Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic

After the Whites left Crimea at the end of 1920, a plenipotentiary commission of the party Central Committee, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars studied the peninsula’s post-war problems from late May to late August 1921. The decree of 18 October created the republic within the borders of the Crimean Peninsula, from the seven districts of Dzhankoy, Yevpatoria, Kerch, Sevastopol, Simferopol, Feodosia and Yalta, leaving its northern border for separate decision. The first constitution, adopted on 10 November, made Crimean Tatar and Russian the state languages; the Crimean Central Executive Committee elected by the congress of soviets was chaired by Yuri Gaven, the first Council of People’s Commissars by Sahib Girey Said-Galiev, and Veli Ibraimov became Commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection. On 25 October 1921 the newspaper of the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities wrote that many had argued for making Crimea a mere province, but that broad rights had been given to the native population to win the trust of the Crimean Tatar countryside, long in physical and cultural decline. The republic began amid famine: Ibraimov estimated that 76,000 of the 110,000 dead were Crimean Tatars. Under korenizatsiya, six of the twenty districts of the 1930s were Crimean Tatar national districts, two German, two Jewish and one Ukrainian. Ibraimov, chairman of the Central Executive Committee in 1924–1928, opposed Jewish resettlement and was executed in 1928; the English-language source sees his execution as the beginning of the end of korenizatsiya.

The republic was renamed the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on 5 December 1936. Two attempts to establish Jewish autonomy in Crimea failed. When Crimea, occupied by Germany in 1941–1944, was liberated, the Soviet government branded the whole Crimean Tatar people as collaborators and, under a State Defence Committee order of Stalin and Beria, deported them from 18 May 1944; Armenians, Bulgarians and Greeks followed in June. The English-language source records 9,225 Crimean Tatars serving in German-formed units. A decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet turned the autonomous republic into the Crimean Oblast on 30 June 1945, and more than 90 per cent of place names were changed in 1944–1949. The oblast was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954. The Crimean Tatars’ rights were restored by a decree of 1967, but they were not allowed to return until the last days of the Soviet Union; in 1989 the USSR Supreme Soviet declared the deportation criminal and unlawful. Following a referendum, the autonomous republic was restored within the Ukrainian SSR on 12 February 1991 and renamed the Republic of Crimea on 26 February 1992.