from the Crimean Tatar People to the Politburo of the Party Central Committee (1973 5 pp.)
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Previous such documents (1967-1973) reflected the growth and consolidation of the Crimean Tatar national movement and the expansion of activities designed to suppress it.
“The seizure of the national homeland” and “the suffocation of the national existence of the Crimean Tatars” are defined in the present document as the actions of the forces of “imperialism and chauvinism”, exploiting the agencies of the Soviet regime for their own ends.
“When the Party is carrying out a program of peace in the international arena,” the document asks, “the Crimean Tatar people ask the Party leadership when it will end for them the conditions of the Second World War.”
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The national movement has completed an enormous task by placing the national question in front of all the component bodies in the Party-State apparatus and elucidating it for them. In the period 1956-1973, 66 all-nation documents, with 4 million signatures from the whole of the adult Crimean Tatar population, were sent to the supreme bodies. The document recalls the promises given at receptions of delegates by Yu. Andropov, A. Mikoyan (1965) and M. Georgadze (1966), there having been 14 receptions in all.
However, it continues, these efforts to help the leadership to implement the line of the 20th Party Congress have been met only with repression: 33 expulsions from the Party and about 100 from the Communist Youth League [Komsomol], several thousand house searches, tens of thousands of interrogations and “chats” in KGB offices, over twenty major “engagements” involving police and troops and the use of water-cannons, smoke bombs and truncheons, eight large-scale round-ups of Crimean Tatar representatives and their deportation from Moscow under armed escort, 32 major deportations under armed escort (involving some 6,000 people in all) from the Crimea, anti-Tatar persecution in the Crimea, more than 50 trials, over 200 defendants convicted.
The document talks of the tyranny of the administrative organs which “are becoming a force above the State and violating international law”; “the international vows of the revolution about the rights of the peoples of Russia… which were proclaimed in the appeal of the Council of People’s Commissars “To the Moslems of Russia and the East” have been trampled on and replaced by the status of exile”. A warning is issued to the leadership of Uzbekistan about its responsibility to the Uzbek people for having turned its national territory into a “reservation for entire peoples”.
Further on: “The urge to single out ‘great’ nations, which, as instruments for implementing nationalities policy, possess the right to dispose of the fate of other peoples, categorized as ‘small’, is tantamount to the reduction of national relations to a system of national hierarchies in every republic, every zone, every group of States and throughout the whole world, which substitutes for equal rights the right to annexation, and results in the suppression of the small peoples. It is clear to these peoples that such a position on the national question is indivisible and cannot be applied differently in the internal and international arenas… It is clear to the peoples that such a position does not promise them anything good,”
The document concludes with a demand to liquidate the exile status; to restore the Crimean ASSR; and to raise at a Party congress “the question of the Crimea, the Crimean Tatars and national equality in the USSR”.
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On 1 December 1973 the document was delivered to the Central Committee with 6,508 signatures (see “Information Sheet” 112); in January 1974 these were supplemented by 300 more signatures (“Information Sheet” 113). For both, see current issue CCE 31. 24.
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