2023-05-18 20:08:36
Moscow has given a touch to its tartar minority from Crimea. From organizations such as Crimean Solidarity they have made public this Thursday that the Russian authorities have prohibited demonstrating in memory of the deported in the era of Stalin. As pointed out by the same group, FSB men, the Russian secret service, reportedly visited some of the members of this organization in person, reminding them that any type of demonstration or protest is currently prohibited in the region. “Activists see these actions as pressure to once again intimidate the Crimean Tatar people“, the entity has officially assured.
This peninsula, annexed after a criticized referendum in 2014, is in the eyes of the international community part of Ukraine, although Moscow has it under its control. The indigenous ethnic minority, the Tatars, regret that since the annexation to Russia they have not been allowed remember in no may 18 to those deported by the Stalin’s regime in the 1940s. They represent about 15% of the two million who live in the region and were one of the main groups that They flatly refused to be part of Russia. On social networks, the Ukrainian president, Volodímir Zelenski, has reminded them and has assured that in the future “they will live free”.
After World War II, the Soviet Union made mass deportations of some ethnic groups accused of having collaborated with the nazis during the war, something that was extended to anyone from certain groups, although could not be proved They were sympathizers of Hitler’s Germany. This included elderly, children and womenwhich were forcibly relocated to Central Asia, Siberia and the Russian Far East, near Alaska, and there were thousands of deaths during the long journeys. Nearly a dozen ethnic groups suffered this fate, in addition to the Tatars, as is the case with the Chechens, Kalmyks, Volga Germansamong others.
A complex legacy
Iosif Dzugashvili, better known as Stalin, was one of the most important leaders of the 20th century and one of the most recognized in Putin’s Russia. Under his command, the USSR became power y was key in the defeat of Nazi Germany in the so-called “Great Patriotic War” in Russia, World War II. Something that is not always comfortable to explain are the purges, the systematic repression of dissentamong other authoritarian tics that characterized the Georgian leadership at the head of the USSR.
Although he is not honored in the same way as Lenin, the great revolutionary leader, his legacy is generally seen in Russia in a more positive than in other countries. One of the few organizations that wanted study that time and above all dignify the victims It was the NGO Memorial, declared a “foreign agent” by the Russian authorities in 2014 and forced to close in 2021.
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