerrillas during the Nazi occupation. But such collaborative acts were by no means limited to the Crimean Tatars. Plenty of Slavs assisted the Germans during the war. Significant numbers of Ukrainians, for example, enlisted in German-led military units and fought against Soviet authority. It is also worth noting that tens of thousands of Tatars served in the Red Army during World War II, with several even winning medals for bravery. Those Tatar soldiers who survived the war were sent into exile after their demobilization. "To say that we supported the Nazis is totally unjust. Most of our men were at the front," insists Mustafa Jemilev, the leader of the Crimean Tatar resettlement effort. "We were neutral!!"
Mr. Jemilev's last comment sheds light on Stalin's decision to deport the Crimean Tatars. According to some historians, the lack of support for the Soviet cause prompted Stalin to brand Crimean Tatars as unreliable subjects. As such, it was impossible for them to remain in such a geo-strategically important area as the Crimea, or so the Soviet thinking went.
Eyewitness accounts of events in the Crimea during the war years seem to confirm that Soviet authorities had just cause to worry about the Tatars' loyalty to Communist principles in the post-war era. Although they may not have actively supported the Nazis, the behavior of Tatars during the occupation clearly demonstrated a widespread anti-Soviet mood. After driving the Soviet army out of most of the Crimea in 1941, German troops were openly welcomed by many Tatars, who initially perceived the Germans more as liberators from Soviet oppression than as occupiers in their own right. Attitudes regarding the Nazi occupation started to change after significant numbers of Crimeans, including Tatars, were shipped back to Germany to work as slave laborers. Nevertheless, some Tatars who lived through the occupation indicate that the Nazi occupation was marginally less harsh than life under the Soviet regime. Shavki Anafiev, for one, remembers the Nazis as being easier to get along with than the Communists:
Now I can say honestly-whereas before (during the Soviet era) I couldn't-that when the Germans came, we didn't see them do anything horrible in my village. A few months after their arrival, they took away our collective farm's boss and party organizer, and we never heard from them again. But other than that, the Germans did nothing to us. . . . The Germans broke up the collective farms and redistributed the land. . . . At harvest time, the Germans helped us gather the crops. Then one day the German commandant sent some trucks and we thought; 'that's it, they are going to take everything and we are going to go hungry during the winter.' But they only loaded nine trucks and went away. They allowed us to keep all our seeds for the next sowing season, and the commandant told us that we could distribute the leftover crops among the peasants. That winter we had enough bread, and no one went hungry. . . . Time went by and we heard that the Germans had been thrown back at Stalingrad (in February 1943). We began to hear that the Red Army was advancing, and so a lot of young people, mostly Russian-speaking, but also a few of ours (Tatars), took to the woods.
By 1944, many Tatars had reached the conclusion that prospects for future cultural autonomy would have been limited under Nazi rule. "We saw what the Germans did to the Jews and gypsies," Mr. Jemilev explains. Indeed, if the Germans had won the war, they had plans to remove all Tatars and resettle the peninsula with ethnic Germans. Still, that some Tatars at first viewed the German occupation as a quasi-liberation is understandable given their suffering during the 1930s. The devastation brought on by the collectivization drive of the late 1920s and early 1930s, followed by the mass arrests during Stalin's purges, afflicted the entire Soviet Union. But Crimean Tatars suffered disproportionally, some experts say. Between 1928-41, the Soviet industrialization drive crushed long-held Crimean Tatar cultural and economic traditions, which revolved around the Islamic faith, as well as private farming and commerce. In addition, the Tatar intelligentsia was virtually wiped out. Tens of thousands of Tatars died during the tumult of the 1930s, and tens of thousands more fled to Turkey.
Some leading commentators suggest a variety of factors, not just the Tatars' actions during the war, were responsible for the 1944 deportation. They point to the intense hostility exhibited by Russians towards Crimean Tatars long before the outbreak of the war. Such ill-will was the product of centuries of uneasy relations between the two nations.
Virtually from the moment of Crimean Tatars' emergence as a distinct national group in the 15th Century, their relationship with Russians was strained, marked by mutual distrust. The precise origins of the Crimean Tatars remain open to debate. Many historians consider them to be descendants of the Mongol Golden Horde, which by the 13th Century had occupied most of what later became the Russian Empire. When the Golden Horde's grip on power began to weaken, the leadership vacuum in the Crimea was filled by the Tatar khan. The independent khanate, which was functioning by the first half of the 15th Century, encompassed not only the Crimea, but also territory along the surrounding Black Sea coast. However, it was not long before the rapidly expanding Ottoman Turk empire invaded the Crimea and turned the khanate into a vassal state.
