Saw a lot of people call the deportations of Tatars in the USSR a genocide. I know that the Tatars collaborated with the Axis but was it necessary to deport so many of them? Many of them not having directly collaborated with the Axis. Im on board with punishing those who actively collaborated with the Nazis but from what i have heard of, this was unnecessary
Not all Tatars… Tatars are in Tatarstan , Daegistan. The deportation happened to Crimean Tatars, they were all saved from the Nazi genocide and were relocated to Turkmenistan or Tatarstan
I can’t recall whether this applies to Tatars.
According to Grover Furr, some mass deportations in the USSR during WWII were intended to prevent genocide.
The logic being that if you only relocate the young men who are liable to e.g. fight for the Axis powers or sabotage the Allied effort, you would effectively destroy the people. The young women would not be able to have children or marry, etc, unless they partnered with young men from a different ethnicity, tribe, culture, etc, which may involves abandoning or changing traditions, languages, practices, cuisine.
To keep a way of life alive, so to speak, the only way is to keep those people together. If one or two of the group need to be relocated, fine. What do you do when e.g. 10,000 young men out of 100,000 total population need to be kept away from Nazi influence? Just relocating the 10,000 likely means a massively reduced birthrate for however long. And if the timing is misjudged, no more group. I.e. they’ve become victims of genocide.
I can’t say that the deportations were necessary, nor can I say that they were unnecessary. But what I can say is that if you see lots of people that you know and love collaborating with the Axis, the probability of you being convinced to collaborate too may increase.
However, deporting innocent people just for the possibility of them collaborating with nazis in the future is pretty bad.
Though I do understand the soviet government of the time. They were losing the war and if they lost their whole people would be enslaved/genocided. As such, they couldn’t take any chances.
edit: since the deportations were not made with the intention of decimating the deported, they were clearly not a genocide by any good definition.
The tragedy with the Crimean Tartars was that they were deported based on heritage, even those who were loyal red army combatants. I’m not saying the situations are a perfect equivalence, but it’s the same rationale the US used to intern Japanese-Americans, which communists have always rightfully criticized. Whether it was necessary or not is debatable but it always troubles me whenever I encounter blanket apologism for the action or communists embracing the reasoning.
In addition, those deported were not allowed to resettle in Crimea for 2 decades after the war. We can still support the legacy of the USSR while still acknowledging that this is a blemish.
