The Crimean Tatars by Brian Glyn Williams

Author:Brian Glyn Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

The Special Settlement Regime

Establishing good relations with the indigenous Central Asian populations was not, however, the deportees’ only concern. Upon arrival in Central Asia, the Crimean Tatars, who were considered to be traitors to the homeland by the state and its officials, were forced to live under a punitive regime, in the so-called spetsposelenie settlements, (special settlement camps). These informal camps, which were surrounded by barbed wire, and were run by the otdel spetsposelenii (special settlement department) of the MVD, are remembered with particular repugnance by the Tatars who lived in them. The heads of Crimean Tatar households were required to report to the spetskommandants every three days for a spetsial’nyi uchet (special accounting report on their family deaths, births, work progress etc.). Those exiles who illegally left their assigned region were arrested and sentenced to five years of hard labor. In these camps Crimean Tatars report that the “The commandants were God and Tsar.” In interviews I held in Uzbekistan, Crimean Tatars told of being woken before dawn for twelve-hour workdays in the fields and factories, of members of their community who were sentenced to the labor camps for leaving their restricted areas to visit family members in other camps, and of the cruelty of the hated camp kommandants. Living conditions in the settlements were abysmal. Most deportees lived in barracks constructed next to factories, in dugouts, or simple huts hastily built of unbaked dried mud bricks during the spetsposelenie years.

As “enemies of the people”, the Crimean Tatars had no rights as Soviet citizens during this period and their aspirations were reduced to one basic objective: communal survival. One Tatar whose mother died in the settlement camps remembers her last words, “continue the race” (prodolzhit rod), and this appears to have been a national mission for the group.39

This simple task was made all the more difficult by the Crimean Tatars’ difficulties in adjusting to their new surroundings. The natural environment of Uzbekistan, with its blistering dry summers, droughts and desert oasis conditions (except in the high Fergana Valley) differed markedly from that of their coastal Black Sea home. The majority had previously lived in the valleys and foothills of the peninsula’s Yaila Mountains or on the Yaliboyu coast and were unaccustomed to the conditions they found in the arid lands of Uzbekistan. Uzbek medical facilities were filled with Crimean Tatars who began to die in large numbers due to their lack of immunity to local diseases, such as malaria, dysentery, dystrophy, yellow fever and other intestinal illnesses, which were not found in the Crimean Peninsula, where the water was purer. The elderly, women and children died in the greatest numbers.

In addition, the majority of the deportees were from the Crimean countryside. According to NKVD sources, a mere 18,983 of the exiles were deported from towns in the Crimea.40 Few Crimean Tatar farmers could acquire fields in the land-starved Uzbek oases and overpopulated Fergana Valley. Most of these village peasants were forced to find work in mines or factories (the

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