Despite its reliance on the Ottoman Empire for its nominal independence, the Crimean khanate emerged as a formidable military power in its own right in the 16th Century. The khan's armies often terrorized neighboring principalities, including the Russian principality of Muscovy. Slavs captured in battle became a major component in the Crimea's thriving slave trade. The practice of enslavement created the stereotype within the Slavic principalities that Tatars were ruthless barbarians. The anti-Tatar fear and animosities that arose during the khanate's heyday still linger.
Over time Muscovy evolved into the Russian Empire, along the way developing an intense rivalry with the Crimean Tatar khanate. By the 18th Century, following the modernization of Russia under Peter the Great, the tide began to turn against the Crimean Tatars. Russian armies sacked the Crimea during two wars against the declining Turkish empire-the first fought between 1735-39 and the second lasting from 1768-74. The second conflict essentially sealed the khanate's fate. And in 1783, Russia under Catherine the Great formally annexed the Crimea.
The process of russification of the newly conquered territory began shortly thereafter, with name changes and the colonial-like settlement of ethnic Russians on the peninsula. From the start, possession of the Crimea occupied an important place in the Russian psyche, a feeling that remains to this day. Seen from a strategic point of view, the peninsula was a vital stepping-stone in the drive to gain access to the Mediterranean Sea, an unrealized dream of countless Russian and even Soviet leaders.
Despite conducting an essentially colonialist policy, Catherine the Great exhibited tolerance for Tatar religious traditions. Islamic clerics thus largely retained their influential position in Crimean society, including in the educational sphere. In addition, Catherine also granted the Tatar nobility the same privileges as those enjoyed by the Russian ruling class. In practice, however, the Crimean elite, which resisted assimilation into the Russian system, witnessed a steady erosion of its wealth and influence. Large portions of the Tatar nobility's land was confiscated and redistributed to Russian settlers.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Tatar population experienced a rapid decline in living standards, effectively reducing them to second-class citizens. In response to Russia's repression and integration measures, many Tatars opted for emigration. Turkey became the primary destination. The exodus, which occurred with the tacit encouragement of Russian leaders, eroded the Tatar cultural imprint on the Crimea. For example, major Crimean Tatar trading centers such as Kefe and Gozleve declined to the point of insignificance. Taking their place were Russian-built cities, particularly Sevastopol.
In the aftermath of the Crimean War of 1854-56, the pace of the Tatar exodus quickened. As was the case during World War II, Tatars were accused of aiding the Anglo-French and Turkish alliance that had fought against the Russian army. The charge lacked a solid foundation. Nevertheless, the Crimean War experience hardened the impression of many Russians that Tatars were unreliable subjects. Tsar Alexander II adopted a policy of actively encouraging Tatar emigration, and most of the remaining Tatar nobility at this point fled to Turkey.
During the last half of the 19th century, Tatar cultural identity teetered on the brink of extinction. The intelligentsia had been devastated by assimilation, and the Tatar population in general lived in a state of poverty. During this moment of crisis, a charismatic Tatar leader, Ismail Bey Gaspiraly, emerged to lead a cultural revival. One of Gaspiraly's major theses held that the Tatar community could best recover its lost traditions through cooperation with Russians. Thus, he led the drive to adopt Russian methods of education, replacing the outdated methods used by Islamic clerics. Gaspiraly also founded a newspaper, called Terjuman, that helped foster the growth of a new educated elite by the end of the 19th century.
The early years of the 20th century saw the Russian Empire rocked by upheaval. Amidst the tumult, radical nationalist ideas began to take root among a new, and mainly young, Tatar intelligentsia. When Tsarist authority collapsed in February 1917, a Tatar nationalist political movement-known as the Milli Firka-gained strength and began making demands for cultural autonomy. By November 1917, the Bolsheviks had seized power in St. Petersburg, causing the former Tsarist empire to shatter and descend into a vicious civil war. The Milli Firka in December 1917 became the dominant force in the government of a self-proclaimed independent Tatar state in the Crimea. The Tatar state was short -lived, however, crushed by Bolshevik loyalists in January 1918.
