MARK PERAKH
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from German occupation, Stalin secretly declared all the Crimean
Tatars "traitors of the fatherland" and accused them of collaborating
with the Germans. He ordered the deportation of all Crimean Tatars,
including women and children, from the Crimea to the desert lands of
Central Asia. The deportation was implemented by special detach–
ments in an extremely cruel manner. Thousands of Tatars perished in
the course of the journey, and thousands of others died later under the
terrible conditions of the settlements in Central Asia.
It
must be mentioned that the Crimean Tatars were not the on ly
people subjeCled to this treatment. A similar fate befell the Karachaevs,
Balkars, Meskhs, Volga Germans and others. In the fifties, after Stalin's
death , the indiscriminate accusations of treason were officially ac–
knowledged as false. Some of the peoples, although now much fewer in
number, were allowed to return to their native soil, but not all of them.
The Meskhs, Volga Germans, and Tatars were never permitted to
return home. Furthermore, any Tatar who individually attempted to
return to the Crimea was persecuted and, as a rule, compelled to leave
the Crimean land. Thus, notwithstanding the rehabilitation of the
Tatar people and the retraction of the accusation of treason: resettle–
ment of the Tatars on their own soil is absolutely restricted.
The Tatars never recovered from the loss of their homeland. At the
end of the sixties a movement of Crimean Tatars concentrated in
Central Asia became especially strong. The authorities suppressed this
movement brutally, and many trials of Tatar activists have taken place.
The Tatar movement has several heroic figures, for example Mustafa
Jemilev, now serving his fourth prison sentence. Many non-Tatar
dissenters have been active in defence of the Tatar national cause as
well. The best known is General Pyotr Grigorenko, an eminent
military professional who, like Sakharov, rejected his high position in
the elite and joined the struggle for justice. Grigorenko was deprived of
his rank, his pension, and was finally placed for many years in a
mental hospital. Another exponent of the Tatar cause, also a non–
Tatar, was Ilya Gabai, who in 1973 committed suicide because of KGB
persecutions.
The Jewish national movement, directed solely toward free emi–
gration to Israel, has played a key role in the development of a ll dissent
in the USSR, largely because of its overwhelming support from abroad.
The movement reached a high point with the Jackson amendment,
which tried to link the problem of Jewish emigration with U.S. laws
regulating trade with the USSR. In 1971 the authorities attempted to
suppress this movement completely with several trials. The most
notorious was the "airplane trial " in Leningrad, where two out of
