A Turkic people who settled the Crimean peninsula over the two hundred years after Batu Khan's conquest, the Tatars of the Crimea came from Central Asia and Anatolia. By 1450, almost the whole of the peninsula north of the coastal mountains was Tatar land. The Tartat language was a combination of the Turkish of the Anatolian Seljuks and the Chagatay Turkic of the Tatar rulers of the Volga region, though by the end of the fifteenth century, Crimean Tatar was a dialect different from both.
In the fifteenth century, the Crimean Tatars established a state (khanate) and a ruling dynasty (Giray) with its political center first in Solhat and later in Bahçesaray. This khanate was closely associated with the Ottoman Empire to the south, though it retained its sovereignty. No Ottoman officials exercised authority within the lands of these Tatars. Crimean Tatar authors wrote histories and chronicles that emphasized distinctions between Tatars and other Turkic peoples, including the Ottomans.
As the Crimean Tatar economy depended on the slave trade and raids into Russian and other Slavic lands, it was inevitable that Russia would strive to gain dominance over the peninsula. But it was only in the eighteenth century that Russia had sufficient power to defeat, and, ultimately, annex the peninsula and incorporate the remaining Tatars into their empire. The annexation took place in 1783.
Russian domination put enormous pressures on the Tatars - causing many to emigrate to the Balkans and Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century. One of the Tatar intellectuals, Is-mail Bey Gaspirali, tried to establish an educational system for the Tatars that would allow them to survive, as Tatars and as Muslims, within the Russian Empire. He had substantial influence over other Turkic Muslims within the empire, an influence that spread also to Turkish intellectuals in Istanbul.
Throughout the nineteenth century the Russian government encouraged Russian and Ukrainian peasants to settle on the peninsula, placing ever greater pressures on the Tatar population. Although the Revolution of 1917 promised some relief to the Tatars, with the emergence of "national communism" in non-Russian lands, the Tatar intellectual and political elites were destroyed during the Stalinist purges.
The German occupation of Crimea after 1941 produced some Crimean Tatar collaboration, though no greater proportion of Tatars fought against the USSR than did Ukrainians or Belorussians. Nevertheless, the entire Crimean Tatar nationality was collectively punished in 1944, and deported en masse to Central Asia, primarily Uzbekistan. In the 1950s, Crimea was assigned to the Ukrainian SSR, at the three hundredth anniversary of Ukraine's annexation to the Russian Empire. Ukrainians and Russians resettled Tatar homes and villages.
Many Tatars fled to Turkey, where they joined descendants of Tatars who had emigrated from Crimea in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the early 2000s it was estimated that there were more than 5 million Crimean Tatar descendants who were citizens of the Republic of Turkey. They have been thoroughly assimilated as Turks, though they continue Tatar cultural and literary activities.
During the next thirty-five years, Tatars in Central Asian exile continued to maintain their national identity, through cultural and political means. They published, in Tatar, a newspaper in Tashkent, Lenin Bayragï, and united their efforts with various Soviet dissident groups. Some attempted to return to the Crimean peninsula, with modest success.
With the collapse of the USSR, and the new independence of the Ukraine, continued efforts have been made by Tatars to reestablish some of their communities on the peninsula. Crimean Tatars, however, remain one of the many "nationalities" of the former USSR that have not been able to establish a new nation.
Bibliography
Allworth, Edward A., ed. (1998). The Tatars of Crimea : Return to the Homeland: Studies and Documents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Fisher, Alan. (1978). Crimean Tatars. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.
Fisher, Alan. (1998). Between Russians, Ottomans and Turks: Crimea and Crimean Tatars. Istanbul: Isis Press.
—ALAN FISHER