Until the mid-1920s, the Soviet grip over the former Tsarist empire was tenuous at best. Reintegrating the country into the Soviet Union was a bloody and exhausting process. The Bolsheviks often granted national minorities extensive rights to win their allegiance to the communist cause. The Crimea was one of the major centers of White Russian resistance to the Bolshevik seizure of power. So shortly after the nascent Red Army had driven the Whites out of Crimea in 1920, moves were taken to placate Tatar yearnings for self-determination, with the underlying aim of increasing Communist authority on the peninsula. On October 18, 1921, Communist leaders authorized the establishment of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which they billed as a gesture of compensation for all the Tatar suffering under Russian autocracy. The new status granted Crimean Tatar leaders some leeway, especially in cultural affairs. All pretense of self-determination ended, however, as soon as Stalin consolidated his position as paramount Soviet leader. In 1927, Stalin embarked on a purge that eliminated the upper echelons of the Crimean Tatar intelligentsia. Forced, collectivization, more purges, war, Nazi occupation and finally deportation awaited the Crimean Tatars in the coming two decades.
Thus, long before their deportation in 1944, the Crimean Tatar nation had been ravaged by centuries of repressive policies at the hands of both Tsarist and Communist authorities. A look at demographic data in the Crimea only partially reveals the extent of suffering experienced by Tatars under Russian rule. In 1783, at the time of the Crimea's incorporation into the Russian Empire, Tatars comprised about 83 percent of the peninsula's population. By 1897, their share had plummeted to 34 percent, while Russians and Ukrainians comprised almost 45 percent. The free-fall continued during the Communist era, as the Tatar portion of the Crimean population fell to 20.7 percent in 1937. According to the most recent figures available (for 1993), the ethnic composition of the Crimea is as follows; Tatars, 9.6 percent; Russians, 61.6 percent; Ukrainians, 23.6 percent; other, 5.2 percent. In addition, an estimated 5 million ethnic Crimean Tatars and their descendants now live in Turkey.
The Tatar Struggle To Return To The Crimea
Most Tatars completed the tortuous journey into internal exile by early June 1944, and were forced to settle in Central Asia, especially Uzbekistan. Smaller numbers were sent to Western Siberia and the Ural region of Russia. Living conditions were harsh, with inadequate housing and insufficient supplies of food and water. The Tatars also had to face a hostile local population, whose hostility had been whipped up by an official propaganda campaign.
The drastic changes of climate and other lifestyle conditions led to the outbreak of diseases, such as malaria, that killed tens of thousands of the deportees. In addition, Tatars were subjected to "special settlement" restrictions, meaning their freedom of movement was severely restricted, thereby reducing access to education and health care. Soviet security services closely monitored all movement and action, and any person who did not obey the restrictions faced up to decades in notorious labor camps. Nuriye Ismailova, the 69-year-old pensioner now living in Belogorsk, recalls her own futile attempt to challenge the rules.
About six months after I arrived in Uzbekistan, my husband joined me after returning from the front. He was horrified by our conditions. He was a veteran and didn't understand, and so he said; '"We can't live here, we must leave." I tried to explain that we were forbidden to leave. . . . Later, we tried to run away one night, but they caught us. They took us to prison, and I got a three-month sentence, and my husband was sentenced to six months. But then-it was 1945-an amnesty was declared on May 9 [to mark the Soviet Union's defeat of Nazi Germany] and we were released.
Conditions improved only marginally while Stalin remained alive. It took years for Tatars to build adequate housing, and otherwise adapt to harsher agricultural conditions. And still, most Tatars lived a hand-to-mouth existence. The first easing of their situation occurred in July 1954, just over a year after Stalin's death, when the so-called "special settlement" restrictions were lifted for Tatars under the age of 16. A year later, they were lifted for World War II veterans. And finally, an unpublished decree in April 1956 freed the entire Tatar diaspora from restrictions. Nevertheless, the 1956 decree maintained that the Crimean Tatars were guilty of collective treason, thereby forbidding them to return to their homeland. It also upheld the validity of the confiscation of Tatar property.
The de-Stalinization campaign, launched by Nikita Khrushchev, marked a watershed for most of the 20 ethnic groups that had been punished for supposed crimes against the state during the war. In his famous secret speech at the 20th Communist Party Congress in February 1956, Khrushchev denounced as unjust the concept of collective guilt. In January 1957 most ethnic groups were rehabilitated, including Chechens, Ingush and Kalmyks. Only three nationalities-Crimean Tatars, Meskhetian Turks and Volga Germans-failed to receive exoneration. The only gesture made to Crimean Tatars was the right to publish a newspaper, called Lenin Bayragy (The Banner of Lenin).
