Soviets Approve Tatars’ Return to Homeland

Crimean Tatars, who were uprooted en masse and dispersed around the country four decades ago by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, were told Thursday that they will be allowed to return to their homeland near the Black Sea.

But a special government commission headed by Soviet President Andrei A. Gromyko rejected demands that the Tatars be allowed to re-establish their autonomous republic there. It said their resettlement will have to conform to state regulations that limit migration to the Crimea.

Still, the commission promised a greater government effort to ensure equal treatment for Crimean Tatars in employment, housing and education after years of discrimination--and expanded programs to teach the Tatar language and revive their culture.

Guaranteed Equality

“The relevant authorities have lifted all restrictions that infringed upon the rights of the Crimean Tatars in various ways and guarantee their complete equality with other Soviet citizens in all matters, including the choice of a place of residence, job placement and study,” the commission said.

The compromise appears to be intended to resolve one of the thorniest ethnic problems facing the current Kremlin leadership--five members of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo sat on the nine-man commission. But there were no concessions that would affect other ethnic disputes, particularly the continuing dispute over the future of the troubled Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in the republic of Azerbaijan.

Acceptance of the compromise by the country’s estimated 350,000 Crimean Tatars, who have waged a 30-year campaign to return to their homeland, will depend on how many are actually allowed to move back there from Soviet Central Asia and the other remote locales to which they were sent in 1944.

Last year, 2,500 were resettled in the region--the first to be given permanent residency there since they were forced to leave at gunpoint.

Stalin decreed their mass deportation--an estimated 250,000 men, women and children, of whom an estimated 46% died--on grounds that many Tatars, rebelling against both the Soviet system and Russian rule, had collaborated with German occupation forces in World War II.

The Crimean Tatars, Turkic-speaking descendants of the Mongols, whose conquest of Russia seven centuries ago still brings a shudder, had long had difficult relations with Russians and Ukrainians, adhering to Islam amid resolute Christian Orthodoxy and then even stronger Communist atheism.

Politically Rehabilitated

They were politically rehabilitated in 1967, with official recognition that many Tatars had fought in the Soviet army, but they were not allowed to move back to their ancestral lands around Yalta, Simferopol and Sevastopol in the strategically sensitive Crimea, where there are many military and naval facilities.

But their determination to return to their homes in the Crimea led to an unprecedented protest campaign--petitions, demonstrations, sit-ins, boycotts, strikes and even a self-immolation 10 years ago--to force the Soviet leadership to reverse fully what Stalin had done.

Their cause was one of the major issues adopted by Soviet human rights campaigners, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei D. Sakharov, in the 1970s.

Yet the struggle has continued, and last July about 300 Crimean Tatars held a noisy, 21-hour sit-in in Red Square. They won an audience with Gromyko, the establishment of the special commission and then quiet measures to resolve their grievances without setting precedents that might apply to other disputes.

Warning Issued

The commission, anticipating criticism of its conclusions by Crimean Tatar activists, warned that this was as far as the government could go and that further demands would undercut this compromise.

The militant Crimean Tatar nationalists, who have waged a long and bitter struggle for restoration of their homeland, “ignore the fact that the present administrative and territorial division of the country . . . came to exist many decades ago and has been sealed in the constitution of the Soviet Union,” the commission said.

Since the Tatars’ deportation in 1944, the Crimea’s population has tripled, from 780,000 to nearly 2.5 million, most of whom are Russians or Ukrainians, making it difficult to establish a special Tatar region even if all the estimated 350,000 Crimean Tatars returned from around the country.

Almost every year for the past two decades, hundreds of Tatar families, rebelling against their continued exile in Uzbekistan and other areas, have packed up their belongings and started to head back to the Crimea, only to be turned back by Soviet authorities. Last year was the first year that any significant number--300 families--was allowed to return officially, and local officials complained that they did not have jobs or housing for many more.