this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
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I understand you, but you miss the one important metric: scale. They were collaborating as ethnicity and the scale in their case was so huge that basically every man was involved at some level, unlike for example Ukrainians who also had some of the most disgusting collaborators but they were tiny minority with 50 times more people fighting against nazis. So even if you wanted to punish only the guilty, you would then basically did a real genocide, leaving them without men and breaking up the families.
Also i mentioned Baltics, and if anything, Latvians or Estonians who had similar collaboration level as Tatars weren't punished. The reason for that was that it was not even a punisment in the fist place, but a safeguard. Something that was not anymore needed when USSR liberated Baltics because back then Germany was finished and there was no need to do it anymore.
While you do not need to be patronising because i do know what i am saying and what i base it on, i will agree with the overall sentence here. But in this particular case the rhetorics of "collective punishment" and "genocide" and "displacement" (particularly this one which purposefully conflate organised resettlement with one sided expulsion, since the former one was done basically only by USSR while the latter is common by west and their puppets) is precisely the framing used by western propaganda. And do you know that not doing it would have resulted in better or worse outcome? That's why i said it is idealism, you are framing this as mistake from the retrospect while not even really knowing it was a mistake, just that it was controversial move and it become more controversial as liberalism took over nearly entire world, and the remaining socialists have more pressing matters than to give USSR justice instead of accepting Khrushchevite critiques.
This is a very strong argument, however it rests in a premise, which is having an entire ethnic group as Nazi collaborators. First, you need to back up this claim with historical evidence. Second, if the majority population were of Nazi collaborators, why did they move them to behind their lines? And in what extent was their collaboration, were the majority of them actively participating in the SS as soldiers, for example?
Sorry, I disagree with this point. The Tatars were not allowed to return, not even after the end of the war, not even after the secret speech by the Khruschevite clique, so I do think there was an element of collective punishment. However I can accept the claim they didn't think that displacement of a minority group, organized or otherwise, was a crime, since the definition only came later. In this point, liberals often think it's ok to be anachronistic when they talk about communists, but never when it's about their own Western regimes.
Please don't take me by the average liberal. I think our theory and concepts evolve over time, as through studying and reflecting on our own practice we do evolve our knowledge. Looking back at the USSR history we can reflect on what could have been done better, but the purpose of this is not about demoralizing the present opposition, but about building a better future. Our past Soviet comrades maybe thought that was the best outcome given alternatives, but it's counter factual to think X or Y decision would produce a better outcome. What I am saying is that trying to defend a past position as the right one, or trying to justify the past, after reflecting on our own past, is counter productive. The better position, in my opinion, is to recognize the past wrongs, as long as we are dealing with factual information, with all the nuance and historical context, not as the typical strawman argument often used by liberals.
Speaking in a more direct way, we can say is that the USSR displaced the Tatar population because they thought that was the best course of action given the circumstances, one of them was the extension of their collaboration with the Nazis. Even though the USSR would later recognize their own actions as a crime. In the future, we need to think on a better course of action if the same circumstance arise.
So, Crimean Tatars. It's crazily hard to find something though with the amount of shitty genocide propaganda being churned out lately (though funnily enough the Ukrainian and pro-Ukrainian media seems to be strangely brief about Tatar issue, i wonder why ). The population of Crimean Tatars were around 218,000, of which 35000 actively fought for nazis in both "self-defence" and antipartisan units. That's very high mobilisation numbers, basically every man able to hold a rifle. Mentioned propaganda also very often claims that Tatars welcomed nazis as liberators at least at first, idk how much real and how much wishful thinking that is, but the numbers do support that.
As you can see from above numbers the resettled 200000 people did included at least some of the armed collaborators. The answer for your question was that in Uzbekistan thery were of no significant danger and without contact with nazis. Btw, the Tatar population in Uzbekistan nearly tripled in few decades, which is not the argument for their resettlement, but it clearly shows that it wasn't just "fuck off" expulsion or extermination.
Mentioning Khrushchev, he literally given Crimea to Ukraine which probably explains why he didn't allowed specifically Crimean Tatars to return, as he was Ukrainian nationalist (and failure to get rid of him absolutely is a mistake of Soviet leadership). Crimea also was and still is generally a very strategic region which might also be part of reason.
Agree, also note that Rafael Lemkin who coined the term "genocide" was a zionist.
I'll stop when you stop trying to use liberal interpretation of terminology to explain events in a westernly manner, but judging from the above this did at least partially happen so ok.
Agree. Going into more context, we basically lost the battle of history. Too much hitlerite/western/zionist propaganda is now accepted as a fact. Even repotable scholars like Losurdo have absolutely baffling moments as starting the research from uncritically in single sentence accepting that Stalin bad. I argue it is important to at least give a context, and by doing that we might arrive at the point of actually questioning those narrations.
So you might for example find me defending Beria, who was considered a lost cause and scapegoat sacrificed to liberal propaganda. But lo and behold, Beria is actually kind of defendable, his main accusers that is Khruchchev and Montefiore are at this point proven to be smearing and projecting.