As could be expected, Crimean Tatars were angered by their failure to be rehabilitated. Propelled by their newly restored rights to move freely, and publish a newspaper, a movement took shape that agitated for Tatars' right to return to the Crimea, as well as for the restoration of an "autonomous homeland." By the late 1950s, the Tatar cause was starting to gain outside attention, especially from those in the nascent dissident movement in Moscow.
The Tatar campaign for the "right to return" began with petitions, signed by thousands and sent to Soviet leaders in Moscow. In 1961, one petition containing 25,000 signatures was delivered to the 21st Communist Party Congress. The increasing numbers of petition signers alarmed Soviet authorities, who responded with a series of crackdowns that resulted in harsh sentences for several Tatar activists. The repression failed to quash the Tatar community's demand for a full restoration of rights. Indeed, Tatar agitators expanded their activities, while modifying their tactics, in order to frustrate further attempts by Soviet authorities to silence Tatar voices of discontent.
In 1964, Tatars established a permanent presence in Moscow. This Moscow lobby served as a constant reminder to the Kremlin that Tatars were united, disciplined and determined to win the "right of return." Such a confrontational move was sure to prompt a harsh response, but Tatar leaders took shrewd steps that prevented Soviet authorities from stamping out the lobbying effort. Most importantly, the lobby was structured in a way that it had no formal leadership structure. Its members constantly rotated, with each carrying a mandate from their Tatar diaspora community. Thus, the lobby could keep operating in spite of attempts at repression.
Soviet authorities, involved in their own leadership struggle following Khrushchev's ouster, tried both to ignore Tatar petitions and to incarcerate the movement's leadership. Amidst this upward spiral of arrests and agitation, however, the Crimean Tatar movement picked up strength. In 1966, the Soviet government was sufficiently concerned that it amended criminal codes to facilitate the prosecution of nationalist activists. The Tatar response was to increase the number of lobbyists in Moscow, so that by the summer of 1967, there were roughly 400.
A confrontation loomed in July 1967, when Tatar activists planned to hold an unprecedented rally on Red Square to publicize their grievances. To preempt such a potentially embarrassing demonstration against Soviet authority, Kremlin leaders finally agreed to meet with a Tatar delegation and to discuss rehabilitation. Those talks yielded significant concessions. The head of the Soviet delegation-KGB boss and future general-secretary, Yuri Andropov-assured Crimean Tatars that they would soon be rehabilitated, but he made no promises regarding the right to resettle in the Crimea.
The rehabilitation decree was made public in areas inhabited by Tatars on September 9, 1967. The decree described as groundless the charges that Tatars had collaborated with the Nazis. But at the same time, it also specifically denied the right to return to Crimea. Several hundred Tatars, ignoring the relevant provisions in the decree, attempted to move back to Crimea. In all but a few cases the effort to resettle failed, with many being forcibly removed by local authorities. In the decade after 1967, only 577 Crimean Tatar families succeeded in obtaining residency permits in Crimea.
Because of the inability to return to Crimea, the rehabilitation did not assuage Crimean Tatar discontent. Again, the reaction of the activists was to intensify their efforts. Soviet authorities matched the growth of Tatar determination with an increased willingness to use force, so that in April 1968 a Tatar demonstration in the Uzbek town of Chirlik resulted in a violent clash with security forces. This confrontation prompted Tatar activists to change tactics yet again. In addition to aiming their complaints at the Soviet leadership, Tatars began to publicize their plight abroad, forming close bonds with the broader dissident movement in the Soviet Union.
During this time, Mustafa Jemilev emerged as the primary leader of the Tatar cause. Only six months old at the time of the Crimean Tatars' deportation, Jemilev overcame long odds merely in surviving his childhood. Already in the early 1960s, Jemilev was experiencing persistent persecution because of his activism which prevented him from obtaining a higher education, or even securing a factory job. Despite Soviet intimidation tactics, which included beatings, he persisted in advocating the restoration of the Tatar homeland. In 1969, Jemilev was one of 15 founding members of the Action Group for the Defense of Civil Rights in the Soviet Union, cementing his place in the leading circle of Soviet dissidents. He would go on to spend years in prison for "anti-Soviet" slander.
