The deportation of at least 240,000 Crimean Tatars to central Asia by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1944 is forever ingrained in the memory of the people of that region.
Stalin used claims, later disputed by most historians, that the Tatars had sided with the Nazis during the second world war to justify the exile and to wipe out signs of Tatar heritage in Crimea, giving villages Russian names and handing Tatar homes to Soviet settlers. Even Tatar men fighting for the Red Army were sent to labour camps.
The Tatars, who comprised most of the population of the peninsula for centuries, were only allowed to return en masse to Crimea – which had been transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 – under the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989. Around 260,000 people returned. Many others died in exile.
