Friday, May 16, 2008

Surgun

The 18th of May marks the 64th anniversary of Stalin's mass deportation of the Crimean Tatars from their homeland to Uzbekistan and the Urals. I do not have time this year to write an extended article on this tragedy. So instead I will refer you to the article I wrote about it last year and the one I wrote the year before that. Please feel free to leave comments regarding these events under this blog post.

2 comments:

Kristina said...

Thanks for sharing these two articles you wrote about the Crimean Tartars. Since I have visited that area several times while I lived in Ukraine, I can see what beautiful country they were forced to leave. Yalta is in that area and I'm wondering what Churchill and Roosevelt knew of this "cleansing?" They stayed there in separate places for several months during those famous talks. What did these two leaders know and when did they know about Stalin? Of course, there is the infamous 10 fingers that Stalin showed to Churchill which was understood to be 10 million deaths. So sad!!!

J. Otto Pohl said...

My guess is that neither Churchill or Roosevelt knew about the ethnic cleansing of the Crimean Tatars at the time of the Yalta Summit. The deportations were only officially announced by the Soviet government on 25 June 1946, over two years after their completion. My guess is the US and UK governments only found out about the deportation of the Crimean Tatars then.