Mustafa Dzhemilev was a six-month-old baby when Soviet troops uprooted his family from their homeland on the Crimean peninsula, packing them off into exile in Uzbekistan, 80 years ago this week.
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the entire population of Crimean Tatars rounded up and deported, employing a sadistic form of collective punishment. Officially, the mass deportations were motivated by the Tatars’ alleged collaboration with the occupying Nazis, from whom the Red Army had just recaptured Crimea during World War II.
But the real goal was ethnic cleansing: “to expel all Tatars from the territory of Crimea” and settle them in Uzbekistan, Stalin’s expulsion order stated.
The Crimean Tatars call this tragedy the Sürgün (Exile).
“The process of deportation was more or less the same for everyone. A knock at the door in the morning, get ready, you have fifteen minutes to pack up,” Dzhemilev told Eurasianet in an interview over Skype last year.
He was too young to remember the grueling 4,000 kilometer journey to Uzbekistan, the final destination for 150,000 of the 183,155 Crimean Tatars who endured the harsh, initial phase of the deportations that began on May 18, 1944.
Overall, 238,500 people were eventually banished from the CrimeanPeninsula, including Greek and Bulgarian minorities. Tatars in the Red Army were also exiled as traitors immediately after they were demobilized.
Jammed into cattle wagons with little food and water, many deportees did not survive. More died of starvation and disease in the squalid conditions awaiting them on arrival.
Growing up with other deportees on a collective farm in the Fergana Valley, Dzhemilev developed a strong sense of his national identity.
“The conversations were always about Crimea, primarily about the deportations: what had happened to whom, how the relocation had taken place, how the escorting convoys had behaved, who had died,” said Dzhemilev, cigarette smoke billowing around his gaunt face with its trademark moustache.
“So we knew about Crimea right from our childhood. We knew it was our motherland.”
He would dedicate his life to the Crimean Tatar cause, spending two decades in and out of the Soviet Gulag system, gaining notoriety as a high-profile dissident during the 1970s and ‘80s, and earning his nickname: “Qırımoğlu”: “Son of Crimea.”
Dzhemilev started dabbling in activism after a chance encounter with some Crimean Tatars at a library in Tashkent, where he was working at the aviation plant.
After losing that job because of his activism, he studied at Tashkent’s agricultural institute, but was expelled after writing an article about Turkic culture in Crimea.
After that, he grinned, “I went to the university of Soviet prisons and camps!”
Jailed in 1966 for refusing to do military service, he spent eleven years in the Gulag and four in internal exile in the Russian Arctic. He survived a 303-day hunger strike in prison, stopping only when prominent dissident Andrey Sakharov begged him to “because your death will only overjoy our enemies.”
Freed in 1986 during a political thaw under the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, Dzhemilev lived to see his dream come true.
In 1989, the Soviet leadership declared Stalin’s deportations “illegal and criminal repressive acts.”
After 45 years in exile, Crimean Tatars could finally go home.
Between 1989 and 1994, some 220,000 Crimean Tatars moved back to their ancestral homeland, which became an autonomous republic within independent Ukraine following the Soviet Union’s collapse. Among them was Dzhemilev, who settled in Bakhchisaray, the former capital of the Crimean Khanate which ruled the peninsula before Imperial Russia annexed it in 1783.
He continued fighting for Crimean Tatar rights, as chairman of the Mejlis (assembly) of the Crimean Tatar People and an MP in Ukraine’s parliament.
Not all the Crimean Tatars went home. There is no data on how many remain in Uzbekistan: perhaps 40,000-50,000, according to Zakir Adjiosman, deputy head of the Crimean Tatar cultural center.
For him, those allegations of war-time treachery still rankle after 80 years. “That we were accused of being enemies of the people during the war is all wrong, all untrue!” he exclaimed in an interview last year in the center’s small office in a grand Stalin-era building in Tashkent.
The accusation was a pretext for Stalin to exile entire peoples as a terror tactic and punishment for perceived disloyalty, which began long before the war.
Between 1936 and 1952, 3 million Soviet citizens suffered this fate, including Poles, Finns, Germans, Chechens, Ingush and Koreans.
On May 18, Uzbekistan’s Crimean Tatars will mark the 80th anniversary of the Sürgün by laying flowers at a monument commemorating the deportations, erected in a Tashkent cemetery in 2022.
It “expresses the gratitude of our people to the Uzbek people, who took us in in the harsh years of resettlement and shared a crust of bread and lodging,” community member Gulnara Nimatullayeva said.
“It was awful, absolutely awful, what our people went through then – war and deportation, it was a double blow,” lamented Adjiosman, silver-haired and dapper in a cream shirt and gold chain.
During the exile, this community was the guardian of the language and culture.
‘We needed to speak our language. There had to be culture, and songs, and dances, and poetry, and writers, and poets,’ said Lemara Bekirova, who studied at a Crimean Tatar language and literature faculty opened at Tashkent university in 1968.
In 2014, Crimea’s turbulent history experienced another tragic phase. Russia forcibly annexed the peninsula from Ukraine; Dzhemilev once again was barred from his homeland.
Away at the time when Russia’s “little green men” overran Crimea, upon attempting to return to his home, he was handed a document banning him from entering Crimea for five years. The prohibition was later extended to 20 years. “You understand perfectly well that neither I nor Putin will live to 2034,” said Dzhemilev, who turned 80 in November. “If I die here [in Ukraine], they won’t let me be buried in Crimea, because my ban hasn’t expired.”
As Dzhemilev spoke from Kyiv, Russian missiles were raining down on Ukraine, which Russia invaded in 2022.
“We always talked about a peaceful liberation of Crimea, but after what’s happened, it’s clear there’s nothing to talk about with that person,” he added, referring to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
The only option was “a military solution” to expel Russian troops from Ukraine and from Crimea.
But did he truly believe in that?
“I believe in it – not so much believe in it but am sure of it, because there’s no other option,” he said firmly.
With a chuckle, he recalled a toast Soviet dissidents used to raise when they got together over a bottle of vodka: “To the success of our hopeless cause!”
