Tatars’ Protest Gains Meeting With Gromyko

It was an unprecedented sight in Moscow--a protest demonstration of hundreds of people on the edge of Red Square within a stone’s throw of the Kremlin walls.

Lobbying for their cause--the return of their homeland, a region that officially no longer exists--the protesting Tatars camped overnight Saturday on the cobblestones behind St. Basil’s Cathedral, demanding an audience with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Just a few years ago, police would have broken up the demonstration within minutes, and the participants would have been sent to prison camps.

This time, however, with Gorbachev advocating more democracy and public discussion of problems, the police took a different approach.

They sealed off Red Square, then circled the protesters with 25 buses and trucks so they were mostly hidden from view of weekend strollers. Apparently no arrests were made.

Finally, on Sunday, with the number of protesters down to something over 100, the authorities promised the Tatars a meeting today with Soviet President Andrei A. Gromyko if they would disperse quietly.

The Tatars, who earlier had turned down a proposed meeting with Pyotr N. Demichev, an alternate member of the Politburo, accepted the invitation to take their demand to Gromyko. Then they marched across a Moscow River bridge to end their unique protest.

Their case is a delicate one, involving the question of nationality rights and a controversial World War II decision by Josef Stalin to deport the Tatars from the Crimean Peninsula and abolish their autonomous republic.

Now, 43 years later, the Tatars want the right to return to a self-governing territory in the Crimea, by the shores of the Black Sea, where their ancestors lived for centuries.

Commission Named

Even as they began a series of public demonstrations at the Communist Party Central Committee and just off Red Square last Thursday night, the government named a commission headed by Gromyko to look into their demand.

An announcement by the official news agency Tass said, however, that the Crimean Tatar question must be solved while considering the interests of all Soviet people.

This means that the attitudes of Ukrainians and other nationalities who now form the overwhelming majority in the Crimea must be taken into account.

The Tatars, descendants of the Turks and Mongols, make up only several hundred thousand of the 280 million people in the Soviet Union, and fewer than 20,000 now live in the former Crimean Autonomous Republic, according to official statistics.

The Tatars, however, have a strong sense of national identity, and their cause has won the support of such well-known figures as Andrei D. Sakharov, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Accused of Collaborating

Stalin accused the Tatars of collaborating with the Nazis in World War II and deported them to Central Asia. Their constitutional rights were restored in 1967, and the government acknowledges that the deportation order was unfair, since many Tatars fought in the Red Army against Nazi Germany.

After Stalin died in 1953, the Tatars became one of the most active groups campaigning for return of their national homeland. Many of their leaders were convicted of anti-Soviet agitation and sentenced to long prison terms.

Many of the demonstrators who came to Red Square were not even born when Stalin’s deportation order was issued. Yet this did not diminish their nationalistic fervor.

Tass, commenting on the latest demonstrations, said some Crimean Tatars were “kindling passions” and hampering efforts to find a solution to their problems.

“Party and local government bodies of Moscow explained once again to those who assembled that extremist actions only hampered a fair and all-around consideration of the issues,” Tass said.

Noting implicitly the fact that demonstrators once faced a far harsher response than a meeting with the Soviet president, Reshat Dzhemilyov, a Tatar spokesman who has served several prison terms for similar agitation, said, “We place a great deal of hope in Gorbachev.”