If we are to judge based on historical material conditions, we should also base the conclusion on them. In this case you can't just quality the relocation of Tatars as bad and punishment since nothing bad happened afterwards while it could be much worse if it didn't happened. Such is the paradox of avoided catastrophes, also some are more obvious and some less and this is closer to the second cathegory while the fist would be something like "if USSR didn't do everything they could to stop nazis, hunreds of millions of people would die" - this is pretty obvious. Point is, i don't see how the relocation of Tatars was crime, nor punishment, nor for certainty a mistake.
And sure, "do not move large amount of people without good reason" is a good lesson to get out of it but it shouldn't be "ethnicities are completely untouchable for any reason, or else a zionist will call it a genocide", which seems to be today "evolved" liberal narrative, completely dismissable for me since they did it more than anyone in history even after it "evolved" into the current shape.
Agree, but note that USSR and Russia after it recognised a lot of what former USSR leadership did as "crimes" because they had the clear motive of legitimising their coups.
I think it would be hard for the same circumstance to arise. And if it did, again the question, what could even be done differently back then in the same situation? Every alternative i can think of would be worse.
Sir, first of all, there's a saying that the truth is the first casualty of war. So, it's part of Ukrainian (and Western) strategy to use every piece of history to smear the now extinct USSR and the current Russian federation, even conflating both into a single thing (muh Russia bad, USSR is imperialist, bla bla bla). Since the West has a much bigger influence on the narrative, it's expected that they will use anything remotely suspicious to accuse Russia of any wrongdoing. And we all know that this is all bullshit, especially if we consider the Nazis in Ukraine and the actual history of Ukrainian chauvinist nationalists and nazi collaborators (including the many pogroms they did against USSR and Russian peoples - and Jews - during WW2 and the past years). So I remember reading some articles about Tatar displacement in an Ukrainian newspaper, but I know very well this is only part of the war of narratives.
However, about the fact that the majority of Tatar population were Nazi collaborators I cannot find any evidence of this. The numbers you provided in the Moscow newspaper don't even provide a source (other than the school book, which does not constitute proper historiographic research). What I did find is a translation of a letter from Stalin addressed to the State Defense Committee about the reasoning for the displacement of Tatars (without citing any numbers), but mentioning all provisions like amount of food, medicine, belongings each person would carry etc. The document is very detailed in the later part. This is the only proper evidence that I found, the others being BBC and radio free europe articles that are known to publish speculative and false information about the subjects they are addressing, without citing any primary or secondary source. I've seen some of these untrustworthy sources to cite that there were like 40k Tatars in the red army against 20k in the Nazi army with 10k collaborators, but some of these could be people who defected from the Red Army to the Nazis. So the numbers of soldiers can't be properly explained.
I do have many reasons to believe all the information in the letter to be true, due to the amount of detail, and due to all circumstances of the war, like infiltration by the Nazi intelligence, incorporation of rebels and deserters in the SS and other paramilitary divisions, and the participation of many of the minority nationalities in acts of violence against the other populations, which are all elements cross-referenced in the letter. However, I don't have any good piece of evidence that points that this displacement was the only solution to the problem or the real amount of Tatars who engaged in collaboration with the Nazis in relation to the whole population. What I can affirm is that they probably pondered about the risk of further collaboration and they addressed that risk by taking an action against the whole of the Tatar population in Crimea.
I do think it's a very weak piece of evidence to simply state that deportation was the only solution available. So with this, I simply don't have enough elements to do a proper historical materialist analysis of a subject. I can understand the fact that they took precautions to minimize the damage to the Tatar population that was being displaced, but from the letter I can also understand that they wanted to move a huge amount of people as soon as possible, to a region and climate they weren't used to.
Aside from the dominance of the West in the ideological apparatuses (history books, school curriculum, historiographic production, press, movies and TV), the ideological battle is never ending, so if we intend to fight it or even build a political movement to dispute the people's subjectivity we must present good arguments. And while I do think we need to engage in defense of the USSR, we can't do this acritically. We can state the circumstance behind the deportations, but I see no issue in telling how this whole process was harmful for these populations, even though there were precautions made by the USSR to minimize those losses. So I can say the USSR commited a war crime, but this has no parallels with some average stuff Zios and Nazis did on a regular Tuesday.
Again, I understand the reasons behind the USSR actions based on the Stalin's letter and I do think the motives are valid, but, honestly, thinking it wasn't collective punishment or that it was due to the populations' own protection is just wishful thinking. From what I can understand. the Soviet leadership intended to minimize risk so they took provisions to handle that risk, even if that would cause damage to the displaced population. We don't need to deny all the times when the USSR dropped the ball in order to defend its legacy. Capitalism has way more atrocities in its records, in conditions not even close to the ones the USSR was into.
Zios, for example, will use all the examples they can to justify their killing of Palestinians and Arab populations in middle east. They can use the same reasoning that it's for security reasons. However, they can't deny the colonial nature of Israel, whose existence depends entirely on the displacement of Palestinian populations and quashing the resistance. The USSR didn't depend on the displacements in order to exist, the displacements were part of war measures in a critical period, but we can't deny there were war crimes committed both by the USSR and by elements of the displaced populations.
Sir, I do agree the Kruschevite clique had ulterior motives, but it was a matter of time until all the bad information leaked from the USSR. The way it was done, however, produced a shockwave throughout the whole communist movement worldwide, so we'll always have reason to dislike them.
Again, this is mere speculation. We can't know if that was the best action or not, or even if simply imprisoning the red army deserters and enemy war criminals would be enough.