The growing contacts between dissidents in Moscow and the Crimean Tatars provoked a sharp response from Soviet authorities. An increasing number of Tatar lobbyists were imprisoned, but new activists emerged to take their place. And so, throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, a stalemate occurred. The Tatar movement remained resilient, flexible and unbowing, while the Kremlin showed no sign of giving in to demands for permission to resettle in the Crimea.
The reasons for the Kremlin's obstinacy remain obscure. Some political scientists point to the strategic considerations connected with the Crimea's location, speculating that the Kremlin may have feared that the Tatars could act as a "fifth column" should the Soviet Union and Turkey clash over the peninsula. Other observers assert that more banal motivations may have been responsible for the official prohibition on Tatar resettlement in the Crimea. Andrei Sakharov, for one, claimed that Russian racism, and the fact the Crimea was a vacation playground of the Communist elite, was a major reason that Tatars remained barred from returning.
Only with Mikhail Gorbachev's ascendancy to the leadership of the Communist Party in 1985 did new possibilities appear for the realization of Tatar aspirations. Gorbachev's liberalization policies rejuvenated the Tatar movement. In July 1987, a group of Tatars succeeded in demonstrating on Red Square. The official response this time stressed conciliation more than force. A commission headed by Andrei Gromyko, the former long-time foreign minister, considered the Crimean Tatars' demands, but in the end it offered mostly vague promises. The first genuine concessions came in 1989, when the Soviet Union was in the early stages of its implosion. Following quasi-democratic elections in March 1989, the newly formed Soviet parliament authorized the formation of a second commission. That body subsequently recognized the Tatar right to return, sparking a migratory surge.
Throughout the years in exile, the constant repression and discrimination administered by Soviet authorities had helped ensure that the Crimean Tatar community remained cohesive and kept their cause alive. Therefore, the moment that the opportunity presented itself, Tatars availed themselves en masse of the opportunity to return. According to estimates, about 38,000 Tatars lived in the Crimea in 1989, while up to 500,000 lived across Central Asia and in Siberia. By October 1990, the Tatar population in Crimea had jumped to 120,000. And in 1993, up to 260,000 Tatars had managed to return.
The main thing preventing the resettlement of the entire Crimean Tatar community was the chaotic circumstances of the early 1990s. Following the Soviet Union's disintegration in late 1991, new borders and customs regulations greatly hampered Tatar efforts to return. Already by that time, hyperinflation had robbed many Tatars of their savings, limiting the financial ability of many to move back to Crimea.
At the same time, the Crimea itself was in the midst of an identity crisis. Khrushchev had authorized the transfer of the Crimea from the Russian Federation (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, even though the majority of the peninsula's population was ethnically Russian. Few considered the implications of this move until the Soviet Union found itself on its death-bed. By then, however, nationalist passions had rendered rational dialogue almost impossible. Throughout 1990, the Russian-dominated political leadership in Crimea advocated the preservation of the Soviet Union. When it collapsed in late 1991, Crimean Russian leaders changed course and undertook measures designed to isolate the peninsula so as to preserve Russian power there. Eventually a determined group of ethnic Russians began to agitate for the Crimea's return to Russia, and the issue became a cause celebre in Moscow.
The Russian secessionist movement alarmed the Tatar community, which had little desire to continue to take orders from Moscow. Both to counter Russian separatism in the Crimea and to provide better direction to the overall repatriation effort, Tatar activists decided to formalize existing leadership arrangements. A convention of elected representatives from the entire Crimean Tatar nation met from June 26-30, 1991, to map out a strategy. The kurultai, as the convention was called, adopted a "Declaration of National Sovereignty of the Crimean Tatar People," and announced an intention to re-establish a sovereign Tatar state. It also adopted a state flag and national anthem, while claiming control over Crimea's natural resources. At the same time, the kurultai stressed that the achievement of the Crimean Tatars' aims could be accomplished through peaceful negotiations with other ethnic groups residing on the peninsula. The kurultai also selected a standing body, known as the mejlis, which was designed to operate as a shadow legislative body advocating Tatar issues. Jemilev, the dissident leader, was elected as mejlis president. With the establishment of the mejlis, the Tatars signaled their intention to become a permanent and immovable part of the Crimean political landscape.
